This monthly challenge is inspired by a blog post I read years ago by Leo Babauta. I could not find the original article, but please check out his blog. It was one of my biggest motivations to starting this blog.

This month I would like to up my tea drinkage, but more importantly cultivate an activity to practice mindfulness each day. Ever since I began my health journey and especially when mindful living became a major part of that journey, I have felt a sense of power and peace at the mental image of drinking a cup of tea. This image and the feelings it evoked have remained constant regardless of whether or not I actually consume tea on a regular basis or even at all.

I would like to experience the full breadth of feelings that can come from mindfully drinking tea. At this point, making tea still seems like a minor chore sometimes. Therefore, I would like this challenge to shift my experience of making tea from a deliberate action to an automatic one, and possibly become part of the baseline routine of my life. Whether that ends up being the case depends of course on how the month goes.

Here are the details:

• Choose a mug before the first day of the challenge – This will be my special tea-drinking mug for the month. I want to choose one that vibes fullness and equanimity AND that is the appropriate size – not too big nor too small. I purpose to treat the mug with the same reverence that I want to experience while drinking from it. Once I finish a cup and wash up, I will store the mug in a special place.
• Make a mug of tea each day of the challenge – This is pretty straightforward. Sometime between when I wake up and go to sleep each day, I want to prepare a mug of tea. The most likely time candidates are first thing in the morning and last thing before getting in bed. Another possibility is after a meal, especially one I am eating alone. However, any time is fine as long as I make at least one mug per day.
• It’s about drinking tea, not preparing it – I have researched and experimented with tea meditation previously. Usually this involves mindfully doing every activity from the intent to prepare the tea all the way through to the washing and putting away of the tea mug. The goal is to make the entire experience a space to practice and enjoy being fully in each moment. My challenge does not concern the tea preparation or cleanup. I am primarily focused on the tea itself and cultivating the ability to savor the sensory experience.
• Do the act mindfully, but not necessarily meditatively – I absolutely love Jon Kabat-Zinn’s definition of mindfulness: awareness that arises through paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment, non-judgmentally. This is a mindset we can have regardless of what we are physically doing. Meditation, on the other hand, is an exercise designed to help us reach a state of pure awareness, where we remove ourselves from being caught up in our emotions and thoughts and simply observe them from a 3rd-person perspective. I practice meditation at least once a day both formally and informally. This challenge, however, is about cultivating a spirit of mindfulness that I can carry with me through the rest of my life. It is perfectly okay to follow and explore whatever thoughts or emotions arise in this scenario, or to just BE if that feels right.

I will conclude this post with this quote by English essayist Thomas De Quincey:                                     “Tea… will always be the favorite beverage of the intellectual.”

Namaste.