What Tea Taught Me About Belonging to the Living Earth

I want to share the deeper calling behind offering the Mingjing Yunnan Tea Journey - an incredible immersion to Yunnan, China I am co-leading in November of 2026.

The first thing to say is that this is not meant to be a retreat. It is an immersion. Retreats, as we tend to understand them, are often designed around personal healing, rest, and reflection. These are beautiful and necessary things. But what I experienced in Yunnan, a place renowned as the birthplace of tea, was something that moved far beyond the realm of personal benefit. It was not simply restorative. It was revelatory.

Tea is not separate from life there. It is woven through everything: the land, the forests, the families, the ceremonies, the livelihoods, and the stories that pass between generations.

What I encountered there was a culture that lives and breathes devotion to tea not as a wellness product or contemplative accessory, but as an ecological, spiritual, and cultural relationship. Tea is not separate from life there. It is woven through everything: the land, the forests, the families, the ceremonies, the livelihoods, and the stories that pass between generations. Witnessing this awakened something in me that felt less like learning and more like remembering. A remembering of the incredible gift of the natural world and of the possibility that human beings can live in deep reverence and reciprocity with it.

For many years, my own tea practice has centered around the contemplative and healing aspects of tea. Tea invites us to slow down, to soften our nervous systems, to listen inwardly. This is real medicine. But in Yunnan, I began to see that this is only one layer of what tea offers.

The deeper medicine of tea is ecological. Tea moves energy, not only within the body, but within our awareness. It has the ability to dissolve stagnation and awaken sensitivity and receptivity. When practiced with care and intention, tea becomes a ritual that reorients us toward the living world. It reminds us that we are not separate from nature, but participants within it. And it was witnessing indigenous tea cultures - the people whose lives remain intimately bound to the mountains, forests, and ancient tea trees - that revealed how profound this relationship can be. Their devotion is not symbolic or aesthetic. It is lived. Tea is a crop that sustains their communities, but it is also something more. It is an ancestor, a teacher, a companion species. The forests that hold the ancient tea trees are treated with reverence because the health of the people and the health of the land are understood to be inseparable.

This experience shifted something fundamental in how I understand tea practice. For a long time, the wellness world has been oriented toward personal healing and self-development. And while tending to our own healing is deeply important, I sometimes wonder if we have become trapped in an endless loop of trying to fix ourselves. We move from one modality, teacher, or community to the next in search of something that always feels just out of reach.

What I began to see in Yunnan is that perhaps we have been approaching the problem from the wrong direction.

What if the sense of belonging, purpose, and wholeness that so many of us long for does not emerge from deeper self-focus but from deeper participation in the living systems around us?

What if the micro heals when we focus on the macro? What if the sense of belonging, purpose, and wholeness that so many of us long for does not emerge from deeper self-focus, but from deeper participation in the living systems around us?

The cultures who steward ancient tea forests are not searching for belonging. They are embedded in it. Their lives are structured around relationships - with land, with ancestors, with plants, with seasons, and with community. The alignment that many of us strive so hard to create internally is, for them, supported externally through living systems of reciprocity.

This is the wisdom that inspired the Mingjing Yunnan Tea Journey. It is not meant to be another experience to collect, or another form of wisdom to accumulate. It is meant to offer a shift in perspective, perhaps even a shift in worldview. This immersion is an invitation into the work of sacred ecology. It is an exploration of what it means to belong to the living Earth again.

Through time spent with tea farmers and indigenous tea cultures, through walking ancient tea forests, through shared tea rituals and meals, participants are invited to witness a way of life that remains rooted in relationship. And through tea ceremony itself, we begin to practice this relationship in small but meaningful ways. Tea ritual is a quiet act of cultural repair. It asks us to slow down, to pay attention, and to acknowledge the many lives and forces that made the moment possible - the soil, the rain, the forests, the hands that harvested and crafted the leaves. It becomes a practice of humility. A practice of interbeing with the more-than-human world. And when practiced in community, it reminds us that healing is not only an individual journey, but a collective one.

The Mingjing Yunnan Tea Journey is ultimately an invitation to remember something simple yet profound: That our deepest healing may not come from trying to perfect ourselves.

It may come from learning how to restore our relationships with the living Earth. Tea, in its quiet and ancient way, shows us how.

"It only makes sense to serve our home. And we can look at home as Earth, as our ecosystems, as the waters that flow through where we live, the trees that give us oxygen. Instead of serving our home we're living at this point, kind of globally, that overculture is ecocidal. We're killing our home. And to me, that seems like Truth and God were put in a blender and this has effected the clarity that maybe some of our ancestors had. The clarity that Truth and God live within the land that allows us to be alive. It allows us to become like all of this becoming." - adapted from a Ayana Young quote