How the evening unfolds
This is an intro session — a short, self-contained evening designed to introduce you to the rhythm of our longer yin and tea cohorts, without asking anything of you beyond ninety minutes and a quiet room. It opens at 19:00 in your local time, which means Chen Hui Yi will be pouring from her Guangdong kitchen in the small hours, with the lamps low and the kettle already warm. You join from wherever you are — Saint Petersburg, Berlin, Almaty, Bengaluru — and the first ten minutes are deliberately unhurried. No introductions, no name round. Just settling: a long exhale, a check that your camera angle shows your mat, a small bow to the screen.
The first arc, roughly twenty-five minutes, is sattvic (pure, settling) yin floorwork. Four shapes — butterfly, dragon, sphinx, supported child — each held for three to five minutes. Chen Hui Yi cues sparingly. Between shapes, she invites you to notice the breath without lengthening it, a small practice borrowed from the early stages of nāḍī śodhana. There is no music. If you have ever practised with a teacher who lets the room go quiet for thirty seconds at a time, you already know what this feels like.
At the half-hour mark we move from the mat to the table. You have been asked, in the joining email, to have two small cups, a kettle of just-boiled water cooling to around 90 °C, and the two sample teas (sent ahead to cohort members, or substituted with anything from shop.thetea.app or shop.puerh.app if you are joining last-minute from your own shelf). The contrast for this evening is a 2023 Bái Mǔdān (白牡丹) from Fuding and a five-year aged Shēng Pǔ’ěr (生普洱) cake from Yunnan — one airy and floral, one already settling into its second life. Chen Hui Yi pours both side by side, walking through the leaf, the rinse, the first short steep, and what each tea does to a body that has just held sphinx pose for four minutes. You taste without commentary for the first round. The second round, the chat opens.
The last twenty minutes are the most important. We close with a supported savasana — bolster under the knees, blanket over the chest, a third cup of whichever tea felt right — and Chen Hui Yi reads a short passage on the relationship between yin practice and slow-aged tea, drawn from notes she has been keeping for the tea.school curriculum. Questions stay open until 20:30. People drift off when they are ready.
This evening is not a workshop in the productive sense. Nothing is taught that needs to be learned. It is, instead, a small demonstration of the shape our longer cohorts take — eight-week seasonal arcs that run through tea.community and tea.events, with deeper material on Wò Duī (渥堆) fermentation, prānāyāma sequencing, and the six-season Ayurvedic calendar. If the evening suits you, the door to those is left ajar at the end.
What you get
-
A 25-minute yin sequence of four held shapes, cued live by Chen Hui Yi from Guangdong
-
A side-by-side guided pour of a 2023 Fuding Bái Mǔdān and a five-year-aged Yunnan Shēng Pǔ’ěr
-
Written brewing notes (water temperature, leaf weight in grams, steep times) sent two days before the session
-
A short closing reading on yin practice and slow-aged tea, drawn from forthcoming tea.school material
-
An optional sample pack of both teas, posted from shop.puerh.app to cohort members at cost
-
A recording of the tea-pouring segment only (the asana portion stays live), available for seven days
-
An open invitation to the next eight-week seasonal cohort, with a small discount for tea.community members
What to know before joining
-
Location — Online via private link, sent 24 hours before the session. No app install required — runs in browser.
-
Language — English, with Mandarin tea vocabulary written into the chat. Russian-speaking members receive a translated brewing sheet.
-
Dress — Anything you can hold sphinx and supported child in for four minutes. Layers — the body cools quickly during long holds.
-
Kit on your side — A mat or rug, one bolster or folded duvet, a blanket, a kettle, two small cups, and the two teas (yours or ours).
-
Tea samples — Posted free to addresses in the EU and EAEU if you register at least ten days ahead; otherwise brew from your own shelf or order via shop.thetea.app.
-
Food — Eat lightly two hours before. Yin on a full stomach is uncomfortable, and the first cup lands more clearly on a quiet belly.
-
Accessibility — Captions on throughout. All floor shapes have a seated-in-a-chair variation. Write ahead if you would like the variations sent in advance.