This content was created by Satya Robyn. This content was uploaded by Satya Robyn. This is a YouTube talk titled "Satya Robyn: What I learnt from my puppy" (recorded May 7, 2019). It is a first-person presentation by Satya Robyn reflecting on bringing home a puppy named Aiko and the practical and emotional lessons that followed: toilet training, sleeplessness, managing relationships with resident cats (including Fatty), changes to daily routines, and how the puppy exposed personal attachments and vulnerabilities. The talk mixes anecdotes (mentions partner Casper, friend Jenny, and temple life), practical dog‑management advice (reward, ignore, manage), and Buddhist reflections (bodhisattva metaphor, mindfulness, letting go). The setting is a recorded talk/presentation at a temple and is not a multi‑speaker conversation.
Chapters
Okay, so I will talk for less than 28 minutes because that's how long we have on the camera. So let me just work out what that means. Okay, okay, so welcome, thank you for coming along to my talk. 'What I Learned from My Puppy.' So I wrote the title for this talk before receiving said puppy. We knew we were going to get her, and if I'd known what having a puppy would mean, I probably never would have written the title for the talk, because now it feels like a completely impossible task to share in however many minutes we have, what I've learned and what I'm continuing to learn, but I'll give it a try. And it feels like it's a good idea to start from the beginning, which is me and Caspar sitting one evening watching TV, and I think what might have happened is a dog was on the screen, and I said idly, in the way you kind of say idle things, 'Oh, I wonder if we'll ever get a dog?' And Kasper said, 'Oh yes!' And I was surprised because I didn't think he was interested in the slightest in dogs. And he said later that he'd been thinking for some time about the idea of a dog. And in my fashion, once the idea was in my head, What's that metaphor about, a dog and a bone? It was a bit of a dog and a bone. So we started looking at dogs when we were out, and I did a little bit of Googling about animal-friendly dog breeds. I started learning what different dogs were called. I had no idea about dogs. I always said that I was a cat person. I was very clearly cat, not dog. Dog. And when I used to go out with my friend Caroline and there was a dog, Caroline would go completely crazy for the dog and fuss it and say hello to it, and I'd just be like, meh, dog, not really into dogs. Um, but the, the, the idea kind of wormed its way inside us, and within 3 weeks we were driving to, um, Hail Zóin, an hour from here, to just have a look at a puppy, just to see, just to check it out. And of course I had some money for the deposit just in case, you know. So we met Aiko when she was 2 weeks old. We saw her online when she was a week and 3 days and met her 4 days later. And the 6 weeks between meeting her for the first time and her coming home were some of the longest weeks of my life. I was so excited about having her. I didn't really know why because I didn't really like dogs that much. I wasn't really— had no experience to go on, but somehow the idea of having a puppy was just— it felt life-changing. It felt like something was going to happen, like having a baby or getting married or going to Australia. And eventually the time came for her to arrive home. By this point we had done, especially me, had done a lot of research. We'd read a few books, I'd read lots of articles online, and I knew that it was going to be difficult. I knew that it was going to be time-consuming. And that it would mean changes to our life and that we'd be challenged. And I felt that I mentally prepared myself for that. And she arrived home and the first couple of days we were just in a bit of a daze really. We've actually got a puppy now, it's not in the future, she's here. And then I started to experience Aiko's own being as not entirely convenient to mine, as not entirely fitting in with my carefully ordered life. So she really wanted to chase the cats because the cats would run away from her. And I really love my cats, and my cats have lived very happy lives for 20 years, our old cat, and 8 years, our younger cats. They've had the roam of the house. They get lots of attention from me and Casper because we're at home a lot. They, they just enjoy being in charge, I guess. And suddenly there was this ball of fur and teeth charging towards them, and I several times was in tears because the cats were really unhappy, and I had done that to them. I was their owner. And I'd made them unhappy. We had the issue of toilet training and there were wees in the corridor and poos in my office and poos under the table and— not many! I'm coming, don't worry! Casper's sitting there feeling a bit protective. She's actually a very good dog, but I'm coming to that bit, so don't worry. And we had the times when I was absolutely exhausted because I'd been up 5 times in the night to comfort her because she missed her mum in the night and she'd whimper and we'd get out of bed and go to her crate and put our hand in the crate and just wait until she calmed down and go back to bed. And then we'd have to go at 3 o'clock in the morning and take her out to the garden to give her a wee. Sometimes it was raining, so I was exhausted at 3 o'clock in the afternoon. I just wanted to lie on my sofa and have a small nap, and she would not let me because she wanted to play, and she'd be jumping on me and running around and chasing the cats and eating things. And then there's the biting. So a few weeks ago, she started really biting us hard, and she really enjoyed getting the tip of our socks. And pulling them and pulling them and pulling them. And then if she couldn't quite get the sock, she'd get the toe. And then if she couldn't get the toe, she'd jump up and pull a sleeve or bite my nose or bite my hands. And the more of these behaviors that she exhibited, the harder and harder I worked to try and do the perfect thing in return, which would sort solve them, which would just mean that she would change from an inconvenient animal into a dog that would just fit with everything that I needed and would— I could go back to living my life as it was before. And I'm kind of making light of it now, but it was really hard and there were lots of tears and there was lots of regret. I several times googled "I regret getting my puppy" or various kind of— I wanted to check out whether I was the only one who was feeling like this, and often what would happen is that I would read that other people felt the same and they just said stick with it and it'll be okay, but it was really hard to believe that at the time. It was really hard to hard to imagine my life ever being the same again. It was hard to imagine ever having any time for myself again. You know, we'd do our work, and then when we weren't working, it was full-time managing the puppy. So my friend Jenny in New Zealand has the same dog as us. She has a Shih Tzu, which is a cross between a Shih Tzu and a Bichon Frise, and I always thought online it looked really cute. That was before we got ours, it's just a coincidence. And she told me— Jenny's a Buddhist— and she told me that her Buddhist teacher told her that dogs are bodhisattvas. A bodhisattva is a being who has become so wise and kind that if they wanted, they could go and be in a pure land or be in a wonderful place, kind of come away from the world. But instead of that, they vow to come back to this world and help people. So that's their vow, is that they, they want to keep coming back to this land until everybody's reached the place that they are. So how do we reconcile these two, these two images? How could Aiko possibly be a bodhisattva? I think that what I gradually learned is that, well, the first thing I gradually learned was that Aiko didn't want to upset me. It wasn't that she was biting my toe really hard because she wanted to hurt me. It was because she really wanted me to play with her, and when she gets overexcited, she can't quite control how hard she bites. It wasn't that she was weeing on the floor or pooing in my office because she wanted me to start my day in a bad way. It was that she was in my office and the doors were shut, and she suddenly needed to poo, so okay, under the desk, that's okay, I'll do it over there, that'll be okay. Or, yeah, I'll go into the corridor because then that's not in the living room, so that's a good place. And it wasn't that she knew that I needed a nap, she just saw me still and she wanted to play with me. One of the things that's been really challenging is our old cat Fatty is a bit, well, quite arthritic, and she really wants to play with Satya Robyn, and she keeps going over and barking at him and whips him around. She takes her toys over to him, she's like, "Please play with me." She doesn't know that every time he has to kind of turn round or swipe at her that it hurts his back because she just wants to play with him. And this, I think, is the first lesson that she's taught me that I'm remembering, is that when people annoy us, frustrate us, or drive us completely crazy, or we want to kill them, it's not because they hate us. It's because they are doing something that has its own logic and their we're just kind of getting in the way. And it really helps me when I'm feeling really frustrated with her to remember that it's not her failure, it's my failure. When something goes wrong, it's because we haven't managed things properly. The 3 rules that we read in a book, that— how to help dogs learn how to live alongside humans in a way that's harmonious is— I love these rules— the first is that you reward the things you like, The second is that you ignore the things you don't like, and the third is that you manage the things that you can't ignore. So if she's eating your shoes and you don't want her to eat your shoes, put them somewhere away. And whenever she pooed on the floor or chased the cat or ate the cat biscuits, which gives her a dodgy tummy, it's because we've failed. It's because we hadn't done those three things, and certainly the third one, the manage the things things you can't avoid. And the more I get to know her, the more I can see that when things upset me, it's because I haven't quite managed something properly. Maybe I've been too tired and I haven't asked for help, or I haven't gone to bed early enough the night before, or I haven't set up the systems that I need to set up. And the second thing that I learned, or that I'm learning, is how tightly I have been clinging to my securities, my security blankets. And I have all kinds of security blankets. Which are to do with having things in the way that I want them to be had. So I find the first hour of the day really precious because I can get up before Casper and do what I want to do and it's quiet. I really resented giving that up because I have a puppy now. And I like to eat when I want to eat, and then Aiko was coming and jumping at us, so we had to kind of— so what she showed me is how tightly I'd structured things and how narrowly I could exist in a way that felt comfortable, because just, you know, a little bit that way or that way and suddenly I was uncomfortable, I was annoyed, I was clinging to how things were. And as time's gone on, I've started to discover that some of the things that I clung rigidly to don't always serve me. So in the morning now, we have a little routine where I go to the alcove in the garden with the Buddha, and I do Nembutsu for 10 minutes. I do my chanting practice for 10 minutes, and and she sits on my lap and chews a chew, and it's really nice. And then we go for a walk. Yesterday we went up to the hills, you know, half 7 in the morning. It was really nice. And I am feeling a little less compelled, a little less compulsive around work because I can't always get to my computer. And what I'm realizing is I don't have to work all the time. Actually, I can do an hour of computer work and see my clients and do my temple duties, and there is space that I kind of had before, but I wasn't forced to use it. So she's kind of been— I described her to someone as like a bomb that sort of came into our carefully organized, structured lives, and she's shattered it. She's shattered all these things, and it's not always bad. For things to be shattered, that sometimes things need to be shattered in order to find a new way of coming together, or maybe just in order to stay shattered. There's a lovely piece in a Mark Nepo book about how his car window gets smashed and he comes out and he's like, 'Oh God, how am I going to clear all this glass up?' And then he notices how beautiful the glass is because the light's just sort of coming off all the little shards and it just— everything's just illuminated. And the third thing that I have learned from Aiko and that she will continue to show me is that the most important thing is that she loves us. And that I love her. And then everything else can kind of fall into place, that that's all, you know, there'll be ups and downs and there will continue to be ups and downs. I'm hoping they're not going to be quite so like that, they'll be a bit more like this, but that our relationship can comes before anything else and the rest of it we'll deal with, you know, because she's family and that's how it is. Last night she, um, there's a little sort of between our bedroom and our living room there's like a little kind of corridor and Fatty usually lives in the bedroom and so it's his, so he was standing kind of guarding the bedroom and she managed to sneak past past him into the bedroom. We were watching TV and we heard this really strange noise— it was like "wah wah wah." And we turned around and she'd found a toilet roll in the bedroom! She was so pleased, she had it in her mouth, she was like "look what I've got!" But she couldn't get past Matty. So she had this toilet roll in her mouth and she was trying to sort of dodge past him and he was there like don't get near me. It was the funniest thing. And that's the kind of, you know, that's the kind of gift that she's bringing us, is those unscheduled moments where something just happens and you can pause and enjoy it. We did go and rescue her. We did let her have the toilet roll and she made a great mess in the living room. Those kind of unasked-for moments that when you are able to let go of some of your security, and we all have a lot of security, that something else breaks through, that the sun breaks through and something unexpected happens. And I've hardly begun to do justice to the profundity of Aiko's dharma., and I'm sure that she will continue to be a bodhisattva. And really, we're all bodhisattvas. We can all be bodhisattvas for each other, especially the people that are really annoying. They're the best bodhisattvas of all because they're the ones that really show us something about how we are. And Aiko has certainly fulfilled that. It's like she's, you know, she's really tried hard. To push all my buttons. And I'm looking forward to learning more from her and from our other animals and from everyone we meet. Everyone we meet is a bodhisattva, really. So I think I'll stop there and The people on the camera won't be able to meet Aiko. People watching the video? Yeah. Well, they can if they come to the temple. Yeah, okay, so come to the temple and you get to meet Aiko. I was just wondering about bringing her up before the end of the tape, but yeah, no, come to the temple and meet Aiko. And if you are in the room, then if you would like to meet Aiko, then we're going to get her up and bring her up. So thank Thank you very much, everybody. Namaste. Namaste.
