Embodying Each Month With All Our Senses: The Monthly Jewish Tea Experience
By Amanda Herring
Amanda is the co-founder of Gold Herring, a publishing company which designs immersive products to deepen your connection to Jewish wisdom. Their first product,The Jewish Planner, is a weekly agenda book based in the Hebrew calendar, which has inspired their newest product: The Jewish Monthly Tea Experience. It is a subscription box that includes an organic herbal blend for each Hebrew month, along with a teaching and guide for facilitating a formal or informal gathering around the tea. Amanda is an experiential Jewish educator, using food and sustainability as tools to teach Jewish wisdom. She started her Well Circle in Washington, D.C. in fall 2018.
As someone obsessed with the Hebrew calendar, it is no surprise that I started a Well Circle almost as soon as I heard about At The Well. Now, I’m continuing to feed my passion for marking Jewish time by co-creating The Jewish Monthly Tea Experience as a way of supporting Well Circles and other Jewish groups in learning about the Hebrew calendar through embodied rituals and connecting with the natural world.
In my Well Circle, we’re always looking for ways to work embodiment into our gatherings - ways that we activate our senses to deepen the experience. As someone with a food and sustainability background, I see how the food we eat can be a really powerful way of connecting Jewish teachings to changes in the seasons and the land on which we live.
At our most recent gathering, a new member was facilitating for the first time and we talked through the different ways we could embody the month of Sh’vat as a felt experience. We talked about food that comes from trees and decided to highlight cinnamon, a tree bark, and an easily recognizable flavor that evokes a distinct feeling of warmth and coziness - what the Danish call Hygge.
We opened our circle with drinking some hot cinnamon chai tea, the scent filling the room. Smelling and tasting the cinnamon as we came inside from the cold was an excellent way to enter into the warmth and comfort that is our Well Circle space.
By drinking herbal blends together on the new moon, we take into our bodies the energies and wisdom of the moment in the seasonal cycle we are in. To me, this is the epitome of embodied learning. Our sense of smell and taste is biologically linked to the part of our brain associated with memories. That is why, oftentimes, a familiar smell will trigger an early childhood memory of a time or place. By embodying each Hebrew month while also learning about the themes of the month and relating them to our lives, we can internalize the months' themes with all our senses.
My own Well Circle has been such an important monthly reminder to reconnect with my body, be in tune with the seasons, and check-in with where I am in life and in my relationships. I knew other Well Circles could use a tool to connect the Hebrew calendar with the senses. That’s one of the reasons my business partner, Mo Golden, and I decided to seek out an herbalist to add a monthly tea blend to the things that we were offering this year.
We hope that through The Jewish Monthly Tea Experience, those who are looking to come more fully into the rhythms and cycles of the Hebrew calendar will find an embodied connection to the months.
Our herbalist, Chelsea Taxman, is putting together education sheets about the properties of each herb in the monthly blends, along with creating a facilitation/ritual guide to help leaders of Well Circles, sisterhoods, classroom teachers, or any gathering facilitator who wants to bring the monthly herbal blend to their group.
Imagine a Jewish workplace taking 30 minutes once a month to brew a large batch of tea, sitting together to reflect on the past month and set intentions together for the month ahead. With a simple ritual like this, we can turn any small moment into a meaningful ritual experience.
When we slow down, take a breath, and use a tool like a cup of tea as a way to bring mindful moments into our days, we transform them from something ordinary into something with significance.
If you want to bring embodied moments to your Well Circle or other community gatherings, you can find out more about The Jewish Tea Experience at GoldHerring.com. When you subscribe, you’ll receive a monthly themed box with 20 servings of an organic loose leaf herbal blend from a sustainable farm in the US, in a compostable bag. You’ll also receive teachings about the herbs and a facilitation guide for your gathering, both printed beautifully as a way to elevate your gathering and anchor learning.
I’m excited to use the facilitation guide included in the monthly tea subscription with my Well Circle. We’ll learn together about each herb, why it's included in the month’s blend, and have guiding questions to help everyone sink into the moment or experience.
The subscription kicks off with the Jewish new year, September 18, 2020, but in case you are too excited to wait, here’s a sample monthly teaching and guide you can use for this month!
Nissan Mint Tea Activity
Supplies:
Mugs for each person
Hot water
Fresh Mint
Lemons
Honey
Give out mugs of hot water and place mint, cut lemon, honey and stirrers in the middle of the table.
Smell
“Pick your leaves slowly and carefully to prepare tea. You need about 7 leaves per cup of hot water. As you pick the leaves, notice the aroma that leaves from the leaves as you gently release their oils. Lets name words we each associate with the smell, we can share popcorn style as they come to mind.”
Let the group keep going with words until everyone feels heard (encourage sharing by continuing to share suggestions: awake, alive, cool, relaxed, fresh, clear, energized).
Steep
“Add the leaves to your hot water, you may customize as you like with honey or lemon. (leave time for prep ). “As the tea steeps (5 minutes) periodically smell your tea and notice how the smell changes, Nissan brings freedom, change, and awakening of spring, so what’s awakening for you? We will go around the circle and share where we are exploring something new, or expanding on something this month.”
Embody
“As we enjoy our tea, take 10 minutes to journal, I’ve prepared a playlist to encourage open and free-thinking.”
Playlist Suggestions: Freedom by Pharell, So What by Pink, Redemption Song cover John Legend, Try Everything Shakira, Freedom Beyonce ft. Kendrick Lamar