A three-month course in contemplative tea blending
Tea is a language written in water
Within a single cup of tea is an entire story unfolding, a meeting of plant and person carried through water.
Contemplative tea blending brings sustained attention and inquiry into the practice of tea, allowing pattern to become visible and meaning to take its place alongside mechanism. Encoding the Waters explores how an understanding of plants becomes composition, and how that composition is translated through water into the finished cup.
Students develop the discernment to read plants more deeply and the practical skill to carry an idea into tea. The work may become a signature blend for a business, an ensouled formula for a client, an offering for a retreat or gathering, a ritual woven into an existing practice, or an original tea ceremony held for a group.
The course welcomes beginners alongside experienced herbalists, tea makers, and practitioners drawn to the meeting place between plants, consciousness, and human experience. Through formulation, tasting, refinement, preparation, and ceremony, students develop an original practice of tea grounded in coherence, purpose and their own relationship with plants.
Encoding the Waters is taught online, with 8 live classes and 12 learning modules. The founding cohort begins in February 2027, with enrolment opening at the end of October.
Join the waitlist to receive enrolment details when they become available.
A three-month journey
From stillness to ceremony
Month 1
STILLNESS
WATER
READING
Cultivate attention and discernment through sustained work with companion plants.
Study water as the medium that carries the plants and shapes what the cup receives.
Read plants through the forms they take, the stories they carry, and the human thresholds they are called to meet.
Month 2
BLENDING
FORMULATION
REFINEMENT
Learn the architecture of blending, choosing and placing each plant with intention to create a coherent whole.
Develop original tea formulas with therapeutic purpose, sensory coherence, story, and intention.
Refine your compositions through tasting, assessment, adjustment, and repeated practice.
Month 3
PREPARATION
RITUAL
CEREMONY
Learn how water, vessel, heat, time, and method shape the finished tea.
Develop intentional tea rituals that bring presence and meaning into the preparation and sharing of tea.
Create an original tea ceremony, bringing plant, water, vessel, silence, preparation, and offering into one held form.
Why study with Mélanie
Mélanie Pulla has spent more than three decades studying and working with medicinal plants, and nearly two decades exploring tea as a contemplative and ceremonial practice. Her work brings together herbalism, formulation, tea ceremony, writing, and the creation of original teas through Water Over Leaves.
Her approach to tea has been shaped by formal herbal training, years of professional formulation, the study of Korean tea ceremony, and a contemplative practice developed across decades of work with plants. Encoding the Waters gathers these strands into the teaching of Contemplative Tea Blending, bringing the therapeutic, sensory, creative, and ceremonial dimensions of tea into a coherent practice.
Founding Cohort Enrolment
The first Encoding the Waters cohort begins in February 2027,
gathering a small group for three months of study and practice.
Enrolment opens at the end of October.
Be the first to know once more details become available.