Paths Crossed: Sarah Scarborough
The founder of Tea Huntress has opened my eyes to the wisdom of tea as ritual.
I’m the farthest thing from a creature of habit. I’m an airy, daydreamy, oft nomadic Aquarian in search of tethers—not those that feel constricting, but those that feel like the warm, grounding hug that I never learned to receive. Rituals made so familiar through practice that I can return home within, no matter where in space I am. This was an epiphany for me—that routine can set you free. Enter tea.
I was lucky enough to meet Sarah Scarborough, the founder of Tea Huntress, upon joining her New Year’s Rituals retreat in Todos Santos, Mexico. This trip marked the beginnings of Retreat Rachel—the Rachel who realized that workshops, gatherings, and concentrated learnings in community were necessary nourishment in an otherwise isolated, remote world. Sarah, whose 25-year career has been spent immersing herself in the properties of tea, generously and with unmistakably innate interest schooled us on tea as ceremony that week, opening my eyes to something I didn’t know I needed.
If you’re anything like me, tea has been that thing that’s not coffee that you sometimes drink when sick or very cold though it lacks in flavor. But looking at tea through the lens of a practice, as something that slows me down, pulls me into an intentional, present moment, and sets the tone of my day when I sit with it, has brought me something entirely new. And it’s why I’m hoping if you, too, are looking for new, tiny practices to gift yourself in this frenetic world, you will enjoy learning more through this read.
Here, we delve into how Sarah made a career of tea, how the histories of teas within the Buddhist and British lineages affect how we engage with the leaf and its properties, and how to start your own tea ritual. You will also find my favorite Tea Huntress blends linked below. To be clear, I don’t work for Sarah! I’m just stoked on what the richer flavors and feelings of her teas and practices have ignited along my path.
I’m excited to finally be talking all things tea with you, thank you. How would you introduce yourself?
I'm a serial tea entrepreneur, and I have spent my whole career connecting tea lovers with tea growers to improve the lives of both. Doors just seem to open with me and tea—at every step on my journey it has been there, and tea has so much to teach us. So I am working on making a positive impact in the world through tea.
How did tea first find you?
I was working at a teahouse in Montana almost 25 years ago. I’d just come out of a pretty tough patch, a quarter-life crisis, if you will. And from the minute I got the job at the teahouse, my body lit up, it all just felt right. I started experimenting with chai there. And then I started a chai company and called it Fairtrade Teas. I was really into connecting women who drink tea to the women who farm tea, creating that bridge. I won't go through my whole history of tea because there are a lot of stories. But I used to express it as tea saying: You! Come with me. Get in the car. And I was like, Okay, where are we going? And she's like, Don't worry about it. Just get in the car—now drive. I’ll tell you where to go, I got this. So I've been so grateful for the path. We talk about finding our dharma, finding what we love, finding what we're good at. I teach my kids that all the time—I tell them to find what they’re good at and what makes them happy, and shine that light. That's your light to shine. That's your calling. And tea has always been that for me.
I love that. I’m always interested in finding out how people arrive at doing what they do, those steps they took, or the little moments they paid attention to, a conversation they had, a trajectory they fell into. Before founding Tea Huntress, you had traveled the world on behalf of other companies, gaining knowledge and relationships with growers, is that right?
I'd started a number of tea companies in the U.S. and New Zealand and Australia, and then I worked for a little bit as the tea buyer for the Republic of Tea. I work specifically as a sustainability liaison, finding new ethical farms and sources of tea. I was traveling a lot during that period of time to all the different origins of tea.
Can you share a story from your tea travels that still plays in your mind, or talk about how you formed a relationship with a particular grower?
I've ridden my bike around the island of Sri Lanka and through all the tea farms, and I’ve stayed in the tea farmers’ bungalows and on their floors. In my 20s and even 30s, before I had kids and could be more adventurous like that, I would do research and just go—get my feet on the ground and ask around. I’d fly to Taiwan, get a translator, and find the farmer. I have one friend in Darjeeling, he calls me his American wife. I love his actual wife. He and I have a joke from my younger days, because I showed up in Calcutta and sent him a random email like, Hey, I'm here and I want to learn about Darjeeling tea, and I want to find out who's growing tea with genetic integrity and from seed, and what I can do to make a difference. I mean, so American, right? Total American chick. Like who are you coming in to save our life? But he took me all around Darjeeling. We spent a week traveling. It’s not glamorous; I'd spend all day in a truck on these roads that 50/50 you might die falling off the edge of them, just living off chickpeas. I've slept on the border of India and Nepal in a room that had what looked like bloodstains on the walls.
You’ve put in the work. It sounds like, as you said, the tea was like, Just get in the truck, Sarah.
Yes, and now at almost 50 years old, thinking back, it’s crazy. I’m not sure I want my children doing stuff like that. But I was so curious. I was so passionate. I wanted to figure it out. I wanted to find out what's wrong in this industry, and how we can fix it. In hindsight, it was like some weird obsession.
So as to the magic. Can we start with tea’s basic properties? What is the name of the tea plant?
The tea plant is Camellia sinensis, and it’s native to Yunnan, China. It is a plant that's been revered in history for millennia—and in modern history. Basically, whatever kind of history you look at, you will find stories of tea. But the thread is that these stories always have to do with healing. They always have to do with connection. They always have to do with a moment of stillness. A moment to slow down. In whichever way that the tea is representing her culture. So, for example, we have chai from India—lively, spicy, sweet. We have matcha from Japan—serene, meditative, quiet. We have British breakfast tea, not from England, but of English culture—very much about a time to connect with people, stop working for a little bit, have some food. So tea is a shapeshifter. Tea embodies her culture. But her core energy—every person has a core energetic, every plant has a core energetic—is that of connection and healing.
And tell me about tea’s two lineages.
Through my experience with tea, I frame things around the Buddhist lineage and the British lineage. Millennia ago, long before written history, tea was considered plant medicine, spirit tonic, by the people who first drank it in the rainforest in Yunnan, China. And then it became a meditation aid by the Japanese monks who sat with it. Beyond the “woo-woo” associated with the energetics, there are actual physical, scientific properties in the leaves. There's L-theanine, there's GABA, there are all these properties that help to bring a person into a zen mind, into that calm, alert, focused state that the monks were after in meditation. L-theanine brings you into alpha brainwaves, which can help you to focus; GABA is a neurotransmitter inhibitor, which can help to keep stress reaction from happening; caffeine creates alertness; theobromine opens the heart.
Until I went to your New Year’s rituals retreat in Todos Santos in 2022, sat in a group semi-circle, in stillness, as you poured us tea for the first time, I’d really only thought about tea on the basis of taste. Which for me, doesn’t do much, as opposed to a hot drink like coffee, something I nerd out on, trying all types of beans. But I joined the retreat excited to learn more about tea within the framework of doing something nourishing for myself, in community, after a couple hard years. Learning about tea as a way into a practice, a meditative, present-mind ritual, really opened my eyes.
It's interesting for people to get their head around that, that tea is special and sacred, because most of us haven’t been privy to its ancient wisdom—we’ve come to it through the British lineage. When you have grown up drinking Lipton tea or whatever is in your grandmother’s tea bags, then the volume has been turned down. The way that tea has been manufactured in modern history, especially in this British lineage, involves monocropping, slavery, and low-cost black tea.
You remind me that one of my favorite things was to sit with my grandmother at her kitchen table and have a tea with her in the evening, to choose a packet from her tin and use her special tea cups. I still have her cups, which make me so happy.
That’s beautiful too. A nice cup of herbal tea or a London fog or chai is delicious, and we learn how to make those things in my courses.
And there’s your Moon Milk blend! Perhaps my favorite new drink. I talk about it all the time, and I’ve made it for people like my niece—she loved it.
It’s so good. It’s really just about understanding your mood. How do you feel? How do you want to connect with the leaves? Do you want to sit down and have a tea meditation session, or do you want to take a cup to go. But as you experienced, understanding tea on a deeper level is to understand tea as a goddess. Tea is one of these plants that we call entheogens, or God plants; they do the work to shift our mindset and teach us about living and dying and reconnecting to ourselves and nature. But what I love is that tea is such a subtle entheogen, so you can work with it as much as you like. There's no negative side effects, like some of the stronger or once-in-a lifetime, once-in-a-season God plants that work intensely—psychedelics like Ayahuasca or psilocybin. Tea works on you in that it can simply guide you, especially when you are having tea in a space that's intentionally set, like in ritual or ceremony.
And the tea used in ritual practices is not contained in a tea bag. It comes loose for steeping in a small pot.
Exactly. In the sacred lineage, tea was considered as such and therefore she was treated well—cultivated with care and harvested with intention. The tea used in ceremony comes from ancient trees and wild groves. The leaves have genetic integrity; they have their agency about them. So we're talking about teas that have their volume turned all the way up. Their frequency is high, just as there is energy medicine in music—its waves, the energy it creates, can reverberate.
I want to talk about the rhythm of the tea ceremony. When you started pouring the tea for us, to my surprise I got tears in my eyes. There was this rhythm, this beauty. It was like this love we were receiving from you, the way you were pouring the water into each cup in a slow, circle motion, these things. Feeling this intentionality, with you and the group, it was very potent. It was also a reminder to me that every mundane act can be an act of beauty if we slow down. I think you introduced me to the Albert Einstein quote, “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”
Your reaction is actually super common. People cry with tea. I still cry at tea. That's the energetic frequency I’m talking about. That's the magic. That's the rhythm of the practice. It entrances you, it pulls you into meditation. That's what we cultivate when we learn to pour tea in ceremony, with respect for the tea leaf. That's what we're sharing. There's the internal sauna as well, the whole experience of drenching your insides with bowl after bowl of hot tea—cleansing and detoxifying.
In terms of the basics of creating a tea practice for anyone curious, I can share my experience in that I came home from Mexico and was all in. As someone who isn’t a creature of habit or routines, I loved how I felt and decided I wanted to make tea one of my practices, like yoga. I FaceTimed with you so you could help me get started. I treated myself to a special teapot from your site, had you suggest a good ceremonial tea (I love Forest Queen), bought two small tea bowls, had my kettle for the hot water, and found a pretty little placemat to set it all out on. I have a beautiful spot by my window in my one-room apartment where I do the tea on mornings I feel I need it. Sometimes I journal after or meditate, or pull a couple cards from oracle decks to set the tone for my day. Can you speak to your tea practice and fill this in?
My tea practice is a place that I delineate to come to again and again. And I know that when I'm sitting in that space, regardless of the tea or the accouterments, it's a place I can reconnect—I always leave feeling better. So the first thing to do is set that sacred space. I have two spaces, one on the front porch when the weather is nice, and one inside by the fire when it's cold out. It can be a corner. In small spaces, people keep their tea mat in a closet and just roll it out right by their bed. It can be a piece of textile, or a runner; it can be on the floor, or up on a table. Anywhere you're comfortable. Once you have this space, you can begin.
And as you’ve taught us, you can bring in elements from nature. I put whatever I’m feeling on my mat that day around the tea setup—some of my rocks shaped like hearts that I’ve collected from different places special to me; a photo; a note someone gave me; driftwood pieces I love. Sometimes I turn on your beautiful yogi-type music.
If you're on Spotify, if you go to Tea Huntress, you’ll find tea ceremony playlists for spring, for autumn, for winter, for fall. There's new moon tea, there's Friday morning tea. Or you can just enjoy the silence. You can also light a candle or some incense. And once you’ve set your space, all you need is to have hot water at the ready. When we practice tea in the Buddhist lineage as a meditation, we are re-steeping the leaves over and over again. You can re-steep the tea leaves 5, 10, even 15 times, depending on the tea and how much it has to give. I always start by closing my eyes, with a silent moment of thanks. And then all you’re doing is drinking your tea and clearing your mind.
We know the benefits of carving out even a few minutes of time for ourselves, yet most people don’t give themselves those 10, 20, 30 minutes of true presence. And that has been really shifting for me.
This is a practice of receptivity. It’s an opportunity to let go of a thinking mind. It can feel very unproductive, but if you can shift your mindset from “I don't have time for tea” to “This is the most productive thing that I will do all day,” it will feel so good to start making a practice of it. It really is the most important, magical, celebratory way to live your life because you're just giving yourself that sacred moment of pause. I find it very hard in this culture to go from go, go, go to stop. But tea can get you there. It's a moving meditation—you're pouring the water, the steam is rising, you're drinking the tea, you're putting it down, you're starting again. It’s good to always have at least three bowls, because it takes that time to drop into that deeper, relaxed state of consciousness and to come into that sweet hum. This whole ritual is about just allowing it to be, not expecting too much like, Am I feeling it? Am I doing it right?
In terms of this surrender and this shift in mindset, can you talk to me about tea being a “she”?
If we talk about yin and yang, and you look at tea, all the qualities of yin are there. The subtle power, the soft power. Women don't have harsh, demanding power. If you take coffee and compare it to tea, there’s a stronger, more aggressive energy in coffee—an energy of listen to me, look at me. A loud, forceful, upward-moving, this-is-my-way energy. Tea is collaborative and gentle, and you still get calm, alert focus. We’re living in a culture that's fueled by this intense yang, coffee energy: Go, go, go. Don't stop. Don't slow down. Be productive. Get your voice out there. Try harder.
I love that. And in modern society we also tune into only what we can see and prove. Versus the subtle energy that courses through everything, the interconnected, the systems of roots through which trees are always in communication, the synchronicities and the coincidences that people usually wave off as “woo-woo.”
Albert Einstein also said that the only truly revolutionary thing he ever did in his life was to prove a particle is a wave and a wave is a particle. Meaning energy is matter and matter is energy. So you can't really separate the two from one another, they are intertwined. We ignore energy in the modern world, because we're a young world. We believe that it's all matter. But when we start to shift our perspective and open our minds, we make this massive paradigm shift towards, woah, actually, it's not just matter. It's not just if you can prove it empirically—if you can touch it, taste it, feel it then it's true. There's so much truth that we can't see and taste and touch and prove with a scientific method.
It also sticks with me when you encouraged us to tap into our intuition as we each created our own blend of herbal tea at the retreat. You poured out piles of herbs across large rolls of brown paper on the ground and had us touch and taste and smell, see what our own bodies liked and needed.
Yes, that's a really big piece of Tea Huntress and what I teach. It’s a big piece of what the yin energy is and what tea is, about putting down the measuring spoons, putting down the thermometer, stopping following the rule book, and tuning into what you know is right and true, what your taste buds and body likes beyond the thinking mind. Of course, we have to start with some rules of thumb, not everybody's going to just be like, I know how to make an eggplant parmesan. So we have to have some structure and some boundaries, a yang quality. But then within those boundaries, we can flow. With Tea Huntress, I'm teaching the flow, how to intuitively steep tea, but also how to intuitively cook. As women particularly, we've turned these instincts largely off in this society. So it’s about reconnecting people to the earth, back to the mother, bringing the feminine back out into our society.
Getting reconnected to the land is something I’m continually interested in doing, definitely a theme of my interviews and the people I’ve met and admired in the ways they understand this connection. What are other simple ways to get connected with the rhythm and the cycles of our earth? I know it’s woven into all of Tea Huntress’ myriad offerings, including a retreat in Finland, where you grew up spending summers in connection to the land with your mom’s side of the family.
There are so many little practices that we can do. The more you spend time with your feet in the earth, with your hands in the soil, noticing the seasons, the more you connect and then slowly notice your own clarity and truths. In nature, you see the cycles of death and rebirth. There are practices that connect us to the land like gardening, learning to cook with something foraged or something grown, learning to plant seeds and watch the cycle of nature through a garden. Learning what plants in your native woods and forests have medicine or energetic or spiritual value. Also doing full moon ceremonies, getting outside under the full moon and the new moon and setting intentions.
What’s a favorite winter tea? Or what is your mood right now?
I’d say there are two. From the wellness collection, Dreamwork. It’s about dream activation, but it's also about relaxation. Winter is such a time of visioning, getting quiet and still. And it's an evening tea, the herbs and flowers in this blend are calming. As far as ceremonial tea, Wood Dragon. Wood dragon is from an ancient tree. It really has a lot to give. It's powerful and it's delicious and beautiful.
This reminds me, can you distinguish between tea as from the tea plant, Camellia sinensis, and from herbs?
That's a great question because it’s very misunderstood. A lot of people call chamomile tea or peppermint tea or hibiscus tea. But those are not actually tea. We steep them like a tea. But they’re herbal infusions; they are botanicals, herbs. So that's a huge misnomer in the tea business. We can certainly talk about the spiritual, energetic, and physical benefits of ginger too. Or cacao. But all the teas for a ceremony are from the Camellia sinensis plant, and the variations in taste of teas are all about origin, the terroir, the processing.
I will wrap this up with the one question I ask everyone. What are you most proud of right now?
With all the practices that I keep and the awareness that I've tried to grow and the becoming that I've leaned into, I feel proud of how I've been able to navigate challenges and grow. Specifically, my ex-husband and I are getting along great, and he and my current partner get along well. I went through a lot and hoped for a zen divorce the whole time, but people laughed at me, told me it wasn't possible. But I kept that vision alive. And I feel proud of work under the circumstances; plenty of self-doubt still comes and goes. I left another business I had for 20 years when the divorce became final. And so there’s a lot of breaking free from stability, not leaning on a company or a marriage that doesn't feel life-giving. I've had the courage to let go of security in order to find an alignment that feels vibrant and alive and truly like me. I still have a lot of fear and anxiety within that shift that I've made. But what I've learned is that you can affect the outcome of things in life by holding a vision, by being aware of my energy and interactions. And also by giving myself grace, because I'm not always getting it right. There are places to still get to, but I started by giving up the roots for the wings.
Favorite Tea Huntress herbal teas:
Favorite teas for ritual/ceremony:
Sarah’s upcoming offerings:
3-Month winter class, starts Dec 21, online
My husband and I traveled to Taiwan a few years ago. Some of our best experiences centered around tea and ceremony. This interview made me want to return to Taiwan — or at least to good tea at home.