Author tea party hosted in Morwyn's historic home.

Introduction to Tealeaf Reading
An Age-Old Art for Modern Times

“There is no trouble so great or grave that cannot be much diminished by a nice cup of tea.”
-- Bernard-Paul Heroux

Start reading someone’s tea leaves at a party or in a restaurant and I guarantee you’ll soon draw a crowd. Everybody wants to know about the current influences on their lives and what the future holds. Tealeaf reading is an easily accessible, relatively uncomplicated, and lighthearted way to take a stab at predicting the future, expand your circle of acquaintances, and deepen friendships.

In my experience, this mellow art benefits the reader as much as the person for whom the leaves are read. Practicing tealeaf reading forces me to slow my own hectic life pace along with that of my inquirer—the person having the reading. The enjoyment I derive from the camaraderie of discussing life issues with friends and family has become as important to me as the actual divination. Relaxing over a cup of tea provides quality time that otherwise tends to get consumed in the daily hustle-bustle.

The heyday of tealeaf reading was during Victorian times. With the invention of the teabag in 1908 and modern forms of entertainment, such as television, videos, DVDs, and the Internet, the practice of this art slid into a steady decline along with other home-based pastimes. However, now that children’s tea parties, tea tastings for adults, and other tea-related leisure activities are making a comeback, tealeaf reading is riding a wave of renewed popularity.

This gentle pursuit of times gone by owes its regeneration, in part, to a nostalgic yearning for less complicated times. People are rediscovering that taking time to brew and drink a cup of tea at the dining room table—and perhaps serving little cakes and cookies as accompaniments—encourages folks to share their hopes, fears, accomplishments, and challenges. And a cup of tea is far cheaper than a visit to a psychotherapist!

Another perk to tealeaf reading is that it acts as a self-development tool to enhance intuition and creative visualization. The images found in the teacup help focus the mind to explore inner worlds. By accessing symbols from your unconscious mind, you can expand your self-awareness.

Who Practices Tealeaf Reading?
There was a time when most families boasted at least one amateur who read everyone’s leaves. When I was a girl, my great Aunt Lizzie, who enjoyed a peerless reputation as the family’s resident psychic, gathered us kids together in her parlor on Sunday afternoons to contemplate the depths of her delicate china cups. My aunt was not an educated woman; she never studied esoteric symbolism, and I doubt she ever heard of Jung or Freud. What she did possess was a keen intuitive mind and the ability to enchant us with the tales she told about what the future might bring. Looking back on the wisdom my aunt communicated to us, I realize that a successful tealeaf reader doesn’t have to have a graduate degree, or study arcane philosophy for years as some tarot card readers do. Nor do you need to meditate daily as do many who practice crystal ball gazing. Just follow a simple recipe that includes a tablespoonful of memorized symbols, a dollop of imagination, and a pinch of intuition, all presented with a storyteller’s gift, and you’re ready for action.

How Tealeaf Reading Works
You may wonder how a bunch of lowly wet leaves left in the dregs of a teacup can predict a person’s future. Is it just an old wives’ tale spawned on superstition?

My Aunt Lizzie made many dead-accurate predictions about the family members, like who would end up with the biggest house, that my great uncle would drop dead in the street, and how my cousins’ financial ups and downs would shake out. I, too, wondered how she managed to see it all in our teacups. I was puzzled enough to do some research on the subject, and this is what I found.

Some if it, of course, can be attributed to the reader’s largely unconscious capacity to interpret the minute bits of information transmitted by the inquirer. Such data might include nonverbal behaviors like posture, facial expressions, gestures, and the like, as well as mode of dress, accent, and speech patterns. In spite of this, I felt there was more to the accuracy of tealeaf predictions than what met the eye. After all, this divination has been practiced for centuries with good enough results that people keep doing it.

I dug a little further, and was delighted to discover that evidently seasoned psychics, and even I, you, my neighbor down the block, and a stranger from another town all possess some knowledge of the future because we are all interconnected with each other and to the cosmos. Some attribute this interconnectedness to a theory rooted in a relatively new science called quantum physics.

According to researchers in this field, everything that exists is interconnected, and each cell in our bodies contains all the past, present and future information about us. When we touch an object, our brains use a subtle form of energy to transmit our information through our bodies to the object, where it gets lodged. Some items make better recorders of this energy than others. Tea leaves, coffee grounds, and even seeds, pebbles, and small stones seem particularly impressionable.

In the case of tea leaves, the information is shown by their habit of clinging together on the sides and bottom of the cup after the tea is drunk. The leaves then arrange themselves into images that the reader can interpret. Such pictures can be construed either literally or symbolically as snapshots of the inquirer’s life.

Set in Stone or Free Will?
Given the fact that everything is interrelated, I also found myself asking the same question that Scrooge put to the Ghost of Christmas Future in Charles Dickens’ classic tale, A Christmas Carol, “Are these images of what will happen, or of what might happen?”

Psychologists remind us that past behavior is usually the best predictor of future behavior. So the images that the leaves form give a good idea of what is likely to occur if the inquirer follows usual behavior patterns. If the predicted outcome is unsatisfactory, the person can always do something to break the chain of events and change the future. In other words, forewarned is forearmed. This is why people go for readings. Also, the reader presumably comes to the table with a fresh eye, free from prejudice. In this way, the most accurate interpretation can be offered of what is likely to occur and what recourses the inquirer has available to deal with the situation.

Timeframes
Both out of curiosity and from a desire to hone my ability, I try to find time every morning to read my own leaves. I program my mind by telling myself that I am reading to see what my day will bring rather than making a prediction for a week, month, or year. The details I receive never cease to amaze me.

In my experience, the time span covered by the leaves is generally not very long—perhaps three-to-four months—because the leaves’ propensity to be influenced is only strong enough to pick up clues from the recent past, present, or near future. Yet within this range, the information they reveal is extremely accurate.

Another school of thought asserts that the leaves reflect events that may happen for the period of up to one year. When readers who engage in year-long readings divine a person’s future, they mentally divide the cup into 12 equal sections, like segments of an orange. They begin at the handle, and move clockwise, interpreting the leaves that fall into each quadrant, according to the month. If you decide to do a year-long reading for someone, a good time to perform it is around the person’s birthday or other important anniversary. In a later chapter, I talk at length about timeframes for interpretation. As you become more adept at reading the leaves, you will find which method best suits you.

Tea Leaves Predict Letter in French
When I was in graduate school, my tea leaves predicted that I would receive a letter from my doctoral advisor about my thesis, and that it would be written in French. A couple of words in French were spelled out in my cup next to an image of a flying bird, which in tealeaf language means “a message.” The information didn’t make sense to me because my advisor spoke Portuguese. Later the same day, his letter arrived from Brazil, and in it, he quoted a couple of lines from a French text.

About This Book
I trust that in a very good way, you will get more than you bargained for from reading these pages. First of all, I hope you discover the joys of tealeaf reading for yourself, friends and family. You’ll learn everything from choosing the right tea to answering your best friend’s question about whether a soul mate is ever going to put in an appearance, preparing the cup, deciphering images, and making predictions that will astound everyone, including yourself, with their accuracy. I help you along, just like I do in my tealeaf reading workshops, by showing you sample cups and their interpretations with photos.

Besides reading the leaves, I give you ideas on how to throw a fabulous tealeaf reading and other kinds of tea parties, and for those diehard java lover friends of yours, how to read their coffee grounds. To help you entertain your guests, I spin some yarns about the history of tea and fun tea superstitions that have developed over the ages.

I clue you in to aspects of tea you may never have thought of, like twenty ways to use tea besides drinking it, and how to cook with tea. You’ll even find out about how good tea is for your health and how to enjoy herbal teas for health and pleasure as well as for tealeaf reading.

In Part II, I decipher many tealeaf symbols that appear frequently in cups, and suggest how to expand your knowledge in this area. Part II is not your typical symbols dictionary that spouts a laundry list of words and meanings from A to Z. To make the symbols easier to reference, I divide them into categories. Each category forms a separate chapter. So if you see a heron in your cup, you don’t have to flip through all the entries under “H.” Just turn to the chapter on birds, and there the word and its meanings are.

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Sherlock Holmes’ favorite tea was Lapsang Souchong. In the spirit of detection that he represents, I have just prepared myself a cup of this smoky brew. With teacup in hand, I invite you to settle back in a comfortable reading chair and turn the page as I unravel for you the mysteries of tealeaf reading and more.