Deep and Lasting Love By Judy Royster Reprinted from THE METROWEST DAILY NEWS October 14, 2003 What if there were something that you could take every day, for free, that would neutralize any negative emotion that might damage your immune system, your hormonal balance or your heart and circulation? This miracle remedy could bring better health, higher self-esteem and more happiness into your life. Wouldn't you take advantage of it? Of course! This miracle cure is your ability to love. Not your ability to seek love, but your ability to give love Isn't it interesting that our attention is often on who loves us, rather than who we can give our love to? Our understanding of love is maturing. As children we focused on needing love. As young adults we equated love with romance and passion. An adult experience of love has more to do with connectedness, voluntary kindness, and opening to God/Spirit/Source. It is a friendship toward all living things. Love starts with compassion and kindness toward ourselves. Sharon Salzberg quotes the Buddha in her book, Lovingkindness, "You can search through out the entire universe for someone who is more deserving of your love and affection than you are yourself, and that person is not to be found anywhere. You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection." From the fullness of my connection with God, life and others, my capacity to love grows. Walt Whitman described this discovery of loving self, "I am larger and better than I thought. I did not think I held so much goodness." Love is when my well being includes your well being. The Dalai Lama offers a clarifying sentence about compassion and love in an article published in Shambhala Sun magazine, "Compassion and love are seen as two aspects of the same thing: compassion is the wish for another being to be free from suffering; love is wanting them to have happiness." In truth, love is our essence; love is the true subject of all spirituality. Love is the one force that nothing external can stop or prevent. There is nothing that could happen and no one who could act in such a way as to force me to not love. We all hold this innate potential. The power to love is given regardless of age, physical impairment, disease, poverty, culture, social status, even cognitive ability. My ability to love is more powerful than my need to be loved by another. I know this because I can choose to love even when another may not choose to love me. This loving is our essence, our deepest yearning and our truest expression of who we are. Love is discovering who I am and what life is, as I give freely to another person with out an ulterior motive. There is a mysterious connection between love and beauty. Have your ever witnessed a stunning sunset and felt a kinship with all those present? In the midst of great beauty, we are in touch with our loving, our own beauty and our always already given perfection. With a heart of love, there is no such thing as a stranger in ourselves or in others. In our deepest self is a yearning for union. When we love and when we encounter great beauty, we experience something larger than our separate self. We experience inherent perfection, perfect peace and no separation. Some call it the experience of God.

The Crucial Question; Who Am I? By Judy Royster Reprinted from THE METROWEST DAILY NEWS November 11, 2003 A number of years ago I took my parents on a Whale Watch Boat out of Gloucester. We were lucky, graced with a visit by a mother humpback and her playful baby. They appeared interested and swam close by the boat. I was a news photogapher then and had my cameras with me. I was using the long lens that lets me see things up close. The mother humpback began to move upward toward the water's surface just beside the boat. She gently floated and then rolled to one side. As I peered through my camera lens, suddenly all I could see was her eye. Her one, enormous bright eye was peering back at me, looking at me as I was looking at her. Gazing into that living eye I sensed a deep intelligence looking at me that is the same as the deep intelligence in me looking at her. I felt a certainty beyond facts and reason, that she was the same as me, from the same living source, and that we were in this living business together. I felt compassion for her and for myself, recognizing her as a part of my self. The Great Intelligence living as her, is the same Great Intelligence that is living me. In a way, she was my deeper self looking back at me. So who am I? Really and deeply, beyond my appearance, roles and abilities. What is constant and unchanged from my first self-awareness as a child, until now? I just returned from a meditation retreat at Kripalu Center in the Berkshires. The 6-day intensive was led by Richard Miller, a teacher of yoga, psychology and the field of awareness and spirituality. where we considered that question, "Who am I?" We spent time becoming more sensitive in our bodies by following our breath, slowing down our minds and sensing into the experience of physical aliveness. We paired up and took turns asking each other the question, "Who are you?" and then simply listening as the other person searched deeply within their mind, heart, body and soul for the most true answer. We found that as the days continued, our answers were moving closer and closer to a deep inner knowing, beyond words or reason, of our essential being as the living Divine. This appears not as a thought, but rather is a living certainty, known more positively and inevitably than information, imagination or memory. It is a knowing that comes from the heart, prior to reason and thought. Our spiritual practice is the practice of becoming grounded in that inner knowing/loving essence, which some call the Presence of God, in the present moment. It is what we are when we relax striving and seeking. It is our natural and original self. It is the knowing from the heart that what we truly are, is the One that is All and nothing is separate. Meister Eckart stated, ""The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me." I like to add that, The "I" with which I see you is the same "I" with which you see me.

You Are Light, Warmth, Love By Judy Royster Reprinted from THE METROWEST DAILY NEWS November 26, 2002 Imagine two rooms. A shared wall connects them. In the middle of the wall is a large door, which is closed. One room is brilliantly lit. The other room is in total darkness. Now, imagine opening the door. What happens? The room that was dark is now dimly lit. You are able to see shapes and movement, but perhaps not yet colors. And what about the room which was brilliantly lit? Notice that the bright room has not lost any light. It is just as bright. Here is a truth: there is no ÒforceÓ of darkness. There is only the force of light and the relative presence or absence of light. When I told this story to a friend who is a scientist, she told me that in science there is no ÒforceÓ of cold. There is only the force of heat and the relative presence or absence of warmth. Likewise, there is no force of evil. There is only the relative presence of love. All of the great wisdom traditions of the world have taught this one truth: God is Love. You may have heard of the Nag Hammadi Gospels. They are writings about and from Jesus and early Christianity that date back 2000 years. They were not included in the Bible as it came to be defined by the Roman emperor Constantine in the 4th century AD. These 52 papyrus texts were discovered in the Egyptian desert in 1945. Among these is the Gospel of Thomas, which some Biblical scholars believe to be the most authentic words of Jesus known today. (If you saw the movie, ÒStigmataÓ it was based on the discovery of these gospels.) In the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus said, ÒIf you bring forth what is within you, what is within you will redeem you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what is within you will destroy you.Ó (The Gnostic Gospels, Elaine Pagels, 1979) The process of becoming fully alive and joyful (redeemed) is the process of bringing to light (or to conscious awareness, or to love) all that is within us. This is the essence of spiritual practice. Looking within and bringing forth all that is there. Indoing so, we free any darkness or limitation and come to rest in our natural light, love, and warmth. Ask yourself penetrating and compassionate questions to get to know the places you might otherwise ignore. There is nothing to change or do, just get to know, bring it into the light, and the flow of life will do the rest. Did you ever notice that evil is ÒliveÓ spelled backwards? Our experiences of anxiety, distress, discomfort and disease are actually crimps in the flow of life. Like a hose with knots tied in it, the flow of aliveness is backed up. What we call evil or fear are simply the places that have been cramped, shut down, cut off, disowned, judged, or denied. As you open your heart and awareness to these parts of yourself with tenderness, you come into fullness, radiance, and balance. You become truly healed and whole. As you begin to welcome all parts of yourself, even the parts that do not deserve love or forgiveness, you heal the world. Our work is always on ourselves first, and not on the other person or the outward situation. As we change within, so the world changes. And so bring your dark places to light. Do the things you love with the people you love the most. Fill yourself with joy and blessings and so bless all others.

Om Meditation By Judy Royster Reprinted from THE METROWEST DAILY NEWS September 23, 2003 10 million adult Americans now practice some form of meditation regularly, according to the Time Magazine cover story published last month. The 9-page article describes brain and metabolic shifts and cites evidence that meditators live longer, have better immune systems, experience less stress and are better focused than non-meditators. In my experience, the benefits of regular meditation include a clear and focused mind, balanced emotions, a relaxed, healthy and responsive body, full enjoyment of the present moment, and feeling centered and at peace. Who can beat that! Although meditation was once associated with secret sayings and burning incense, more and more it is recognized as a practice of sitting quietly and relaxing deeply into a state of alert relaxation. It can be likened to the peaceful swoon that precedes sleep, without losing full awareness. The best known types of meditation practices include Trancendental Meditation, Zen, Vipassana and meditation based-movement practices such as Tai Chi, Yoga and conscious walking. These differ only in the method they use to quiet the mind into an alert presence and calm the body into relaxation. Meditation is unlike anything you have ever done before in that you can't get better at it by trying harder. The whole point is to relax, let go, not to "try" at all but simply to "be." One of my favorite poems about meditation comes from Wu-Men, a 13th century Zen Master. Ten thousand flowers in the spring, The moon in autumn, A cool breeze in summer, Snow in winter - If your mind isn't clouded By unnecessary things, This is the best season of your life. A benefit or perhaps the point of meditation is: being more fully present in the moment. That means less obsessive rumblings about what has been or should have been and less planning, fantasizing and dreaming about the future. Three decades ago a meditation teacher posed a question to me during a 10-day Vipassana retreat, "When you brush your teeth each morning, are you experiencing the brushing, or are you planning your day?" At that time I was an MBA student working in corporate Silicon Valley, raising a pre-teen daughter. My purpose in life was multi-tasking to oblivion. I thought the more I "did" the better person I would be. That one question opened my eyes to a way of life that is less driven and more fully awake. When you begin a meditation practice, it is best to do only 5 or at most 10 minutes each day, at the same time and in the same place, preferably a spot you don't use for something else such as studying or sleeping. The floor at the foot of your bed might be fine. If you are interested in a good book on meditation you might look into some of the classics such Miracle of Mindfulness" by Thich Nhat Hanh, "The Experience of Insight" by Joseph Goldstein; "Lovingkindness" by Sharon Salzberg; "Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind" by Shunryu Suzuki, and "How to Meditate" by Lawrence LeShan. For a meditation retreat there are two great resources in this state, Insight Meditation Society in Barre and Kripalu in Lenox. How to Meditate: 1. Find a quiet place. 2. Sit straight and in comfort. (Note: this is not an endurance test) 3. Breathe slowly, deeply and fully as you notice your body relaxing. Watch you breath gradually become slower and deeper. Just watch. 4. Know that you cannot do this incorrectly. Just invite relaxed alert presence. 5. You may use techniques to slow down your verbal mind including keeping your attention on your breath, using a repeated word or phrase, or visualizing a still pond or clear and open sky. 6. Simply note any thought, feeling or sensation, which may arise in your space of calm. Label it, "thinking" and return to stillness. 7. Relax any effort or struggle. Let go. Let go even deeper. Nothing to do but be. 8. Smile.