Ikushin Dana Velden has been practicing Zen since she visited Green Gulch Farm in the early 1990s. She lived at City Center and Tassajara from 1998-2012, was ordained as a Zen priest in 2001, and served as Shuso in 2006 under Senior Dharma Teacher Ryushin Paul Haller. She currently lives in Oakland beside a tangled garden and many fruit trees where she writes about practice and life in the kitchen. You can find her most recent book Finding Yourself in the Kitchen: Kitchen Meditations and Inspired Recipes from a Mindful Cook in the City Center Bookstore. She has also contributed to The Hidden Lamp: Stories from Twenty-Five Centuries of Awakened Women and Divine Gardens: Mayumi Oda and the San Francisco Zen Center.