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.

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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.