Chai Pilgrimage

While traveling in India we collected discarded matchboxes on the roads. There are so many, and it’s sorta like trading cards among travelers. These, along with the countless, amazing retro designs from India’s past (recorded in the beautiful book, LIGHT ON INDIA by Warren Dotz), inspired me to create these masala chai spice icons. I added a page here with this art, a description of each spice and tips for using it in chai.

We thought it would be fun to send an archival art print to one of you fellow chai lovers. If you’d like be included in the give-away drawing, share YOUR favorite masala chai spice(s) you like to use in a comment. We’ll draw a name February 21st and mail it off to the lucky winner. After the drawing, this print will be available in my shop. I hope you enjoy it!

There are many factors to consider when selecting masala chai spices.  Earlier we discussed how the Gunas, or qualities, that are inherent in the spices determine the effect that it will have on our being.  But there is another level of quality that is paramount when we embark on making a deliciously healthy cup of chai – good quality.  As the vendors in India often touted, “cheapesht and besht!”

When possible, choose the highest quality, freshest, organic, whole spices that are available to you.  From an Ayurvedic standpoint, high quality in a spice means that it full of Prana, or life force.  If we use Prana-full spices, our chai will come alive, and if we use old, stale, powdered, dead spices, the end result will reflect this.

Within a plant, Prana is the living intelligence that is transferred to our body upon ingestion and digestion.  This botanical intelligence is what communicates to our cellular intelligence how to go about healing itself.  To protect the life force of the spices, it is important to keep the spice in tact, in its whole form, until we are ready to place it into the simmering water that will extract its Prana.  The easiest way to do this is by purchasing whole spices instead of powder: fresh ginger root, whole cardamom pods, cinnamon sticks, peppercorns, etc.  When we use spices that have been pulverized on the other side of the world months or years ago and then sit on the shelf for just as long, the Prana, and with it the flavor and healing potential, has escaped by the process of oxidation.  For this reason it is also beneficial to store spices in airtight glass, porcelain or tin containers, preferably in a relatively cool, dark location in your kitchen.

It may seem like a lot of trouble to crush your own spices, but it really takes only a few minutes.  The best tools to have are a mortar and pestle, a coffee/spice grinder and a cheese grater.  Indian chai wallahs will often just use a rock to smash the spices.  We have heard of saddhus that will simply crush the spices in their teeth, but for hygiene reasons, we do not recommend this. Personally, we use a cheese grater for the ginger, the electric coffee grinder for the cardamom (which is very hard) and a mortar and pestle for everything else.

Another benefit to processing the spices manually is that your own energy, or Prana, is infused into the spices as you crush them.  This is where chai making becomes alchemical and you can transmute your chai into a golden prayer for your friends and family.

Traditional masala chai spices assist in increasing the body’s Prana in another way.  Ginger, cinnamon, cardamom and other chai spices support the function of the lungs, thereby allowing you to absorb more elemental air Prana through the breath.  In addition, almost all of the spices are digestives that help the body to assimilate nutritive Prana from food.  And many of the heating chai spices act to burn up toxins in the body, thus clearing away unwanted sludge that impedes the flow of healing Prana through the channels of the body.

Ayurveda, “ the knowledge of life,” is the ancient healing system from India that illuminates how an understanding of one’s interconnectedness with the natural universe is the key to a life of balance within the body, senses, mind and soul.  It reveals that we exist in a creation of essential energies that are in a constant dance to maintain the balance of the Universe, internal and external.  Everything in the world is seen as interconnected and, therefore, effects and is affected by everything else.

Lesson 1: The Karma of a Cup of Chai

Everything that exists in the universe, you, me, our thoughts, the season, the elements, spices, a cup of chai, absolutely everything, has inherent qualities, called gunas in Sanskrit. These qualities are understood along a spectrum, between pairs of opposites.  Something can be hot or cold, light or heavy, moving or stable, etc.  We can take any substance, look at its qualities, and know the effect it will have on anything else.  For example, fire is hot.  The hot quality of fire has the effect of warming anything it comes into contact with.  The fire, its heat and its ability to warm are inseparable, so we know that when we sit next to a fire, we will warm up.

As far as masala chai goes, with an understanding of the qualities of the substances that we are ingesting, we can know the effect, taste, feeling and healing properties that are present in our cup of chai.  Every”thing” held within the liquid vehicle of our masala chai, the water, spices, tea leaves, milk, sweetener as well as the love, prayers, intentions, and thoughts that are imbued into the chai during preparation, has a specific action, or karma, on anyone who imbibes it.

Lesson 2: Like Increases Like and Opposites Balance

Any substance, even masala chai, can have a healing effect on our being if it brings about balance, or a detrimental effect, if it brings us into imbalance. The scientific law applied is that like increases like and opposites balance.  For example, you are very cold while taking an unheated overnight 2^nd class sleeper train across Northern India in January.  You are suddenly awoken by a train station chai wallah, yelling “chaiiiii, chaiiiii!” and a steaming cup of masala chai is placed into your frozen hands.  You happily drink it up and become comfortably warm.  Opposites balance.  Cold + Hot = Balance.  If you had an iced, unspiced chai (we never saw iced chai in India, but just for the sake of an example) you would have become even colder.  Like increases like.  Cold + Cold = Colder.

This law is universal and applies even outside of India.  When cooking up a batch of chai in the winter, which where we live, is dominated by the quality of coldness, we choose ingredients with a hot quality that will balance the cold quality of the season.  We utilize warming spices like ginger, cardamom, cinnamon and maybe even some very hot spices like black pepper or clove.  If we had a visitor who was hot-headed or had a fiery bodily symptom like a red rash or heartburn, we would make them a masala chai without so much heat.  If you are a person whose constitution is dominated by heat, especially if it is the middle of the hot summer, it would be wise to prepare a cooling masala, using spices like mint, coriander and fennel.

In this way, we can consider how much tea to use, if at all, depending on whether we are serving a person who is tired or anxious.  The amount and type of milk can be determined by whether the drinker has congestion, is overweight or has digestive issues.  Asking questions like: “What will the weather be like today?  Who is coming over?  How buzzed do I want to be?” will help determine the formulation you choose as you brew up your chai.

Lesson 3: A Strong Agni (digestive fire) is Essential for Health

Another factor to consider is digestive strength. In Ayurveda, our digestive capacity is likened to a fire in our stomach.  It is called our Agni, or fire of transformation.  Promoting a strong digestive fire is essential for good health, because when food is digested properly we are able to assimilate all of the nutrition and Prana, or life-force, present in the food.  The qualities of our digestive fire are hot and light.  If we apply the above lessons, we know that eating light, warming foods will help keep our fire burning while eating cold, heavy foods will put out our fire and hinder digestion.  Milk is a food with cold and heavy qualities.  Ayurvedically speaking, drinking a large, cold glass of milk out of the fridge will extinguish our fire, making it difficult to digest and potentially causing indigestion and mucus formation.  What to do?  Make masala chai, of course!  Milk can be made into a balanced, digestible food by heating it up, watering it down to make it lighter and infusing it with warming chai spices.  Yummmm.

Atithi Devo Bhava or “Guest is God” is a teaching from the Hindu scriptures, the Upanishads, and a living custom practiced throughout Nepal and India. It means that when a guest arrives at your home, even if unexpected, you welcome them and treat them as the Divine. Customarily this means you are received with great enthusiasm, like a dear friend, given the most comfortable seat in the house and served a fresh cup of chai!

Chai is the welcome mat, a gesture of friendship that transcends language. It is a humble offering and an invitation to be part of the family. It melted our hearts over and over to experience this profound level of hospitality as we traveled throughout the subcontinent.

And a cup of chai is usually only the beginning. It is often followed by a spread of mouth-watering food that appears out of nowhere. (I have theorized that Indians are always cooking, just in case someone shows up.) Hungry or not, it’s time to eat. Then the stares, as your every expression is scrutinized for a smile or a sound of satisfaction.  And just finishing your plate is not good enough, “More chipati? Subji? Dhal? Take!” I finally learned to put one hand over the plate, and the other over my full belly, while delivering a friendly Indian head waggle to prevent the host from slopping more food in front of me.

Being treated as God is a huge responsibility. You must eat everything you are given, or risk appearing disrespectful to your host. But if being in the position of the Almighty demands being embraced with a warm cup of chai and delicious food every time I walk into a home, it is a liability I can handle.

According to the ancient wisdom of Ayurveda, pure cow’s milk is nectar.  It is complete to nourish and strengthen the body and is considered sattvic, promoting peace in the mind.  It helps induce sound sleep, fortifies the nervous system, provides strength and mass, and is a rich source of protein and essential minerals and vitamins.  It is no wonder that Hindus consider the cow the most sacred of animals.

Goshala (cow sanctuary) at NKB Ashram in Vrindavan

In India, one’s relationship with the cow is quite different.  The cow, kind of like the dog in the West, is considered part of the family.  In semi-urban areas in India where outdoor space is limited, we met cows that had their own room as part of the house.  The cows are milked each day, and for those without a cow, fresh milk is delivered, usually by bicycle.  The milk is then boiled before use to purify it and make it more digestible.  To further enhance digestibility, it is often watered down with warming spices added, thus masala chai.

Milk delivery man cycling through Durbur Square in Bhaktapur, Nepal

Neighbors in Bhaktapur who provided our milk

Cow caretaker in Chitrakoot, India

There are many factors to consider when choosing which kind of milk to use in your chai.  When possible, it is preferable to buy milk that is certified organic or from a small dairy farm.  The certification guarantees that it is free of added hormones, antibiotics and chemicals, and smaller farms are more likely to provide more humane living conditions and better diet, compared to factory-farmed cows.

Most store-bought milk is put through two processes that can compromise its quality, taste and digestibility – pasteurization and homogenization.  Pasteurized milk is heated at a controlled temperature over a specific period of time to slow the growth of harmful microorganisms, thus extending its shelf life.  Some research suggests that low heat pasteurization alters the protein molecules in such a way that it makes it difficult for digestive enzymes to do their work.  This is different from boiling milk, which can break down the proteins completely, thus aiding digestion.  Homogenization then reduces the milk fat into smaller, more uniform sizes, so that the oily cream does not separate and float on top over the watery portion of milk.  Some researchers believe that these smaller fat molecules regroup into a sort of capsule, rendering them indigestible by the body.

Our neighbors’ cows in New Mexico, USA

We feel ourselves fortunate to have access to pure, raw, fresh cows’ milk, just like we drank in India and Nepal.  It is our liquid, white gold.  It is milked the same day we pick it up, and has the seal of freshness, a layer of thick cream, floating on top.  Unfortunately however, in our country, pure milk rarely exists any more.  In fact, in many states it is not even legal to sell.  There is an ongoing controversy of whether raw, un-pasteurized milk is safe to consume because of the possibility of bacterial and viral contaminants.  On the other side, are raw milk advocates, who question whether the legal, pasteurized, hormone and antibiotic laden, homogenized milk (that doesn’t even taste like milk) is truly safe for human consumption.

Ultimately, like anything else, all we can do is to educate ourselves and choose what we feel is best for our family.  We choose to drink the pure contraband milk, homogenize it by using the low-tech method of shaking the bottle before use, and bring it to a momentary boil while preparing masala chai.

Goat’s milk is not just an alternative to cows milk, but stands alone as a tasty and nutritious choice for chai.  The first few years that I made masala chai, I used nothing else.  It contains comparable levels of calcium and protein compared to cows milk, and many people who have sensitivity to cows milk find goats milk easier to digest.  Goats milk is naturally homogenized, meaning that separation of fat does not occur like cows milk.

Benares goat

Water Buffalo milk is extremely difficult to obtain in North America, but is quite common in India, and is ideal for making masala chai.  One of our best-loved chais was the rich, creamy buffalo milk chai served in a clay cup in Benares.  Buffalo milk provides more calcium and other minerals, and more protein, while having less cholesterol compared to cow’s milk.

Water Buffalo on the banks of the Ganga in Benares

Soy, Rice, Almond, Hemp and other nut, seed, grain and legume milks offer an alternative for those who cannot, or choose not to, consume mammal milk.  The nutritional content varies with the plant used, and many are fortified with vitamins and minerals.  Often other ingredients like thickeners, sweeteners and flavorings are added, so if you are not making your own, it is a good idea to read the label to know exactly what you are drinking.  When making masala chai, know that most plant-based milks are thinner than full-fat animal milks, so when using a recipe, it is not an equal substitution.  Again, choosing organically grown foods is healthier for your body and the planet.

Almond Milk Recipe

Soak 1cup of raw almonds in a bowl overnight with enough water to cover almonds.  Cover bowl.

Drain and rinse almonds in the morning.

Add 3 cups of water and blend together in blender.

Strain almond ‘milk’ into a glass mason-type jar by pouring through a nut milk bag (can also be found at your local health food store)

Cover tightly with lid and keep in refrigerator or use immediately for chai.

Goshala in Citrakoot (above and below)

Pahupatinath is an ancient Hindu temple on the banks of the Bagmati River in Kathmandu, Nepal.  Dating back to the 5^th century, it is considered one the oldest and most important Shiva temples in all of Nepal.  One early myth tells the story of Lord Shiva taking refuge in the woodland valley to evade his Godly duties.  Residing in the forest, he became renown as Pashupati, the Lord of the animals.  When the other Gods finally found him, they were quite angry, and insisted that he return to his residence on Mount Kailash.  To escape, he disguised himself as a deer and ran off to hide in the forest.  In the ensuing chase, a piece of his antler was broken off and fell to the ground.

Many years went by, and the antler lingam, or empowered phallic symbol, was covered over by vegetation and the passing of time.  Finally, a cow herder noticed one of his cows going to the same place each day to offer up her milk onto the earth.  When he examined that spot, he found the horn and recognized it as a Shiva Lingam.  Soon, it began to be worshipped by a growing number of people and eventually became the site of a temple.  Now Pashupatinath is an elaborate temple complex with extensive grounds comprised of the main pagoda-style temple, numerous smaller Shiva lingam shrines and burning ghats along the river, where Hindu devotees are cremated.

It was here, where a cow made her milk oblations to the lingam of Pashupati, that the renowned holy man known as “Dudhadhari Baba” or “Milk Baba” welcomed us.   Ram Krishna Das earned his Milk Baba title because of his austerity of receiving his nourishment exclusively from milk for over 25 years.  According to Ayurveda, milk is considered a Sattvic, or spiritually pure, food.  It is peacefully obtained from a cow, considered the holiest of animals, without the loss of life, and is complete to sustain human life.

The saddhu, now around 80 years old, has also committed to wearing his hair in jatta, or dreadlocks, since he took his initiation at 18.  If not wrapped up on top of his head, they would drag on the ground behind him.  He has practiced many austerities including years of meditation in isolation, barefoot pilgrimages through the Himalayas and a lifetime of celibacy.  He is a great scholar and master of the Hindu epic, the Ramayana, whose teachings he fully embodies.

Milk Baba invited us into his small kutir, or ascetic’s hut, where a circle of temple musicians sat by candlelight singing verses of the Ramayana.  Between verses, Baba would discourse on their meaning.  Not being fluent in the dialect, we sat quietly sipping the chai he offered us and enjoying the darshan, or vision, of this gentle living saint.

In the West, yoga is sometimes perceived as a type of physical workout that involves getting into tights and molding the body into contorted positions while keeping one’s hands in a prayer position.  The word yoga, however, literally means “union,” and is an ancient Indian spiritual science designed to bring about the union with, or realization of, our own Divinity.  Just as all religions can lead one to God, each created to suit the many different types of people and cultures, so there are various paths of yoga.  These yogic paths do not just involve standing on one’s head, but utilize the mind and heart as tools to help us become fully conscious of the One.  The four predominant yogic practices are Raja Yoga, which uses various methods to control the mind and enter into meditation; Jnana Yoga, or using knowledge to realize the Divine Truth; Bhakti Yoga, or the yoga of love and devotion to the Divine; and Karma Yoga, the yoga of doing selfless service for other living beings.

Chai Yoga, or the conscious preparation of chai, can also be taken as a path to enlightenment by incorporating the practice of one or more of these four yogas.  First, we compose a mindful awareness of our being on every level: our attitude, body, breath and senses.  In other words, clear the mind, be comfortable in the body, breath, and be aware of, but not overtaken by, sensory perceptions while preparing chai.  Only then can we access the depth of meditation that will allow union.  This is Raja Yoga.  This state of meditation is the door into the innermost mind, beyond thought, that is not separate from the cosmic mind, one with the simmering masala universe, wherein lies knowledge of Absolute Truth.  This deep wisdom is found through the practice of Jnana Yoga.

Love is always present.  It is the energy that binds the universe together as One.  If the first two yogas sound a little bit too out there, then we can embrace Bhakti Yoga, our innate love for the creator, as our path towards union.  We set the intention to prepare the best cup of chai we are capable of as an offering to our Divine Beloved.  With love in our hearts, a vision of the Divine Form in our mind’s eyes and praise on our lips, every movement we make as we prepare the chai is transformed into an expression of devotion.  Without attachment to the fruits of our labor, and expecting nothing in return for our kindness, our actions then become the practice of Karma Yoga.  Serving good-tasting, healthy chai is a great service to mankind.  And as we realize it is the Divine who is stirring the pot through our hands, the chai becomes a pure offering.

When one is fully engaged with a yogic practice, anything, even the simple act of making chai, can be an opportunity to consciously merge with the Divine Source. The secret is, to prepare the chai with utter sincerity, as if it will be the last time.