My Journey with Ceremonial Cacao and How She Supports me To Hold Sacred Space

I started my journey with Ceremonial Cacao around ten years ago when I attended my first ceremony on a Kundalini Yoga session with Ecstatic Dance. It was the whole combo in one. It was really intense for me to experience so many practices together. I remember crying throughout the whole event without even knowing why.

Many years later, I started attending more ceremonies in Bristol. I then felt called to connect with the spirit of Cacao on a regular basis as part of my practice of self-awareness and my shamanic journey with plant medicines. My connection with Cacao strengthened and I started envisioning ways of integrating this beautiful plant with my Creative practices and the spaces I create to bring people together through my workshops and concerts.

In June 2024, I created my first concert in Bristol where I offered the Medicine Songs I channel and Cacao was there as part of the experience. It was beautiful and expansive. In July I co-created a Cacao ceremony with Dia from CacaoAmor and I performed my songs accompanied with another musician from Brazil. The ancestral forces of Ecuador, Brazil and Venezuela came together to light up this powerful space we created together. It was truly magical. After that I facilitated my first Cacao Ceremony and Creative Women Circle in October. The experience was incredibly expansive and heart-opening. We all shared our hearts with vulnerability and experienced the love of sisterhood.

Cacao has been unfolding the journey for me and I honour her spirit with deep gratitude.

The next experiences I will be offering in February 2025 are an Authentic Connections and Cacao Ceremony and a concert as part of my new ‘Music is Medicine’ project. You can check out the concert here

My intention for the Authentic Connections ceremony is to bring men and women in sacred circle and offer a space where healing for the masculine and feminine energies dancing together takes place.

With a history of sexual trauma, domestic and physical violence in my childhood, I learnt to fear the masculine. The masculine figures in my family weren’t safe. How did I cope with this? By stepping into my inner masculine and driving my life from there, with little space from the feminine within me to express herself. I would be completely focused on the doing, on the getting things done, on the hyper achieving mentality, on the directive and over protective side of myself taking control and finally, over exhausting myself to not really feel the pain I was carrying. I would only stop if I was very ill, had an accident, or unexpected circumstances like the death of a family member forced me to stop and look within. 

I’ve always been an intuitive healer, even for myself. I sought a career path that was meaningful and of service to others. Starting as a support worker for young children with autism, deaf-blindness and other learning difficulties, I started to find some inner peace. I didn’t know it then, but they were supporting me to heal more than I thought I was supporting them. 

I always wondered what attracted me to work with deaf-blind children. I learnt Spanish Sign Language to be an interpreter for people with hearing difficulties and when I discovered the world of deaf-blindness it fascinated me and I worked passionately in that field for at least five years in Madrid, until I decided to move to England. Then in England I kept supporting people with learning disabilities, especially aspergers and autism when I worked in the College supporting young people. 

At this point I was doing my degree in Creative Arts Therapies and then a Masters in Creative Writing. When I finished, I started lecturing Counselling in the Foundation Degree of Counselling and stayed there for two years, until I decided to leave. I was burnout and starting to feel very ill due to all the stress I accumulated throughout my life. Quitting the security of that job was the first time in my life I allowed myself to take a break from life as I knew it, trying to find a way to live differently. I then moved to France for five months and worked as a nanny, teaching English to a young girl that was the vivid mirror of my inner child. This was my first opportunity to consciously re-write my story. 

I mentioned the part where I worked with deaf-blind people because some years ago, when I started my process of awakening, I realised that I had chosen that path because I was deaf-blind myself. Not on a physical level, thank Goddess. On a spiritual level, I was. I was numbed to the pain I buried from the trauma I was carrying. I wasn’t aware I was in such pain or that I was carrying such a big trauma. I didn’t know I needed healing. I was simply led by my intuition, always choosing career paths that would take me out of my numbness into personal development and consciousness. 

This is what took me onto the plant medicine path. My intuition was leading me towards the options that could help me to heal the most. My first medicine ceremony was with Ayahuasca in 2011. That was the first time I connected with the energy of Love within myself.

Being from Venezuela, a land of Cacao, it is surprising that I only ever discovered this plant in England. When I lived in Venezuela, I only heard of Cacao and Coffee plantations as part of Venezuela’s natural agriculture and source of exchange with other countries. Venezuela is incredibly rich in natural resources and Cacao and Coffee are one of them. Cacao taken ceremoniously is not part of our tradition. I’m not really sure if Venezuelans know that we can use Cacao this way, as the only way we ever knew Cacao was through chocolate bars produced by Nestle, which is a Swiss company that was taking all the advantage of producing their products using Venezuelan Cacao. Sadly, that’s all I ever learnt from the Cacao of my country when I lived there. It was only until very recently when I decided to dive deeper into the fact that Venezuela can be a place I can represent as a Cacao sorceress and ceremonialist. And it is my vision to be able to go back to my country when things are safer so I can liaise with local farmers and producers to create my own brand and distribute it in Europe. I thank the Spirit of Cacao for this realisation and the embodiment of a mission that I can feel proud of. I am intending to reframe the use of Venezuelan Cacao into something more meaningful than chocolate bars with sugars. I also intend to investigate further into indigenous traditions from my land that perhaps have been working with this plant without people living in the cities being aware of this knowledge; ancestral wisdom we could all benefit from.

The merging of Cacao with Creative Expression and Authentic Connections

As I have dedicated the last ten years of my life into self-development and regaining the power of my voice through singing, poetry and other art forms, this is the area where my expertise has developed. I experienced the most amount of healing through the use of plant medicine and the therapeutic arts. The Arts unlocked that traumatised part of my psyche that was silenced and helpless. Through the Creative Arts I started getting in touch with my inner child for the first time since I fled Venezuela. It is now another part of my mission to offer other human beings the guidance they need to regain the power of their own voices. Sometimes, we might not even be aware that our voices are blocked, and that we really want to be able to express our soul’s message by being creative; we simply don’t know where to start. 

Creative recovery definitely requires courage, self-trust, and feeling worthy of more in our lives. Only when we acknowledge our deepest dreams can we take the first steps towards manifesting them. Having been there myself, unlocking my dream of being a singer and pursuing it without giving up - despite always feeling I wasn’t good enough - is what has brought me to the other side of the tunnel. The strength and determination I developed by believing in myself is what actually helped me to start fulfilling my dreams. And because I know how hard it can be to walk this path of liberation, I know how to support others to walk the path themselves. 

Cacao is one of the tools I am using to unlock creativity and I am now creating spaces where I invite her Spirit to be the gentle mother that guides us back to our hearts. Combining the therapeutic arts tools that I have with the presence of Cacao has been a beautiful blessing I received last year. 

I am now incorporating the development of Conscious connections with the aid of Mama Cacao. Balancing the feminine and the masculine within in a subtle dance where the inner rhythm flows. This will be reflected in our connections with other human beings. It doesn’t matter the gender we’ve been assigned at birth or the one we identify with. The heart-to-heart connection that we can create with others can still be full of obstacles, limiting beliefs and unprocessed old experiences from childhood that we project onto others. Creating spaces where the assistance of Mama Cacao in opening our hearts is present in authentic relating can make the experience even more powerful and healing for all of us. 

My idea is to co-create a space where I place the invitation for everyone to be seen and held in vulnerability and we all get to share our voices, perspectives and experiences whilst being witnessed by the ‘other’. The other can resonate with an experience shared that can remind them of their own and will propel them to share their own feelings and reflections. A space where we can meet in resonance and trespass the barriers that we uphold to protect us from breaking open to feel and receive love. 

Through shamanic drumming and medicine music that I channel; our voices will merge in song, weaving sounds and rhythm, co-creating a space free from fear, judgements or expectations. Delighting ourselves in the healing frequencies of music and movement, Mama Cacao will gently hold space for us, allowing our defenses to drop so we can surrender to the feeling of being in community, relating authentically;  in joy and in love. 

My next Authentic Connections Cacao Circle is on the 2nd of February, a day for the Imbolc celebration, where spring returns to us. A time to honour the fertility of Goddess Brigid. A time to clear obstacles so we can manifest the intentions we set during the winter solstice. The time to plant the seeds we will see sprouting as the light returns. 

If you feel called to join, we have a few spaces left. You can join us here

With love,

Yhonet