Happy Lunar New Year. One of the great things about having dual heritage is I get a second crack at the New Year, new me!
As I begin to offer deeper training into the simple, yet sacred practice of ‘Breathe and Brew’, I wanted to share why we offer tea as a medicine for the soul. When examining what we mean by soul work, for us it is the active process of self-discovery, where we begin to find our way back to the original blueprint of who we are under all the layers of conditioning.
So the newsletter today is a story about a Cheetah and comes from the opening chapter of ‘Untamed’, a book by Glennon Doyle. For me it perfectly describes this process of uncovering ourselves, seeing ourselves anew and noticing its urgent call at certain times of our life, midlife for one, as we desperately search for a grounded freer sense of self and a life of meaning.
So let us begin. In this story the Cheetah is called Tabitha. The author takes her daughter to the zoo and they watch a performance called the Cheetah run. It begins with a Labrador, Minnie (Tabitha’s ‘best friend’) chasing a fluffy toy attached to the back of a truck around a racecourse. Once completed, Tabitha is released and copies Minnie and is rewarded with a big juicy steak at the end. In essence, Tabitha has been tamed and trained to believe she is a Labrador.
Everyone cheers and wanders off to see the next attraction. But the author’s daughter continues watching Tabitha as she is returned to her enclosure. She notices her posture change as she begins stalking the perimeter, regal, scary…. remembering something.
The author postulates what Tabitha might say to her at that moment. “Something’s off with my life. I feel restless and frustrated. I have this hunch that everything was supposed to be more beautiful than this. I imagine fenceless, wide-open savannahs. I want to run and hunt and kill and sleep under an ink-black silent sky”. Then she looks back at her cage, the only home she has ever known and she says “I should be grateful. I have a good enough life here. It’s crazy to long for what doesn’t even exist”.
The author finishes the story with saying “Tabitha, you are not crazy, you are a goddamn Cheetah”
In another book, called ‘embracing ourselves’, they call this remembering the roar of awakening. It is the realisation that we have taken on identities that incorrectly or inadequately express our essential being. Symbolically, we have all been raised as Labradors, in families, societies and cultures where we are trained and conditioned to think, act, feel and be a specific way. But then at certain points something begins to force its way up into our awareness. An itch, an instinct, a knowing that has never been vocalised, not even to ourselves. We too sit in that space of ‘I should be grateful but something feels off’.
Once we give ourselves permission to explore and feel into this and listen and really hear what comes up, not only a truer version of ourselves but also a truer version of our humanity begins to show up. We start to uncover our goddamn Cheetah that is waiting, poised underneath all the modern life stuff and begin to reconnect to the beauty of the world and honour our place within it.
But we need space.
Space to stop squashing everything back down.
And we need courage.
Courage to hear and acknowledge parts of ourselves that may be exiled, sad, angry, confronting.
And some of that journey can be held by the Teas and the different spaces each tea can open and invite you into. Breathe and Brew is our take on the ancient practice, known in China as Cha Dao. The monks who first cultivated tea fully understood the power of these teas to cultivate inner harmony and a deeper sense of our interconnectedness, when the tea’s sentience is honoured. How else did it become the most sought after drink in the world! The Chinese character for tea represents the deep union between tea and humanity, when we choose to work WITH the teas rather than use them purely for their nutrients, as medicines for our soul.
Enjoy a wonderful February and a return to the light. We look forward to speaking to you again in March
Anne and Ric x