how to read tea leaves, reading tea leaves, tea leaf readers

For thousands of years, tea has been giving us more than just cancer-fighting antioxidants… tasseography—the ancient art of reading tea leaves—has long been used to show what the future holds. Find out how to read tea leaves.

To learn to read your own tea leaves, you will need loose tea leaves which are somewhat large. It is best to use a teapot with a wide spout so that when you pour the tea out of it and into your cup, the leaves can easily pass through. Some tea leaf readers recommend using only the highest grade teas and your best china, and all readers advise against using a mug, which makes it hard to look at the leaves sitting at the bottom of your cup.

The person wanting their tea leaves read should concentrate on a question or area of their life that they would like insight into. Drink the tea quietly until about a half of a teaspoon’s worth of tea is left in the cup. Swirl the tea leaves at the bottom of the cup three times while thinking of your question. You can ask a question about yourself, about the past, about the future or even about someone else in your life. Turn your cup over onto a saucer and let the moisture drain out for about two or three minutes. Then turn your cup back over gently and see how the tea leaves have settled. If all the moisture is removed, you are ready to have the leaves interpreted.

Symbols and Positions in a Reading.
Tea leaf readers from all cultures based their readings on objects and images which were common in everyday life. Natural forces like the weather, or animals, people, and even man-made objects each may turn up as a tea leaf symbol.

Some modern tea leaf readers have added contemporary symbols to the list of possible images, for example, using cars to represent travel or roller coasters to represent drama. Other readers are more old-fashioned and like to stick with the universal images that all people have witnessed in their daily lives for thousands of years. As long as the reader is good at interpretation, the images that they choose to work with don’t really matter.