Meeting Paolo Panda, about tea and meditation

That meetup group recently met with someone who has been active in social media group discussion lately, Paolo Panda.  At first glance he is into aged sheng and tea ceremony as meditation themes, which really did work out as primary areas of interest through discussion.  We just didn't get far into details about aged sheng.

Jan joined, that contact (/ tea friend) living in the Netherlands, who I wrote about talking to here.  Huyen didn't make it; something came up.  As with most of these meetups there wasn't really any one clear theme or reason for meeting, just running through interesting ideas.

Paolo described the tea and meditation theme.  As background, he has personal history with the Global Tea Hut, probably the best known organization that promotes tea and religion or tea and Taoist practices themes.  He didn't say a lot about his experience with them, although we started in on that.  I guess they are into tea experience as meditation, with variations in brewing forms or natural experiences factoring in, but not really into linking that to religious ceremony or ideas, or more formal meditation.  He spoke positively of Wu De but not in so much detail.

Paolo's evolved ceremonial form largely involves having people join to drink aged sheng pu'er, selected in relation to what he expects them to like, and to typical effect from a certain tea (which would vary by person).  Then they drink tea without speaking, for an hour and a half.  He said that some people find that experience of tea in silence very moving, experiencing internal scope in a novel and unusually deep way.

In his website he talks about categorizing aged sheng, and about some relatively standard factors affecting how a tea comes across:  growing conditions, elevation, tea plant age, local source area, processing inputs, storage conditions, more natural grown or wild plant source material versus plantation grown tea, etc.  This site has more on the ceremony and meditation side.

Paolo is from Italy and now lives in England (Brighton), and has traveled a good bit, and has experienced quite a bit in relation to themes like tea and meditation.  The meditation and effect of aged sheng aspects just resonate with him; he doesn't seem the "spiritual seeker" type to the same extent one might expect from the rest.  He probably spends more time focused on inner reality and how he relates to external factors than most, but it came across as just being introspective, and open to atypical approaches.

To be clear I'm fairly open to a lot of that other Eastern culture range myself.  I practiced meditation in different forms at different stages of my life, and was ordained as a Buddhist monk at one point.  I don't think I would fit in at Burning Man, which Paolo mentioned attending, but then back in my 20s maybe more so.  Meditation seeming effective is familiar, just not that tea ceremony form.

Suzana's pictures are always better (credit to her)

We talked for awhile, about a broad range of things, but this is going to make it sound like we didn't.  Ralph, Jan, and Paolo talked about clay pots for awhile but I kind of tuned that out; I own a couple of those but don't even use them, since I'm familiar with gaiwans, and didn't make it through a full seasoning cycle.  In discussing aged sheng it helps to overlap quite a bit in relation what you are drinking with someone else, able to use familiar versions as discussion starting points.  I don't spend that much on tea, so the more interesting $1/gram and up range higher demand versions I tend to never try.  Ralph and Paolo might've put more effort into exploring that but didn't.  Jan is not new to sheng and aged sheng, and even sells sheng online in a small shop.

One interesting discussion point came up related to how people combine tea and meditation, or how they tend to borrow Eastern culture aspects.  Suzana mentioned that because meditation practice is so familiar and adjoined to yoga in India people wouldn't ordinarily connect it with tea experience.  There's a lot to that, and a deeper pattern that it informs.  Here in Thailand meditation is also familiar, tied more to religious practices, and internal self-development, and again it isn't regarded as connecting at all with tea experience.  

Keo!  he doesn't look like he's meditating in any pictures I have.

To move back to a broader level, it seems like "Western culture" individuals drawing on Eastern themes tend to see a broad range of ideas and subjects as connected, and import them as if they go together.  Tea, martial arts, meditation, religion, health themes, and even clothing styles can end up combined, when in the original traditions these are all separate subjects, that can have points of connection and significant overlap, but they rarely are tightly coupled, never mind embraced as a bundle.  Or at least that's my understanding.

We talked about how in modern Chinese culture people aren't even that into the same forms of these things.  Gong Fu tea practice isn't all that common, and not everyone drinks tea.  The people who do are far more likely to use very simple brewing approaches, like "grandpa style," brewing in a tea bottle.  We were close friends with three families from China through my kids' school friends, to the level that we did activities on weekends or visited each other's houses, and none of them were into tea in any way remotely like Western tea enthusiasts.  They could try to name a couple of local types they would regularly drink, and maybe not get far with that.  One friend from Japan drank tea but couldn't place any name, not even the category of sencha, just saying that he bought tea at a grocery store.

When I moved to Thailand to ordain as a monk something similar came up related to being disappointed with monks' takes on core Buddhist ideas:  they weren't really familiar with them.  The topics of rejection of a real self or the meaning of suffering as a fundamental condition of life experience they had heard of, but had no opinion on what those really meant.  Their approach was more towards being moral, going with the flow, staying relaxed.  And these were monks!  They said that forest monks do more with such theories, and related meditation practices.  I did study formal meditation (vipassana) at a local Bangkok temple meditation center, a main one too, Wat Mahadat, but even though the support was helpful the depth of practical advice and links to theory weren't what I expected.

I did want to touch on one theme that I noticed from that experience, which we discussed as a topic but that I didn't add in that conversation, about how sitting on a floor to meditate works out.  Many people notice that this makes them uncomfortable, and then it's often accepted that they could meditate sitting in a chair instead.  But there is a deeper function behind sitting meditation in relation to the physical posture playing a practical role, that links to internal perspective.  

We all carry stress in our bodies in relation to posture and tension; it's normal.  A practice like yoga helps regularly "clear" that, and a lot of kinds of exercises would minimize the impact or experience.  Something like sitting at a desk 8 hours a day would make it much worse, both the routine posture and degree of tension.  When you sit without support (the cross-legged theme) the lack of support and motion activates that tension as causing discomfort.  Mental experience and physical experience meet in this form, to a certain extent; as you relax and clear your mind the tension naturally reduces.  It's not about amount of time spent, and really also not about "not thinking," although thoughts racing and shallow chest breathing do adjoin the opposite experience, feeling tension and experiencing internal noise.  As you relax your mind and body together the physical tension can subside.

Anyway, we didn't really talk about that.  Per usual we did skim across introductions, with a bit on tea preferences and experiences, travel, and social media experiences.

It was great meeting Paolo and hearing his take on those themes.  I think the connection between tea and meditation is much more routinely embraced by Western Gong Fu Cha practitioners than I take up, but of course I see it as perfectly valid and functional.  It was interesting hearing about a developed perspective and approach to that.  The rest about tea exploration, varying cultures, and travel added up to more than I captured in this summary, but it didn't work to go back and add details to fill it in.  These written summaries need sets of connected ideas within main themes to sound more interesting, but organic discussion can be something else, about lots of diverse ideas.  

There is a more standard interview form discussion with Paolo that covered more background available through this link, conducted by Pascal Djpas of the My Tea Pal community.