With His Holiness In Atlanta

I arrived in Atlanta yesterday for an all day panel discussion today at Emory University on meditation and the treatment of depression. The Dalai Lama has accepted a professorship with this prestigious school and together they are proving in laboratories what meditators have know for years.
I am writing from my hotel overwhelmed with all the data I downloaded today. Depression affects 30 million people in North America alone and the average age of onset has changed from 55 to 24! While there is evidence of genetic disposition in developing depression there is so much good news in this newest data- namely that the practice of meditation can alter gene expression and prevent depression from developing!!! Also, this new data shows evidence of brain changes in only 2 weeks of meditation, where much of the previous data only used long time meditators.
This was my first time seeing the D.L. and I found him to be captivatingly charming and funny and humble. The person next to me experienced giggles at first in his presence and then 15 seconds later was sobbing uncontrollably. My own physical experience was a state of heightened awareness and overwhelming well being.
I was headed back to my hotel after the panel discussion for an early dinner when I was asked to volunteer at the monks' performance. I was whisked away in the monk van to set up the retail center at the performance. Some of you may remember some of the monks from their last 3 visits to Jax and I saw some of our old friends and worked with them selling books, t-shirts and sacred items. As always, spending time with the monks is a good time. Mundane tasks like running credit cards become fun when working with them. They seem to be perennially in great spirits and it is absolutely infectious. Later, I watched their performance and remembered how amazing the multiphonic chanting is. The monks chant 3 notes at once as they manipulate their voice box into a human amplifier. Every cell in my body seemed to vibrate with the chanting.
Tomorrow morning is an early morning teaching to the Buddhist community. I am hoping it will be a more intimate gathering, but I understand Atlanta has a very large Buddhist community and people have come from all over so it will probably be another very large group. Security is very tight. I could not even bring in my purse today. The D.L. is surrounded continuously by a large detail of secret service men who form a wall of human flesh to protect him. I was hoping this meant that the US now recognized the D.L. as a formal head of state, but asked and was told that he is recognized as the head of state of a nonrecognized state. Semantics, but apparently important in the political world.
Tomorrow, I head back to Jax and will be teaching at Bliss on Monday night. We will be practicing 30 days of the Metta soon in honor of His Holiness.