Depresso: The Feeling You Get When Coffee Leaves Your Veins

Java Junkie To Tea Ceremony

My First experience with tea was Constant Comment. It was everywhere when I was young. I loved the aroma. Looking back, the taste was not so desirable. Once the initial burst of flavors of cinnamon, cloves and citrus wore off it was pretty bitter stuff.

The Early Years

Actually I was a java junkie. It started pretty young. I remember my granny sitting at her breakfast table in the morning with a shawl draped over her shoulders and her cup in front of her. The aroma wafting through the house waking me and calling me down to the kitchen. There would be a cup waiting for me across the table from her. The curious part was the bottle of brandy sitting there. She’d pour some in my cup, remarking that it was a chilly morning and this would take the chill out of my bones. To a 10 year old granny knows best. And that is where my coffee drinking began. In a tiny kitchen, me and my granny, coffee and a bottle of brandy.

By the time I was a young adult I was powering down as much coffee as I could find in the mornings and then taking the edge off at night with a bottle of wine so I could relax enough to sleep. Depresso: The feeling you get when the coffee leaves your veins. Not a very healthy lifestyle!

Herbs to Tea

In my late Twenties with three kids in tow I started looking into and practicing herbalism. I loved that I could heal the maladies of life with herbs. Colds and flu became less and less frequent in our family and this fueled more experimenting. Oh, I was still drinking down my pots of coffee in the morning. After all I had these three kids . At one point I think my family was on the verge of coffee intervention. That’s when it happened. In one of my herb orders there came a bag of Gunpowder Green Tea

Serendipity Took Over

I hadn’t ordered the green tea but amazingly, there it was. The universe was trying to get my attention. So many times I tried to quit the coffee, even cutting back was painful. The symptoms were terrible. The headaches, nausea, energy crashes. I was on caffeine overload and I was acidic and I knew that I had to get off this merry-go-round. I no longer had time for this shit. Back to that unsolicited bag of tea, I decided to give it a shot. I told the family to brace themselves because I was going to drink Green Tea in the morning. I did. Hmm, no headache! No negative symptoms whatsoever. In fact I felt elevated! Okay lets try it again, and again and again. And you know what? It’s been Twenty years. Oh I’ve taken a sip here and there but never have I wanted a whole cup.I became a more relaxed and focused person and that fueled my desire to explore and experiment with more teas. And that is when things really started to get more interesting. It brought more ceremony into my life and made me want to bring more tea ceremony into the lives of others.

This leads to more stories on other days…