Me and Mama Cacao

This story starts in 2005. April 7th I receive a phone call from my aunt that my mother has died. I am 21 years old, and I go to school to TEACH the next day, because I have literally no idea what else to do.

Fast forward 19 ish years, to January 10, 2024, when I receive a phone call from that same aunt that my grandmother (my mom’s mom) has died (considering never picking up when that aunt calls to be honest…).

I grieve (at least I think I do), I mourn, I do my shamanic thing and leave a prayer bundle by my favorite tree for Joanie and her beautiful way of being. I continue on with my year, always holding her in my heart, and in my thoughts. She shows up to me as a starfish, and I see them everywhere. My friend Tamara sends them to me all the time and every time I say “Hi Joanie!”

I do a pretty big dose of mushrooms in October, end up purging a lot of my grandmother’s stuff. Then December comes along, and my sweet friend Lindsay brings me a kilogram of Cacao from Peru, and says “I’m doing this dieta, do you want to do it with me?” Immediate full body yes.

A dieta is a shamanic practice where you take all the fun tasty things out of your diet (physical and mental) so that you can attune to the energy of a plant. People do this before ayahuasca, but you can do it for a lot of other Master Plants. The portal is actually opened for you by someone with a song, and then you and the plant sit in each other’s energy for the duration (about 3 weeks).

I go to Mexico for a week, pick up some Mexican cacao because I’m pretty sure that kilogram isn’t enough for me (HA!), come home and then the dieta starts.

I felt that sweet embrace as she merged with my energy, and then I realized just how bitter sweet cacao can be.  

I went into this dieta with literally no expectation. Holding myself to a standard and discipline as an act of self love was really my intention. I really committed to three weeks without salt, sugar, my favorite teas, red meat, and most fruits. I was doing this for me – because I deserve to be taken care of in all the ways. I drank half of a ceremonial dose most mornings, and really leaned into the devotional practice of communing with this beautiful heart opening plant that now occupied my energetic field. She was loud. She was very clear, and was also so soft and comforting.

I also went into this dieta with vertigo. And the day it started I did a shamanic journey to figure out what the vertigo was all about. I ended up following Jaguar through the jungle, to the edge of a cenote, and she told me to get in (remember, I’ve just been on the Yucatan peninsula, where there are many cenotes). Now, I don’t like water where I can’t see the bottom, so in real life, there’s not a chance I’m getting in. But she was like “get in. See you on the other side.” I entered the cenote, dove down to the very dark bottom, swam through an underground river, and then came up out of a different cenote where Jaguar stood there. I surfaced and she handed me a cacao pod. I learned later that cenotes are portals to the underworld in Mayan belief, and if you know me, you know I love a good underworld.

It turns out, that cenote was actually the well of my grief. And Cacao made me feel all of it. I grieved our 12.5-year-old dog Harvey that we had to put down day 8 of the dieta, I grieved my grandmother who had passed last year, I grieved my mother who had died so many years ago, I grieved her moving away when I was 15, I grieved her not ever really being there for me, and not actually being maternal in a way that felt nurturing and beautiful and motherly. I cried for 5 days. And then one night while having a bath with Cacao in it, she said “take two days off”, and I listened. And the crying stopped, and I felt like I had gotten to the bottom of the first cenote and was in the river portion of my journey. I was still in it, and I was still spending time with Cacao but I just wasn’t consuming her. I went back to drinking Cacao on a Thursday morning, the same day my best friend had to put her 10-year-old dog down. Pam asked me to make sure that Mika’s soul crossed over, so I did some psychopomp work, and when Mika’s soul crossed over Harvey was there waiting for her. I immediately started crying again. It was a little bit more limited but I was still in the depths.  

The last week of the dieta felt like I was coming up for air, things had started to clear, I was feeling lighter and then my husband lost his job, and then I quit sleeping. I was waking up at 4am and spending two hours in the liminal space. I even tried to nap one day, and literally just laid there half awake, half asleep, floating. I was exhausted, and confused, and just wanted to rest.

The last day of the dieta, I was WIDE AWAKE at 5:30am, so I went downstairs, had a FULL dose of cacao, and the beautiful human holding the dieta closed the portal for me.

The closing of a dieta is a very unusual feeling, as if something is being ripped out of your energy field (because it is), and leaves one feeling a little bit of grief. I had some salt, and an orange, and felt a little more grounded in myself, but then decided I was going to do another journey to figure out what else I needed to know.

My journey started in the Hallowed Hills – an in-between space. My mom was there, and I get annoyed when she comes to me, so I was like “hi…what do you want?” and my mom looked at me and said “I know I was never able to comfort you, but I’m really glad Cacao could”. I was shocked. I had never actually forgiven my mom for just being her, and not being maternal. So, I forgave her. I gave her a spark with my words, that she turned and passed it to her mom (Joanie!), who then passed it to both her adopted mom, and her birth mother.

My grandma’s birth mother is a woman named Mabel. She was forced to give my grandmother up because she was an unwed mother in 1939. Mabel took the spark of forgiveness, put it in her heart and said “Now I can forgive myself for giving you up”. I had a huge energetic release, and came out of my journey, again crying.

This is not where the grief ended! I had an acupuncture appointment three days after the dieta closed, and I attributed it to really missing my dog, but then I realized that I actually was also grieving the cacao. I don’t feel nurtured very often, and because of that having that present for 21 days and then having it taken away was really hard. I really learned what it felt to be nurtured, and that was the whole point – discipline as an act of self love.

The discipline has remained so far, I’ve been getting up early to sit with a tea and I light a candle and journal, or I write for a little bit, I pull some cards and reflect on my day, or my dreams.

The other thing that I have realized is that I was dismembered in Cacao. In the shamanic way of being dismembered in order to be remembered. I’ve had this experience in a shamanic journey once, on the Island of the Giant Ants in the Celtic Underworld. In that journey the ants told me that in order to be re-membered, I had to remember who I was. Which felt so obvious, but then I said “wait what do you mean?” and they told me I was the Shaman. I had pulled a card that literally said “remember who you are” at the beginning of this dieta and placed it on my Cacao altar.

This experience has left me in a semi altered state. I have had to remember that I love being in ceremony – for myself and others. That my practice with Celtic Shamanism is not relegated to ceremony days but is a daily practice of calling in the directions, calling in the Goddess, lighting a candle to call in Brigid and invoking her flame of protection. That in everything I do there is magick, there is wonder, and there is a deep connection with the Earth and the Divine.

And so in all of that… I’m doing it again in March. I will travel with Holy Basil and her energy of abundance, the goddess Lakshmi, and hopefully can be a little bit more re-membered than when I went in.