Steam rising from a freshly made bowl of matcha in soft window light

Is making matcha a form of meditation?

October 11, 2026 By Mio.K

Making a bowl of matcha is not meditation in any formal sense, and the tea ceremony is not a meditation technique. But the way thin tea is made, a short fixed sequence of small acts done with the hands, has much of what people go looking for in meditation: it gives your attention one thing to rest on for a few minutes.

The short answer: not officially, but it can work like one. Each step, warming the bowl, sifting, pouring, whisking, drinking, asks for your full attention for a few seconds, and there is nothing to think about except the next one. Done slowly, three minutes of making tea is three minutes of doing one thing at a time. It does not need any belief, and it does not need the tea ceremony.

I study tea in Tokyo, in the Urasenke school. I do not teach meditation and will not claim anything about what tea does for the mind. What I can describe is what the making of a bowl asks of you.

Why the steps hold your attention

Most of what we do in the morning can be done while thinking about something else. Making thin tea is harder to do that way, because each step is small and goes wrong if you are not there for it.

Warm the bowl. Hot water in, the whisk rested in it for a minute, then tipped out. You feel the heat come through the clay.
Dry it. A cloth around the inside, once.
Sift. Two small scoops pressed through the mesh. If you hurry, the powder clouds up.
Pour. About 60 ml of water just off the boil. You hear it before you see it.
Whisk. Fifteen to twenty seconds, fast, from the wrist. The sound changes as the foam forms, and you can hear when it is done.
Drink. In both hands, in a few sips, while it is warm.

None of it is difficult. But every step is one thing, and doing it well means doing only that. That is the whole of the resemblance.

Listening, not only looking

A good deal of it is sound. The water going into the bowl, the whisk against the clay, the foam settling. Okakura Kakuzō, describing a tea room in 1906, wrote of the guests waiting until "quiet reigns with nothing to break the silence save the note of the boiling water in the iron kettle." At home there is no iron kettle, but there is still the sound of the water and the whisk, and if you let it, it fills the room.

Japanese has a word for this kind of attention in incense: you do not smell incense, you listen to it. I write about that in what Japanese incense smells like.

Is the tea ceremony connected to Zen?

Historically, yes. Powdered tea came to Japan with Zen monks, and many early teachers of tea studied Zen. But the tea ceremony is not a religious rite, and you do not need to believe anything to make or drink a bowl of tea. I go through this in is the tea ceremony religious.

Making it a daily practice

Same time, same place. A corner of a table, the same bowl, the same few minutes each morning.
Put the phone somewhere else. The steps are short enough that one notification undoes them.
Do not rush the whisking. Twenty seconds feels long the first week and right after that.
Drink it sitting down. The last step is the one most people skip.

If you want the method in full, how to make matcha starts from the beginning.

Questions I get asked