It’s Friday – and it’s tea time . . . time to take time out for our tea-way ritual. This week the focus is on Yellow Tea: and here’s my guidance for your contemplation . . . “yellow” in its energy connects us at our solar plexus chakra, giving us a culture of awareness of energetic birthing into connectedness with Planet and Nature.
Yellow Tea
Yellow tea is produced similarly to White Tea and Green Tea although an additional step is added. This extra step produces a tea that brews into a golden hue and features a mellow flavor without grassy notes. When you learn more about the basics of Yellow Tea, you can unearth some of the best types on the Planet.
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Types and Characteristics
Yellow tea is from the type of tea known as true teas. These types of tea are made from the leaves of the Camellia sinensis plant, known more commonly as the tea plant. Other famous teas in this same classification include green tea, white tea, oolong tea, black tea, and pu-erh tea.
What makes this tea so desirable is its rarity. Yellow tea is a Chinese tea that is difficult to find outside of China. That’s because the process to produce this tea is time intensive, requires additional labor, and proves to be difficult when it comes to large-scale quality control. As a result, there are only three main types of yellow tea available on the market today.
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Health Benefits
Yellow tea is packed with antioxidants including polyphenols and catechins that are beneficial to overall health. These antioxidants work to prevent damage known as oxidative stress, which is caused by the presence of free radicals. This type of stress is known to break down healthy cellular processes and can contribute to premature aging as well as mental decline. Yellow Tea is naturally calorie-free, making it a great choice for people on weight loss regimes: particularly when we’re looking to replace sugary sodas with healthier alternatives.
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As usual, I encourage you to inform yourself and if you’re instinctively drawn to a tea like Yellow Tea for your mind-body-spirit then gen up as much as you can with self-education. Learn more about our Zen Tea-way in my blog.
I left the Wednesday slot on the Blog free purposefully, intuitively wanting to know what would “flow in”. Wisdom is what seems to want to flow . . . but maybe not every Wednesday, so maybe there’ll be a blog or post of some kind, and maybe not. As long as the inspiration keeps coming, I’ll keep going with it. This series of inspirations is a new way of distilling wisdom and passing it onto you . . . “Voice of Men”.
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Wisdom inspiration for your day : The Pale Blue Dot Carl Sagan
Carl Sagan’s words: . . . the best speech about Humanity: ” . . . everyone you love, everyone you know, is here on this pale blue dot”
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Carl Sagan gives one of the best speeches ever about Humanity – and how foolishly we behave. His message is about the fragility of Earth and the pettiness of war as seen through a cosmic lens.
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Pale Blue Dot is one of the most important and reflective speeches about the human condition and our place in the Universe. The Pale Blue Dot is a photograph of Earth taken in 1990 by the Voyager 1 space probe from a record distance of about 6 billion kilometers from Earth, as part of the solar system Family Portrait series of images.
[Video by Patrick Mylund Nielsen. He makes some incredibly powerful videos. You can subscribe to his channel here, and like/share: https://www.youtube.com/user/pmylund]
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Balance is what happens when you know in your heart something is right.
When you think “thrive”, think of all the seemingly small, but necessary daily elements of life as the miraculous organ you are as a human being. At our essence we are a living organism, on a living Planet, in a living Universe. So, here’s something else I’ve been teaching this for over 20 years : the miracle of our skin as an organism, and how we help it eliminate toxins: the teaching never changes, results of practice are always the same . . .
All we are on a physical level as a human being is air, water and food. And physically, our body’s 10-13 trillion cells replace themselves every 100 days [just over 3 months]. How about that for a “slow flow”? And how do we help our organism to replace and renew?
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LET NATURE TAKE ITS COURSE
Nature loves balance. Your body always strives to be in balance, no matter what you do to it. If you work with it using some pretty simple natural techniques, you can help boost your circulation, rid your body of waste products and toxins – and you might be surprised what you find out about your own body in the process.
Massage and Skin-elimination are two techniques which are vital to restoring and maintaining balance for your body. They go hand in hand, one assists the other. Let’s start here with skin-elimination:
SKIN-ELIMINATION
Besides massage and circulation boosting, to successfully get rid of toxins on a regular basis, you need to be using some way of helping your body to eliminate through your skin: dealing with toxins is a daily process for your body-system.
Remember that your skin is the largest organ of elimination of your body–system and the largest part of your immune protection – it will literally throw things off your body that you don’t need. But to do this it has to be healthy, clean and free from debris (that will clog up your pores), so that it can ‘breathe’.
Purity is one of our values in living with zen, and part of our healthy living principles with yoga.
The ways that you can help your body to eliminate are by exfoliating, or clearing off dull, old, dead, dry or flaky skin or by sweating out wastes. And the more ways you find to help your body, the more strain you are taking off your kidneys and liver, and the healthier you will look and feel. This is one technique:
Dry Skin-brushing
This method of skin-elimination and circulation boosting has now passed almost into legend. I haven’t read a book about detoxing, Cellulite, legs, healthy lifestyle changes and re-balancing in the last 20 to 25 years, without it containing this amazingly simple and effective method.
Skin-brushing is invigorating, it will energise you and it directly works on stimulating your lymphatic system.
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Dry Skin Body Brushing | Balancing Bodymind | Amazing, simple and effective skin elimination practice for balancing the bodymind system. I’m teaching you this in the most beautiful way I can for your appreciation of the holistic healing in this self-care practice.
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How you do it
You use a Mexican-cactus fibre brush (you will recognize it as a back bath brush, they are wood and bristle, have long handles and oval brush heads.) You use long repetitive strokes, using the brush DRY, on DRY skin, working from your feet up to your neck – and you need only brush your skin for up to five minutes at a time.
This is where homeostasis comes in: more is not more. 10 minutes a day is not ‘better’ than five minutes every other day, your body just gets used to it and the method stops working as well. And you only brush every day for the first week, then start chopping and changing the days you skin-brush to keep tricking your body into getting rid of wastes. By “chopping and changing” your dry-brushing I mean alternate days one week, then random days the next etc.
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Why we do what we do to thrive: learning to be “you”
I’m a teacher, so repeating myself goes with the job! Small steps, small changes . . . one day at a time: in 100 days from now you’ll be a new you! I’ve said this to you before, I’m sure there’ll be many tellings again. [ Read more about this in my blog . . . thrive | Rest and Relaxation #1 ]
And, so, let’s talk about repetition and commitment as well as practicalities and practices: we could take the attitude of “What’s the point in showering we’re only going to get dirty again?” or “Why bother washing up when we’re only going have to redo it when we reuse the dishes.” Come to think of it, what’s the point in eating, when we’ll be hungry in a few hours time? And of course, sleeping’s unnecessary, too . . . we just always end up feeling tired again, don’t we? I don’t think I need to say anymore, do I? Some things in life just need to be repeated: and diligently.
A single change doesn’t always effect a permanent transformation. But taking things one step at a time in your day eventually leads to trillions of new cells of “you-ness”. Proper purification is one of the yogic principles for health and a healthy life: the way we thrive.
A U M OM CHANTING | A U M is the feminine inner process of our spiritual embodiment : Creativity gets chaotic, it comes from intuition and inspiration and neither can be controlled – this is how I give myself space for the chaos, by producing mantras and meditation energy medicine tracks for chanting, movement meditation and videos: all intended to raise our vibrations.
A U M OM Mantra Chanting : here is the teaching and the practice in my video below | the sound which makes up the OM Mantra: A U M.
Thich Nhat Hanh: “Let your breath touch Eternity … “
I teach you the breathing and sounds and then we practice the chanting of the Mantra. Mantra is one of our gateways to Consciousness, with the vibration harmonising us with the Universe.
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A U M OM Mantra Chanting | Teaching and Practice | Harmonising
The symbol OM represents Humanity’s realisation of Divinity within the Self. A U M is the feminine inner process of our spiritual embodiment in the chanting vibration. As we chant we’re harmonising with Divine Feminine process so we can settle into our awareness of inspiration, creativity and constant Universal renewal.
As usual, I encourage you to inform yourself and if you’re instinctively drawn to a tea like Yellow Tea for your mind-body-spirit then gen up as much as you can with self-education. 
I left the Wednesday slot on the Blog free purposefully, intuitively wanting to know what would “flow in”. Wisdom is what seems to want to flow . . . but maybe not every Wednesday, so maybe there’ll be a blog or post of some kind, and maybe not. As long as the inspiration keeps coming, I’ll keep going with it. This series of inspirations is a new way of distilling wisdom and passing it onto you . . . “Voice of Men”.
And, so, let’s talk about repetition and commitment as well as practicalities and practices: we could take the attitude of “What’s the point in showering we’re only going to get dirty again?” or “Why bother washing up when we’re only going have to redo it when we reuse the dishes.” Come to think of it, what’s the point in eating, when we’ll be hungry in a few hours time? And of course, sleeping’s unnecessary, too . . . we just always end up feeling tired again, don’t we? I don’t think I need to say anymore, do I? Some things in life just need to be repeated: and diligently.
A U M OM Mantra Chanting : here is the teaching and the practice in my video below | the sound which makes up the OM Mantra: A U M.
SuZen YinZen 