For those who read this newsletter regularly, you know I am often sharing thoughts around what is currently in my head, but it inevitably returns to tea. Well that’s expected I hear you cry, as ATTIC is a TEA website selling tea, but for me it goes much deeper than that.
I was recently looking through the manual we created to go alongside our Tea’cher training days and there is a line in it that caught my attention. “In many spiritual traditions, it is believed there are hidden 'alarm clocks’ built into the fabric of our reality. Things to wake us up to knowledge we have forgotten, at the time in our history we most need it”. The longer I sit and imbue the goodness from this wonderful plant’s leaves, the more sure I become that tea mirrors life and it is here to reflect something important back to us.
'But tea has never left us' I hear you cry (there is a lot of assumed crying in this newsletter!) but Chinese tea and thus the true power of what tea can offer us really has.
This brings me nicely on to my musings for this month around awareness, attention and stillness.
The active nature of attending to our lives and where we choose to put our attention has a major impact on our inner world and psychology as well as our outer world and our interactions within it. I have explored many times in this newsletter the two different forms of attention provided by our left and right brain hemispheres and how our cultural shift towards the 'doing’ left has drastically altered the once balanced perspective of us as individual significant beings whilst concurrently being insignificant tiny parts of something so much bigger. As we have become completely absorbed and our lives swallowed up by the attention of the left brain, we have completely lost our connection to the rich, beautiful interconnected view of the right.
It is no wonder our anxiety and search for meaning is so weighty, we have each unconsciously put our individual selves firmly front and centre in life’s spotlight, while actually trying to live in a world full of other-than-humans, an ecosystem that requires a little more humility. It makes me think of the Lamott quote “I may not be much, but I'm all I think about.”
Our healthy sense of self has become strangely distorted and it seems our only way back is through re-cultivating our connection to stillness, so we might make sense of what we have become and shift to where we comfortably need to be. The difficulty of this plan is that in our busy 'doing' life, it calls for us to eke out some of that precious commodity, time.
When I say stillness, for me there is a distinction between inner stillness and the inner power of outer stillness. Inner stillness seems to speak to the point in meditation where the mind becomes empty of any thoughts which most of us will find impossible! I’m more interested in the inner power of outer stillness, the space created inwardly for productive ‘work on oneself’ whilst outwardly doing nothing but sitting still. The act of being still can provide a settling quality that invites us to actually feel, to connect somatically as well as emotionally to ourselves. And in that space we have an opportunity to become aware of what is sitting under the surface, and start to notice the choices we have available should we wish to make changes.
And so now we track back to the tea. Obviously we can ‘do’ stillness without tea but this is where the tea's gift to humanity at this time in our history comes into play. The balancing chemical impact Chinese tea has on our brain, activating both left and right hemispheres simultaneously, offers us an opportunity, when in stillness, to observe and process things through our truer human perception- that healthier sense of self where our uniqueness and inconsequentialness sit together joyfully within the same space. There is nothing more beautiful than that.
This 'ideal' way of perceiving the world is something the tea happily contributes to our human brains with every brew and is something that would be much harder to reach without the tea's input. So why not try combining your morning cuppa with 5 minutes of sitting in stillness and see what emerges over time. As it becomes a ritual, it will take less sustained effort to drop into that productive inner space. Over time that semblance of peace we all seek can become a more and more tangible goal.
So wishing you a lovely Spring, embrace the light as well as the stillness. Have a wonderful month and we look forward to speaking to you again in May.
Anne x