Imagine waking up and wanting that burst of energy, but you open the kitchen cupboard to find that the coffee is all gone. What do you do? Behind the snacks, canned goods, and your favorite coffee mug sits a tin of tea that you have not opened in months. You have heard all of the professionals talk about different types of tea, but you never jumped on the bandwagon. Instead of contemplating further, you brew yourself a cup anyway. You go about your day, which includes running errands, finishing your work assignments, and working out at the gym on the treadmill for an hour. You have not felt this great in years and you feel a sense of peace overwhelm you at the end of the day. Was it what you drank instead of coffee? Wellness experts like Helen Schifter know that tea can be transformational.
While all tea is good for the body, green tea especially has a lot of healing benefits for mental health and overall wellness. Not only does it help a person maintain a healthy physical body with weight maintenance, but it can also help reduce the risks of several ailments, including heart disease and diabetes. As humans, we drink coffee and other caffeinated beverages daily, sometimes multiple times per day, but green tea works the same way. Waking up with a cup of the brewed leaves helps a person wake up just as well as they would with coffee, but the difference is the level of antioxidants that are not found as much in coffee. A plus is that it leaves you with a clean feeling in your mouth, while after drinking coffee, a breath mint is usually in order.
We know now of the physical healing benefits, but it also has a lot of benefits for the peace of the soul and the overall wellness of the mind. A lot of us do not have time for meditation in our busy schedules, but it has been said that brewing yourself a cup of this green liquid creates the same effect as though you were in full meditation. Believe it or not, this is a very common practice amongst monks who seek to use their time in a different manner than sitting and listening. Monks are also very health conscious as well, looking out for the wellness of their body and mind at the same time, creating a sense of mindfulness that seems hard to recreate. The funny thing is though, we can have the same way of mindfulness and it can happen as well as it does for the monks. It simply starts with just brewing two to three cups a day, the same amount of coffee you would drink in the morning anyway. So the next time you find yourself in the coffee section at the grocery store, consider picking up a tin of green tea leaves. You might just thank yourself later, as Helen Schifter does.