Global Tea Hut's "Light Meets Life" Retreat Center
LIGHT MEETS LIFE - A Tea & Meditation Center
Imagine arriving at a retreat center to find you feel instantly at home. The smiles of all your new friends from around the world welcome you. Imagine the first bowl of tea, and how it warms and refreshes you after a long journey. You start letting go of the vicissitudes of daily life and the quiet rhythm of this amazing place takes over. Along with insights and wisdom, you find a stillness in yourself you did not even know was there.
You stay here for ten days—meditating; eating nourishing, healthy food; connecting with wonderful humans from around the world; wandering the gardens; learning and practicing tea brewing; and drinking lots and lots of the finest organic teas on earth.
And it is all free. When you leave, you pass by the donation box and quietly leave an offering from your full heart, sending good thoughts to the future people that will be nourished here, as you have.
Welcome to Light Meets Life.
We are ready to make this long-standing vision a reality, and we need your help! Please share to your social networks and donate generously to this home for tea, meditation, community, and you. We cannot wait to host you in our new Center.
Respite from the Chaos | A Living Legacy—Preserving Tea Culture
Modern life is overwhelming and unsustainable—for us as individuals and for our planet. There are few places of true respite from the chaos, and together with your help, we are creating one that uses one of the simplest and oldest methods of accessing the calm found within tea.
But the true roots of tea culture—tea as a path to cultivation, tea as a Way: Cha Dao—have largely been foundering under the weight and distraction of modernity. At Global Tea Hut , we have been carefully stewarding this thread for the last decade, through our magazine and our Center, where we have served and changed the lives of thousands of people from sixty countries.
The Present & The Future
For the last ten years, we have hosted numerous life-changing tea and meditation courses at our old center, Tea Sage Hut, which closed in December 2019. While it is sad that we have had to move on from Tea Sage Hut we are joyful at the many thousands of bowls of tea that have been shared there, and the nostalgic memories many chajin around the world carry in the hearts from their experiences there. And our old Center had grown far too small for the interest many people had in learning about tea as the courses only had space for four guests at a time, while there were waitlists of more than thirty people for each ten-day course!
We have a bigger vision. And we want you to be a part of it.
It is time for us to grow and create the tea center that will allow us to:
○ Host 20-40 retreatants per course & 10+ residents all year long for free, donation-based retreats.
○ Continue to offer 10-Day Intro to Cha Dao (Way of Tea) courses, while adding Zen & Tea retreats, tea brewing workshops, and local tea gatherings.
○ Expand into new offerings, including:
· Taichi/Qigong
· Traditional Chinese Medicine
· Flower arranging
· Incense ceremony
· Environmental seminars
· More in-depth tea studies
○ Host a yearly symposium for farmers and producers of clean, organic tea.
○ Preserve tea culture for centuries, benefiting tea lovers throughout our lifetimes and long, long after we are gone.
○ Always have charcoal burning in the hearth to keep a kettle steaming, ready for you, wherever you may be.
Why “Light Meets Life”?
“Light Meets Life” expresses all that we hope to create: a place where the sacred light meets every aspect of life, from daily work to meditation, from seed to tree and from leaf to bowl. We love the word "light" since it implies both purity and divinity as well as levity and humor—a place of laughter and joy.
The Four Phases for Light Meets Life
1. Continue searching for the right property to suit our needs as a retreat center and tea farm.
2. Have one large main building similar to Tea Sage Hut so that we can host smaller courses while gradually raising funds towards the final phases of building Light Meets Life.
3. Build a large meditation hall.
4. Build dormitories and small houses for residents so that the main building could be transformed solely into tea classrooms that then facilitate larger courses.
Our Vision
Our vision for the new Center has changed a bit in the last few months as we have had the time to catch our breath and gather our energy together for the next step in fundraising towards building Light Meets Life. As time passes, we realize more and more that we also want Light Meets Life to be a tea farm. It makes perfect sense that what we pass onto future generations of tea lovers includes heritage trees that grow older with every generation—in two hundred years, Light Meets Life will boast two-hundred-year-old trees that we have planted! We already take guests out to process tea on one day of the ten-day course that we offered at Tea Sage Hut, so why not do this on our own land? And why not have tea trees to wander through for the whole duration of your stay? Imagine waking up early before the day’s activities begin to sit and enjoy some bowls of tea beneath the trees that those very leaves came from! What a tremendous joy this would be for everyone who stays at Light Meets Life. 
Also, having a tea farm will be an unprecedented move into a future of sustainability and offer us many new and exciting opportunities to access different types of funding, including offering our own teas to this community. This shift in vision opens up many possibilities for building Light Meets Life and help preserve the genetic heritage of tea for generations to come.
We are confident that our Center will find the perfect space! And no matter what happens, we will create a beautiful tea retreat center for all of you to come and deepen your tea practice, returning home revigorated and fundamentally changed by ten days of tea and meditation.
Your Donations Will Cover:
○ Purchasing, and renovating a location within the budget of what we fundraise here and through private donations.
○ Costs related to starting a non-profit organization or cultural association in Taiwan.
(Please note that 2.9% of your donation is automatically applied to transaction fees on GoFundMe.)
Do not worry, we can keep all the funds raised here whether we meet our goal or not!
We hope that Light Meets Life will long outlive us all, and that future generations of tea lovers will also have a free tea center to use as they see fit, benefiting their exploration of tea on all levels from educational and linear to spiritual and ceremonial. Please donate what you can and use all your social media power to amplify our fundraiser to the world. Together as a community we will light the charcoal in the hearth of the main hall and hang our kettle there.