I’m Suzette Hammond. Tea is my way of life.
For 15 years, I’ve traveled extensively as a professional tea trainer. My experience includes more than 10 years in training management and education development roles for leading tea companies, as well as leadership in tea industry trade groups.
I train retail staff and fine dining, brewers and sommeliers, baristas and coffee tasters, tea importers and growers, mechanical engineers and scientists, bodywork therapists and counselors. My classes are as small as four and as large as 100+. Yet, I notice they all have something in common.
People who connect ALL of their senses in the process benefit the most from tea. My clear passion in tea is shepherding these connections.
I founded Being Tea as an independent, training-focused bridge for tea professionals, their partners, and their customers. Anyone who wants to live more tea.
By improving access to functional, embodied tea skills – practices that can be demonstrated every day – tea can spark greater marketplace creativity and storytelling.
At a deeper level, people are looking to connect their curiosity with physical knowledge to work and play with tea, confidently. It’s about the connection to our sensory self and the magic that happens when we touch tea.
My personal background is also multi-disciplinary and diverse, influencing my growing passion for tea as a wellbeing and mental health practice. My original career was in journalism and the intense, high stress environment of broadcast news. If you can handle live television (!), you truly take almost anything. My initial years in tea were side by side with specialty coffee; baristas and roasters remain some of my favorite people to train.
I’ve also studied Alexander Technique, MBSR (Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction), restorative yoga and complementary somatic studies. I enjoy researching sensory-based therapies for healing trauma, trauma stewardship, and applying the practice of tea to these areas. I’ve also been a formal student of several tea ceremony traditions, including chanoyu (Japanese tea ceremony).
My life in tea came from a search for a more tactile, physically embodied sense of connection. Being Tea came from a realization that we all need to work on our collective trust issues, and that tea could be the medium for this work. I believe the greatest thing tea can offer is us this potential for connection. Tea connects us to ourselves and to each other. It teaches us to just be.
Through tea, we cultivate patience, compassion and non-reactivity… the roots of mindfulness itself.
Interested to learn more? Get in touch with Being Tea here: