Tea Ceremony #3

We had our third tea ceremony/fresh herb instructional Sunday yesterday. It was definitely more fun and interesting than the other ones have been for me. The first one was definitely the most difficult since it was only 2 weeks after school had started and I had no idea what was going on. The first 2 were also outside at Waahila Ridge park, which was nice being outside, but it was very difficult to concentrate and to hear everything that was being said and participate at the same time. This third ceremony was inside at the temple since the weather was so wet and windy.

Here's some OFFICIAL Taoist tea that Shifu brought back from China. It has a certificate and everything saying how official it is! There's a yin tea and a yang tea. This has to do with the taoist calendar... the yin tea ingredients was collected by hand only on the "yin days" and the yang on the "yang days" - I'm not entirely sure what that means - it might just be even and odd days.
We learned, over the three classes, how to conduct a taoist tea ceremony. This type of this is performed if you have a patient with a very difficult disease, to bring in the new year, perform feng shui for a house, or just to ask for help with a problem.

Shifu brought all the herbs for us to learn in from her garden. They were super high quality organic wonderfulness - all edible (my favorite!!) and fragrant. It was really helpful and interesting to get to see the whole plant that is used as medicine instead of just one part that we use for one thing, and then another part used for something else, etc. She also spoke for a while about how much care she puts into her garden getting to know the plants and giving them attention and getting to know each of them as a kind of person. This pic is of her friend Coconut that wanted to come to class.

The tea ceremonies/fresh herb classes are the one class that everyone in the school comes to. It's been great fun getting to see how the knowledge progresses in the students that have been around longer and longer than me. This is Lucia working her ink stone in preparation for the tea ceremony.

This is Jorge. He's watching Lucia prepare and is (I imagine) settling himself into a nice state of mind to receive some tea ceremony wisdom.

This is Michelle and Bowen.. they're always making me laugh! Doesn't it just look like they're scheming?
This is Dr. Todoki talking to Ele about some pictures of old Chinese doctors Ele brought in for the ceremony and some other wooden artifacts Ele brought in. When I go to the clinic, I'm working with Dr. T.
Here's Shifu behind the alter after class, checking on something... hopefully she doesn't mind a picture of her with a cell phone being on the internet. =)!