Satya Robyn leads a Buddhist service with guided meditation, chanting of Nenbutsu/Amitabha, and a dharma talk on self-compassion and caregiving. The recording includes formal readings, recitation of refuges and precepts, and closing prostrations, designed for both in-person and online participants.
Chapters
There we are. Good morning everyone. We're going to start with a reading and then move into our meditation practice, and this reading is called Turning to the Tatagata. We, your spiritual children, for countless past lives have chased after worldly things, unable to recognize the clear, pure basis of our true mind. Our actions of body, speech, and mind have been unwholesome. We have drowned in ignorant cravings jealousy, hatred, and anger. But now the sound of the great bell has caused us to awaken with a heart that is determined to renew our body and our mind. Please help us completely remove the red dust of all wrongdoings, mistakes, and faults. We, your spiritual children, in this moment make the vow to leave all our habit energies behind and for the whole of our life to go for refuge to the Sangha. Awakened One, please place your hand over us in protection so that loving kindness and compassion will lead and assist us. May our heart's garden of awakening bloom— sorry, heart's garden of awakening bloom with hundreds of flowers. May we bring the feelings of peace and joy into every household. May we plant wholesome seeds on 10,000 paths. May we never attempt to escape the suffering of the world. Always being present wherever beings need our help. May mountains and rivers be our witness in this moment as we bow our heads and request the Lord of Compassion to embrace us all. Namami Dabu. So now we'll move into a period of quiet meditation. And I'll just invite you to just sit calmly and quietly, just having an awareness of your breath and feeling that your breath is like your anchor. It's the place that you come back to if your mind starts to wander. We come back to our breath. So we're going to move into the period of chanting. We're going to chant the word Amitabha. Amitabha. Aah, ta, aah, mi, ta, ba, aah, mi, ta, aah, mi, ta, aah. Tao. Tao. Tao.
Tao. Tao.
Me.
Aum.
Ee ta.
Aum. Ee ta.
Aum. Ta. Now we're going to move into our refuges and our precepts. You just need to repeat the words. For refuge I go to the Buddha.
For refuge I go to the Buddha.
The one who is awake and full of love.
The one who is awake and full of love.
Namo Buddha.
Namo Buddha.
For refuge I go to the Dharma.
For refuge I go to the Dharma, all that guides us to wisdom and compassion, all that guides us to wisdom and compassion.
Namo Dhammaya.
Namo Dhammaya.
For refuge I go to the Sangha, for refuge I go to the Sangha, all who live in the Buddha's light, all who live in the Buddha's light. Namo Sanghaya.
Nam-myoho-renge-kyo.
With faith in the Three Jewels—
with faith in the Three Jewels—
and in light of my human tendencies— I pray that I may become aware—
I pray that I may become aware—
of when I take life—
of when I take life—
I pray that I may become aware—
I pray that I may become aware—
of when I take what is not freely given.
Of when I take what is not freely given.' 'I pray that I may become aware—' 'I pray that I may become aware of when I fall into sexual misconduct,' or for my call to sexual misfortune.
'I pray that I may become aware—' 'I pray that I may become aware of when I fall into wrong speech—' 'Of when I fall into wrong speech—I pray that I may become aware I pray that I may become aware of when I become intoxicated. Of when I become intoxicated. No blame.
No blame.
Be kind. Be kind. Love everything.
Love everything.
Innumerable sentient beings, we vow to save them all.
Inexhaustible are deluded passions.
We vow to transform them all.
Immeasurable are the Dharma teachings.
We vow to master them all.
Infinite is the Buddha's way.
We vow to fulfill it completely. Good morning everybody again. So my dharma talk today is kind of, well, is influenced by a project really that I've been working on for quite a few months. And it culminated this week on, when, Satya Robyn, Thursday, giving a talk at a local hospital on compassion and how can we be more compassionate to ourselves and how can we invite that in, because often being compassionate to ourselves is the thing that we find the hardest. And we live in a society where we're told, and you know, we put a little poster up on the screen that went, "Keep calm and carry on," because society, Western society, soldier on, you can do this, we can all do this. In the pandemic, we were all told to soldier on and everything will be fine. And we live lives where we have this framework for ourselves, where we are a certain thing for certain people. So we might have had a— as carers, we may have had a job that was our framework for our lives. Our family become a framework for our lives. We live in a world of social media where everybody puts a version of themselves online. So everything is around a structure that can be really difficult to uphold and that we can be afraid of losing. And then actually, when you become a carer, you do lose a lot of that. You do lose that framework. You might not be able to hold your job down anymore. You may have friends and family that distance themselves from you. It can be quite a challenging time, and although there are structures in place that are meant to help you, they don't always give you that space to identify with the suffering. And we kind of have this approach to suffering of saying, well, I'll just pretend it's not there, and if I pretend it's not there, I'll actually be okay. But what we don't then realize is that that suffering can start to affect us mentally, um, and we could become depressed. We might have a heightened state of anxiety, and physically we might find that we have a pain appear that we didn't have before, and When we start to cultivate compassion for ourselves, um, with a practice, which is what we went to do, is to teach some people how to cultivate the compassion. It can be really hard because we're having to look at that fear and invite a relationship with it that we don't normally do because we can find it uncomfortable. And, um, rather than hardening ourselves and becoming resistant to that fear, we have to make friends with it. And that can be really challenging. And what— that's one of the hardest things that, um, I've discovered with planning this workshop and researching it, is that it's really hard to find that space in the first place, to sit down for 10, 15 minutes and start to practice meditation in a way that allows you to become comfortable to feel these difficult emotions. And then secondly, actually sitting with them. Um, but when you do invite a relationship with the fear and with the suffering that allows you to feel comfortable interacting with it, then it opens up a huge opportunity for change within yourself. And studies are now showing that, um, actually there's been huge gains in people's mental well-being. Um, a survey of 200 people who did a compassionate care course found that, I think it was 28%, said that they had a reduced amount of depression. And that's, that's not a statistic to be sneezed at. It's a, it's a big, big difference. And so how do we create this safe space and cultivate awareness? So when we do our breathwork, we're trying to find these little spaces where we can lean in and feel safe.. And one of the things, it's not always obvious when we meditate, but actually when we do the nenbutsu, I tend to find it comes greater. You know, that silence at the end where we sit feels boundless. It feels really protecting. And those are the moments where we can soften our hearts. You know, we lean into the compassion of Amida and we can feel that softness. And we can go, okay, now's the time that I can be in tune with where this fear might be. For example, whether we feel it in our chest or our stomach, our legs, wherever fear holds us steady, cuz it doesn't want us to let go. And of course we must let go. We have to find a way to let go, to be wow. So the building up of this process of awareness through meditation allows us to stick with it. And I think anybody who's meditated for any period of time will have had a moment where they felt like they've wanted to run out of the room. I know I certainly have felt that on several occasions as a new practitioner a long time ago. So we create the steadfastness, and in those quiet spaces, whether it's be afternoon butsu or whether it's during meditation, We can feel a bit agitated, but that's because we're no longer creating this deception. We're no longer in a space of deceiving ourselves that the world is okay. We're acknowledging that yes, there are things that are uncomfortable in this world, and there will always be things that are uncomfortable in this world, but we have to learn how to make friends with it, and how to keep journeying on. Um, and it— there's always a misconception that meditation will somehow solve all of our ills, will make it all go away. You trot into the meditation room, you do a bit of breathing, you leave, and you feel so much better. But it's so much more than that. It's about allowing us to create this steadfastness to be able to sit in the mire, to sit and work with it and make friends with it. An uncomfortable friend, one that you don't wanna be around really for very long, but necessarily you need to work with it to improve yourself. So we create this self-compassion through this experience. And one of the lovely things that I found with all of this is this idea of letting the story go, letting it go, and being able to say, there's this gentleness inside me that's still here. So even though this difficultness is around and this fear is around, this gentle quality of me is still here. Amongst all the chaos and the confusion. And, uh, we learn how to let go of all the difficult stuff in a way that means, okay, it's not completely gone. Like, I'll wake up tomorrow and I'll still be a carer, but the things that are troubling me, I'm allowed to say, okay, this is difficult, this is uncomfortable, and it's probably always going to be difficult and uncomfortable. But I can breathe with it, and I can look to Amida and call out to Amida, who will accept me just as I am. So when I'm having a difficult day, if I might fall into a place of blame, Amida is going to say, it's okay, it's all going to be just okay. Just entrust, just lean into the Nembutsu. That's all we have to do. That's all that is asked of us. Just lean into the Nembutsu. So the next time we feel uncomfortable, the next time fear feels difficult in our bodies, we just have to breathe, do a bit of Nembutsu if we can, and just say, it's okay, I recognize that it's there, but I also recognize that I can be Still, I'm still here beyond the chaos. There's always going to be a place of calm that you can find. Namaste. And we're going to do our prostrations.
In gratitude, we make this offering to all Buddhas and Bodhisattvas throughout space and time. May it be as fragrant as earth itself, reflecting our careful efforts, our wholehearted awareness, and the fruits of understanding slowly ripening. May we and all beings be companions of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas. May we awaken from forgetfulness and realize our true nature.
Thank you everyone. I think we need to tidy up our seats, and then announcement-wise, we've got the continuous chanting week after next. Yeah, so in 2 weeks' time we've got the continuous chanting around the room from 10:30 to 12. Yeah, 10:30 to 12:30. You don't have to chant for the whole 2 hours, you can come and just experience a little bit and then go again. But it's a really nice activity and it's always good to have lots of different voices and different sounds. So if anybody would like to join in, that would be lovely. That's all. So we can just do the final blessing. So blessed by Amitabha's light, May we care for all living things and the whole earth. I'm just going to stop the recording. Hello to everybody online, I'll come back and say hello in a minute.
