Okay, is that okay? Yeah. So, welcome. And I always get tired when I hear people say what I do. So I'm really glad that Sojin's here today and Linda Hess is here today and Judy's here today because today I want to talk about love. Um, and, uh, what happens often, not infrequently in this, uh, in this setting is people keep on asking it and they get answers. And then six months later they ask again. So there's a certain sense, uh, that, that maybe the answers haven't quite touched them or, um, there's something missing. When we talk about it, during a spring practice period, Carol talked about love in a kind of love of nature sense, love of all beings.

[01:11]

And she also talked about it in terms of her relationship with her husband. husband who died a few years ago, Al. And she was talking about their love as this constant support in her life, a lot of kindness, tenderness, generosity, support in her journey towards becoming a priest. And she said, well, sometimes she kind of missed something like the old spark, but that it was more than overset by the constancy and the solidity of the relationship. Then the next week, Sojin talked about it. And Sojin kind of talked about two kinds of love. The passionate love, which is sort of, oh, we all know that's a delusion. And then the real Buddhist love of all beings and the compassion for a recognition of our interconnection and our feelings of when we sit and drop away, we feel we're connected to everyone.

[02:26]

But somehow that human love always gets short shrift. And it's been troubling me for some time because I keep on thinking, wait a minute, wait a minute. There's something missing from our discussion. Love and passion. Those are things that kind of make the world go around. Those are part of everybody's life. And maybe we need to have another discussion. And so what came to me, which often does, songs come to me. So Judy and Linda, please. The song, What's Love Got to Do With It. Now I am not Tina Turner. And so it's very hard for me to channel her, and also I'm not at a party dancing and stuff. But anyway, that song started playing around in my brain. What's Love Got to Do With It. So here we go.

[03:27]

You must understand that the touch of your hand makes my pulse react. That's only the thrill of boy meeting girl. Opposites attract. It's physical. It's logical. You must try to ignore that it means more than that. Oh, what's love got to do, got to do with it? What's love but a second-hand emotion? What's love got to do, got to do with it? Who needs a heart when a heart can be broken? A lot of people in our age group really love that. So my premise for the talk is that we are all living, feeling, sexual, relational, embodied human beings with all that goes with that.

[04:35]

Surely the Buddha, who was deeply compassionate, being a husband and a father himself, surely he understood that. And whether it was explicit or not, whether culturally you talked about it or not, that's certainly, you would assume, given our practice of Buddhism, that that's the case. So, part of that premise I'd like to say is, really, isn't every phase of our life equally valuable as a place of Buddhist practice? Whether it's working, our working life, our dedication to working, our creativity, our impulses to create, our parenting, our intimate relationships, all of these, and aging and loss and grief, all of these are the stuff of life.

[05:37]

Our life, our daily life, the messiness of being in it includes this whole range of feelings, roles, responsibilities, stresses, et cetera. Generally, obviously, these are the experiences that we have that generate the feelings of dissatisfaction. This is where we learn about impermanence. This is where we practice. We may lead with a sense of me, me, me, and a separate self, and we bump into ourselves over and over again. All of our delusions grow in that mess of life, in the midst of all of that interaction, in the midst of all those relationships.

[06:42]

And in the joy and in the pain and in the muck of life, in the muddy pool, that's where the lotus blooms. In that mess of our life, we confront ourselves. We have the opportunity to see what's going on, to really see. So I'm going to talk about, when I talk about love, I'm going to really include the passionate love and also sexual passion. You don't have to worry, I'm not going to get into details. So when I first started thinking about that, I thought about an old story where this passion or lack of passion comes through for us, a story that everybody or many people know, but I found a longer translation of it.

[07:48]

Usually when you hear it, you hear like six lines and then somebody kind of treats it like a colon. But I found a longer translation. So I wanted to read that. This is called The Old Woman Burns the Hermitage. Many of you have heard this. It is said that if you practice hard for 10 years, you will attain something. So as is customary among Buddhist laypeople, an old woman in China once supported a monk for 10 years. She provided him with food and clothing and allowed him to live in a hermitage that she provided. For his part, the monk only practiced very, very hard and did not have to concern himself with anything else. After 10 years, however, there was still no news from the monk. What did he attain, she wondered. I must test this monk. So one afternoon she summoned her 16-year-old daughter, who was considered one of the most beautiful girls in the village.

[08:52]

Her mother asked her to put on makeup her best perfume and clothing made of the finest materials. Then she gave her daughter instructions for testing the monk. Loaded her up with plenty of food and clothing and sent her off to the hermitage. The woman's daughter was very excited about the plan. When she arrived at the hermitage, she bowed to the monk and said, you have been here for 10 years, so my mother made this special food and clothing for you. Oh, thank you very much, the monk replied. Your mother is a great bodhisattva for supporting me like this for so long. Just then, the girl strongly embraced the monk, kissed him on the mouth and said, How do you feel? And the monk said, rotten log on cold rocks, no warmth in winter. So the young girl returned home full of happiness and admiration to report the incident to her mother.

[09:57]

Mother, mother, this monk's center is very strong. His mind does not move. He must have attained something. Oh, wait a minute, it doesn't. It doesn't matter if his center is very strong or his mind cannot be moved, or if he is a wonderful monk. I want to know, what did he say? Oh, his words are wonderful, mother, he said, rotten log on cold rocks, no warmth in winter. What, the old woman shouted, fuming, she grabbed a big stick, ran to the hermitage and mercilessly beat the monk. Shouting go away get out of here. I've spent 10 years helping a demon and then she burned the hermitage down So It's interesting because I've had different responses to this story for many years. My first response was like, how could she send her daughter in to be a seductress?

[10:58]

That's treating women like sex objects. What a terrible thing. I don't even want to read the rest of this. Somebody, whoever wrote this is a sexist and taking advantage of women, but I have to say, In this more detailed version, the daughter is complicit in the testing of the monk. And the idea is to really, it's like testing the monk in some other way. So it's a device and it's a literary device, if you will, to kind of get our attention, probably to shake us up a bit, because it doesn't sound really good, right? That you would send your kid in a situation where they could be harmed. But at any rate, I'll let that go because that's not the point of the story. Maybe it is. That certainly would be misuse of sexuality if someone sent their daughter into a dangerous situation. On the other hand, she knew the monk for many years and had a relationship with the monk. So, uh, I'm, I'm just treating this today.

[12:04]

People may have a response in the response part about this, but for me, I, I'm going to let it, I'm going to letting it, let it pass as a literary device and not a literal, uh, a literal thing. Another concern was, so the old woman felt that he, he failed the test. You might say, what does that mean? Wouldn't the test be following the precepts? Wouldn't the test be not misusing sexuality, not taking advantage of a beautiful young girl who's presenting herself to you in this aggressive way? Well, that actually is not, is not how the old woman looked at it and not how many teachers look at it. Many teachers look at it as the lack of compassion that he showed. He didn't have to respond to her sexually in an active way, but he could have responded in a compassionate way and said, thank you very much for the food.

[13:08]

It was very nice of you to come and appreciated and even felt something about her, but not acted on it. Reb Anderson says about this story in his book of Being Upright, The Third Precept, he says, although he appeared to be not misusing sexuality, he did not demonstrate the compassionate skill of one who was intimate with his own sexuality. Although his response seemed to protect the young woman and himself against indulging in sexual greed, his coldness hurt them both. Another quote from Nonin Chawani, who's a Zen teacher, if practice has turned our hearts in stone and made us oblivious to human's sensation and feelings, we have been not doing it properly. So, feeling feelings, recognizing our humanity,

[14:19]

completely feeling them. We talk about letting our feelings penetrate us, being totally with our feeling, being totally engaged with our feelings. And we talk a lot about anger, fear, hatred, some desire for some status, those kinds of things. We talk about sitting with those. But we don't often talk about how to sit with sexuality in overtly it's kind of implied but we don't really talk about it and so with these other so so what a lot of some So certainly me, but some other, when I started looking into that, there were other people talking about this, that they felt that we weren't giving enough space, enough importance to these feelings. In fact, in his book, Reb says, if you haven't felt a sexual feeling in a very long time, you're actually

[15:26]

an accident waiting to happen because that's rolling around in your subconscious and it can come out. because it's a natural thing. It can come out in an unexpected way. Whereas if you let the thoughts come, if you are skillful, not running around doing anything harmful, but if you're skillful, then you learn how to be healthy and in connection with your sexuality. You learn how to be with those feelings and not push them away and say, oh, that's inappropriate. That happens sometimes in long sessions, people, we call it like falling in love on the cushion. It happens especially in Tassajar, it happens a lot when you're there for three months, you get to sit next to somebody for a really long time. Pretty soon you have a relationship and people actually report having fantasies about some relationship with the person sitting across or the person sitting next to them, that those feelings come up. South Sahara being the cauldron that it is, you get a lot, you get three months to figure it out.

[16:29]

You can't really act on it. I guess you could, you'd be thrown out, but you'd be, you could, you could, you could, but you have that way to actually learn how to totally be sexual, be who you are, be with the feelings without necessarily putting a, putting a stop on them. So there is another story also that I thought about when I was starting to think about this. It's called Carrying the Woman Across the Stream. So it's another old Chinese story. Two monks taking a walk along a river discussing the Dharma. They meet a woman trying to cross the river and having trouble navigating the current. One monk picks her up. carries her across, sets her down, and crosses back, and the two continue their walk. But the other monk begins to berate the first monk, berate him ceaselessly about how he violated a precept by having physical contact with a woman.

[17:33]

The first monk responds, I put her down at the bank of the river. You're still carrying her. So that's the same kind of thing. Whether or not he felt sexual towards touching the woman, he might have, especially if he was celibate for a long time and it might have come up, but he didn't act on it. He just did what was compassionate at the time, which was respond to the need of another human, another being, and help that being, and not really worry about what might be going on in him. So that didn't interfere with his being a bodhisattva and helping a woman in an appropriate way. Again, Reb Anderson says. We are all sexual beings. In order to release the enlightenment body of the Buddhas, we must be intimate with our whole sexual being. He suggests the gatha moment by moment, standing or lying down. We vow to be intimate, to be upright with this great ball of fire.

[18:39]

He goes on, if we can sit here in the middle of such passionate feelings, then gradually integration will be realized. So, um, So he's telling us, embrace the passion. Embrace the passion. Let it totally flow through us. But then we have to make decisions about what we're going to do about the passion. And that is the discernment process we do about everything, right? Whenever we feel a craving, we make a discernment process. For example, It's a good idea to learn when you're in the throes of falling in love not to make big decisions. That would be a bad idea, for example, leaving your job and going to South America with a woman you met on the plane, that kind of thing.

[19:44]

It's recognizing I have this passion. It's great. I might want to have this relationship, but I'm going to just Here comes my Buddhist practice. I'm going to sit with that. I'm going to cherish that I had this feeling, you know, this connection and then act appropriately, decide. So this business of Rebs telling us to go sit with it, let the cauldron burn is kind of go take it where you can be with it in that way. And then recognize things for what they are. Recognize, for example, an unknown person that you have a sudden connection with, or even a physical connection with. Is that something that you want to hold on to? Is that something you want to see about? So having the feeling, maybe even acting on the feeling,

[20:49]

in a not unhealthy way, but not letting that feeling drive you in a way, take over your life. That's the danger. That's the danger he talks about. And so you face the fire in yourself and then come from that place of really knowing yourself, what is going on here? So how do we then? How do we then, the other pitfall is getting so hung up on the passionate love that we have for a person in a relationship. That when the magic goes, I can't tell you how many times I heard that in my life. What happened to you and your husband? Well, the magic left. So we fall in love with love. We fall in love with our falling in love.

[21:51]

We fall in love with how we are. In the beginning, it may be a wonderful experience and it's perfectly wonderful. But then we have to be able to recognize that things change. So if we live moment to moment in a relationship, we notice things change. And we work with that just like we work with change in every other part of our life. The inevitability of things are not gonna be the same. One of the issues with relationship is we hold on to some magic image of how things were and we're always hoping to get back there. But life has moved on. Circumstances are different. So we have to deal with what's in this moment and not hold somebody to some standard of how it was. How come you're not the same anymore? How come it's not the same anymore? That sort of thing.

[22:51]

So there's all kinds of traps. these passionate relationships, and yet that's the lesson. That is the lesson. The lessons come from living it, seeing it change, seeing impermanence, seeing the change into some other thing, which is, you have to be with that and feel that completely. So I'm going to leave sex for a minute, go on to just love. So relationships can elicit all kinds of feelings, emotions, and thoughts. But we go into these relationships with our own conditioning. and our own unrealistic expectations. We may fall in love based on physical attraction with all kinds of intense feelings of connection. We think we've found a soulmate, somebody who will meet all of our emotional and physical needs.

[24:02]

We will live happily ever after. That person will bring us flowers or make us a good dinner and all the time they'll always be there when we're in a bad mood, what have you. And that's, that's great because that, that's a wonderful relationship to have. And many people have that, but sometimes it's not that way. Sometimes both people are very busy and needy. So. Working with that in love, in a love relationship, is the gist of how we tune out to ourselves and begin to think, what am I bringing to this? How am I responding in this situation? Where's my part, right? Why am I blaming my partner for not being who I want them to be when in fact I I have an issue I have to look in. And that's what we do with everything, right? That's not different from what we do in our practice every day when we sit on the cushion, except we forget when we're home with our partner.

[25:07]

Then it's their fault. So practicing with the waves of passion, the waves of difficulties, the boat of marriage gets rocked around a lot, the boat of relationship is not an easy boat to ride. But in that, we understand suffering in relationship. We really understand where we're producing our own dissatisfaction. We begin to see that it's not all about me, hopefully. We cultivate that it's not about me, it's about relationship, it's about connection. And that's what we have to do with every relationship, not just a passionate relationship with a partner, but an intimate relationship with a friend. We like our friend because they're nice to us, that we get along, we agree on things, except when we don't and so forth.

[26:09]

So we have the same expectations that we have with our intimate relationships, with our emotionally intimate relationships. So a lot of times I think the danger is when I hear people talking about love or relationship here is that we somehow see the relationships and what's going on in the relationships as a distraction from practice, right? We're not really practicing because we're worried about what's going on in our relationship. But in fact, we are practicing, or we can be practicing. We can be practicing with our children. We can be practicing with our relationship. And in fact, that's really hard practice. That's really hard practice. That's a lot easier, for me anyway, than getting along with somebody who I'm washing dishes with at the Zen Center. I can handle that. But when I'm day-to-day in a relationship,

[27:10]

That's when the irritability comes, the self-centeredness shows up, the expectations arise, and that's when it's really hard. That's hard practice. So, Joko Beck says, in Every Day Zen, writes, relationships with people, especially close and trusting ones, are our best way to grow. In them, we can see that our mind, our body, our senses, and our thoughts, what our mind, our body, senses, and our thoughts really are. There is no way that is superior to relationship in helping us to see where we are stuck and what we're holding onto. As long as our buttons are being pushed, we have a great chance to learn and grow. So a relationship is a great gift Not because it really makes us happy, although it certainly does, but sometimes it doesn't.

[28:14]

So any intimate relationship, if we view it as practice, is the clearest mirror that we can find because our guard is down. That's the way I look at it. Your guard is down when you're in an intimate longer-term relationship. You're not on your best behavior necessarily. You can loosen your awareness of how you're affecting people. You can let it out, say things in an irritated way that you would never think about saying to somebody else. You're so nice, it's like when your kids go play at somebody else's house and they tell you what a great kid it is and so well-mannered. So people don't know what goes on behind the closed doors of relationship. Everything happens there. A lot of stuff happens. So I guess, you know, you might be thinking,

[29:18]

All of this relationship stuff sounds really hard. Is it worth it? Maybe I should go to the monastery. It might be a lot easier there. Is it worth it? Is it worth it to actually have the cauldron of relationship to be our Dharma practice, to be very much something that we look to and try to realize the truth through that. There's another story, which isn't particularly about this, but it's, but it feels emotionally related. Hakuin's, one of Hakuin's famous disciples, Satsu, had a granddaughter that died. Satsu was overcome with grief. A neighbor rebuked her, noting that he had Hakuin's certificate of enlightenment.

[30:23]

So how? She had it. So how could she be carried away like that? She replied, poor fool. Don't you see how my tears are better than a priest's chance? My tears remember every child who has died. She concludes. This is me at this moment. So it is the same to me with the exquisite pain of intimate relationships. There's the joy of togetherness, the desolation of separateness, the wonderful surprise of unconditional love in the moment and the disappointment when that same lover, lover disappoints you. In those experiences, we get to feel the joys and sorrows of other couples throughout time. We learn to discern a healthy dynamic from an unhealthy one. Ken Jones, who's a Canadian Buddhist teacher, offers a slightly different view.

[31:30]

The good news is that love motivates us and inspires us to develop a deeper self-knowledge without which love may perish. Our egocentric impulses are paired with a compassionate desire, moved by a sense of at-oneness with the other, which selflessly seek the other's well-being and which manifests from our Buddha nature. A committed long-term relationship can be a spiritual journey. in a more profound way when we loosen our clinging and support each other in moving from dependency to what Suzuki Roshi calls interdependency. So it can go both ways. Our passionate love helps us to sustain us during difficult times and open our eyes to ourself and our stuff and enhance our Buddhist practice. And our Buddhist practice can help us to grow and mature in relationships. It can be a spiritual journey, but it requires letting go of expectation of the others, any other to fill our needs.

[32:33]

So I will start asking you, what's love got to do with it? So I propose that passionate love, from my point, Passionate love for a partner, a child, a vocation is an essential Dharmagate through which awakening to the totality of the human condition and to the development of compassion for all beings. And I would like to hear what other people have to say about what's love got to do with it. Judy. I was just, I actually was having a sensory moment yes We're language-making creatures, we're narrative-driven creatures, we're cultural creatures, and so we bring all that in expressing this, in some ways, indescribable experience.

[34:23]

As Huzon said during the spring practice period, he said he liked the phrase, deep connection, rather than love. It isn't. It's maybe more connecting. And I think of all the times that Suzuki Roshi spun words, like interdependency, because it stops you. I don't know why he did that, but it stops you to go up. What? So I think it's really great practice What do I mean by love? And the person says something, and you say, thank you for your answer. What do you mean by love? And you keep going, so if you go below the chatter, it might be something like, I'm so alone.

[35:30]

So it's about deep connection. And I feel like that's the kind of conversation that's really important to be in, because it's really about getting close. How is that connected to all these girls? How is that connected to the Me Too movement? How is that connected to Buddha and this time and so on? People go crazy trying to come up with some answer to that. But for us to have this kind of warm-hearted connection and bring these beautiful family stories into the conversation, I think it's just very And I also think that when I asked Sojin Roshi a few weeks ago what his definition of discipline was, he said something like, I'm paraphrasing, but I heard it as

[36:37]

Sojin? Yes? Did you have something to say? Well, you know, you presented so much that it makes the head spin. I would like to say that passion actually means suffering. So, it's applied to strong desire. And in Buddhist terms, channels in a way that is beneficial and not destructive. Because passion is like fire. It is fire. And how we control that fire to make it work for us rather than destroy us. That's what I was going to get to. I don't know how you feel about this. I have my own feelings of passion. Desire. It's great, but I mean it's true, self-centeredness is a problem.

[37:54]

So if we let go of self-centeredness, love is right there, true love. Because when we want something from somebody in the area of sexuality, we call it love. use that person to satisfy Madison. Not everyone is aware that we live in a world of Madison. So, what is love? There are various degrees. Even that So what I was trying to do actually was respond to what you just said now, because that's what you said before.

[38:58]

And it, because to me it holds, it emphasizes the downside of something or whatever. And that there's also the fact that these experiences, whatever we get into is fodder for practice. when we were inevitably going to follow our passion in some way or another. And in that human condition where we are going to do it, we're not going to be some kind of people who tamp down our feelings. in order to avoid pain and suffering. We can do that, but for me, that's where the tension is. The tension is how do you be skillful with your feelings and your actions, but how do you not do that and then lose that part of life?

[40:03]

He sang the song very well. Early support, but the old woman, who probably wasn't all that old, you know, did to the mom when she beat him up. I had a sort of suspicion that maybe that was the only thing you could turn him on. It was an SNM move, yeah. Linda, you want to say it again? Well, I said that I thoroughly support what the old lady, who probably was not so old, did when she beat up the monk, and that might have turned him on when nothing else could. I think it's a kind of a Buddhist slippery slope to speak of sexuality in a negative way. Like you said, we sit with anger and greed and just like that we can sit with sexuality.

[41:12]

Yes. Well, that was another, that was kind of slipping down that slope, like putting it in a negative light along with anger and, or maybe, maybe you didn't mean it that way. No. I just want to say that the danger of coldness is as great as the danger of heat or fire. And that's what I love about the story. So thank you for bringing it to us. Yes. That was, that's my, I was hoping that you would actually be here, because I thought you would be the one who would really get it. Anyway, John. Oh, sorry, Peter, I'll get you later, next. If you can connect the struggle of practice in the most basic stuff that we're doing in the Zen Do with the talk, what I'm thinking of is, when I stand in front of the Dzogchen, and I'm about to bow to it, things come up at me and say, why am I doing this? So my issues come up. When I get into a relationship with a human being, they're already crowding around by the thousands, these things that come up.

[42:17]

So how can we take bowing to our seatmates, bowing to our ancestors, bowing to the zabutan, and extend that into effective approaching of a relationship? To me, our forms are about being completely present in the moment when you're bowing, about being respectful, about recognizing that harmony requires some, I always talk about in Zazen instruction, we become one body if we move together. We have to let go of our self-centeredness. We have to, just coming in here and doing the forms in sitting. It's just doing what's to be done. We don't, and then when we're sitting, all of those things come and we go back to our breath. So it's not like you're not doing that at home. You know, you have to go back to your breath.

[43:20]

I mean, Thich Nhat Hanh says we should all have a room where we can go in our house that we call the neutral space. And you go in there and you just sit quietly for a few minutes when something bad happens or you say to somebody, I'm in a bad mood, it's not good, you know, let's not talk right now, whatever. But we are responding to in the moment. We're not bringing all of the past and any of our future hopes to that moment. We're just right here. So you're right with a person with what's going on right now without generalizing or harking back or thinking of what's, you're just present completely. Yeah. Peter, he's had his hand up for a long time. So tell me how you do that. And that you can learn that.

[44:35]

Well, and that's true for a relationship too, right? This is not going to be a vacation. Peter was talking about somehow not only taking our practice out to our life, but bringing our life here into the Zindo. And he talked about meeting what's here. you know, in the story or something. Yes.

[46:00]

Yes. Yeah. It's not, it's not like we have this. Yeah. But, but I think what you're saying is kind of also what Heiko was alluding to was, you know, we, when we, what we're bringing here is, um, our whole selves. our whole selves and with our whole selves, all of ourselves, all of ourselves, we can bring all of it here and we can practice here and bring that. And that is who we are. So we're being, trying to be both, I think, authentic, but also, as you said, that other aspect, which I think I alluded to in the talk was, you know, not having expectations. of how it's gonna be because of how it was. Yeah. Yeah.

[47:05]

The movement? Well, would somebody like to pick? Go ahead. and then we'll answer, so go ahead. Yeah, I was thinking about, I've heard enlightened and spoken of as intimacy with all things, and I appreciated some of the words that should be introduced around deep connection or tenderness, because I heard you saying that there's a way in Buddhist discourse that the primary relationship, the marriage, the mother-child or parent-child relationship is sort of de-centered But that's actually one of the things that I find so radical and interesting about the Dharma, is that the possibilities for deep connection, for intimacy, transcend these kind of more normative structures.

[48:11]

So I just want to say that although I appreciate that you are sort of bringing, sort of wanting to recenter things that you feel like Yeah, I think my point was that if you are not involved in your life, There's always going up to the mountain and experiencing things dropping away, but you have to go back into the marketplace. That's your life. You can't live in that other space. You have to hold everything there. You have to hold all the messiness. And if you don't, you get into trouble. So you really have to bring it all to your practice.

[49:12]

and not exclude and not make something lesser than or not important because these things are really quite central to people's lives. So dismissing these things as somehow second rate, dismissing the kind of love you have for a child, my goodness, that's the most intense self way to kind of completely forget yourself and completely open to that what you're talking about. That's the Dharmagate for that. That's a way to do it. Not in some heady way, not in some intellectual way or some abstract way. Really on the ground, really on the ground. How does one control one's feelings in a situation like this, where people have feelings about each other?

[50:25]

How does that get expressed? How do those feelings get expressed? Both. Both. It's skillful in a skillful discernment process. If there's time and there's space between feeling and action, which we practice all the time, if we practice that, then you can have the strong feelings and then you have an assortment of ways to respond to that. And the more you feel it and you see it and you see what it does to you. The more you say, ah, I see where that's coming from. So I have a better understanding and I can be more skillful in how I work. That's just my point.

[51:25]

That's my point in this. Yeah. Helen. I just want to say thank you for bringing sexuality into this. Okay, well, she recommends, yeah, okay. Well, maybe you can give a talk on that. I think so, because, you know, I remember we had one priest who isn't around much anymore, but David Weinberg, and he said, we never talk about love and sex, so I'm going to talk about it, but then he didn't. And I was so disappointed. I mean, he talked about desire and stuff like that, but he actually didn't. He choked. But anyway, I mean, I'm not saying that I have some whatever.

[52:32]

I'm just saying, let's talk about it. What's love got to do with it? We should be talking about it. What sex got to do with it? Those are part of our lives and our practice. Let's not be afraid. We have different opinions. That's great. Oh, she was so, yeah. I mean, she's the reason I, probably the reason I went. Well, I shouldn't say that because it was so gin. But I felt that I could be a priest because I had, I did a, three-year study thing where she was a teacher and Grace Shearson. They were naughty ladies. They were naughty ladies. And I felt like a flesh and blood, I could be a flesh and blood person and be a priest. Yes. And I think it's time, right?

[53:43]

Okay. Um, I think that's an answer to me. The answer to me too, is that when sex, when there's sexual sublimination, um, sometimes, me too is a lot about power, right? Uh, so I don't think it's really as much about sex as it is about power. And I really think that if we start saying, oh, it's about sex or love or something like that, it's really about respect, power, equality, these kind of things, not let it get in the middle of what this we're talking about. Jose, did you have something to say? I did. I just wanted to point out that I think it's interesting that all the stories you brought Yeah, okay.

[54:51]

@Text_v004
@Score_JJ