New Year’s Message from Dharmanidhiji

 
Namaste Jnanagni Kula.
Yesterday the 19 year venus cycle that gave me/the school many challenges ended, and the 6 year cycle of the sun began today, Dec. 28th.
Like the sun, the next 6 years will be a time of shining growth and effulgence for our kula. I am enjoying the newly found abundance of assistance that [...]

Protocols

This letter was originally sent to TYSG via email and was based on observations that Guruji had pertaining to some specific kula members. However, the content is appropriate and currently pertinent for all of us and can serve our own process of self-reflection nicely.
 
From Dharmanidhi-ji:
Dear Kula –
Since I will be commuting to and from [...]

Ouch! Hooray! The Guru Undermines Your World

by Sherab Chodzin Kohn
In order to understand the Guru-student relationship we have to understand that we live in a flat world. Most of us do not identify with it completely, but it is our default world, the one we fall into. The guru does not live in the flat world. If we try to describe [...]

Blinking Turns off the Brain

by Nicole Garbarini, Scientific American Mind
We blink an average of 15 times a minute. So why don’t we notice our world repeatedly going dark?
University College London scientists used fMRI brain imaging to find out. They placed light-blocking goggles on volunteers and put a strong fiber-optic light source against the roof of subjects’ mouths, which illuminated [...]

Depression Hastens Heart Disease

by Jamie Talan, Scientific American Mind
Scientists have known that heart patients who also suffer from depression are at greater risk for a subsequent attack. But the experts did not quite know why. Epidemiologists at Ohio State University’s School of Public Health have offered an intriguing explanation. They scanned the blood of depressed and non-depressed [...]

Placebo Power

by Kirin Haslinger, Scientific American Mind
Optimists are no longer alone in promoting “mind over matter.” A compelling study claims there is chemical credence for the placebo effect, at least in masking pain.
University of Michigan at Ann Arbor neuroscientist Jon-Kar Zubieta, who led the work, says that people produce a natural painkilling chemical in the brain [...]

Estrogen Blues

by Sarah Todd Davidson, Scientific American Mind
Over their lifetimes, women are twice as likely to suffer clinical depression than men. Low or imbalanced hormone levels can prompt depression in either sex, and insufficient estrogen in women has long been suspected. Now a comprehensive review of 30 years of research indicates that the trouble may not [...]

Shoveling Snow with Buddha

Following is one of the editor’s favorite poems.  Send in your favorites to VAC, and also your original pieces of poetry or other writings…
by Billy Collins
In the usual iconography of the temple or the local Wok
you would never see him doing such a thing,
tossing the dry snow over a mountain
of his bare, round shoulder,
his hair [...]