The Soul of Tea: A Two Day Retreat in Ojai, CA

Dear one,

On my twenty-second birthday I came to Ojai for a hike. I stood at the top of the trail and looked out over the mountains and Lake Casitas in the valley below, and I knew, the way you know only a few things in a lifetime, that I was home. I never left!

That was thirty years ago. I am still here, importing tea, blending tea, formulating in the lab, finding my creative flow in these gorgeous mountains among these extraordinary people. This valley has held me while I built three multimillion-dollar businesses and wrote and published several books, and in three decades it has never once asked me to hurry.

They call Ojai Shangri-La. It is the valley where Krishnamurti awakened, and I believe most of us who come here have moments of awakening that happen nowhere else on earth. This is a creative valley. The mountains turn pink at sunset. The sunrises are full of hummingbirds and pollinators. The orange groves, the vineyards, the olive groves, the rivers, the mountains: they all speak one language, and it is the language of creativity, nourishment, rejuvenation, and magic.

So it is with a very full heart that I welcome you to the first Magic Hour Retreat in Ojai, California, November 20 to 22. You will learn. You will absorb. You will steep. And somewhere in the weekend you will find your own pink moment, in a sea of all the other moments of a life.

With a full cup,

Zhena

The morning is Tea School for Energetic Healing. We taste our way through the six pillars of tea as medicine: Beauty, Immunity, Digestion, Sleep, Stress & Calm, and Mindfulness. For each one you will learn which leaves and herbs serve it, what the science says and what the old traditions say, and how to steep them so the medicine makes it into the cup. Sleep, you will discover, is a layering and not a single herb. The skin drinks what you drink. Immunity lives in the gut. By lunch you will be able to walk into any tea shop, or your own kitchen, and know exactly what to reach for and why.

Then Chef Noah feeds us, slowly, from the valley’s organic gardens.

The afternoon goes deeper, into the places tea has always quietly lived. Tea as a writing companion: a cup, a timer, and writing that will surprise you. Tea and relationships: what shifts in a room when we pour tea for another. Tea and healing: how to use teas as a healing mechanism for emotional well-being, nervous system regulation, and deep moments of meditation, creativity and relationships. 

Both mornings begin with a Magic Hour Tea Ceremony™, the practice I have carried into luxury spas and living rooms around the world. Breath. The bowl held to the heart. A fingertip tracing the rim. A mindful tasting. An intention written down before it is spoken aloud.

Saturday's ceremony is Arriving Home to Ourselves. Sunday's is Becoming.

Because within you is where the magic is born: in the sacred pause, the ritual chosen over the regular routine, the moment the cup goes quiet and so do you. Tea is a six-thousand-year-old plant ally, and a ceremony is simply a ritual of returning to yourself.

Every session and both tea ceremonies, with dozens of teas tasted across the weekend. The Soul of Tea workbook, with the six pillars, blend profiles, tasting pages, writing prompts, and your blending worksheet. Your signature blend in violet glass, with your formula card. Friday happy hour, Saturday lunch, and Sunday's light breakfast by Chef Noah. A retreat gift: a jar of the weekend's ceremony tea, an intention card, and a pen worth keeping. And twenty percent off everything in the Tea Salon during Sunday's shopping hour.

With a room: two nights, Friday and Saturday, at boutique Ojai lodging minutes from the salon, with a welcome tea tray waiting for you when you arrive. Seven rooms only, and they go first.