Welsh Language Meetings

Welsh Language meditation evenings – Y Sangha Cymraeg.An update from Prajnavaca, one of the organisers of the Centre’s led meditations in Welsh, which are held on Zoom every fortnight on a Tuesday between 7:15pm and 8:30pm…
“These have now been held for over 4 years, as I believe the first meeting happened in March 2021. I thought it would be good to celebrate this and update people on how it’s going.
The initial idea and drive came from Kamalagita when she was Centre chair – diolch o galon Kamalagita, we shall always be grateful for how she took the initiative and with energy and determination made it happen.
Then the baton was passed to mainly 3 of us – Anantamani (based in Llangollen) Miriam Lynn (Anantamani’s daughter, based in Cambridge) and myself.  Miriam is currently on the ordination retreat in Spain and received the name of Jnanapadma, just last week.
Jnanapadma is a truly wonderful Dharma practitioner. Her qualities include showing a genuinely felt care and kindness for each group member, regular and new. She has an open heart that is able to hear and really see the people she meets. This is accompanied by her sparkling intelligence – which she uses to great effect when helping us to organise. I am grateful that she is also a fluent Welsh speaker, and is therefore able to share the task of leading the group. We are all really looking forward to her return, probably early in July.
Anantamani has been an order member for many, many years and is a stalwart of the Llangollen group and her experience and sense of joy brings a special quality to the evenings.
I’d like to take this opportunity to thank Liam Davies for taking over the fortnightly task of sending out reminders to people and sharing the login details. Despite Jnanapadma and myself not being available for over 2 months, the meetings continued and thrived – diolch o galon Liam.
Currently somewhere between six to eight participants join the group. Most are regulars, however we continue to be blessed by new faces. They can join from near and far, an average of 4 of us from Cardiff and others from Sheffield, Pwllheli and Pontardawe. In the first 2 years we had a regular participant from Montreal!  
I really want to stress that although having a reasonable understanding of Welsh is vital in order to benefit from the evenings, there are no expectations whatsoever about the standard of Welsh required. If you can follow, then please join – and join in the brief discussions only if you want to.  One of our participants at present is a new speaker ( this is the current preferred term for ‘Learner.’ If you think about it, one rarely refers to an English “learner” – only someone who is new to the language). Some people have joined us briefly for only a couple of nights, some join us once in a while and of course that’s all perfectly OK, all are welcome. We’d be very grateful if Sangha members could share this update with any Welsh speakers they know. Please remind people that the login details are readily available on the Cardiff Buddhist Centre website.
The format usually involves a brief Dharma talk, followed by 2 or 3 sits with short breaks. We follow the Triratna tradition of consciously ensuring equal time for mindfulness focused and metta focused guidance. Recently I have led a few visualisations including a Buddhanusati. Occasionally I have introduced examples from Welsh poetry that chime with dharmic values and vision. (e.g. R. Williams-Parry, Waldo Williams) The other recent trend is that we have been using our new Welsh translations of the Triratna puja book, for instance the refuges and precepts and the transference of merit. Ideas about future initiatives include organising a Welsh language retreat, for example Tirylan House near Llandeilo. I’ve noticed that we occasionally refer to ourselves as “ y Sangha bach Cymraeg” ( small Welsh language sangha) and the feeling behind this is really not one of separation at all, but a warm appreciation of what we share and our enjoyment of the language, an appreciation of this unique context in which to practise the Dharma and how it links us with the myriad languages of the world that are used to pass on the eternal teachings.

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