It's true. Zhena Muzyka really is a Gypsy. Even before she told me about her ancestry, I knew. I could hear it in her voice, the way she communicated every word with passion. From her hearty laugh to her ethereal beliefs, of which she speaks of at length and with great enthusiasm, I could sense her gypsy spirit. Zhena Muzyka is a special woman. And everyone who knows her will undoubtedly tell you the same.

Zhena is the Mistress of Ceremonies ("Founder" or "CEO" for the traditionalist) of Zhena's Gypsy Tea, an all-organic, fair trade tea company based out of California. But don't let the corporate exterior fool you; this woman is anything but white-collar.

What's unique about Muzyka and her company is that it's been built on gypsy tribal values: the strength of togetherness, mutual respect, and love. From offering her employees ("tribemates") "Tribal Health Credits" (a monthly allowance that can be used toward alternative medicine, or if they prefer, toward a standard Western medicine health plan) instead of traditional health insurance, to sitting down with each of her tribal members and letting them help choose what their unique job title will be, Zhena Muzyka runs her business more from savvy intuition than by crunching numbers.

Although this is not to say that she runs Zhena's Gypsy Tea like a fly-by-night operation. She has a business mentor whom she consistently works with for guidance, and she is always looking to improve her business skills from a traditional sense as well, in order to make her business be the best it can be. In fact, when I spoke with her, one of the first things she mentioned was that she had recently taken over additional responsibilities within the company.

"We're growing and growing and I've just actually become more empowered," she said. "I've taken on the job as National Sales Manager where before I didn't have the confidence and had hired one to do it for me. I realized that I could sell my product better than anyone, probably, and also realized that I couldn't manage somebody in a job that I'd never done and had no idea what that job even entails. So I definitely have been redefining, becoming more empowered and confident, and growing up I guess."

When Zhena first embraced the idea of beginning her own company, she never could have imagined that it would have grown into what it has - and is continuing to - become. At the time, her personal life was in turmoil. Her newborn son, Sage, had been diagnosed with a severe birth defect in his kidneys and when he was just 2 months old had to undergo massive surgery. Zhena needed a lifestyle that would allow her to stay home with her son, but with no job or health insurance she felt she had little options.

So where did the idea for a tea company come from?

"The universe. I always kind of had a formulator head," Muzyka admits. "I was always making my own aromatherapeutic perfumes. And I went down to Peru and studied herbal medicine with a shaman on the Amazon down there for a while. And I went up and lived with my godmother who is, basically, a white witch up in Idaho, a really brilliant, beautiful healer that people come from all over to see. And she taught me a lot about herbs and, you know, really helping people and so, I don't know - I've always just kind of had it. And my Gypsy heritage - you know, my grandma was always using herbs and had huge gardens and was always drinking tea and mixing concoctions. It's just a potion-like energy."

And so, armed with inner confidence and gypsy spirit, she began selling tea out of her friend's antique shop, carrying Sage with her in a baby carrier to work every day. Now, several surgeries and three years later, Sage is a healthy young boy and Zhena's life is thriving. She now dedicates herself to giving back to others what she herself once lacked.

Zhena takes pride in the fact that her teas are all fair trade certified. She says that supporting fair trade is "all about empowering the individual. Everything that I didn't have when Sage was born - like health insurance and an income and a place where I could go to work and have my child with me - all of those things that I didn't have, I'm able to give to the women who grow our tea and who process it. And so I feel like that is really, really powerful."

I hadn't realized until Zhena explained it to me, but it takes 2,000 plucks from one woman's hands to get just a single kilogram (2.2 pounds) of tea. The average tea plucker produces 16 kilograms a day - a stunning 32,000 plucks. "It is amazing," she tells me. "You should see how fast their hands move. And they do not have lotion. [Laughs] I mean, their hands are just so incredibly powerful and ancient."

Zhena's fair trade organic teas are grown and hand-picked in India and Sri Lanka. She often travels to the countries, to help out and visit with the growers and tea pickers and learn about their culture and tea-growing process. "They are some of the most kind, powerful people I've ever met. They feel so other-worldly to me," she says. "I mean, one of my growers said to me, 'When the children are laughing, we know the tea will be good.'"

The teas are also biodynamic and would be Demeter Biodynamic Certified if it weren't for the fact that Zhena couldn't bear to crowd her current product label with yet another logo. But what is 'Demeter Certification'? Zhena was happy to explain:

It means that they're not only organic but they actually infuse the soil with herbs to fight off disease. Each herb has minerals that it's strongest in. So they grow herbs and fertilize soil with the herbs and then they also plant quartz crystals at the base of the plant to bring the energy from the sun and the moon closer to the roots of the tea plant. And they have entire rooms dedicated to planetary motion . . . I mean, I'd never seen anything like it.

This attention to detail and commitment to quality, socially responsible growing has no doubt contributed to Zhena's business success thus far. Muzyka's dedication to fair trade operations won Zhena's Gypsy Tea the Socially Responsible Business Award in 2003. And in the three years they've been operating, Zhena's Gypsy Tea has done quite well for a new business.

"I'll profit next year," she tells me, "but the human profit has already been huge for all of us. Our lives have improved so much, everybody who's joined the tribe. And my goal in my life is to empower other women to start their own businesses."

Zhena's official business adventure began when Zhena's Gypsy Tea became a legal entity on October 1, 2001. But she's been working just as hard these past few years on her own business as she has with her goal to help other women realize their own personal and career dreams.

"I make potions with love to empower others' passions." She laughed as she told me this then added, "How's that for alliteration?"

And it's this passion that Zhena brings out in people that, she believes, is what is going to help change the world. "You heal the world in your own little way by doing those simple acts of love for other humans. And then all of a sudden there's a ripple effect. That's how we're going to shift things, I believe."

The first change, Zhena says, is that there needs to be more women in business, more feminine energy to balance the masculine American corporate world. As she puts it:

We can no longer just take our ambitions and simply raise children with them - there are so many children in the world. What we need to do now is take our energy of creation and actually create ourselves and create the world anew. And that the goddess that is within each of us will transform the world as we know it and heal it [. . . ] If we were to actually take the mothering energy that we have an apply it to our work ethics, we would definitely solve many of the problems on the planet.

In an effort toward reaching this grand goal, Zhena teaches classes at her facilities in Ojai, California entitled "Young Women Who Aspire," a series based on her entrepreneurial venture and her theory that business, like life, should be operated from the heart.

"The goal in my life is to inspire other women - as well as men - to take any hardship in their life and turn it into something really positive for themselves" Muzyka explains, "because I feel like our hardships are our gurus, basically. And if we can do that and do so with love and caring for one another, we really will transform the entire business world. And I've seen it happen. I'm doing it in my own small way."

Sure, it's a tough order to fill. But it can be accomplished, Zhena believes, if everyone commits themselves to it. And ladies, our self-empowerment is the first step.

What's great, Zhena says, is that "women are coming into more power and instead of man-bashing, they're uplifting the men in their lives - because they're our other half, whether or not we want to admit it. And, you know, we can't really survive without them - or at least the species can't quite yet. But it's one of those things where we're one and the same."

One way in which all of us can come together and celebrate human nature is through what Zhena calls "gypsy tea parties." I asked her if she could tell me a bit about them.

"Okay," she happily agreed, and then jumped right in with the story:

When I first started Gypsy Tea, when I had Sage and I found out he had to have surgery, I got down to my core, you know because I was so scared, and I said, "God, what do you want me to do?"

I'd been having kind of these images . . . because my family was in the circus in Moscow - my great-great-grandparents were trapeze artists and they were gypsies, you know, violinists, dancers, trapeze artists . . . And I kept seeing like this gypsy tea ritual with women dancing - like belly dancers with kind of like a Cirque du Soleil kind of energy - and musicians . . .

So, I kind of saw this place where people would be able to just fully have a safe haven where they would just be able to be completely vulnerable - if the poem sucks, you know, big deal, we all are there to support each other and love each other.

So I started having these gypsy tea parties at my girlfriend's art store. And she had a big back patio and so I would have musicians come and they'd play for tips. I'd have dancers come and they'd play for tips. And it was just this environment where I had a lot of tea and I sold tea, a lot of artists and dancers came, and people put up their artwork.

I only had enough money to put up handmade flyers. And I would go post them all over town. And then when the second one happened, like 250 people showed up. And I was just like, "Oh My! . . ." I mean, nobody could have guessed that that many people in a town of 8,000 would come to a gypsy tea party, which, you know, seems pretty abstract. But it was like the whole community came out to support me and to support what the vision was. And I realized that, wow, you know, these things were really cool.

So I started doing them in women's homes and, you know, teaching women how to bellydance . . . and I would put bindis on everybody, we would put on scarves and jingle bells, and we would drink tea and do these passion exercises, which my goal is to empower people's passions and bring them out more and more. And so they would sit around and I would ask them all these questions and they'd write in these little journals that I would make for them. And they were just these really beautiful little rituals.

So now I do them nationwide where you can sign up, say, through Whole Foods or Wild Oats, and you can win one of these in your home with me, The Mistress of Ceremonies. We had 5 winners in Southern California in the spring and summer and the women learned about fair trade, I showed them my India slideshow about fair trade, I talked to them about bellydancing, they got their palms read, they ate yummy organic desserts and fruits and had a full tea bar. And they giggled and had so much fun.

Now, Zhena told me, most of the women who's homes she's visited continue to host their own gypsy parties. I wondered aloud how she would suggest someone start one herself.

"The thing about gypsies," Zhena started, "is that we're very resourceful. We love to dress up. We're very passionate. We're not stuck on the material wealth of life. We are the first group of cultural people that don't have homes. (You know, Native Americans didn't have homes but they had teepees and were very nomadic.) But we don't have homes and we feel like the whole earth is our home . . . And that, to me, is so empowering. So I try not to get [women that host these parties] to feel like they have to spend a lot of money or do anything like that. Just buy a few tins of tea, get some old scarves out, you know, go to a thrift store and find a cool teapot . . . It's kind of just about spending a little bit of time, getting resourceful, and being really creative."

There are some tips on hosting your own gypsy tea party on the Zhena's Gypsy Tea web site (http://www.gypsytea.com/), although Zhena does point out that it's in construction mode as she gears up for new product offerings and an updated web site.

"Eventually I'm going to have a whole product line of highly, highly creative peripherals," she excitedly mentioned. "I met the Queen of the Gypsies when I was in India this summer and I'm going back in March to be with her and I'm having the Gypsy tribes out there make some handicrafts, . . . some really special things to have along with the gypsy ritual."

Muzyka is excited for this opportunity, not only because it will be a fun addition to the already festive Zhena's Gypsy Tea line, but, more importantly, it will also help the Gypsy tribal culture. Tribe members won't have to go to work in factories, and will instead be able to continue creating their highly creative handicrafts while still supporting themselves financially.

Eventually, Zhena told me, she'll also be publishing a book with more detailed instructions on hosting and enjoying gypsy tea parties.

In the meantime, Muzyka and Zhena's Gypsy Tea company continues to encourage women - and men - to follow their hearts and their passions - ultimately, to celebrate the gypsy within.

"We all have gypsy within us. It's just the feisty little one that won't settle just for a house in the suburbs; she has to have more. [Laughs] Whether she's eating beans out of a can, but she doesn't care because she's able to afford to go out dancing all night - you know, that's the gypsy within us."

Meet Zhena Muzyka

Zhena Muzyka is the Mistress of Ceremonies for Zhena's Gypsy Tea, an all-organic tea company based out of Ojai, California. A strong, empowered woman with true gypsy lineage and spirit, Zhena stays busy as a mom, entrepreneur, and aspiring world healer. She also teaches classes at her facilities in Ojai for "Young Women Who Aspire," based on her entrepreneurial adventures through "The Heart of Business," a column which also appears in the Ventura County Reporter. Zhena lives in California with her precious son Sage.

Website: www.gypsytea.com

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