Tea, Vietnam, Education... with Suzette Hammond
Suzette Hammond is the founder of an education-based small business Being Tea, American Tea Ambassador to Vietnam, and a practitioner of various activities supporting mental health, including yoga and tea meditation. We bumped into each other for the first time in Las Vegas in 2019 and I simply had to ask a few questions.
You’ve been working with tea for over 16 years now. How did it all start?
I transitioned to a new career in a rather unplanned way in 2003 — previously, I had worked in a newsroom, as a producer for morning and evening newscasts. Journalism was in many ways a tremendously fulfilling path: it opened my eyes to our connection as living beings, and to lives lived in very far places. But it was also tremendously stressful and didn’t always focus on what I increasingly thought should be part of our community dialogue.
Originally, my temporary plan was to work at a coffee and tea company for a while, to “figure out my life”. I had no idea what would come next, but I knew that I loved coffee and tea — I had already been a barista for two years previously, as a part-time job to socialise outside of the news environment. The company I started with in 2003 was Peet’s Coffee & Tea, which then had an enormously rich training curriculum and a pathway in education. Within months, I knew this was where I was going to stay. I ended up staying with them as an educator for seven years, while at the same time working with wider tea industry organisations to promote tea education.
Since then, I’ve worked with other prominent tea companies and industry organisations, always in a training/education capacity. I realised this is what I was meant to do with those skills gained as a journalist, it just took me down a very different path. In 2015, I began working freelance and this eventually evolved into my own education-focused small business, Being Tea, which seeks to make tea education more widely accessible to both organisations and individuals.
Tell us about your guest interview programme.
I believe the many connections that run through tea, or parallel to tea, are where some of our deepest growth seems to happen. Each month, I interview special guests who are mainly friends and people whose work I follow, as a means to introduce each other to different audiences and share ideas. The topics we discuss — and even sometimes the guests — are intentionally not always directly “tea related”, but they do highlight layers of the tea experience. For example, while I may interview wonderful tea producers, I also have interviewed artists, yoga teachers, and coffee professionals on topics like expression of creativity, spirituality, and value vs perfection — themes which resonate through our experience of tea. I post these as video interviews, although in the future I’ll also likely introduce a podcast format. The interviews are currently available to view here.
Before tea you worked in journalism (although given your podcast, you are pretty much still in it!) where you became aware of the toll it takes on one’s health (I hear you!). How does tea help in this matter?
Oh, I was absolutely aware of the toll that intensive lines of work can take on health. My first and only panic attack was during a live show, and being unable to say anything to anyone during that time, I had to suppress the need to blackout with every ounce of volition I could muster. The period I worked in news — 1999 to 2003 — was also a precarious time in the US to work in the field. There were no conversations at the time about mental health in the newsroom. It was still some years before research into how vicarious trauma affects first responders became a louder conversation, let alone for other folks who witness and work around trauma on a nearly daily basis in their professions.
It was during those years that I first discovered tea, and without knowing much about the “why”, I could feel it doing something. I started taking quiet breaks with tea outside on the patio area at work, under the trees, and resting for just a few minutes before the show. I only had tea bags at the time, but I took to the habit of opening them sometimes, to let the tiny leaf bits be free in the water. Tea helps us during intense times because it’s something that grounds us in the present moment, allows us to feel inside our bodies again, and brings awareness back to dulled senses. We spin out when we lose that present moment, lose track of our physical place and position in a room, the feeling of breathing and living in this moment — not a future possibility or a past memory. Tea calls us back home.
What is tea meditation?
Meditation is a practice that brings us to the present moment, allows us to examine and dwell in this space with intentionality and mindfulness. It can be any range of practices or activities, and tea is just one of them. Depending on my audience, I vary whether I describe this activity as tea meditation or mindfulness - or sometimes I just call it simply tea practice, which I find the closest in meaning. I do this because sometimes, people are intimidated by the term “meditation.” I specifically enjoy working with tea in meditation because some forms of traditional meditation are not accessible or appropriate for all audiences. Tea gives people something physical to interact with, in a way that mirrors your own inner intentions and current state. It is very simply just being with tea and being with yourself. Learning to understand, in time, how to care for yourself each day and how to take care of your thoughts and habit energies, so that you may more fully be able to show up for others. I teach different methods of the practice, some very very simple (just tea leaves in a cup “grandpa style”), and some more involved like gongfu cha. But I do make a distinction between tea as meditation practice - like how one does yoga to tend to the mind and body - and tea as ceremonial form. The intention and reason for either is unique and different, so I’m careful with the language.
You have studied various tea ceremonies, including the Japanese one (chanoyu). Is the Japanese tea culture a significant part of your tea focus nowadays?
Absolutely so. I don’t have easy accessibility to a tatami mat tearoom anymore since I moved from the San Francisco area to Chicago, but the lessons learned from my years as a student formed the basis of how I view tea in a more connected way now. Many schools of tea ceremony emphasize seasonality and attention to detail, for example. Another interesting point was that we never took notes, we just learned through repetition through the body. Without ever saying the word in a lesson, this was absolutely mindfulness in action. I often share some of the more behavioral elements of the study with students in practice, too, such as how we handle tea objects, how we move, and how we position ourselves in ways to demonstrate (and physically embody) paying attention. I started offering tea meditation classes based on some of those experiences when I moved here in 2010, and it’s just grown as my own studies have grown ever since.
You are also Vietnam’s American Ambassador for Snow Shan teas. What is your connection to Vietnam?
I was really happy and touched to accept the nomination last year, although I also feel wholly beginner at the idea of sharing such a responsibility! I went to Vietnam twice last year, both for tea exploration and also for spiritual retreat. One of my teachers who has had the greatest influence on my study, Thich Nhat Hanh, is Vietnamese and came home to his root temple in Hue at the end of 2018. I felt very called to go visit, realising this might be one of my last chances. How he integrates connection to quiet, daily, “ordinary” moments (such as tea) against the larger canvas of life — including the trauma and hardships of war, poverty, racism, classism — has always really spoken to me. It gives me hope and feels like a reason to say that tea matters. Experiencing the vivid contrasts and complexity of life and tea in Vietnam in person, from mountain to city, made it all the more clear for me that this wouldn’t be a single-time pilgrimage. To really understand the lesson, I would need to come back. I connected early on with tea friends in Vietnam, including the Vietnam Tea Association, who generously shared their time and story. And later in the year, I was invited to return as a guest judge for the Tea Masters Cup, which I’m involved in here in the US as well.
How did you become a speaker for World Tea Expo?
I’ve actually been involved with World Tea for a rather long time! I think my first year attending as a class volunteer was somewhere around 2005, maybe. I was also involved with the Tea Championship cupping competition that World Tea organised for many years. In 2018, the community nominated and awarded me with a World Tea Award for Best Tea Educator, which was a very moving and emotional highlight of my many years with the organisation. As really our only industry-specific event in the US, World Tea has always felt like an important home base to connect each year. So many friends and colleagues are at World Tea each year. I started teaching my own classes at the expo sometime around 2010, often around the topic of professional cupping training — one of my favourite subjects!
You were also a judge at the Tea Masters Cup in Las Vegas in 2019. How was the experience?
I was very inspired by the TMC experience in the US, which was also held at World Tea Expo. There were competitors who really put their heart out there and it absolutely showed. I’ll admit, I was a little sceptical of the scoring system for evaluating competitors entering it, as my previous experience/knowledge was based in barista competitions and tea competitions. Both of them have very different ways of identifying and calibrating established metrics for quality, sensory experience, and technical demands. I had no idea how something as broad as TMC would tangibly work. But as I started to understand the mission more clearly — which is related to sharing tea experience from all over the globe, not unifying a standard — it made much more sense. Both in the US final and also later at the Vietnam final — which was even more extraordinary, because we international judges, who had never worked together before and some first time visitors to Vietnam, were also evaluating performances — were remarkable to me, because the very best competitors won at both events. There was no contention or split opinion on the judge pools. The best simply stood out. I found that totally inspiring and refreshing.
What is your daily tea routine?
I’ve taken to describing tea life in a new way recently, to help students in tea meditation classes better understand the distinction of what they’re doing from their “regular” tea. In my daily life, I basically have 3 ways I am interacting with tea: Professional, personal, and practice. My professional tea is cupping for projects with clients or sometimes evaluations I’m asked to do, prepping for workshops. My personal tea is just what I’m drinking all day, which varies greatly by season. More warming, sturdy teas in the deep winter and cooling, gentle teas in the summer. My practice tea is what I’m doing in my seated quiet time, and that can be whatever tea feels most supportive for me that day, “seasonal” or not. I talk about this concept a lot in classes about energetics of tea. Some days, a challenging dancong might feel like what my mind needs. Others, a soothing bowl of silver needle and journaling.
We have different parts of ourselves that interact with and need different things from our tea at various times. Of course, the beauty is when you see that, really, it’s all the same thing - we and tea are all the same thing. But I feel that to get to that place of interbeing with tea, we need to give voice to the parts of ourselves that may feel unheard or unseen. For me, this made the biggest difference in how I felt about tea in my life - when I realized I needed to stop separating out the professional/technical of how I presented my work life from the personal/spiritual of how I actually practiced and thought of tea in my “off time.” It’s all the same and needed to be shared as the same.