Happy Beltane and the beginning of the ‘bright half’ of the year!
As our work is so centred around contemplation, I am currently reflecting on how the bright spring morning vs the dark winter one impacts my Breathe and Brew practice each day.
For those new to ATTIC, Breathe and Brew is the term we've coined to reflect the ancient practice of drinking and sitting quietly with the Tea, inviting the healthy mental space for insight, unburdening and exploration of self, known as contemplation. It is both a receptive and active process, calling on input from both the right and left brain.
The Tea’s important nutrients (much higher in our beautiful whole-leaf teas) induce this environment naturally within the human brain, activating both hemispheres and promoting the alpha brain wave state, bridging the gap between active thinking (beta brain wave) and deep relaxation (theta brain wave). But although this is the ideal state to help you travel through your day with more ease, it still requires you to deliberately set aside time for sitting, if it is to engage you in useful contemplation.
So Breathe and Brew is the combination of both parts- the drinking Tea to create the conducive state, while also carving out time to utilise this space and improve mental wellbeing. As I carry out this practice every morning, I like to ponder on helpful tools that might add interest, prompts, guidance or ease to this inner journey and this brings me back to the light.
There is something about daylight shining into the room where I sit, that increases the connection to that which is bigger than me, to the weather, to the seasons, to the surrounding environment whether birdsong or trees filling out with leaves. For me, it expands the space I sit in, the outdoors coming inside, in a way it doesn’t in the darkness of a winter morning. Personally I have found this invites me to contemplate on the broader questions, the more existential considerations of life. The bigger picture.
Whereas when in the depths of winter, I light a couple of salt lamps and sit in the dark, no sense of the outside coming in, instead a cosy nest of just me and the Tea. The darkness removes external visual distractions, shifting me from sight to insight, where my deeper wisdom has a chance to emerge. This seems to guide my contemplations inwards, bringing up the stuff sitting in my subconscious, cluttering up my mind. The seeming minutiae that can leave me feeling at capacity.
So the light does seem to matter as for me, it seems to invite a different focus.
Another ‘tool’ I have found helpful is music, shifting me from my head into my body, from my thoughts into my feelings. I have always sat in silence, finding it helpful for introspection as without external input, I find it easier to drop into myself. It demands more discipline as it can feel uncomfortable, but it reduces distraction which helps my fidgety brain settle and relax more easily.
But recently, I have begun to add emotive music (usually Max Richter) to my practice as I am trying to cultivate a better felt-sense, being more in my feelings than my intellect. I have been using it as a ‘sensory bath’, trying to feel the music as well as listen to it and what I have found is that if it's the right piece of music, the resonance dislodges emotions from deep inside, most of which I can’t name but can feel. The music releases a plethora of emotions, like a symphony to being human- all our potential and frailty, the magic and sadness, the joy and the hurt, the lived and unlived experiences. All of it.
So I invite those of you that have your own Breathe and Brew practice or wish to start one, to play around and allow the Tea to anchor you as you explore different ways to inhabit the space it opens within you. Through changing the light, trying silence and sound, maybe a poem or a picture or any other inspirations that call to you.
Anne x