Tea Gong, for Rebuilding the Self

When you are staring into space, do you think the brain is resting?

In fact, even in the moments when you believe you are doing nothing, thoughts keep running of their own accord: I should have said it differently. What am I, really?

The source of these self-propelled thoughts is the default mode network — the DMN. It is the circuit that keeps spinning the story of yourself, without pause. That we are able to hold on to a consistent “me” is partly thanks to this network.

But when the DMN works too hard, the same regret is chewed over again and again, anxiety swells, and the self-image hardens until you cannot move. The story of yourself begins to bind you.

There is another mechanism worth knowing. In the brain, the DMN, which governs introspection, and the TPN — the task-positive network, which works when you concentrate on what is in front of you — stand in a seesaw relationship. When one rises the other falls. In the moment you are deeply absorbed in something, the DMN naturally quietens. This is a basic structural principle of the brain.

The well-known answer is meditation, but meditation takes time to learn. Sitting and facing your own stray thoughts is not an easy road for a beginner.

Which brings us to Tea Gong. It can quieten the DMN for two reasons, one layered on the other.

The first is pharmacological groundwork. The L-theanine in tea gently regulates excitability in the brain and calls up alpha waves. The catechins suppress neural inflammation and settle the environment of the brain itself.

The second is the full mobilisation of the senses. The sound of the water, the aroma rising, the feel of the bowl in the hand, the shift of the taste — when all five senses are woken at once, the TPN activates gently but continuously. One side of the seesaw goes down. Rather than stopping the DMN by thinking about it, you let it quieten naturally, by way of the body.

Three entrances

There are three ways into Tea Gong.

The densest is hand-rolled tea making: meeting the leaf itself with your hands, an experience that calls on every sense at once.

The second is sarei, the tea ritual of the Zen monastery, where seated meditation and tea are one practice. Eight hundred years ago at Mount Tiantong it was precisely through this ritual that monks like Eisai and Dōgen reached their deepest states.

And the third, which anyone can start today, is everyday tea. Listen to the sound of the water being poured, attend to the aroma, taste the changes carefully. That alone is already Tea Gong, properly so called.

The cycle of the year

Tea Gong has one further framework: the cycle of the four seasons.

• Spring — waking. Green tea and white tea, and their alpha waves, to come gently awake.
• Summer — activation. Black tea, to bring the dopamine pathways into play.
• Autumn — maturing. Ripe pu-erh, to settle the gut-brain axis and serotonin.
• Winter — meditation. White tea and raw pu-erh, to give yourself over deeply to the parasympathetic.

Spring and summer activate the TPN and build new circuits; autumn and winter constructively reactivate the DMN and integrate them. The cycle of the year is itself a gentle rewriting of the self.

Eisai wrote that tea is the elixir of long life. Dōgen reached the state he called shinjin datsuraku, the casting off of body and mind, at Mount Tiantong. The power of the tea ritual that they grasped intuitively eight hundred years ago might, in today’s language, be precisely the rebuilding of the default mode network.

Tea Gong Academy sets out to retell this old and deep knowledge in the language of contemporary neuroscience.