teakkurim

21 shvat 5781 camellia sinensis is not the only ‘tea’ i drink. every morning i drink herbal tea when i wake up. depending on what time of year or how i am feeling i will drink different things. in the winter i like things that are warming and spicy to help generate some heat and give some fire to my digestion. during the summer, i usually wake up with my anxiety at an 11. boom, im awake, time to be anxious. when this happens, i like to start my mornings with some serious downer tea to help me calm down. i like to make my own blends but i also will drink bag tea, especially this time of year when i feel more ‘blah’ and want something convenient. when i go backpacking or camping i love spending my morning by walking around and finding some things to make tea with. i will boil water, make my ‘forest tea’ and sit by some water and pray or sing while i drink my tea.   i love tea because it is a plant. i love interacting with plants. i especially love plants i can eat, drink, or make me...

18 shvat 5781  i have been using the word qi a lot in this blog. i think a lot of it is wishful thinking. i want to think i am perceptive and can sense the energetics of tea. i believe i can to some degree, but any evaluation or judgment of qi in a tea should be balanced with the fact that i am fairly amateurish. i do have a better sense for tea than the average person and i do have an above average sense of plant energetics but i am nowhere near the most experienced or the most perceptive. i want to be. i hope to be, but for now, i just aint there yet.   where does my experience with qi come from? it’s a little hodgepodge. i have done a little bit of qi gong and tai chi with a couple different teachers. mainly, when i lived in north Carolina in the black mountains, one of our neighbors just graduated acupuncture school. he was friends with a bunch of us at the farm which he happened to have previously worked at, and he would hang out with us and on tuesdays we’d do qi gong wi...