David Oromith

Hello. Good morning, everyone. It’s a joy to be with you all. It’s such a highlight of my week. So I’m very glad to be here with you. Thank you for coming along. Thanks for joining. I hope the sun is shining where you are too, we have a rare experience of sun in Wales, so hopefully you get to share in that as well.

So let’s begin. We’ll begin with our practice, 20 minutes of meditation, then our talk, then our discussion and the meditation. The theme this morning is self-compassion.

So I’d invite you all to find a comfortable posture and we can begin our practice.

Meditation

So just taking a moment to get comfortable, bringing to mind your most meaningful motivation for practice this morning.

Let’s begin our practice as we often do by first settling our body, speech, and mind in the natural states. Just allowing your awareness to permeate the field of the body, first of all. Just getting in touch with the experience of the body right now: the tactile sensations rising and passing, moment to moment.

And very much setting the body at ease as best you can. Just softening any tension, any tightness.

Just really inviting in that sense of ease in your body right now. You might like to couple this with some slower deep breaths. So just starting to slow down your breathing a bit deeper and letting there be this sense of release with the out breath.

Then seeing if you can bring a similar sense of ease to the mind. Can you give yourself permission to be at rest right now? Do not need to be ‘doing’, on the go, but to give yourself the gift of this moment of stillness and ease.

It’s okay. We can drop the guard.

Before we venture into the main practice, I’d just invite you to start to witness the experience of the breath in the body. We can count 14 rounds of in breath and out breath.

So just releasing the focus on the breath.

This is a practice of compassion that entails bringing to mind some experience of suffering. So I just invite you to think of some real situation in your life right now that you’re struggling with. Maybe it’s something you’ve been struggling with recently.

Maybe it’s something in the outer world- like a relationship issue, something at work, about your health, something with your friends, your loved ones, something that’s been quite painful or difficult to navigate.

Maybe it’s something inside you – that you’ve been feeling that you’re not good enough or you’ve made some mistake, you’ve done something you regret and that’s been weighing on you.

Just taking a moment, and as we recall this and bring this into our mind, just seeing if we can sit with that. You might like to make sure that your breathing doesn’t become too sharp or shallow.

Just acknowledging what it is. What is the situation? What’s going on, what’s happening.

It can help to recognise the humanity of our difficulties. So we can acknowledge that this is difficult, it’s hard, it’s painful.

So just seeing if we can sit with it for a moment, if we can turn towards it, allow it, and acknowledge it – that it is a real part of your life.

And it’s a moment of suffering to being human. Everyone experiences this. ‘There are probably many people experiencing something similar to me right now’. That’s not for us to then trivialise or compare, but simply acknowledge that being human means we struggle, sometimes we make mistakes, and sometimes we go through difficulties.

So just holding that recognition with a sense of kindness and understanding – not needing to fix anything or change anything.

I want you to consider – what if you had a friend, a good friend or loved one, who was going through the exact same thing you’re going through? A moment to imagine that, that you have someone you love, someone you care about, feeling the same thing that you’re feeling.

How does your heart respond? And what would you naturally want to say to that person?

You’d express your support, your understanding, your love. You’d tell them that ‘I’m here for you. I’m sorry this is happening’.

‘It’s okay, we’re all human, it’s okay to make mistakes’. ‘This will pass, you’ll be okay’. ‘How can I help?’ ‘I care’.

It may be a little bit awkward at first, but I’d invite you to then turn that in upon yourself and express that same understanding and kindness and compassion towards yourself in this difficulty. ‘You’ll be okay’,

‘I’m here. I care’, ‘It’s okay to be human’, ‘It’s okay to struggle’.

And so with the in breath, I’d invite you to just offer that sense of encouragement and care and tenderness and support for yourself.

As I said, this can be uncomfortable or awkward, but just do our best.

As we consider ourselves at this challenge, we might offer some phrases of kindness and compassion: karuna. Like ‘May my suffering be eased. May I be kind to myself. May I accept myself’.

So, just repeating these kinds of phrases to yourself, you can use these ones or others that feel more alive to you: ‘May my suffering be eased’, ‘May I be kind to myself?’ ‘May I accept myself’. Just paying attention to what you notice as you express these phrases towards yourself.

In the mind will wander, we might find ourselves down a rabbit hole.

That’s okay, just notice that wandering, let it go and come back to these phrases expressing compassion and kindness and understanding.

Teachings

This is what I thought we could focus on this morning: the need for greater self-compassion, in a sense. I think that we can be so hard on ourselves. I see that very clearly in what people share with me. I know that, from my own experience, life can be hard enough. The political world and our own difficulties and the difficulties of our loved ones that we’re maybe helping them through. It’s a lot to bear. It’s a lot for any one heart to hold, isn’t it? So you let that pain in, you let that difficulty in, the difficulty of the world, our own inner difficulties. We do our best, we do our best to stay afloat and to help others and to be present in their lives through their challenges; to be present during our own challenges and navigate them with the greatest wisdom and compassion we can muster in the moment. But it’s hard, it can be hard, and maybe we fall short of our expectations. Sometimes, we find ourselves exhausted or tired or snappy, needing a break, just having that feeling like we just need time away from it all. We need space even from our own difficult feelings. ‘I just don’t want to feel them today’. ‘I don’t want to do the work’. ‘I don’t want to do the practice today. I just don’t want to deal with any of it’.

And that’s okay, and it’s okay to need to take time. It’s okay to be human. It doesn’t mean we’ve failed, it doesn’t mean that we’re bad, it doesn’t mean we’re not a very good Buddhist or we’re not a very good meditator, or good whatever. It just means we’re human. It just means we’re human and suffering is part of life, right? Problems are part of life; they’re inevitable, and finding them difficult is part of life. That’s why we call them difficulties, because they are difficult. So we’re not enlightened beings yet; we’re not realised beings yet. At least I’m not. We’re sentient beings. We’re sentient beings with attachment and aversion and ignorance and delusion and everything that comes with that.

Though we have this great potential- although we have Buddha nature; although we have a mind that is pure, we do have to recognise the situation that we’re in and be realistic with ourselves. Not expect so much of ourselves, to take a realistic and measured approach to dealing with life’s challenges, to dealing with caring for others, and caring for ourselves. There’s a story in my book, ‘Calm Mind, Open Heart’.

It’s the last one -108, a little parable that I wanted to share as I see it’s relevant to this. So I’m just going to read it rather than try and remember it.

So it goes,

‘A mountain village was split in two by a fast flood-fed river.

In spring, the water ran so high that even strong swimmers feared it. Now, one year, a traveller arrived just as a child lost their footing on the bank and fell in. Without hesitation, the traveller leapt in after him.

The current was colder and fiercer than it looked. He grabbed the child, but the water just spun them both down the stream. An old ferryman on the far side shouted, threw a rope across the torrent, tied himself against a tree, braced himself against a tree. Only when the traveller caught that lifeline could he pull the child – and himself – to safety.

Shaking on the bank, the traveller gasped. “I only wanted to help.” The ferryman nodded. “You have a good heart, but the wrong order. You have to tie yourself to something solid first, and then you can save many. If you jump in untethered, the river will take you too”

When we face the world’s overwhelming difficulties. It can feel a bit like that river. If we plunge in without a lifeline, we can easily be swept away by despair, grief, and anger. A calm mind, a boundless heart, good spiritual friends: these are the things that are solid that we tie ourselves to. Secure the heart and mind first, then venture in. From that grounded place, we can be of benefit to others. Sometimes this means taking time away from the world’s difficulties to cultivate our inner qualities, and then venturing back out. This may seem selfish, but it is often the most compassionate thing we can do.’

And this doesn’t necessarily mean completely abandoning a loved one – say that you’re caring for a loved one – or walking away from your problems completely. You know, if your problems need you- they need you to do something. Ignoring the world – you know, sometimes it’s possible to really take time away, other times, we need to navigate the two. But finding respite, right? Finding moments of rest and recuperation and opportunities to restrengthen ourselves: to rely on spiritual friends; to do things that delight our heart and mind, that uplift us, that get us back in touch with our best qualities, and then venturing back out.

And this is an act of self compassion. It’s an act of self kindness, recognising that we can only do our best when we’re at our best, right?

And the negative self talk and pushing ourselves to the brink: that kind of very forceful striving. It’s no good for ourselves, and it’s no good for others either. So we have to learn to kind of reframe the negative self talk sometimes, don’t we? To actively replace the critical thoughts like, ‘I’m a failure, I’m no good. I can’t do this’, with thoughts that are more encouraging, thoughts that are more realistic. Like, ‘This is hard, but I’m learning. I’m doing my best’, ‘I’m doing my best today’. ‘This is a moment of suffering. Suffering is part of life’. ‘May I be kind to myself’ – as we did in the meditation there – reminding yourself that everyone has struggles and trying not to compare ourselves to others who seem to be doing better.

You know, ‘Everybody else seems to be coping. Why am I struggling so much? I must be doing something wrong’. And I think, asking ourselves, ‘What do I need right now? What do I need right now to be at my best for myself, to be at my best for others? What is it that I need?’

Some great advice I heard once was ‘to be your own best friend’. I think it’s fantastic advice. That everything becomes easier if you’re on your own side rather than against yourself. Either pushing yourself too hard or just not showing yourself any understanding and kindness. But if you stand alongside yourself, as it were, in an encouraging and supportive way, well, you’ve just made the job that much easier because you’ve got someone on your side. As we said, life is hard enough, right? Our own and others’ difficulties are hard enough without us fighting against ourselves the whole time. So if we can be that encouraging voice, then it can be really quite transformative.