Saint Valentine's days invites us to invite love, sexuality, and romantic love back into our lives and practice. We can't just repress these basic human needs. We have to find a way to allow that aspect of our lives into our practice and the way we think about practice and what practice is for. Zen teaches non-separation as a model for how to have a good life. But what does that mean in the context of attachment, love, and loss?

The Student teacher relationship is at the core of our tradition and practice. But how do you go about having a student teacher relationship with someone? What does it mean to be a student? What does it mean to be a teacher?

"I fought the law and the law won." There's a certain kind of suffering we undergo when we beat our head against the wall of suffering, when we somehow fail to recognize necessity for what it is, and we see it instead as the kind of removable obstacle that we metaphorically describe as slavery. We think of it as the kinds of chains that are removable. When someone once asked D.T. Suzuki how is freedom defined in Zen, he replied, "The elbow doesn't bend backwards." Freedom was movement within a defined dimension of functioning. It did not try to break out of those bounds and do something that it was not designed to do, or even capable of doing. Are there further, equally determined necessary aspects of something called human nature? What is it to be a person? To what extent is love or attachment a necessity?