How Ceremonial Cacao Helped Me Turn My Life Around
In 2015 I was practically bedridden with an especially bad wave of a long-term illness that had only ever been known by the name “chronic fatigue syndrome” (or CFS).
By that point I had tried everything I could find—Western allopathic medicine, naturopathy, homeopathy, shamanism, and so forth—and a lot of people had told me they could cure me.
None of them did. And a lot of their treatments either made my condition worse, drained my bank account, or both.
So there I was, stuck with recurring bouts of exhaustion, muscle pain, and brain fog, thinking I might be sick for the rest of my life.
That winter I saw the film “Wild,” based on the book of the same name, in which a woman walks the Pacific Crest Trail to undergo her own sort of healing journey. It lit me up, but I knew the PCT was out of my range in that condition.
Instead my mind turned back to stories of a friend’s pilgrimage on the Camino de Santiago through Spain. I set a goal for myself to walk 60 miles on the Camino, the minimum distance to obtain a Compostela saying I had officially walked the Camino. In early 2015, I thought even 60 miles would have been a heroic feat!
Then in June I attended a regional Burning Man event in my home state of Michigan and camped with a mostly Chicago-based group. Their camp featured a temple space where people hosted workshops and ceremonies.
I saw on the schedule that someone would be hosting a cacao ceremony. At that time I felt skeptical about the idea.
I had started to see posts about cacao ceremonies on Facebook the winter before, and the concept sounded silly to me. I had always loved chocolate, but I couldn’t imagine how it might have a spiritual significance.
Yet this ceremony was free and happening right near my tent, so I sucked up my pride and decided to give it a try.
We lined up in the camp kitchen to receive a ladle or two of the thick, steaming brown liquid into our cup.
Then we filed into a temple space and sat in a big circle.
I don’t remember the exact course of events in that first ceremony. I know it started with setting intentions and led into different embodiment and interactive practices allowing us to connect more deeply with ourselves and also connect with the others in a very enriching way.
Mainly I remember my own embodied experience. My heart felt like it was waking up after a long, murky slumber. I felt my blood pumping more quickly, but not in an alarming way… just more vibrant and alive.
Leaving the ceremony I felt energized and clear, which I noticed especially when I went right from there to lead my own workshop that had been scheduled far in advance. After nearly three years of hosting workshops, I was more lucid than ever.
I suddenly knew that cacao was going to be part of my life from that point forward.
Within a month of that first cacao ceremony, I stopped drinking alcohol forever.
And I began a structured, self-guided training program to prepare for the Camino de Santiago, measuring my distance and weight carried each day.
I didn’t know at the time, but I had tasted the real deal — Guatemalan ceremonial cacao roasted over a wood fire and prepared by hand. I didn’t have access to that cacao, so I bought cacao powder at a local health food store.
It didn’t have the same depth of sensation or flavor. But when I would hit a wall in my training and thought I had to quit, eating a little bit of that cacao helped me to stay motivated and keep going.
Within two weeks I was walking further than I thought would ever be possible again. And in September 2015 I began a route on the Camino that I followed not 60 miles — but more than 400.
After the Camino I experienced another CFS crash. It wasn’t quite as bad, but it was a crash nonetheless. With the help of cacao, I kept pressing forward.
At the dawn of 2016 I began a 4.5-month backpacking trek through Central America, in part to learn more about cacao and cacao ceremonies.
I visited a cacao farm and met with cacao experts and collectives. On that trip I also found other healing and self-development practices that assisted in my path of recovery from CFS.
I brought home a suitcase full of Guatemalan ceremonial cacao. I began hosting cacao ceremonies and incorporating cacao into my other workshops. I made another trip to Central America at the turn of 2017 and visited a second cacao farm.
By late 2017 I was barely ever experiencing the symptoms of CFS—and never again in the degree or frequency that I had from 2011 to 2015.
Cacao didn’t “cure” me of CFS. I had to make a variety of lifestyle changes — diet included — in order to see real progress. And I had to do deep, holistic re-patterning work on beliefs, imprints, and communication patterns.
Yet finding ceremonial cacao was without a doubt the biggest turning point in my journey. It’s when I began to take full responsibility for my own health and well-being.
This is only an overview of my story. There was so much more to the Camino training, and to getting to a point where I no longer experienced “crashes” of a month or longer due to CFS.
But my point stands: ceremonial cacao is a powerful superfood and “plant medicine”—a plant that could be said to have an intelligence of its own—unlike anything else on the planet.
I believe cacao can help people tune into a clearer sense of life purpose, and also give them the focus and motivation to live it out. I believe that because it did this for me.
After selling cacao to friends for two years, in early 2018 I moved to California and launched Soul Lift Cacao, my legal, inspected food business sourcing ceremonial cacao through ethical direct trade relationships with the family farms and collectives I met in Guatemala.
Now my mission is more specific, and I only source from groups that have ethical arrangements for employment of Mayan indigenous workers. They also prepare ceremonial cacao paste in their own facilities, keeping more money at the source that would otherwise go to American (or other Western) chocolate-making factories.
They send the cacao with their consent for it to be used as a soul medicine in parts of the world where cacao doesn’t grow natively. And we hold respect for the Mayan people in everything we do.
It’s an honor to contribute to the ceremonial cacao movement and make the “real deal” more available, so that it can help others take more responsibility for their holistic health and well-being, get clearer about their life purpose, and turn their own lives around. After all, the world needs it.
