Tea

Apparently in Burma, much of what we would call mental illness is addressed through spiritual practice. Vipassana meditation is often recommended for a wide range of mild conditions—depression, anxiety, obsessive tendencies, attentional disorders. Not because they are seen as illnesses to be cured, but because they are understood as variations of consciousness. Restless, sad, angry, distracted, dull—just different weather patterns passing through the same sky.

In the Buddhist framework, there is no special dignity in suffering and no moral urgency to confront it. One does not wrestle anger into submission (like I do) or excavate sadness for meaning (like my wife does). The instruction is simpler and more mechanical: observe the body, attend to sensation, and do not interfere. The mind, given half a chance, tends to reorganize itself.

I found confirmation in reading accounts of westerners experience of intensive retreat. The emphasis is always the same: no narrative, no diagnosis, no catharsis. Just attention, applied (patiently) to breath, pain, itching, boredom, whatever. It sounds austere, until something intangible quietly improves.

I have no desire to go to Burma to verify this firsthand. Still, I find comfort in how neatly this tradition supports my own refusal of psychotherapy and my general dismissal of what my generation labels “(mild) mental health issues.” We all have something odd going on. The only universal diagnosis is being born. This doesn’t deny that some people need serious help. Clearly, some do, and institutions remain wildly inadequate. But it does challenge the idea that every deviation requires treatment.

I’m writing this after a vacation I didn’t realize I needed so badly. No screen or work pressure sent my 3rd ADHD diagnosis to oblivion. I was able to shlep peacefully through the childcare I usually struggle with. An hour of quiet sitting a day clearly did something. I don’t like the connotation of meditation, like blogging or running. I do all of these. They sounds like great big things. But when I do them, it’s just “this thing I do”. Whatever is happening doesn’t announce itself as progress or pain, and that’s the point.

It’s not treatment in the clinical sense. There’s no sense of correction, no project of improvement. Like tea doesn’t fix a cold. Common sense suggests it helps.

I’ve grown an appreciation for tea this winter. It’s my third winter in San Luis Obispo. Until moving here, I never noticed any seasonal changes in my body. But for the last 3 winters starting mid-December I’ve been taking awful shits for a few months. The gut, like the mind, has seasons.

Last year, I fell hard for the IBS pseudoscience. I had all the so-called symptoms. I got freaked out by slushy poop and absolutely foul gas. I’d never thought much about my GI tract because everything had always been fine (occasional food poisoning aside). I wondered if I was eating too much protein. I tried low FODMAP. Of course I tried expensive supplements. I fasted. I cut kale, broccoli, sauerkraut, all beloved staples. I blamed slimy texture on poor fat digestion and bought enzymes. I ate smaller meals. I did GI-focused yoga and breathwork. Naturally, I bought fancy probiotics, which did nothing. In my panic I omitted all testing best practices, but I’m confident nothing made the difference I was hoping for. My doctor said that if it didn’t hurt, it was probably fine, and that blasting my intestines with antibiotics would be a bad idea. “It’s probably some kind of local or seasonal bug” she satisfyingly concluded. And after three months, everything drifted back to stool chart number four, as if nothing had happened.

This year I saw it coming. My wife even joked about it, stinky fart season was coming. We visited family in LA for Christmas during the storms, right when the drama should have started. We all got sick because of our sloppy kids. My Chinese in-laws made us chug warm water all day (tea only reasonably and mostly in the morning) and refused to eat cold or raw stuff. Low stress holidays and warm insides kept my tummy happy. Since then peppermint tea keeps me company more consistently, especially morning and evening.

It’s like baking poop in a little oven. Taking a good shit is one of my greatest pleasure, directly related to conscious and warm liquid intake. Tea doesn’t fix anything per se. But it does a lot.

Tea doesn’t cure the mind either. It warms, softens, helps things pass. It seems to create the conditions for things to settle. And often that’s all I really need.