Last winter, I noticed that our Medicinal Mushroom cacao quickly became our most popular as the seasons changed. For several years I had been making various medicinal mushroom teas with reishi and chaga that I wild harvested, and I became curious about combining them with cacao. My first experiments led me to learn far more about mushrooms than I knew previously, and I became fascinated with the incredible adaptogenic properties of a wide variety of medicinal mushrooms. I also discovered cacao is an ideal carrier to help my system absorb the mushrooms, and that the flavor profiles are a perfect match with our Belizean cacao.
Cacao Ceremony For Two Cacao teaches me to bring love into every single day. Since working with cacao, I've discovered that creating space for a ritual with my loved ones, and sharing a cup of cacao together, creates closeness, depth of relationship, and true intimacy. Drinking cacao together, there is spaciousness … to share, listen and witness each other. To reflect on what you enjoy about each other. To simply be, together.
After our island retreat, we explored a beautiful cacao forest at Martín's family-run cacao farm in Belize. We were greeted with bottles of fresh cacao juice recently made and frozen, which made our entire group light up with excitement. Cacao juice is very sweet and will ferment quickly if not kept frozen, making storage, shipping, and distribution outside of the country a prohibitive challenge.
Dolphins guided us along part of the journey to the island, and as we got further from the coast I realized just how far out we were going as we lost all sight of land. For six days we cooked all of our own meals, living without electricity or internet. We synced with the natural rhythms of the sun, drank fresh coconut water from coconuts that I harvested by climbing the trees on the island, and took time to vision and reflect. It was a rare opportunity to reset, commune with cacao, and get crystal clear about what we want to create next.
Our last stop in Belize was a visit with Minni and the team at Maya Mountain Cacao. MMC, founded in 2010, put Belize on the craft chocolate map as the first exporter in the country to produce high-quality, centrally-fermented, transparently sourced cacao. They have 400+ certified organic smallholder cacao farming families in their network, most of them indigenous Q’eqchi’ and Mopan Maya.