Formal Tea at Jikoji

With Meiya Wender & Naomi Kaigaku Yoder

Join us for the first Tea of the New year. The Japanese tea ceremony is a choreographic ritual of preparing and serving green tea, together with traditional Japanese sweets to balance the taste of the tea.  It is not about drinking tea but in the attentive placement of one’s heart in preparation of a bowl of tea and the relationship that arises in the simple act of giving and receiving the effort and compassion of another while sitting firmly in the midst of an eternal moment.  
 

Meiya Wender has practiced at Zen Center since 1972, was ordained as a priest in 1986 (receiving the name Luminous Night, Original Practice, Meiya Honshu), and received Dharma Transmission in the lineage of Shunryu Suzuki Roshi from Tenshin Reb Anderson in 2002. She has also trained in traditional Soto Zen forms at Zuioji in Shikoku, Japan. She has held many monastic positions at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center and Green Gulch, including director, ino (head of the zendo), tenzo (head cook), and tanto (head of practice).

She has studied the Way of Tea for many years, including a year at the Urasenke Midorikai program in Kyoto, and teaches Tea in Sowing the Moon Teahouse at Green Gulch.

Naomi Kaigaku Yoder is a former resident of the San Francisco Zen Center, Tassajara, and Green Gulch, where she studied the Way of Tea in the Urasenke School.