06/16/2025
✨🙌 Ceremonial Cacao as Medicine 🙌✨
We will be offering a cacao ceremony at our Replenish Retreat on July 18.
Indigenous tribes have sat in ceremony with cacao as a sacred drink for thousands of years. But let’s talk about what makes cacao ceremonial.
Ceremonial cacao is cacao that has been processed and prepared into a drink in a much more special, careful, and intentional way than commercial chocolate, in order to keep the medicinal alkaloids and the spirit of the plant medicine alive. It also means the cacao has been prepared with respect to, and in honoring of, the indigenous traditions and practices around the plant.
🦋 :: Science Corner :: What are the medicinal alkaloids that make cacao so powerful?
Theobroma Cacao is the official name for the cacao plant. One of the main active alkaloids is Theobromine, which is a much more gentle, healing cousin of caffeine. It stimulates your blood flow, allowing more blood to flow to your heart, to your head and to every part of your body; it is a heart opener and a third eye activator in quite the most physical sense. It allows you to become more connected and aligned, allowing your energy to fully move through you.
🦋 Cacao also has an amino acid in it called Tryptophan, which opens up the dopamine receptors in your brain. This means that instead of giving you a buzz for a few hours that then causes you to crash, tryptophan actually enables your brain to create more serotonin on its own, and this is something that stays with you for far longer than the effects you feel from your cup of cacao. It is even possible to heal mental imbalances and restore a brain’s depleted well of serotonin for the long-term while sitting with cacao regularly, especially in an intentional or ritualistic way.
🦋 A large amount of magnesium is also present in the cacao bean. Magnesium works beautifully on the nervous system; it stabilizes it and relaxes you, doing wonders for anxiety, fear, low moods, stress and trauma.
🦋 Another main proponent in cacao, and perhaps our favorite, is anandamine, also known as the ‘bliss molecule.’ Anandamine is an alkaloid that instigates a feeling of pure joy, home, and happiness. It makes you feel safe and alleviates pain, and has a similar rush to the endorphins after exercise. It produces feelings of euphoria and works as a natural antidepressant. It invokes a feeling of coming back home to the womb.
🦋 The divine feminine spirit of Mama Cacao feels like that: Coming home to the womb of Gaia, being wrapped up in the embrace of the Goddess mother, and returning to both the childlike wonder and the sacred parental nurturer we have within our own bodies, arms open and ready to welcome us.
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💫 2 spots remain for our Replenish Retreat on July 18. 4 spots remain for our retreat on August 8.
💫 Appointments to book a naturopathic consultation with Dr. Sugrue are available for next week, as well as for our day spa packages, and other healing modalities and offerings.
☎️ Call or text us to book, or for more details: 808-430-3500
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