Calming cacao ceremony

February 11, 2021 - “Food of the Gods” cacao is also a medicine of the heart. Through her cacao ceremony, our Visiting Practitioner Christelle Chopard shows how it can help bring clarity and focus for when you’re feeling wrung out.

Theobroma cacao literally translates to food (Theo) of gods (broma). As a food, cacao appears in many forms. It brings a sense of comfort and sweetness to our life. In its original state, cacao heals our heart in a physical and spiritual way. It brings balance, creating clarity and focus.

Cacao in its purest form increases blood flow through the body and brain. It is enriched with a high quantity of magnesium which allows you to be stimulated and focused, while being relaxed at the same time. That’s because magnesium plays an important role in the nervous system, helping to activate mechanisms that calm us, while relieving anxiety, which can interfere with sleep.

Cacao guides us in our journey to inner clarity. It brings us together in ways we would never have thought possible.

Visiting Practitioner Christelle Chopard has joined us to explain how she prepares and performs her cacao ceremony.

The cacao ceremony

There are no set rules as to when a cacao ceremony should take place. Christelle sometimes performs hers during a full or new moon as the moon is very powerful when combined with cacao and intention.

She starts by lighting a fire and representing all four elements: earth, water, fire, air. Don’t worry if you don’t have a fireplace, you can use a candle to represent the element of fire.

To prepare the cacao, she uses raw organic cacao powder or ground beans, along with hot water, a touch of cayenne, perhaps a touch of “fleur de sel” and cardamom. As the drink is shaken, the smoke rises and includes the fifth element, spirit, into the ceremony, as an offering to the ancestors.

When she leads her ceremony, Christelle will give a cup filled with the hot cacao to each participant and then facilitate the experience for people to release emotions and open their hearts. The effect of the cacao supports the transformation of emotions, healing hearts and bringing more oxygen and serotonin into the system.

She drinks cacao to meditate, to say thank you for what she has, who she is and what she needs. You may find that your connection with the fire and cacao begins to run in your veins and oxygenate you to open your mind and your heart, leaving fears behind.

Each time Christelle performs a ceremony she finds that participants move through many emotions and complete the ceremony with chants, smiles, lightness and a comforting warmth in their hearts.

Christelle’s journey

Originally from Switzerland, Christelle has many comforting memories of chocolate. However, after a few years, the extra sugar, lactose and sometimes palm oil added to it was providing a high and short rush, followed by a crash. This can lead to a sense of addiction to chocolate, which is not a property of the cacao, but of the extra sugar and other substances added to it.

In the last few decades, she has chosen to explore different ancestral traditions and healing modalities worldwide. Her encounter with the Maya Tzutujil tribe in Guatemala and healer and spiritual guide, Tata Pedro Cruz, has transformed her perspective and she finds the cacao ceremony always brings the spark back to her eyes.

In the Maya Tzutujil tribe’s traditional language, the name of cacao is “Kokow”, where Kow means force. Cacao makes several appearances in the Mayan creation myth, as Tata Pedro Cruz explains in this short film, Cacao: Food of the Gods.

From generation to generation, the Maya Tzutujil are well known in San Pedro La Laguna for their work roasting cacao.

About Christelle

Christelle Chopard is a life coach, yoga therapist C-IAYT, vortex meditation practitioner and author of a trilogy about the dharmi method.