This Playa del Rey Tea Ceremony Is Like Meditation, Turbocharged

Ay Am, the community space that hosts regular “tea sits,” is in a squat building just off the wetlands in Playa del Rey. The whole area has famously been prevented from overdevelopment since it’s under the flight path of nearby LAX, but the sound of whizzing planes is drowned out by fields of swampy wetlands twittering with birds who use the place as a sanctuary.

Before checking in to my tea ceremony, I had a few minutes to browse the cabinet of curiosities that is the front room to Ay Am. Crystals, shamanic pamphlets, sage bundles, botanical-infused oils...basically, this place is one-stop shopping for all the woo-woo wonders.

About nine of us tea ceremonialists (tea aspirants? acolytes?) filed upstairs to a small room where we sat on cushions. Our leader sat cross-legged behind a low, raw-edged wood table, and her assistant brought her cast-iron teapots to pour into another cast-iron teapot, which was filled with loose tea. Light filtered through a clerestory window, and we all sat silently watching the woman carefully pour water into the pot, let it steep for a moment, then pour it out of the pot into speckled artisanal pottery cups that she would hand to the front row of attendees. They’d then turn and hand the back row the cup with movements as slow and deliberate as the ones the leader had used.

By the time my cup of tea reached the back row, I was so relaxed I was worried I’d drop the cup. I saw the leader and others really get into their tea, so I followed suit: I held the cup under my nose and smelled the tangy scent, felt the steam like moist breath on my face and finally sipped the medium-strong tea with flecks of leaves in the cup.

Here’s what’s cool about the tea ceremony at Ay Am: It lasts an hour, but in that hour, time speeds up (you don’t notice that you’ve been sitting cross-legged for so long, because you’re paying attention to what stage of decanting is going on, to make sure to return your cup to the leader in time for the next round). And time also slow-slow-slowwws, because the deliberate rhythm—hot water pouring, tea steeping, cup filling, cup passing, people sipping, cup being passed back up—is repeated six times. It’s a crash course in mindfulness, and I was both energized and, frankly, a little narcotized. Not by any drug—I’m not sure if the tea even had any caffeine in it—but by the silence and graceful movements of the small group. By the third or fourth round, I was pretty pleased with myself: I got this, I am really going with the flow.

Then a mouthful of tea went down the wrong way and I had that brief sensation of drowning, followed by a mild spit-up session and protracted coughing. Like the kind of loud coughing where you get up to see if Nana needs the Heimlich. This is the last thing you’d want to do in a super hushed, perfectly cued setup like a tea ceremony. But to the credit of the leader and the other guests, no one told me to leave. (Then again, they didn’t hop up to help, either.) It was a great ego leveling: Just when I relax too much and get too full of myself, well, I choke on what’s good.

No trickery or hocus-pocus is involved in this tea ceremony, which follows the teachings of an expat American who opened a Taiwanese Zen retreat and publishes a magazine about all things tea. There’s also little of the flagrant cultural appropriation that New York Times readers leveled against the place in the comments of a recent profile. (Or possibly I’m tone-deaf—although as a former practicing Zen meditator at a New York monastery where Americans wore robes and chanted in Japanese, and as a current Angeleno yoga practitioner who goes to classes where om is chanted, this seems like a comparative nonissue.) What I do know, sincerely, was that at the end of the ceremony, when the leader asked us to share an observation about the practice, there were comments alternatively giddy and glowing and warm from participants who were happy to have had help shutting off their electronic devices and focusing on the simple act of being quiet, in a room, with others. As for myself, I bought a couple crystals on the way out, and driving home through the wildlife protected wetlands, I felt (ahem) as free as a bird.

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