I have walked through fire more than once. Through grief, addiction, illness, and the long unraveling of old identities. I have lived the truth that healing is not a destination, but a devotion — a returning, again and again, to what is real, to what is tender, to what is whole underneath the fractures.
For so many decades my life has been shaped by a vow — not in words, but in presence. A vow to sit with suffering. To bear witness. To not turn away, in the lonely hours of my own unraveling, even then I have chosen to stay.
I am not a guru. I am not here to lead. I am here to be — with you, beside you, in whatever form love asks of me. My work is the fruit of lived experience: 39 years of sobriety. A lifetime of trauma transmuted into presence. Thousands of spiritual reflections, handwritten in the dark. Teachings born not from ideology, but from the groundless knowing that Love heals, and silence reveals.
Tea & Zen, and its greater body Meditation Sans Frontières, are not projects or platforms — they are living sanctuaries. They are the natural outbreath of a life spent listening. What you find in the library, in the podcast, in the small offerings stitched across the site, are not strategies or teachings. They are gestures of love.
This sanctuary is for the unseen ones. The grievers. The weary. The ones who remember something ancient and cannot name it. The ones who know that presence is the only true medicine.
It is for those who long to live rooted in something real, and who ache for a place that does not ask them to be anyone but who they are beneath the noise. This living library — is a gathering place for all of it: Reflections. Letters. Audio echoes from the threshold. Spiritual technologies born of trauma and prayer. And invitations to remember what was never lost.
It is not polished. But it is real. And it is offered in love — from one who has wept, and remembered, and chosen again and again to stay.
Nigel Lott teaandzen.org
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