Music of my Tea - How Tea Way became the Way of my Life

Here’s a short podcast about my Tea Way. Everybody comes to tea different way, and this was mine.

For number of years I did not drink any tea. I did not know any better than tea bags I could find on the shelves of regular grocery stores. And I did not like what was there, at all.

My comeback to tea drinking happened in 2005. Yes, about 20 years later after I stopped drinking tea. At that time I was already studying Japanese bamboo flute called shakuhachi, which of course you can hear now on the background. And internet started gaining some more popularity, so I could actually find some friends in Russia who were also interested in bamboo music. We started associating, and this was how I found out about Chinese tea ceremony, called Gong-Fu Cha, and about various types of tea. Yes, I was learning about tea ceremony from over 10,000 miles away. But it does not surprise me. The border line between Russia and China is somewhere around 2,500 miles, so there are a lot of traditions that crossed over from China. And tea was one of them.

I even downloaded several educational movies in Russian about types of Chinese tea ceremony and kinds of tea. Then I got curious about traditional Chinese tea ceremony in San Diego. BINGO! I found one very traditional tea shop very close to where I lived. It was called The Whole Leaf. It had a pretty large selection of loose leaf teas and tea wear. And the owner was very knowledgeable about tea and about Chinese philosophy in general. Before long, I volunteered to play shakuhachi flute at that location, and that was the beginning of my Tea journey…

Want to know more about how Tea Way became my Way? Listen to my podcast! Or you can read the transcript below 😉

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Tea Way Podcast Transcript

Hi everybody,

This is Eugene Sukhorukov from beautiful San Diego, CA. I hope everything is going great in your corner of the world. Thanks for listening to my Healthy Positive Lifestyle podcast. Welcome back.

This is the first episode in a new year of the Horse by Chinese calendar. So, happy New Year! So far, I have been discussing different aspects of my own Path. I started my holistic journey with Autogenic training, then I progressed into Yoga, Martial Arts, various meditation techniques, Chi Kung, Suizen or Zen Buddhist music meditation, Vibrations and their use in meditation and so on. And finally last time I talked a little about how I could find time to fit all of this in my life.

Well, I am not really done with basic outline of my journey. I’d like to talk about couple of other things before we can go into more details.

I’d like to talk about Tea and tea ceremony, and about how I personally got into tea and what it means to me. I often look at my life as a jigsaw puzzle, and Tea became one of the valuable pieces. It felt like there was a very specific place in my life for tea, and nothing else could replace it.

Tea has been part of my daily routine for as long as I remember myself. I grew up drinking tea. I grew up in Soviet Union. Our neighbors from the South were China, Mongolia, Iran, Afghanistan and Turkey. India was not an immediate neighbor, but our countries were really great friends. So, our friends and neighbors had tea as a big part of their culture. No wonder that it became a big part of Russian culture as well. And by the way, Russian word for tea is “Chai”. I am not sure if the word has Russian origin, but it is definitely part of Russian language now. And perhaps has been for at least 1000 years. But I am not gonna speculate about etymology.

My first tea experience began with loose black tea. We did not have any tea bags, we used loose leaf black tea from India or Ceylon, which is now called Sri Lanka.

The tea tradition as I remember it, involved making really thick brew of black tea in a small porcelain tea pot. My grandma would usually preheat teapot with hot water, then put tea there, and pour boiling water. After that she would cover it and leave it alone for a while. After tea was ready, we would pour hot water in a cup and add concentrated tea from the tea pot.

Tea drinking always included something sweet, mostly sugar or honey. I even remember special sugar nippers used to chip pieces our of sugar cones. But in my time we already had white sugar which came granulated or in a form of small pressed cubes. I used nippers to split those cubes in pieces, just for fun. Of course, some kind of cookies, pies or cakes also were there.

Concentrated tea stayed in the tea pot for the whole day. Any time somebody wanted to drink tea, it was there. Hot tea drinking has always been a part of holiday meal, or any official family meal gathering. Sweet hot tea often helped me to get rid of light headache.

As I was growing up, first I replaced sugar with honey. My grand uncle was a bee keeper, and we were getting 2-3 one gallon jars with fresh honey every year. He was extremely health oriented, and he was an energy healer. We knew that his honey was as pure as honey could be. So I ate a lot of honey as a kid and teenager. But as a teen I started drinking cold tea. Not ice, I still don’t like ice in my drinks. But room temperature. I was just pouring glass of water and adding tea concentrate. And this was my tea. I consumed a lot of it for a number of years, until I got into milk drinking. Yes, I was drinking a lot of milk instead of water for quite long time. But this may be a different talk later.

If you look for Russian tea tradition on internet, you will see a very traditional device called Samovar. Well, this may be tradition Russian way, but we did not use it when I was growing up. Samovar is actually nothing else but a fancy looking tea kettle combined with a heater. After it was heated outside, the host would bring it inside and put it on the dining table. But in 20th century many people started using kitchen stoves to heat water in the kettle, and samovars disappeared in the history until couple of decades ago, when they came back in the form of electric samovar. Again, just a fancy looking electric kettle. We used it sometimes during holiday family gathering more for fun rather than a necessity.

As I mentioned before, my tea drinking was replaced with milk. For several years I was consuming a lot of milk every day. I could easily drink half a gallon a day. There are a lot of opinions about whether this is good or not, and I am not going into this discussion now.

For number of years I did not drink any tea. I did not know any better than tea bags I could find on the shelves of regular grocery stores. And I did not like what was there, at all.

I’ve learned a lot since then! Also I met a number of tea enthusiasts in the area. I became a member of San Diego Tea Club, and even hosted several tea-and-music events.

I’ve seen the tea map of San Diego change several times since I got started. the Whole Leaf still exists in a form of internet store I believe, and it’s retail place was taken by Mad Monk Tea, another wonderful tea shop. I will make some videos for my video podcast about that place, and some other tea places too.

Now let’s talk about what fascinated me in tea ceremony.

First of all, I think the whole tea set up. The atmosphere, the process, the tools, tiny tea pots and tea cups. I think it just completely matched my mindset I developed. It was very oriental and very wabi-sabi by the time I was introduced to tea ceremony. So there was no question do I need this tea or not. That was it. That was one of the pieces of jigsaw puzzle, ant it fit perfectly in the whole picture. I like rustic simple environment of tea drinking. In fact, being introduced to Zen through my flute study, I already developed the sense of unnecessary decorations often used in wester styles. Simple plain bamboo tea tray, simple tea cups with no or minimum ornaments – this is what I really appreciate in the setting.

Next thing that attracted me was the possibility to slow down. Yes, tea ceremony is the way to stop the chaotic movements and just observe and enjoy the simplicity of the process. So tea ceremony is just another way to meditate. I was talking about meditation in one of my previous episodes, and tea ceremony definitely fits definition of meditation.

Once I began learning the process of Chinese tea drinking, I found that it involves all senses of the human. We look and observe the tea and the process. We listen to the sound of water heating up, and to the sound of the water stream coming out of the tea pot. We smell dry tea leaves, and we smell the tea and the tea cup. There’s even special “smelling” cup in a traditional Gong-fu Cha set. Of course, we taste. First we taste dry tea leaf, and later – we taste tea. We learn to observe the difference in tea taste between multiple steepings. We learn to taste and to recognize the taste. Finally, we touch. We learn to work with variety of tiny tea tools. We learn to move nicely.

These moves is another thing that got my attention. Tea ceremony is a very neat choreography, which also gives the performer room to make it very special and very individual. Almost like a dance.

I was also learning about all the benefits of drinking tea. But that was not my primer interest in Gong-Fu Cha. Of course if I discovered that it was dangerous, I would not do it. But I first discovered tea ceremony, and later I was looking at the positive effects that come from drinking tea.

Later I was introduced to Japanese tea ceremony, called Cha-no-Yu. Definitely there are other styles of tea drinking in Japan, but Cha-no-Yu is the most famous I think. Whenever I talk about tea ceremony, this is what people usually picture in their minds. Even if I conduct Chinese Gong-Fu Cha, some people are often surprised because they expect something totally different.

I am not going into details of tea ceremonies today. Though I will be making some videos in the future, and I’d like to talk about tea clubs, tea events, and of course about tea ceremonies. It is much easier to demonstrate on the video then to talk about tea ceremony. In my future audio podcasts I will be discussing health benefits of tea drinking, types of tea etc. Whatever does not require video. So stay tuned!

Now let’s look at tea ceremony in general. Just like almost everything in the East, tea ceremony is a great example of mindful work. The name Gong-Fu Cha does not reflect Martial Art Kung-Fu. However, on the other hand, it has a lot to do with martial arts in terms of mental concentration, regular practice and a lot of patience. That’s why it is called Gong-Fu. The term Gong Fu means hard work, not a name of any martial art.

There are many-many ways to perform Gong-Fu Cha. Just like there are many styles of martial arts. There’s no right or wrong way of doing it, as long as it fits the criteria of Gong-Fu.

Perhaps the most important element is a mindset. There’s no rush. Being there and observing every move is the main criteria. Yes, different schools will teach you how to put items on the table, how to pour water, how to sniff tea etc.. They all are just elements, and they won’t make any sense if mind is not there, again, just like in martial arts. You can learn basic elements, forms, but your performance is yours only, and you are the only one to fit it to the particular situation.

There are some schools of Gong-Fu Cha that ask performers to stop for a second between elements. This gives them a chance to reset their mind and start each new element basically with a clean slate. I am familiar with one of these schools, and I will make a demo video at some point.

Quality of tea is another very important element of tea ceremony. Of course, there are no tea bags in tea ceremony. Perhaps somebody can create their own ceremony using tea bags, but this is not what I am practicing. I am selecting the best tea I can find from the sources I feel I can trust.

Now it may be a good time to mention that from now on I only call “the tea” the product made of Camellia Sinensis, which is a tea plant. There are some herbal blends, other plants used to make wonderful drinks. People are talking about chamomile, mint, and many other types of herbal tea. I like them too! But when I talk about tea then I mean tea plant. There are a lot, and I mean a lot of types of Chinese loose tea. It may surprise some people, but black tea the way it is known in the West, has not been used in China.

The tea does not come with a single taste. For example, you can find different kinds of apples. They are all apples, but they have different sizes, colors and they taste quite different. Or pears. Or grapes. The same plant, but different kinds. The same is true about tea. There are many various kinds of camellia sinensis. They have different leaves, different colors and taste. Also, they are processed in many different ways. I will be talking about different kinds of tea in my future episode.

Right now I just mention that basically there are three major types of tea in China: green, oolong and pu-er. Some people call it pu-erh. Yes, I know that you can also find white tea, yellow tea and perhaps something else. But technically, what is white tea? Both white and green tea come from the same plant, and they are both green. However, what is called white tea is harvested earlier than green tea. Also, white tea is less processed than green. That’s why it is supposed to have more antioxidants compered to green tea. White tea is more gentle than green. But again, they are the same plant.

Green tea is very lightly oxidized. It is quite rich in antioxidants. However, it is recommended to use green tea within one year after harvesting. Maybe 2 years, but you better store sealed package in a refrigerator. We will talk about this later.

The next tea is called oolong. It is not the kind of the plant. Oolong still comes from camellia sinensis. But the way it is processed is quite different. Oolong is a uniquely processed partially oxidized tea. Tea leaves are hand-rolled in a small pellets. The way oolong is processed and rolled is very different for each type of oolong tea. The taste of each oolong is very different, and the taste is changing with each next steeping. Part of the Gong-Fu Cha is to recognize the difference in taste, often very subtile. But when we do a long ceremony with 10-15-20 steepings, the difference between the first and the last ones can be quite significant. Oolong is the tea that is most often used in Gong-Fu Cha.

The last tea I wanna mention today is Pu-Er. Again, some people call it Pu-Erh. I am not gonna argue about pronunciation. This is a very unique tea. Pu-Erh is made of large leaves of very old tea trees. The tea itself takes a long time to process, and it is an aged tea. Good pu-erh is 10-20 years old, and even more. It may come in variety of forms. I used loose leaf pu-er, and also pressed bricks, cakes and cups of different sizes, known as tou-cha. Pu-er is famous for its detoxic effect on the body. Did I mention multiple steeping for good tea? I usually get 15-20 steepings out or my tea. I have a friend who is using the same tea for a month, re-steeping every day. So we are talking about some miles you can go with a good tea.

I hope this all makes some sense. In my future podcasts I want to discuss different kinds of tea in details, and talk about health benefits of drinking tea. Also I am planning to make some videos about tea ceremony. And I have a couple of people in mind I’d like to interview for my videos. Of course, I always appreciate feedback and suggestions. Please let me know what you think.

Send me a message at HealthyPositiveLifestyle@gmail.com. You can find me on the FaceBook as Healthy Positive Lifestyle, or you can follow me on Twitter @HPLPodcast

Hope to hear from you soon!

Until then,

Smile, stay happy, keep the balance and make a wonderful day happen!

This was Eugene from San Diego, CA. Talk to you next time!