Every summer, we extend the same invitation: take your practice outside. Into nature. Your back porch, a quiet spot in the park, a trail deep into the trees. The light is generous this time of year, the air warm and alive, and something in the practice opens differently when you bring it into the world.
This year, we've been sitting with something else alongside that invitation.
We've grown used to experiencing life through a lens. A moment catches you somewhere beautiful—and before you've finished feeling it, you're already thinking about how to share it. The phone comes out. The shot gets framed. The caption forms somewhere in the back of your mind.
Psychologist Linda Henkel named this the photo-taking impairment effect: when we photograph something, we remember less about it than when we simply look. The brain offloads its work of being present to the device. The phone holds the memory so the mind doesn't have to.
The moment becomes something to capture rather than inhabit.
A kind of self-editing sets in. You stop asking is this meaningful? and start asking how does this look? You become the curator of your own experience instead of the person inside it. The moment is already being translated—into content, into something shareable—before you've fully arrived in it.
Tea practice has always asked you to be inside the moment, not outside of it. The sit asks for your full presence. Taking your bowl outside, phone left behind, is one of the most honest ways to answer that call.
This is the invitation.
Leaves in a Bowl
The Simplest Way to Take Your Practice Outside
You don't need a full setup to sit outside. The simplest way to take your practice into nature is leaves in a bowl—a bowl, hot water, and large-leaf tea. No extra teaware, no elaborate arrangement. Everything you need, nothing you don't.
This is the practice in its most essential form. And in that simplicity, there's something clarifying.
How to brew:
- Fluff your tea and find a few large, intact leaves.
- Add the leaves to your bowl.
- Pour hot water along the edge of the bowl, not the center. This creates a gentle whirlpool that gathers the leaves together as they settle.
- Let the leaves come to rest. Notice the color, the aroma.
- Sip slowly and enjoy.
- Re-steep the same leaves, adding a little more time with each steeping.
Leaves in a bowl yields fewer steepings than a teapot session—the leaves are doing slower, more ambient work. Look for large-leaf teas that stay gentle over a longer brew.
What to bring:
- Your bowl(s), wrapped in cloth and packed in something hard-sided
- Your kettle
- A Jetboil or camp stove to heat water on site—or preheat water at home and carry it in a quality thermos
- Large-leaf tea
Finding your spot: Quiet, flat, and shaded is best. Scout it ahead of time if you can.
Your phone: Leave it at home, or turn it off entirely. Airplane mode still lets you take photos—which is why we suggest going further. The invitation here is full presence. No documentation.
Teas for This Practice
Not all teas are suited for leaves in a bowl. You want something large-leafed, gentle over a long steep, and expressive enough to reward slow attention. These are our favorites for sitting outside.
Gateway of Spirit: Wild Tree Purple Tea 2025 — Our #1 go-to for leaves in a bowl. Gently uplifting, euphoric qi. Gateway of Spirit has earned the nickname "dreamtime tea"—the kind of tea that takes you somewhere and asks only that you be present for the journey.
Awakened Heart: Golden Tip Pure Bud Red Tea 2023 — Named for the warmth it brings to the chest. An active, buzzy energy that opens you up and draws you toward connection. A natural companion for Fire season.
Treebeard: Ancient Tree Big Leaf Shou Puerh 2025 — Uplifting yet soft and gentle. Treebeard lifts you into the canopy without losing its rootsy groundedness. Large-leafed and well-suited for warm weather.
Peaceful Slumber: GABA Oolong 2024 — Slowly unfurls throughout the session—watching the leaves open is a meditation in itself. Naturally occurring GABA brings calm without heaviness. Best in the afternoon or evening.
Five Element Inisghts
On Connection and Presence in Fire Season
We're fully into Fire season now.
In Traditional Chinese Medicine, Fire governs the Heart—and the Heart holds the shen: spirit, consciousness, the thread of awareness that lets you be fully present and feel what's actually happening. The Heart is considered the Emperor organ. Everything else in the body serves it.
The emotion of Fire is joy. The kind that comes from genuine contact—with a moment, with another person, with the bowl in your hands. The kind of joy that is felt rather than performed. It requires no audience.
Fire is connection, wider than we usually hold it. Fire season asks for connection:
- To the present moment—this warmth, this light, this aliveness
- To the natural world and the living things around you
- To the practice and what it asks of you
- To yourself, underneath everything else
This is the work of summer: to feel it fully. To let the season actually land.
The Heart longs for this. The shen settles when it has something real to rest in—something it doesn't have to manage, translate, or share. When attention is divided, when part of you is already elsewhere composing a caption or checking the light, the shen scatters. Connection thins. The Heart can't do what Fire season is asking.
Taking your bowl outside, phone turned off and out of reach: it's a direct way of giving the Heart what it needs. A way of saying: this moment is enough. I'm here for it.
To open. To receive. To feel the season on your skin and the bowl in your hands. To be in full contact with all of it.
This is what it feels like when shen is at home.
Art from the Earth
Somewhere out in nature, someone is gathering what the earth has dropped—feathers, petals, bark, bones—and arranging them into something. A mandala. An altar. A form that could only have come from that particular morning in that particular place.
Then they leave it there.
This is the practice of morning altars, a devotion to impermanent beauty, as artist Day Schildkret calls it. His page, @morningaltars, is one we've been following for a while now, and it feels right to share it with you this summer.
What seems valueless becomes—briefly, beautifully—something together. The piece doesn't get carried home. It decomposes. The wind takes it. What was made belongs to the earth that made it possible.
There is something in that gesture that feels essential right now. To make something not for documentation, not for sharing, not for anyone but yourself and the place you're sitting. To let it be enough that it existed, even briefly, even if no one else ever saw it.
If you take your practice outside this summer, try it. After your session, gather what's nearby—whatever catches your eye. Arrange something, however simple. Make it just for yourself and the place you're sitting.
Then leave it when you go. Don't even document it.
The Invitation
The practice has always known what the Henkel research confirms: presence is not something you can split. You're either in the moment or you're managing it. The bowl, the leaves, the open air—they ask for the former.
This summer, take your bowl outside. Leave the phone behind. Let the season actually land.
That's the whole thing.