Tea and Travels
Life Filled to the Brim
-
-
4.3 • 7 Ratings
-
-
- $7.99
-
- $7.99
Publisher Description
Sylvia Faddis was born and raised in a bombed out 18th century castle in Western Germany. Her dramatic tales trace her work in film, theatre and fine art in Berlin as a way to escape dilapidated post-war Germany, and eventually leaving her homeland in 1972—to her global travels and evolution—to become the spiritual woman and homeopathic healer she is today.
We join her remarkable adventures from the Trans Siberian Express through gloomy, impoverished Russia, to a boat from Nachodka to Japan where her insightful and courageous discoveries of Asia began. Read and be entertained by colorful rituals in Indonesia, Philippines, Macao, Hong Kong, a chance meeting with Carlos Santana and Leon Thomas in the midst of a typhoon, and the great spiritual masters of India and Tibet, which informed Sylvia's life.
Image galleries and video clips of rare rituals permit you to meet the diverse people of her numerous adventures. Her constant companion? Teas from every culture.
A childhood dream brought her to the U.S. to meet American Indians and learn about their wisdom and herbal healing. And her love of jazz brought her to meet her first husband, the trumpet player Jon Faddis. (Dizzy Gillespie was the Best Man at their wedding) …and thus for the following decade-and-a-half she joined the global world of jazz, meeting music legends she adored. After a painful divorce Sylvia traveled to Tibet and went through a powerful, enlightening death experience, which led her to the teachings and eventual meeting with H.H. the Dalai Lama and her spiritual teacher H.H. Mindrolling.
Still searching for further fulfillment, Sylvia became a homeopathic healer and is the founder of a foundation that helps the Tibetan people and the promotion of homeopathy.
In a monastery in southern France, she met her late second husband, a passionate British musician and tantric yogi, David Kirby, who shared her beliefs and joined her path until his untimely passing.
Integrated with her rich and powerful tales are many cups of tea and healing recipes Sylvia gathered—aromatic, relaxing, bitter, meditative and healing.
Taste the experiences and enjoy fireworks of teas, including:
● Russian Tsheinik from a growling samovar;
● Green Tea from a 16th century samurai's bowl;
● Fertility Chrysanthemum Tea in a Macao opium den;
● Ayurvedic tea in Kerala;
● The best Chai from tea stalls at train stations in India;
● Future-telling tea from a Bali magician;
● Horse Milk tea in a girr in Mongolia,
● Butter Tea with nomads in Tibet.
These and more tales will fill you to the brim, through word and image.
A very moving picture.
Customer Reviews
Tea and Harmony
Sylvia compiles a lovely visual and writen history of some excellent and empowering uses for tea. Journey with her around the world as she discusses the power or tea.
A Must Read
Tea and Travels is a beautifully crafted iBook that is capable of intriguing a mass group of readers through a number of outlooks. Sylvia Faddis has remarkably compiled the themes of travel, tea, history, and spirirtuality into an easy to read iBook. Faddis makes a point to befriend her readers by adding in personal photographs from her journeys as well as detailed tea recipes. She includes the origin country of the tea as well as a description of how the plant can invigorate the mind and body. It’s very beneficial and extremely educational to anyone searching for natural remedies. While Tea and Travels is very health informative it does not read as a text book. It’s meant to be read for pleasure, Faddis has enjoyed a number of foreign travels and to read about her adventures is a delight. This iBook will allow anyone to be insprired to embark on their own personal journey.
Samantha Alder
Freelance Editoral Assistant
Travel, a Wondrous Journey
Anyone who has experienced the magic of discovery through travel knows that it is first and foremost a journey into one’s own self, a journey facilitated by the encounter with the unknown, the Other. Sylvia Faddis’s book Tea and Travels: Life Filled to the Brim takes us on just such a journey. The premise is simple: traveling the world and sampling its many varieties of tea. Yet the impact is so much more complex.
Knowing she must leave the conflict, confusion, and contradictions of post-WWII Germany to seek the truth about other peoples and belief systems, young Sylvia sets out for Russia and the Far East, opening her heart and mind to new cultures, new images, new ways of being. We follow her in her travels over the decades as she discovers India, Greece, Bhutan, Tibet, the United States, and the Caribbean, finding peace, rejuvenation, and salvation in the people and ideas she encounters. Adventure is Sylvia’s middle name, be it the adventure of traveling with her then-husband and his jazz band or the adventure of discovering her inner self in Buddhist monasteries and through the teachings of mentors.
Evocative photographs and videos, created by Sylvia, add to the beauty of this book and draw us into Sylvia’s life of art and adventure. Along the way, through every country she visits, she discovers tea – teas that will heal, teas that will comfort, teas that will nourish, or teas that will simply give us a moment of pleasure and calm, a moment to savor the present and reflect on our lives. Tea and Travels is a book that is hard to put down; it is a journey we all should take, in one way or another, and it can show us a path to living “life filled to the brim.”