The Starting Point: Early Menopause and a Search for Meaning
It all began at the end of 2020, when I learned I was going through early menopause, at thirty-six. In the sudden emptiness that followed, losing that rhythm my body had always kept, I felt a real need to fill the space it left behind with something else. That’s where a spiritual search began, one that would lead me to sacred cacao in a way I never could have predicted.
The first signs showed up as synchronicities, around the rhythm of the earth, the rhythm of the mother, and what a medicine drum’s vibrations could offer. I’d had a vague pull toward a shamanic drum for a while, but this time it felt different, almost visceral, as if it were the lost rhythm of my own body calling it in.
Following one synchronicity after another, I found my way to Daniel, a drum maker whose work I connected with immediately, and we started working together remotely on the birth of my drum. Strangely enough, Daniel sent me meditations, visualizations, and ancestral lineage work to do first, so he could understand who I was before deciding what drum he would make. That work turned out to be a revelation. Visions came, along with a name for my drum.
Around the same time, I started a tarot challenge focused on reconnecting with ancestors, the very subject that would, years later, become the center of everything I teach. The cards were unsettling, and they kept lining up with what was coming through the drum work. My ancestors, it turned out, were really there, around me.
The Spirit of Cacao Appears
Around that same time, the spirit of cacao started showing up too, again through signs and synchronicities. I was getting used to receiving information this way by then. Sacred cacao kept appearing around me, more and more, almost daily, and since I was still deep in my ancestral research, I started to wonder if the two were connected.
They were. My family research kept pointing me toward the Caribbean and Central America, the birthplace of this sacred plant. My cycle ending, the tarot messages, the pull toward a drum, the ancestors, our travels, the land, the plants, the cacao — it was all part of the same thread.
I still didn’t fully understand what this chocolate drink was that people online seemed to revere so much, until I read a few surprising accounts, in English, and placed my first order with Keith’s Cacao. My husband and I chose a quiet moment to try it together, and that first sip is a memory I’ll carry forever. Something between deep calm, total relaxation, euphoria, and a strange kind of high — I couldn’t quite place it. We’ve been in love with this plant, and its spirit, ever since. It has walked with us daily, and changed more of our life than I ever expected.
The Ancestors of Caribbean Lands
As I reconnected with my ancestors, I started to feel the call of the native peoples of the Caribbean archipel, the Arawaks and the Kalinago, themselves descended from Mesoamerican civilizations who had once taken to the sea. I followed that thread for days, tracing it back through Central and South America, until I understood: this was where cacao, in its most original form, came from.
The Maya, the Olmecs, the Toltecs, and the Aztecs all drank sacred cacao, a gift they believed came from the gods. Cacao trees still grow across the caribbean today, since these civilizations had once settled the islands, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Dominica, whose waterfalls and volcanoes turn out to be ideal ground for cacao trees thriving in the jungle.
The Arawaks and the Kalinago, native to the Antillean arc, would have followed the traditions of their ancestral lands and known this medicine plant, honoring it in ceremony and ritual. But that knowledge was forgotten, erased over time. I think that might be exactly what I was hearing: the call of the Arawak.
My Mission: Bringing the Medicine Back to Life
Through sacred cacao, I felt the ancestors of this land asking me to bring these traditions back to life on the islands, the way they once were, especially in Saint-Martin, where I lived. To remind people that cacao is a healing plant, a messenger from the ancestors. To remind them that the ancestors are still here, only waiting for us to listen.
This world, in the middle of so much transition, needs these ancestral wisdoms to come back to life, needs us to reconnect with the EARTH and with our ANCESTORS. I followed what the spirit of cacao was asking of me, with love, the same voice that had been quietly guiding me since my menopause began.
Four Years of Teaching
For nearly four years, I shared this medicine through group and online ceremonies in Saint-Martin, an initiatory ebook, and various spiritual collaborations. I held countless sacred spaces, and was taught in turn by mentors, native guardians, and cacao priestesses along the way.
I also traveled, more than once, to the lands where this medicine had lived for generations, to meet it, to speak with it, and to keep growing on my own path: Guadeloupe, French Guiana, Saint-Martin, Mexico. At the top of the Tepozteco pyramid in Tepoztlán, Mexico, I felt the beginning of the end of one chapter with Mama Cacao.
📍 At the top of the Tepozteco pyramid, Tepoztlán, Mexico.
Mama Cacao’s Birthday Gift
On April 5, 2023, my birthday, I was walking down a street in Marigot I’d known for fifteen years. I turned my head, and there it was: a tree full of pods. A cacao tree. Fifteen years I’d walked past it without ever seeing it. Four years I’d spent looking for cacao trees on the island, always told by locals that the hurricanes had wiped them all out. And there it was, appearing on my birthday, of all days.
After a moment of hesitation, I asked the Antillean woman who owned the property if I could take a pod. Her son ended up selling me five, and gifting me two more. I was overjoyed. Mama Cacao couldn’t have given me a more meaningful gift. I kept a few dried pods for my altars, and saved the fresh beans to plant.
That’s when I understood: the mission the ancestors had given me was reaching its end. I had brought this medicine back to the island, helped heal hearts, brought the old rituals back to life, and planted new cacao trees in the ground. The circle had closed.
2024: Travel and Transformation
After that, we decided to leave, with no return date, in the summer of 2024. We’d been dreaming of this camper-van trip across Europe with our children for a long time, and even then, it was the spirit of cacao and our ancestors guiding us into it.
All through 2024, though, my relationship with cacao grew chaotic, a mirror of everything shifting inside me. Even as I felt aligned with our choices as a family, I felt strangely far from my own medicine: preparations that kept going wrong, fewer and fewer messages coming through, real questions about what this relationship even was anymore. In the end, it wasn’t really about cacao at all. It was about my relationship with myself. Even so, cacao carried us through more than one moment when we felt completely lost.
2025: Renewal in Portugal
As I write this, we’re settling into life in Portugal, and I haven’t found that same strong thread back to the spirit of cacao. (Update: things have shifted since I first wrote this!) It feels like its energy didn’t fully follow me across the ocean, this far from the land it grows in. But I’m not ready to let it go. Maybe that distance is really just a reflection of my own confusion right now: until I find my own footing, I won’t quite find my way back to it either.
What’s interesting is that my husband’s relationship with this medicine has shifted instead. These days, it’s him who prepares the brew, and holds the sacred space. Almost like something passed from me to him.
Coming Full Circle
That thread I thought I’d lost found its way back to me. Since landing in Portugal, cacao and I have found each other again, slower this time, and quieter, but real. And it’s showing up again right when it matters most: with the house finally behind us, our home is becoming the ground for everything I keep passing on.
A large bell tent is taking shape on the land, meant for cacao ceremonies, sound healing, and small wellness gatherings held in person. Alongside it, we’re building a wooden cabin, for anyone who wants to come stay and slow down here with us, even just for a few nights.
So depending on where you are, here’s how to stay close to what’s coming next.
Nearby, or planning a trip to Portugal? Follow me on Instagram, that’s where I’ll be sharing the ceremonies, and the cabin’s availability.
Further away? Insight Timer app is where you’ll find me instead, with meditations, sacred chants, and cacao journeys, wherever you are in the world.