A Mindful Morning Coffee Meditation

By: Scott Dubois, Fauna Travel Designer

Mindfulness is a core aspect of my philosophy at Fauna Travel. As part of that, I’m becoming a certified meditation teacher and will be sharing some of my personal favorite meditations for travel here. This meditation is particularly good for early morning coffees on safari.

If I genuinely appreciate my drink, it can take me an hour to finish a cup. Slowing down and eliminating distractions can reveal the profound within the mundane.

One of my favorite mindfulness rituals involves waking up before dawn to enjoy a hot French press of coffee. In the early morning darkness, there is space to simply enjoy drinking it. This coffee can be a bell of mindfulness, grounding you in the present moment and cultivating a deep sense of joy and gratitude for the world around you.

I invite you to try this with your morning tea or coffee to explore its effect on your day. First, wake up early so that you can prepare and drink your coffee in silence. Resist the urge to pick up your phone to read emails or check the news first thing–there is plenty of time for that later. When your cup is ready, find a comfortable place to sit upright and hold it in your lap. 

As you settle in, feel the warmth of the cup radiating in your hands. All meditative practices are rooted in breath, so bring the cup up to smell the coffee. Feel your breath flowing in and out. There is no right way to do this, observe how you naturally draw sustenance from the atmosphere. 

Now take a sip and let the coffee linger on your tongue. If I genuinely appreciate my drink, it can take me an hour to finish a cup. Slowing down and eliminating distractions can reveal the profound within the mundane.

Deeper Into the Cup of the Present

If you slow down enough, you may also find that your coffee isn’t exactly coffee at all. 

If you slow down enough, you may also find that your coffee isn’t exactly coffee at all. According to Buddhist tradition, if you look deeply into anything in the world, its whole existence is a web of relationships. Thich Nhat Hanh coined the term interbeing to describe it. All things inter-are. We are each made of family, water, air, plants, animals, our relationships, and our experiences. There is no separate self apart from all of that.

As a trained designer, I love mapping relationships, so I often explore these coffee connections as I drink. It doesn’t take long before I’m overwhelmed by a fractal explosion–coffee beans, grocery store, roaster, shipper, farmer, soil, plants, rain, evolution, earth, sun, and so on. Each of these elements also has its own tree of relationships. If you consider how the farmer’s tools were made or the trucker’s breakfast, you very quickly touch almost everyone on earth. 

Taking it further, you could factor in all the events of your life and that of your ancestors that led you to the moment of brewing your coffee, as well as the unseen forces of your metabolism.

You can use this exercise to gain a deeper understanding of how reliant you are on an infinite multitude of events coming together to make something as simple as your morning coffee. It generates a profound sense of humility and gratitude in me, which I try to offer to the people around me whom I share my interbeing with.