This piece is a repost, originally written in 2023, but it still matters to me, and it connects directly to what I’ve been sharing more recently. That’s why I brought it back and reworked it, even if it’s not new.
Guadeloupe, Again
Every time I come back here, something in me shifts.
My first real shift happened years earlier, in 2018, during a chamanic retreat with Yann Lipnick. I came home from that one with my mind cracked wide open, and it’s what set my whole spiritual path, and everything I’ve shared since, into motion.
This time, my third retreat on the island, I came back changed again: calmer, lighter, whatever grief and anger I’d been carrying, gone. More patient than before. Something had shifted again, another layer, another step further along the path. I’d been initiated to go even further.
Wisdom. Expansion. Reconnection. Release. Focus.
Guadeloupe has always been, for me, a land of growth and transformation. Every time I come here, I change.
I Am the Arawak
Once you build a real, ongoing relationship with your ancestors and with plant teachers, the information, the synchronicities, the messages start arriving fast, faster still during a real initiatory passage.
One morning, our retreat group set off on a water trek upstream from Saut d’Acomat, in Guadeloupe. That day, I moved through more fear than I expected to, but more than that, I found myself back in sensations that felt both familiar and impossibly old.
Slipping through the pools like an iguana, feeling the strength of the water and the rocks, stopping to listen to the sounds around me, catching the sun through the jungle canopy. Moving along the river current on all fours, hands on stone, brought something back to the surface, and all at once, I saw myself: bare, wrapped only in a loincloth, long black hair, straight and loose. And this line arrived in my mind:
❝ I am the Arawak ❞
That one small sentence handed me a sudden understanding: I’d had something wrong, all along.
Cacao had come to me through a reconnection with my own lineage, but also through the ancestors of this land, the Caribbean. I’d believed, until that moment, that it was specifically the Arawak of Saint-Martin asking me to bring this medicine back to the islands, since it had once been part of their tradition. That one small sentence, that glimpse of a past incarnation, this hike, on this particular trip, told me otherwise. The karmic reconnection had been set in motion long before.
I am the Arawak, once living across the Caribbean and Central America, in relationship with plant medicine and sacred cacao, carried down from ancestors further south still, in the Yucatan, in Guatemala, in Venezuela.
We’re always learning, and every experience we live through in this body is also a memory of who we’ve been, and why we came back. This piece of understanding reached me almost three years after I first began my path with cacao.
Life is an adventure, barefoot on Mother Earth and with your gaze towards the sun.
The Most Powerful Ceremony I’ve Ever Lived
The most powerful cacao ceremony I’ve ever experienced happened on this same trip to Guadeloupe. And yet, it wasn’t a big ceremony at all.
There was no altar. No flowers. Only four of us. No music. I didn’t even have my usual cup or my ceremonial tools with me, I was traveling light, and all I had was a small piece of palo santo, a candle, and my voice.
And still, that evening, the spirit of cacao showed up, along with several other strong presences, moving through my shaman friend for nearly an hour. I went through something I still don’t fully understand, in my body and in my soul, something that kept unfolding over the nights that followed.
That evening taught me something I keep coming back to: it takes nothing but an open heart, love, and real devotion, to call this medicine’s magic in.
If this story stirred something in you, you’ll find more of this kind of work in my ancestral healing and reconnection meditations on Insight Timer, journeys built for exactly this sort of remembering.