Satya Robyn teaches three practices for cultivating joy: connecting with yourself, others, nature, and the Buddha; practicing gratitude; and remembering faith. The talk includes a personal story about cleaning and ends with group chanting.
Chapters
Welcome. So there are a couple of people here who are very familiar with this place and this practice, and others who are a little bit, and others who are not at all. And I'm going to be speaking this morning on Connecting with joy, and then we'll have a little bit of space for a small group discussion, and we'll finish with a little bit of practice to finish the morning. So connecting with joy, I've known that I'm going to be speaking about this, and so it's been on my mind for a little while. And I'm always interested in what happens when we hold something in mind, what kinds of thoughts come up. So the kinds of thoughts that have been coming up were, what is joy? And do I feel joy? Do I feel more joy now than I used to? What kind of credib— what kind of authority do I have to speak to you about joy? Those kinds of things. And what I do, what I did notice is that lots of people were very interested in this talk. So there's obviously, it's obviously something that we can all feel drawn towards in some way, that word joy. It's something that if I said, "Would you like more joy?" most people would say, "Yes, please." No, I've got enough. So the other thing that happened when I started thinking about this topic was an incident came to my mind from my life about 10 years ago, and I was living in a little cottage in the country with my ex-partner. It was a very little kind of thatched cottage, and in this cottage, on the way upstairs into the single bedroom, it was all very small, there was like a tiny little, almost like a tiny little space that had a little window, little tiny window under the thatch, and before you went into the bedroom, and this little space was my writing area. It's where I did my writing. So I had a little tiny desk, a kind of a thin desk from IKEA, one of those ones that's really narrow, to fit in the space. And just next to it on the floor I had some little, a little box with little things in, and a chair, and that's pretty much all there was space for. So for this story to make sense, one of the things you have to know about me is that I hate cleaning. I'm not a good cleaner. Cleaner. I'm a good tidier, I'm not a good cleaner, and it's always one of those things that I try to just not see the dirt for a while and eventually kind of force myself to clean. I'm always pleased when I've done it, but it's not— it doesn't come naturally to me. Some people say that they enjoy cleaning. I really wish one of those people lived with me. So that's not my— it's not one of my natural joys. And the incident that I'm remembering is, I think it was maybe a weekend and I had a few free hours and I decided that I was going to clean this little area, this little writing area. And I think I was on my own in the house and I can remember somehow feeling like I was going to do a really proper job. So I took the chair next door into the bedroom, took the desk out, I took the drawers, I took everything out of the drawers and cleaned them and tidied them and put them back. And I had the empty area and I just scrubbed it. I scrubbed, you know, I cleaned the window and scrubbed the skirting boards and hoovered like I've never hoovered before. And as I was doing this, I was full of joy. I just was so happy, and I can remember it just streaming through me, and I was singing, and I just felt great. And then the cleaning finished, and it was all lovely and clean, and my life went on. So why did this story come to me when I thought about the topic? I think that this story was to tell me, to remind me, that we are not in control of joy. That joy comes when joy wants to come, and we never really know when it's going to arrive. And it can arrive in the middle of of the job that we thought was going to be an unpleasant job or something that we really resisted. And I can pretty much guarantee that if I went back to that cottage and all the same things were in that space and I did it again, did exactly what I did last time, it's unlikely that I would feel the same. That we can't manipulate joy. We can't do exactly the same thing that we did last time that we were happy and expect that we're going to get happy again. So that's a shame. Yeah, so what can we do? And what I think we can do is What we do have some control over is our conditions. One of the conditions that you have chosen to put in place for yourself this morning is coming to this talk. So there would be lots of other things that you could have chosen. Facebook has probably given you all kinds of different options, and you could have stayed at home. It was a bit dull outside and drizzly. You might have just kind of thought, oh, 'Got a cup of tea, I'm just going to stay here and watch TV,' or whatever. But you chose to come out and come here, and so this is one of the conditions that you have chosen. I'll talk a little bit about the conditions that I choose because I think that might help you to think about your own conditions. So I've kind of I've kind of got 3 things that I want to talk about when it comes to conditions, and the first is bringing ourselves into connection with different things. So this talk's called Connect with Joy, and I think that if we connect with certain things, joy is more likely to come to us, almost like some kind of electrical circuit that we, we're lining things up in a certain way. Maybe clearing things out the way. And for me, there are 4 things that I choose to connect with. There's always a question about how much choice we have. Sometimes things are difficult to choose, so I want to just say that before I continue, that, that we all have grown up in different families, we've got different family histories, we've got different you know, stories, different limitations. So sometimes to choose something can be incredibly difficult, but I kind of feel like we do have a choice, even when it is incredibly difficult, that there is something that we can do in that situation, even if it's just asking for help or stopping something or moving a millimetre in a different direction. So when I'm talking about the choices we're making, let's be realistic as well about what's possible. So the first thing that I choose to connect with is myself, and I do that in various ways. I have a journal that I write in sometimes. I do spiritual practice. And sit quietly, which helps me to connect with myself. I have a new, um, I'm a psychotherapist and I'm working with a new model which is called Internal Family Systems, which I won't go into now because it would take up the whole talk, um, and I'm really excited about it, so I, I talk about it for a long time. But the, the short version is that it involves, um, tuning into the different parts of ourselves, as if those, almost as if those parts are our little people in us. And something that I've started doing every morning for 10 minutes with a cup of tea before I do anything else is sitting down on my own, lighting a candle, and inviting any of my parts who want some attention to step forwards. And that's been a really excellent way of tuning in to the different things in me, the different feelings or problems or impulses, whatever it is, that need attention. And so this morning I did that. I won't tell you what happened because it might sound a bit strange, but I connected with some parts of myself and we had a little adventure. So all of that, all of those things kind of add up to— walking might be a way that you connect with yourself, or gardening, or anything you do on your own, really. My friend went on a retreat day to Muknalabi on Friday and just spent the day doing a bit of art and reading. That's the kind of thing I'm talking about. These things that help us to, to join some of the dots in our inside us, because the more I learn about my internal world, the more I have the experience that some parts of me me are completely unaware of other parts of me. They think they're on their own, and that's, that's their belief. And so connecting with those parts can just help those parts feel less alone, maybe give some information to other parts of us. And so everyone's talking, it's all a bit more joined up. The second thing that I think is helpful to connect with is others, other people. So I do that in various ways. I have a husband, I have a community, very lucky to have a lovely community, spiritual community. I attend a 12-step program, so I connect with others there, and I also connect with others in all sorts of other ways—friendships. I'm a therapist, so I have clients, and I'm also a client sometimes. Sometimes all of these things help me to not only experience connection with others and receive things and give things, but also help me to see how I link up inside myself. Because when we, when we come into relationship, there's always a mirror there. There's something that shows us something about ourselves. I've got nature here as a category to connect with, which Ema will be pleased about. And I think that nature and myself, you know, nature is a really good way of connecting with myself, but it's not just about connecting with myself, it's also about connecting with nature. So we have a veg patch which is therapeutic, and I've got garden and we have the hills and even just— we have bunnies who live in the garden and we have to get them up in the morning and put them to bed at night and even just walking outside to the hutch, whatever the weather, it connects me into the world in a different way than if we just stay sat in our warm and cosy flat and that's especially true when it's cold and miserable outside, I think it's even more tempting to stay inside. And for me, the fourth thing is the Buddha. So for me, the Buddha represents something that, something that, that sits behind all of these other things that I've talked about, something fundamental. And people talk about it in various ways. It may be that you connect with that through nature, or it may be that you have some little personal rituals that help you to connect with that something bigger. But for me, the Buddha is the thing that contains everything, so it's underneath everything and behind everything. And whether or not I'm experiencing it, I kind of know it's there. And I do that in various ways. I have a personal practice, have a little 5-minute— we'll be doing some chanting at the end of this morning, and the chanting we'll do is what I do every morning, just for 5 minutes, because that's really doable. I don't rebel against that and say I haven't got time. So that's my little personal practice. And we're lucky enough to run a temple, so we have to come to services because we run them 3 times a week. So that's really good practice. And also sometimes we get together with more people in the community, which is really nourishing. And I also connect with the Buddha through reading books that are by Christian writers or Sufi writers, or there's something universal for me about that light that for me tends to shine through the Buddha but also shines through all kinds of other teachers and, and nature. So that's the first way I would suggest that we can create good conditions, is that we connect with those four things: ourselves, others, nature, and the divine spiritual dimension. The second of the three things that I would suggest we think about is gratitude, a cliché when it comes to joy, and it's a cliché because it works. It does make a difference, and I've always seen gratitude as something that we are born with. I think we're born with a kind of a propensity for, or a certain capacity for, or skill for gratitude. Some people are lucky to be born with more than others. And I think that it is a muscle that can be developed if we practice it. And practicing it can be as simple as writing 3 things every day that you're grateful for at the end of the day. Or we have a spiritual practice called Nei Kwan where we list the things that we have received over the past 24 hours. So even 5 minutes of sitting and just making a list of what we've received can put us in a place where we are more open to receiving more. It's like the channel's open and something, something— I think that the I don't know if it's just that we recognize it when we get more, or if it's that we actually become open to more. I think it's probably both, because I'm just thinking about how it works with people. If you, if you have a friend who is really grateful when you make them a cup of tea, you're more likely to really enjoy making them cups of tea or giving them things, because there is something that invites that, that kind of that what you want to give to people who are happy to be given to. And it is harder to offer things to people who have walls up and who find things wrong with what you do. And you know, that's, that's not their fault, that's just how they're keeping themselves safe. But I think that if we can open ourselves to feeling grateful, then that does open the channels for more stuff to come. And the third thing is faith, and the word that I've got here is remember, to remember that the sun is shining even when the clouds are really thick. It's not always possible to feel full of joy because life is difficult, dukkha, happens. We can't avoid suffering. The Buddha told us that, that whatever we do, we cannot avoid suffering. We will get sick, we will get old, we will die. Other people will do that. Yeah, our old cat at the moment has got a furball but can't quite— he can't quite get rid of it. So he's been vomiting in the night, you know, maybe once, maybe 3 times for the past couple of weeks. Bless him. And, um, he really— this is— sorry, this is a bit graphic, but he really enjoys vomiting on the carpet just where I— just where my pillow is, just underneath my head. So I have to sort of shove him onto the kitchen, which is, uh, non-carpeted, where it's much easier to clear up. So every night I'm, I'm conscious of whether he's his little footsteps going down the steps. I'm waiting for that telltale sound, and as soon as I hear it, I kind of lean over and shove him over. So that's been interrupting my sleep, and, you know, interrupting his sleep as well. But these are the kinds of things that happen in life. This is life. And at times like that, it's helpful to just remember that that there is something more than that, that behind the difficulty, behind the suffering, there is a possibility, a potential for something wonderful. So those are the 3 things that I wanted to mention today: connection with those 4 things, gratitude and remembering that the sun is shining even when the clouds are there. And I'm— I could go on, there would be lots of other things I could say, but I think when it comes to thinking about what we are in control of when it comes to changing our lives, it's helpful for me certainly to keep it simple and to not go too crazy for various reasons. I think that it can trigger parts of ourselves that are very perfectionist, so we start thinking, 'Right, I've got to do all of those things in order to whatever.' I think it can just be overwhelming if we try and change too many things at once. I also think that we are as we are for a good reason. So we are experiencing the levels of joy that we're experiencing right now because that's how our system knows how to be stable. That's how we kind of— we know where we are as we are. And although you may think that experiencing more joy could only be a good thing, there will also be reasons why we don't experience more joy in our lives as it is. And they will be varied. It could be that experiencing more joy would connect us with, with things that are more difficult to feel, like maybe grief or disappointment or anger, because when we're not feeling much joy, it may be that we're not feeling much of anything. So that, that the keeping the joy out is also keeping all the difficult stuff out. Uh, it may be that feeling more joy makes us feel more vulnerable. It may be that it brings us closer to other people and more intimate with them, which is really scary. I nearly said fucking scary. It's fucking scary to be closer to people. So when we're, when we're changing these conditions in our lives, it's helpful to acknowledge that we are where we are. For a good reason. The bits of us that are keeping us safe in whatever way they're keeping us safe are doing so because they really want to keep us safe. And to just sort of go gently with it and to do little experiments. So, okay, so I know that if I go swimming once a week, I tend to feel better, and also I get this weird guilt thing the day after. So let's just, let's just experiment with that for a little while, and when I feel the guilt come up, just kind of tune into it and be curious about it. Ask the guilt, what's going on? Or I feel like I really want to do this thing, but I somehow keep not being free or deciding that something else is more important, or whatever it is. Oh, so that's interesting. So there's a part of me that really wants to do it and another part that's really not sure. So let's be curious about the parts that aren't sure. What is the fear of those parts? Is it that I'm not free enough? Is it that I'm too busy? Or is it that actually I know that if I do that, it's gonna start dismantling some of these defenses that I've built so carefully for the past 30 years, and what would happen then? So we can reassure the parts of that are worried and just say, okay, so how about we just go, we just go once and you can leave halfway if you want to, and then we'll talk about it afterwards. So that's that kind of checking in with yourself thing. And just always be curious. I think that curiosity is always a good thing. What is it that is blocking me? What is it that is getting in the way here. And rather than just wanting to get rid of that thing, asking that thing that's in the way what wisdom it's got for you. What is it that would make it feel better about you doing the thing that you feel that you— that would be good for you. Yeah, so be realistic and My own experience of being alive is that a lot of the change that happens happens very, very slowly, and it's a bit like roots going down onto the earth, that the roots are going, the roots are going, and you think nothing's changing, and you're still changing in the good conditions, and you're like, what, you know, why is it this not working, and then one day the plant comes up and blooms because it's, it's ready. So there's also something about really trusting the process, trusting, having patience in the process, that we change as quickly as we are ready to change. However good conditions we have, if we put a plant that's had a kind of a rough start in life in the perfect conditions in the garden it's going to take it a bit longer to recover. However much, you know, you can't put too much— you can give it a little bit of fertilizer, but giving it too much just doesn't make any difference. Sometimes time is the only medicine. So the words for the chanting are Namo, which means I call out to, I take refuge in, Amida, Satya Robyn is the Buddha of infinite light, and 'Buu' is short for Buddha. Do join in once you get the tune, and I'll get quieter at the end, and we'll all just have a little moment of silence at the end.
Nam-myoho-renge-kyo. Namoh Amitabhu. Namoh Amitabhu. Namoh Amitabhu. Namo Amitabha. Namo Amitabha. Namo Amitabha. Namoh Amitabh. Namoh Amitabhu. Namoh Amitabhu. Namoh Amitabha. Namoh Amitabha. Namoh Amitabha. Namo Amitabha. Namo Amitabha. Namo Amitabhu. Namo Amitabhu.
