cacao dieta & the butterfly effect

How do you write about something that was never meant to be understood by the mind? I've been home for a few days now, yet a part of me is still sitting in that mountain hut, beneath those mountains, creating earth altars, cradled by the scent of cacao and forest. Words feel too small to reduce something so vast and intimate into small structured sentences. I guess some experiences are never meant to be fully translated for the world, but perhaps they are simply meant to be lived through us allowing our frequency to elevate, to send even more ripples of healing and inspiration and rememberance...

I also didn't come home carrying one great revelation, or any dramatic breakthroughs, instead, I came home so much more in love and closer to myself, to the earth, to the women who walked beside me in this journey. I feel closer to the inner knowing that the wild woman is something that lives within all of us. Coming back into the "real" world has felt strange. Even here in Austria, where I live in a quiet mountain village, I can already feel a difference of the unseen weight of some sort of identity slowly settling back onto my shoulders. But last week, offline in those mountains, none of that existed. Not our online persona, our respobisilites, any plans or schedules. For that week, life belonged to something much older. Only the rhythm of the sun and the moon, the birds and butterflies, the pull of intuition. We followed whatever called to us. Everything was in conversation with us and we remembered how to listen, and to trust those signs again. The earth held us like a mother who had been waiting patiently for her daughters to come home, the rivers stripped us bare (literally), the water softened our hearts so deeply, and the fire became an altar of death. Offering after offering, we surrendered old stories, past lives, old versions of ourselves, trusting that every ending carries the seed of another beginning. Creativity and imagination began flowing freely again, no longer bound by pressure, time, or the need for an outcome. My journal transformed into an altar and its pages filled with pressed leaves, wildflowers, colours, sketches, and fragments of the forest. Where once there had only been black and white, life returned in every page.

Nature wasn't simply surrounding us, she was participating in ceremony and perhaps that is what we've forgotten. We speak of connecting with nature as though she exists somewhere outside of us but in this space there was no separation, only relationship.

Time also disappeared. Days were no longer measured by clocks but by the sunlight, by the changing colours of the sky, by the songs around the fire, by the fullness of the moon. Time began to feel like the system, the rhythms of earth felt like the truth. We are not made for clocks. We are made for seasons. We ended up praying, chanting, speaking, embracing for hours and hours on end. Remembering that we, too, are cyclical, are nature. And without even realising it, we began embodying the Mayan day energies before actually learning what they were each day. There was an intelligence beneath thinking and the body remembers what the mind has forgotten. There was something ancient awakening from deep within us.

And then of course, we sat with mama cacao. Initially, we gathered to deepen our already existent relationship with our plant ally cacao. Every cup and every ceremony opened a different doorway. We could taste, smell and feel the lands and history of each cacao we sat with. Some invited grief, some laughter, some dissolved the walls around our hearts so gently that we hardly noticed they had fallen. It was an invitation deeper into ourselves and into each other, over and over again. Until love and understanding became the only thing left.

Maybe the greatest gift wasn't just the ceremonies, but it was the women. I have never experienced a group so naturally devoted to one another. So willing to witness and hold each other, to trust and celebrate and weep and laugh until our bellies ached. Women remembering women. It made me wonder how long we have survived without this. How many generations have forgotten what happens when women gather without masks and the ego? Because it felt SO instinctive as though our bones recognised one another long before our names did. It reminded me that ceremony, prayer and nature are not a luxury, they are our inheritance. We are meant to sit around fires and chant, we are meant to bathe naked in rivers hours on end without shame, we are meant to sing before we know the words, to braid each other's hair, to touch, to dream aloud, to birth new worlds together.

In our modern world, we were taught that this was extraordinary or crazy, it isn't. It is simply what it means to be a woman. As I sat beneath the presence of the earthy full moon, surrounded by these beautiful, wild women, I knew that every single step of my life had been leading me there. That every hearbreak, every "wrong turn", every choice that felt impossible at the time... they were all guiding me. I was always meant to return here. The butterfly effect unfolding exactly as it was meant to. I was simply finding my way back to the earth, back to safe sisterhood, back to most beautiful and messiest self.

I believe nature responded to us because we surrendered and trusted we were never separate from her. That we belong to the rivers, the trees, the fire, the mountains, and to one another. May every woman who walks this earth know this kind of love. May every woman remember what it feels like to be held and understood. May every woman find her way back to her mother, the earth.