The Pali suttas
17 teachings in the library draw on this text.
- Session Three - Restraint Without Suppression David Oromith · 84 minutes · recorded February 11, 2026
In the guided meditation we invite in a memory of anger, tracing what it cost and how a calmer response might have gone. David works through the Buddha's sutta on anger, its seven things pleasing to an enemy, from bad sleep to reputational harm, then four remedies: restraint, discernment, persistence and right view. He tells the anger eating demon story and reads verses on speech and blame. Questions cover the inner enemy as harsh imagery, and how anger builds until it feels like possession.
- Session Two - What Patience Actually Means David Oromith · 79 minutes · recorded January 28, 2026
The session opens with a guided heat and space meditation in which we bring a small recent irritation to mind and track where it lands in the body, before widening into spaciousness and phrases of goodwill. David turns to the sutta of Sakka to show patience is not passivity but a mindful, chosen restraint, backed by verses on non aversion and the story of a maid who provokes her mistress into striking her. Questions cover staying calm at the time but doubting it after, and finding compassion for a difficult sibling.
- Session One - Not Debating the Insult David Oromith · 76 minutes · recorded January 21, 2026
The evening opens with a guided meditation on feeling tones in which we notice sensations as pleasant, unpleasant or neutral, before David turns to the Insult Sutta, where the Buddha refuses an insult hurled at him, letting it hang in the air rather than debating it. David draws out why retaliation only escalates and what it means to stay calm without suppressing feeling. The group discusses whether restraint reads as weakness, and why anger flares more easily at family than at work.
- Teaching & Meditation for the International Day of Peace 2025 David Oromith · 38 minutes · recorded September 21, 2025
David marks the International Day of Peace, a day for committing to peace above our differences. The loving kindness practice comes first, and we widen from ourselves to a loved one, a stranger and someone we are in conflict with, then to all beings in the words of the Metta Sutta. The talk sets the Dalai Lama on inner peace coming first, and closes on Wangari Maathai's hummingbird carrying drops of water to a forest fire, doing the best it can.
- S1 - Refuge in Good Company David Oromith · 87 minutes · recorded September 3, 2025
Loving kindness is directed towards spiritual friends: early influences, one particular friend, the wider sangha and the lineage of teachers, guided throughout. David explores why the Buddha called admirable friendship the whole of the path, using the story of the monk Magiya, then covers sangha's pitfalls, groupthink, cliques, cult-like devotion and overdependence, and the qualities of authentic friendship. Michelle compares Samadhi to another group; Tracy asks where the community gathers.
- D4S2 - The Buddha's Instructions to Bahiya, and the Stages of Attention David Oromith · 75 minutes · recorded August 21, 2025
A few lines the Buddha gave to Bahiya, who urgently wanted teachings, used here as preparation: in the seen let there be only the seen, in the heard only the heard, in the sensed only the sensed, in the cognized only the cognized, without labelling or identifying any of it. David then takes the first four of the nine stages shown in the elephant artwork, where the meditator chases a mind that is following the monkey of involuntary thoughts, and the powers, faults and antidotes that go with them.
- D4S1 - The Dzogchen Approach to Mindfulness of Breathing David Oromith · 86 minutes · recorded August 21, 2025
The last of the breathing methods: we move attention off the sensations of the body and rest in awareness itself, noting only whether the breath is long or short. David takes it back to the Buddha's own instruction for mindfulness of breathing, to go to a forest, sit at the foot of a tree or find an empty room, sit with the back straight and establish mindfulness in front of you, and sets that beside the Dzogchen teaching of releasing awareness into the space ahead, eyes open, with no object of focus at all.
- Reigniting our Practice David Oromith · 28 minutes · recorded January 26, 2025
The meditation follows the Buddha's instructions to Bahiya: in the seen let there be only the seen, in the heard only the heard, as we rest in bare awareness of body, sight, sound and thought without elaboration. David talks about Marcus Aurelius' reminder that our principles are never extinguished, only buried, and that we can reignite them at any moment. He offers a journal prompt for what small change would bring us closer to our values, and the water pot filled drop by drop.
- Guided Meditation - Loving Kindness, Widening the Circle David Oromith · 19 minutes · recorded September 17, 2024
Loving kindness widened one person at a time: yourself, someone whose life you admire, a close friend, then someone you feel nothing about either way, and finally a person who wishes you harm. With that last one David asks you to cut through the hardened image to the real person who wants happiness as you do. It closes with the Metta Sutta and a dedication.
- Session 1 - Loving-Kindness (part one) David Oromith · 91 minutes · recorded September 11, 2024
David guides a loving-kindness meditation directed entirely at oneself: recalling a kind action, naming a quality worth admiring, then arousing the wish to be at ease, well and happy, and joyful. He explains why metta is a yearning rather than an emotion, and traces its near enemy, self-centred attachment, and its far enemy, malice, reading from the Metta Sutta. Several members speak openly about how hard they found turning kindness towards themselves.
- D3S2 - May I Be at Ease Michael Lobsang Tenpa · 59 minutes · recorded January 5, 2024
The phrase comes from the Metta Sutta, may I be at ease, taken from oneself out to fellow practitioners and then to all beings. Michael Lobsang Tenpa explains sukha as good space, or the smooth hole at the centre of a wheel that lets it turn. He answers a question about a teacher who called Alexander Berzin stupid, and why kindness can only be judged in context. A body directed practice he learned from Sharon Salzberg, who had it from a Burmese monastic teacher, is described for the break.
- The Noble Eightfold Path: Prajñā - Right View, Right Resolve David Oromith · 84 minutes · recorded November 22, 2023
This session starts with a brief settling meditation, with refuge and bodhicitta, before turning to the wisdom division of the path. David takes right view as knowledge of the four noble truths and the Kalama Sutta's advice to test a teaching by its results, then turns to right resolve as work at the level of thought, the Buddha noticing craving or ill will arise and letting it subside. Questions range from whether studying philosophy is wasted time to why compassion for others comes more easily than for ourselves.
- The Noble Eightfold Path: Sīla - Right Speech, Right Action, Right Livelihood David Oromith · 77 minutes · recorded November 7, 2023
The session opens with ten minutes of mindfulness of breathing, with refuge and bodhicitta motivation, and closes with a shorter practice. David works through sila from the Pali suttas: right speech and its five gates of truth, timing, affection, benefit and goodwill, right action on killing, stealing and sexual misconduct, and right livelihood's forbidden trades and a balanced income. Questions cover lying to protect a friend from hurt, and working somewhere that sells meat or alcohol.
- D1S5 - Tenderness, and the Metta Sutta Michael Lobsang Tenpa · 61 minutes · recorded August 25, 2023
Two practices on tsewa: holding yourself in awareness as you would hold a kitten or a newborn, then adding a hand on the chest so that the warmth also travels through touch. Michael Lobsang Tenpa explains why trauma needs both safety and connection, and why a plush toy is a legitimate object here. He tells the story of monastics sent into a frightening forest who were given loving kindness as the antidote to fear, and the group then recites the Metta Sutta and dedicates the day.
- D5S2 - Shamatha Without a Sign Lama Alan · 55 minutes · recorded January 1, 2019
A guided 24 minute practice from Yangthang Rinpoche's root text on the view, meditation and conduct of Dzogchen. Turn awareness in upon that which is aware, follow no thought of past or future, and rest loosely without modifying anything. Lama Alan Wallace then reads the Vajira Sutta, the one place he has found in the Pali canon where the outer world is questioned: the nun answers Mara's who made you with the chariot that is only a word, but leaves suffering as real as it gets.
- D1S1 - Are You Human? The Three Poisons and the Substrate Lama Alan · 100 minutes · recorded January 1, 2019
The opening evening is teaching only, with no practice. Lama Alan Wallace starts from a Pali Canon exchange in which the brahmin Dona asks the Buddha whether he is a god, a spirit or a human, is told no to each, and hears the reply, I am awake. He works through the three poisons of the mind, and the dualistic grasping that is the taproot of craving and hatred, runs the ten Buddhist analogies for illusion, and lays out the substrate and substrate consciousness.
- D2S2 - In the Seen, Just the Seen Lama Alan · 46 minutes
The Buddha's instruction to Bahiya, in the seen let there be just the seen, becomes a twenty four minute guided practice. We take attention in turn to the visual, auditory, tactile and mental fields, with as little projection as possible. Of everything that appears we then ask whether any of it is unchanging, a true cause of happiness, actually yours, or actually you. Lama Alan follows with a challenge to materialism, arguing that nothing we directly experience is located in physical space.