Zen Tea for a Zen Moment: Why Try a Zen Tea Candle for Meditation
Fresh green tea leaves with a quiet trace of warm wood, green and clean rather than sweet.
If you have ever wondered whether a scent could help you meditate, a tea candle is a good place to start. Zen Tea is the one we made for that quiet moment, and its story goes back to the tea that kept monks awake through long hours of meditation. But first, why a scent helps at all.
Why meditate with a candle? Start with the scent
Many kinds of meditation begin with the breath: you sit still and notice the air going in and out. A scent gives each of those breaths something to notice, so a wandering mind has a simple place to come back to. Smell is also an unusually direct way in. As Harvard Medicine magazine explains, smell signals travel almost straight to the parts of the brain that handle emotion and memory, while sights and sounds take a longer route.
Many people also meditate by gazing at the flame itself. In this practice, often called candle gazing, you rest a soft gaze on the flame for a few minutes and come back to it whenever your mind wanders. A scented candle lets you do both at once, with the flame for your eyes and the scent for your breath.
Why tea is the scent for it
Tea has a long history with meditation in Chinese culture, and the reason was practical: tea keeps the mind awake and alert. As far back as the Tang dynasty, monks in Chinese temples drank tea to stay alert through long hours of sitting meditation.
Over time, tea became more than a drink that kept the monks awake. By the Song dynasty, serving tea was a set ritual in the monasteries, with fixed timing and seating and the burning of incense. Making and serving tea with full attention became a way to meditate in itself, and the art of tea grew into a practice of its own. The Japanese tea ceremony, which grew out of these rituals, is still described as a form of both art and meditation. An old saying sums it up: tea and Zen are two sides of the same coin.
Zen Tea grows out of that tradition. Its scent is green and clean rather than sweet, and it holds steady in the room. Like the monks' tea, it relaxes you without making you sleepy, and it is a scent you can breathe for a long time without tiring of it.
Scent was always part of meditation
Those monastery tea rituals already included incense, and in Chinese culture scent has long been used to settle and clear the mind. Huang Tingjian, a Song dynasty poet known for his deep love of incense, wrote:
“A stick of burning incense on the armrest against which I lean brings me a clean and clear mind.”Huang Tingjian, Song dynasty, as quoted by the National Museum of History, Taipei, in Distilling the Soul's Fragrance.
Centuries later, during the Ming dynasty, monks, Taoists and many well known figures of the day built quiet rooms for incense meditation, using scent to discipline the mind and to study their own thoughts.
Your modern quiet room
Zen Tea brings that quiet room home, without the incense smoke. Many people who meditate with incense find that the smoke gets in the way: the smoky smell pulls at their attention, and breathing it in deeply, when meditation is all about the breath, can feel harsh.
A candle scent is easier to sit with. Zen Tea pairs fresh green tea leaves with a quiet trace of warm wood, calm and clear, so every deep breath brings the scent without the smoke. Lighting it can become a small signal to yourself: for the next ten minutes, there is nothing to do but pay attention to your senses.
Each candle is 100% soy wax, poured into a handmade ceramic vessel.
Find your Zen Tea candle →Photos: Longjing tea fields, Hangzhou, by Armin Kübelbeck (CC BY-SA 3.0); tea bushes at Meijiawu by Peter K Burian (CC BY-SA 4.0).
