About Po
tea monk, tea drunk
My life has been a journey to connect with essence, presence, and being.
My journey led me to explore the potency of presence through the art of cooking as a chef, understanding energy through years of internal martial arts training, and decades of passionate study of how Buddhist and Hindu arts and how thery are used as transmission vehicles of living spiritual essence. In each step, (and each fall) I was developing a deeper understanding of how cultivation of presence and being connect us to the essence of life.
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My training has included decades of focused daily spiritual practice, including 15 years of intense inner yoga practice in Shaiva ashram, 2 years of private daily work with a Tibetan yogic master, years in a Gurdjieff school, as well as study with many other spiritual teachers and saints from Tibetan and Hindu lineages. My work is a distillation of all that has been given to me through my teachers as well as my heart's own connection to the divine, a connection that is in every human being.
Tea has become the perfect vehicle to share everything I have cultivated in myself. I have spent 27 years teaching how to use traditional Chinese tea as vibrational plant medicine to support healing and inner transformation. My work focuses on helping each individual reconnect to their own power, their own unique essence, and their own creative expression.
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Mission
A life devoted to cultivating internal depth and discrimination and facility in working with subtle energies. In service of healing people and leading them back into their own power and essence.
Vision
To create a lineage of tea used as vibrational medicine for internal cultivation, growth, and healing through the lens of plant spirit, and medicine. To provide an understanding of tea based on direct experience, the energetic reality of tea practice, and common sense. And, most importantly of all- to give people simple effective tools to support their soul and spirit growth on this planet.
Pieces of the puzzle
Director of The Tortoise Temple at Onedoorland, a cultivation community in Portland, Oregon
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Founder and owner of Heavens Tea School of Tea Arts, Portland Oregon - the only tea school in North America devoted to tea and cultivation. Operating for over 20 years.
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Two years as manager of the Tea House at the Lan Su Classical Chinese Garden in Portland.
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Adjunct faculty member at NUNM School of Chinese Medicine in Portland, Oregon for 3 years.
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Decades studying Buddhist and Hindu art and selling asian antiques. Expert in Himalayan art, specializing in 11th to 19th-century painting and sculpture.
Guest Curator at the Portland Art Museum of an exhibition of early Tibetan Art called -Ascending the Cosmic Ladder, The Sacred Art of Tibet. A piece from my collection was on display at the Rubin Museum of Tibetan Art, in NYC.
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Over 40 years of daily spiritual practice, including 15 years of intense inner yoga practice in Shaiva ashram. 3 years of private daily work with a Tibetan yogic master, years in a Gurdjieff school, as well as study with many other spiritual teachers and saints from Hindu, Tibetan, Sufi, Taoist and native traditions.
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A degree in Asian Arts from Portland State University
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Six years of study in Internal Martial Arts and Yiquan.
Two decades in gourmet French, Italian, and American restaurants from dishwasher to chef de cuisine. As well as years a the chef at an Ashram where I cooked international vegetarian cuisine.
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Photographer and Poet- see my Art of Tea page, Poems page as well as my IG page at teadrunkpo, where I post daily photos, poems, and teachings.
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I studied evolutionally neurobiology for three years with my mentor at Harvard, as a renegade unpaid unenrolled lab assistant and have my name on two papers in The Journal of Comparative Neurology.
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Explore
A Gene Keys Video for International Tea Day with my students Richard Rudd, Elijah Parker, Kursten Brewer, and others.
