Teatime with the Tea Lady

This Teatime—a storytelling series sharing people's unique experiences with tea—we chatted with Katie Bannock, pilates instructor, herbalist and founder of TeaLadyBK.com.

Katie is passionate about harnessing the healing powers of adaptogens and teaching others the radical act of self care. Her wellness journey began with a magical encounter with Reishi mushrooms that inspired her to dig deeper into the benefits of herbs and fungi.

Q: Who are you? What do you do? How did you get started?  My name is Katie aka Tea Lady! I’m an herbalist and pilates teacher based in NYC. I started working with herbs in my own personal practice after a few years of teaching restorative movement, just as a way to care for my own nervous system and hormone cycle. As I got more familiar with my body’s signals and when it craved certain herbs, I started created a few tea blends for each of my body’s *moods* and shared them with the internet - now those blends have grown and been shared with thousands of people around the world! Which is really crazy and probably the coolest, most rewarding experience of my life. 

Q: What is your relationship to tea?  Tea is my grounding tool. Tea is the way I remind myself through physical practice that the way I feel is meaningful, and it is worthwhile to take the time to return to the plants and come back into contact with my self before I move through the world. 

Q: What significance does tea have in your life? In your family? In your culture?  The answer to this is a little backwards - but tea has absolutely no significance in my family, and that’s sort of why it is so significant to me. I think I come from a long line of women who struggle to prioritize themselves, and taking the time and space to do so, for me, feels like a quite radical act. 

Q: Share a tea memory & its significance to your life?  Finding reishi mushroom for the first time. I can literally still remember running my fingers over the grooves and feeling I had discovered something magical or other worldly… as a kid I used to play in the woods every single day and make little potions (at one point I even asked my parents to change my name to the garden fairy from one of my books) so it felt like that little girl was touching something she had been searching for my whole life. To this day Adaptogenic mushrooms are still the herb I’m called to over and over again because there’s such an ancient intelligence to them, I feel immediately grounded in something much calmer and wiser than myself .