Tea as Daoist Meditation, with Robert Coons
Mar 18, 2022
After nearly a year hiatus from releasing new episodes, and
nearing what’s hopefully the end of a worldwide pandemic, we’re
very happy to welcome back Robert Coons to talk with us about tea
as a medium for meditation and health, from a Daoist viewpoint.
Robert is a well-known teacher and writer on Daoist meditation, a
tea vendor, an acupuncturist and practitioner of qigong and martial
arts, and was our guest two years ago in our episode “Tea
& Daoism: Adjacent Connections”. He’s about to launch an online
course on tea meditation, so we took this opportunity to get an
overview of Robert’s perspectives on tea as a meditation
practice. We begin looking at the origins of tea
as herbal medicine in China and possible historical roots for tea
meditation, and we also look at tea meditation as a novel practice
built on older influences. Robert chats with us about how our
setting and intention in preparing, serving and drinking tea can
lead to the generation and movement of qi, or energy, and we
discuss the roles mindfulness, physical movement and tactile
sensations, as well as our choices of tea, play in this process. We
talk about why tea meditation is gaining a lot of attention at this
moment, how tea fits in with goals of opening the mind and
improving health and longevity, and why tea can serve as a gateway
for deeper levels of meditation practice. Robert also gives us a
peek at his new “Tea Mastery” course and how it will be part of a
broader platform for tea meditation and self-care
resources.
For more info on Robert’s upcoming course, go to the Tea
Mastery page on Robert’s Qigong Meditation website (https://courses.qigongmeditation.online/tea-mastery-course),
and be sure to subscribe to the email list for updates and
registration info.
Robert’s other online platform for qigong and
traditional Chinese medicine resources, mentioned in the episode,
is https://tcmsix.com/.
Internal Elixir Cultivation: The Nature of Daoist
Meditation is available on Amazon at
this link.
Talking Tea is produced and hosted by Ken Cohen. You
can follow Ken on Twitter @kensvoiceken.
Sign up for our
email list to get updates on new episodes and
events.
The views and opinions expressed by guests on
Talking Tea are those of the guests and do not necessarily reflect
the views or opinions of Talking Tea or its
staff.
This podcast features music from “Japanese Flowers”
(https://soundcloud.com/mpgiii/japanese-flowers) by
mpgiiiBEATS (https://soundcloud.com/mpgiii) available under a
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/).
Adapted from original.
Image of Robert Coons courtesy of Robert
Coons.
