“365 Days of Mindfulness” [Day30] Meditation and Mindfulness In A Mug…

I am sitting here with an over-sized mug in my hands. It is very heavy. Sometimes sitting with my latte mug in my hands in the morning is the deepest meditation I do.

There’s something in this. I was holding my mug, looking deep into the aromatic coffee with frothed milk and suddenly I felt one with everybody in the universe. Almost every one of us starts our day with a cup or mug of something hot. There are coffee breaks and high teas, tea shops and coffee bars, and in India they sell chai on the streets. People everywhere are staring down into a mug or cup being rejuvenated. I understood something in that moment.

I have given up coffee at different periods of my life but I always came back and yes while I missed the delectable brew and always return like a wayward child I realized as I sat there that it wasn’t the coffee per se but the ritual of it all. For me it often seems like the most sublime moment of the day. All of the animals are taken care of and started on their day and then I walk over the the counter and begin the routine. Get out the mug, fill it with hot water to heat it to keep the coffee warmer longer. Pour the black, oily French Roast beans in the grinder and watch it whirrrrrr around fast and faster and finally when I take the lid off of the grinder my knees go a little weak. Oh, there is nothing like the pungent smell of fresh roasted beans freshly ground. I only use whole beans and while I will skimp on some things and give up others good coffee is a must have. Mmmm…

The whole routine of watching the espresso stream into the tiny pitchers, frothing the milk, and then walking back to my studio with it. I sit down, lean back, put my feet up and scoop tiny Delilah up who settles into her spot and then take the first sip. Oh my.

The thing is it’s not just me in my studio sipping my latte, or even the latte itself, good as it is, it is the sacred moment when we are alone with our morning beverage that people take for granted and without which there would be a lot of grumpy people. But there is more, and this something that I thought about this morning that made my head go all googly for a minute, the thought so astounded me. It was a BIG THOUGHT.

What I was thinking is that if you asked most people if they meditate they would probably say no. They think of sitting on a mat with legs crossed and eyes closed.  People say that they don’t have time for meditation, but I believe that most people meditate every day without thinking of it as meditation, yet for a society where meditation wasn’t taught growing up, not for most of us anyway, we all find ourselves, probably since childhood, seeking a beverage to hold onto when we are stressed, anxious, or out of sorts. There is a reason the British believe a cup of tea fixes everything, or why the guy behind the counter at Starbucks sees a line of people that might come in crabby but go off with blissy looks on their faces when he hands them their coffee. We slow down, everything comes to a halt, we are transported.

We meditate with mugs in our hands, whether first thing in the morning, or on a break from work or just needing to be soothed. Look at someone taking that first sip of coffee. You can see the look on their face as they slip from some outer set of circumstances and just sigh and melt into oneness with a hot beverage in their hands. Eyes may close, silence surfaces to make way for our thoughts, we slip into these moments a if in a state of grace, and often our best times of the day, looking deep into a cup, then closing our eyes, and relaxing into the moment is something that people return to many times over each day because we crave not just the coffee or tea or hot cocoa, it is those few moments of soulful silence that melts away the worries and cares of the day and, for a moment, we are one with everything, our conscious mind melts away, and there we are. We go deep.

It is often here that my most profound lessons come to me, where I can mull them over and hatch a plan to move forward in some area of my life or simply have a few contemplative moments before the busyness of the day encroaches. Mindful Meditation With Mug. I never thought of it this way and it probably just seems plain odd that I devoted an entire post to meditating mindfully with mug in hand but I seem to creep through life watching, listening. and trying to understand how something thousands of years old is something that we just plain missed in our society, but did we really?

Next time you are in Starbucks or sitting with a cup of tea to relax feel the mug or cup in your hands, slowly sip the hot beverage and notice how everything changes. We are a society of Mindful Mug Meditators and we never knew it.

I thought of this today and it just blew me away.

  pondering the big questions of the universe on a cold November night…