My journey with tea started in 2014. I was beginning my final year of undergrad at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and I was going through depression. My coursework and thesis were overwhelming, and I found myself needing a break from engineering.

I had no prior interest in Japanese culture at this point, and no prior contact with tea, but I knew I had to do something different from my regular coursework. Japan House, a facility nestled in the very southeastern corner of campus, offered university courses on the Japanese Way of Tea. Skimming the course catalog, this felt like the right move. So I registered for ARTD 209, Chado (The Way of Tea), run by Jennifer Gunji-Ballsrud.

The class was held on premises at Japan House for three hours a week every Wednesday. At first, I was annoyed by the location – my engineering classes were all in the very northwest corner, and Japan House was literally the furthest academic building away from me. Rather quickly though, I began to enjoy the commute. It gave me time to unwind and dust off my mind before arriving to class. And once I was there, we had a mandate: no phones, no laptops, no responding to emails or working on other projects. While you are there, you must be present.

This class changed my life.

Firstly, I credit Jennifer and this class for dragging me out of depression. What I thought originally was a mandate to stay focused was actually permission to stay present. While you are here, you don’t need to think about everything else. Your homework will still be there waiting for you when you leave. While you are here, you should give yourself permissions to leave all of those other things at the door, and just focus on the beauty happening right in front of you. This was such a revelation to me, and it is something I have always carried with me since then.

Secondly, I fell in love with tea. Once the semester finished, I joined the community tea class to dive deeper into this art. I attended class every Thursday for years while finishing up my graduate education and starting work in the area. First I loved the mindfulness aspects of tea – then I found the creativity and expressiveness, and the precision that scratches an itch in my engineer brain. I started helping out, volunteering every Thursday afternoon to help give demonstrations to the public. I must have served over a thousand bowls of tea by then.

It didn’t take long for me to realize that I never wanted to let go of tea. Japan House was my lifeline to tea, but I knew there was a good chance I would move away some day. I needed to improve myself so I could keep going independently. My teacher, Kimiko Gunji, recommended me for admittance to the Midorikai program in Japan, so in 2019 I left for Kyoto.

Our school of tea, Urasenke, has a school in Kyoto specifically for the study of the Way of Tea (Urasenke Gakuen Senmon Gakko, or the Urasenke Professional College of Chado), and there exists a one-year program for overseas tea practitioners to study alongside domestic students. This was simultaneously the hardest thing I have ever done, and also the most rewarding. While I was here, my relationship with tea transformed into something much deeper.

Now, I teach out of my home in Colorado while continuing to study with my current teacher, Glenn Pereira-sensei in Boston. We have a wonderful group of students, and every day, I fall more and more in love with tea.