Inner Hygiene or How I've Cleaned my Teapot

Teapot needs cleaning

Today I had to clean our teapot. Teapot that me and Smiljana use every day. We don’t miss our tea ceremony, the same way we don’t miss Qigong. This tea ceremony, which is not traditional in some Chinese or Japanese sense, because we are usually not quiet, we don’t converse silently, we don’t have clay frog or turtle, on which we pour first brew of tea. We never throw away first spilling. No, our tea ceremony is more of an inspiring nature.

Our moments

We are always excited about that day’s tea ceremony sitting as it gives us a moment to chat about newest and most »crazy« ideas for future blogs, videos, programmes for Qigong, about newest posts of people that we follow in social media and who inspire us. Sometimes when we feel lack of that good ol’enthusiasm we encourage and inspire each other to be more creative.

Time goes on

This is happening every day and years pass and in some moment you realize that trough your teapot’s neck tea doesn’t run like it used to. There’s a lot of scale, sediments of tannins that tea leaves and other smaller stuff, that I don’t know what are they but just to mention them here so, I can finish this sentence with more than two deposits.

Inwardness is also important

What was I supposed to do other than start removing a scale. You need to take care for the inside as you do for the outside. But sometimes we forget about the inside and what happens is we get stuck, unable to let the stream flow through, we get blocked, imprisoned in some past moment that is long gone and unable to live in present. We become a teapot with blocked passage. Me and Smiljana are doing Qigong exercises every day, we sit in meditation, we try to take care of and follow our feelings and thoughts and we try to acknowledge patterns that operate from unconscious but are now useless for creativity. All of that is my and I may say Smiljana’s inner hygiene.

What now?

Yes and I do take care of teapot, as every time I use it I rinse it and clean it, but during the years there might be a lot of scale gathered from hot water. That’s especially true if you use it every day and is piece of traditional clay pottery or made out of some of the older traditional materials like cast iron and not from stainless steel or porcelain. The thing is that a teapot all of a sudden doesn’t drip like it should, even though we had it for many years now, is a shock – not really. I took a little of citric acid, one little brush and the other smaller one, and another one for the neck hole and put a water on the gas to boil it up nicely. I poured water into teapot added some citric acid and let it sit for a while.

Water is also very important element in inner alchemy or spirituality, as is fire and both of them form, fertilize, cleanse, nourish, enliven… Then I took brush and started rubbing, not on the outside, but on the inside. And I made it.

Progress

Inner gloss started to appear which I thought disappeared and teapot sounded like it used to in it’s own unique sound – you know how a pottery or other vessel can sound if it’s empty and free of any sediments or anything on the walls. Well this is how our teapot now sounded when I held it in my hands clean at last. Smiljana was happy, as we used this teapot for quite some time now. And how many good thoughts came up to our minds and how many good ones we shared while drinking tea from this teapot. All of that was now imprinted in material, in substance from which teapot was made of. Old folks used to believe that you can imprint information or even holographic image of living being in certain materials that we still use today like metals or glass – silicon dioxide. Computer has hard drive made of silicon.

My rites

Teapot reminded me of my wish. Because I want to be sonorous, I make my qigong every day, I meditate, I drink my tea and let myself be immersed into new blissful moments of my life. That is how I take care of my inner hygiene.

May the Qi be with You!

Petar