Trust the process

We have been doing several chanoyu presentations lately.  When students make tea in front of an audience, I am usually talking and explaining what is going on in the presentation.  Unlike in class, where I am sitting right there, correcting, encouraging and reminding students about the procedures, they are  on their own to do the temae.   Students call this making tea without a net  

It is scary to be out there without sensei to remind you what to do next if you forget.  Sometimes you make very stupid mistakes, and strange things happen in temae.  I never criticize students when they are presenting tea.  Instead, I ask them what did they learn.

Some students can do the temae perfectly in class, but in presentation or chakai, they forget everything completely.  They have an out of body experience.  Sometimes this is due to stage fright, performance anxiety or nervousness.   Sometimes it is doing it for people they don't know  -- or even just for people that they do know.

This is where your training comes in.  Trust that you and your body know what to do.  And if you make a mistake, you will know how to recover.

One student asked me after the last presentation, "How do you trust?"   That is a hard thing to answer.  You cannot tell someone to JUST "trust the process"  when they have no idea how to do it.  After thinking a while about this,  I expect everyone will have different answers to this question.  

For me, trust is a leap of faith.  Like mountain climbing, you have to let go of where you are and make a leap to some other place.  This is scary and risky. We want and need assurances that we will be okay when we land, we need to know we won't lose what we have when we let go.  We need to have control so we can feel safe.

So how do you make that leap of faith that is  trust?  You have to focus on what is on the other side.  How much do you want the outcome that you will risk letting go of where you are?  There has to be some greater value to take the risk otherwise why do it?  The secret is maintaining deep belief that your initiative will be rewarded.

When I went to study tea in Japan for a year, I didn't know anyone, I didn't speak the language, and I didn't know if I could endure the discipline of it.  I had to give up a business, a relationship and a home.  But I certainly wanted to go to Japan to study the heart of tea.  I wanted it so much that I trusted that I would be okay and that whatever the outcome, the experience of living tea in Japan would be worth it.

Are you ready to trust?

The heart of tea

Rikyu says:
The very heart which wants to enter the Way is the best teacher.

Sensei says:
Beginning teachers want to teach the heart of tea and lecture about it.  This is virtually impossible to do.  Don't get trapped into a romantic notion of tea .  You cannot define it for others.  Temae teaches the heart of tea itself. It is in the movement we discover ourselves.  You can't think your way there, you must use your body.

I sometimes have beginning students who are adverse to doing temae over and over again.   They think that if they have seen it a couple of times and done one or two, that they have learned it and want to go on to the next thing.  The thing is that they cannot remember the order of it unless I prompt them.  If they had to do it on their own, they would be lost. 

Recently a few of my students assisted me in a presentation of Chanoyu.  I was doing the explanation and one student was guest and the other host.   It was one of the first times that they both had to do everything on their own, and they learned so much by doing it without me to help them.   One student said it was like doing tea without a net -- scary and exhilarating at the same time. But they both said that they learned so much from just doing it.  

Some people say that tea is moving meditation.  If you can make tea according to the procedures without getting bored or sloppy and still remain aware of your surroundings and your guests, then you will have found the heart of tea.

Working without a net

We had a chabana flower arranging lesson in class recently. Chabana is different from the more well known Japanese flower arranging study of Ikebana. Chabana is flower arranging for tea. According to Rikyu’s rules, one should arrange the flowers as if they were growing in the field. Chabana is also known as thrown in flowers – that is, the flowers are arranged in one breath and put in the vase.

I have already mentioned about looking at flowers before picking them so that you know how they grow and can arrange them according to their nature. Quite often we have an image of how the flowers should look in the vase and then when we put them in, they droop or twist around. Arranging flowers in one breath means to be able to let go and let the flowers arrange themselves. There is the temptation to “fix” the flowers by moving them again and again after they are put in the vase, not just let them do what they would do naturally and leave them alone.

You only get one chance to arrange the flowers, then you have to let them go. It is like doing crosswords with a pen or calligraphy on rice paper. Once you put the mark down, you cannot go back and change it. It becomes what it is at that moment in time. My husband is a woodworker and with wood you only get one chance to cut the wood.

If we are doing things with intention, you don’t go back and re-do it. This is what he refers to as working without a net.