I am about to celebrate two huge milestones in my life, and I’d love to celebrate them with you in my favorite fashion: by telling stories and sharing practices.

Next year, I am moving into my fourth decade, and next month, I am celebrating seven years of partnership with a whole other human being.

This human has loved me unconditionally for seven whole years, and still wants more.

Can you believe it?

Gavin and I have spent seven years in partnership, as lovers, confidants, best friends, business partners, and spiritual pilgrims.

Those years have been spent as two autonomous individuals learning how to navigate our own wants, needs, and very serious, “neurospicy” idiosyncrasies.

The biggest lesson I’ve learned over almost 40 years of radical living, and seven years in radical partnership:

“Let your freak flag fly!”

Do you get me?

Let me rephrase, for everyone in the back:

You, and only YOU, have to live inside your head, inside your heart, and inside your intimate relationship.

It’s time to lean into all of the weird, unhinged, and seemingly unforgivable things that you wonder about.

Give yourself space to try things out, and give your partner the same.

It is only through radical curiosity that we can arrive at our most loveable place.

Unmasking relational “shoulds” and reclaiming our strange

We often receive the comment that we are the “perfect couple,” and we have to laugh and ask, “Perfect to whom, exactly?”

We’ve spent the better part of our lives being constantly reminded of just how strange we are in comparison to “normal” humans.

We don’t have “real jobs.”

We don’t have a “real family.”

We don’t have a “real relationship,” if you follow all of the conventional rules of relating.

As the years go by, our lives move even farther away from that baseline.

Each year, we seem to get more and more radical about living exactly how we desire to live.

If you’ve ever spent a day with either of us, you understand that we are unconventional beings.

Sure, we are loving, dynamic, and easygoing, but we are also hyper-focused on our dreams, extremely opinionated, and intentionally radical about how and why we live our lives in the ways that we do.

Living unconventionally means divesting from societal “shoulds” to prioritize what is genuinely true for your unique dream and partnership.

It requires abandoning a prefab life structure in favor of co-creating a fluid container where you can show up in your full, unmasked authenticity.

As Sondra Ray writes in Loving Relationships, “There are no shoulds; there are no supposed tos... All kinds of different relationships are going on in the universe; one form is no better than another.”

This perspective allows us to focus on “co-creating a context that makes pleasure easier to access,” as Emily Nagoski describes, rather than attempting to live up to a rigid societal template.

In short, we are an intense experience together, and an intense experience apart.

Fierce privacy and interdependence

Last week, Gav surprised me during my trip to the United States by sharing the story of how we met, and fell in love, and all of the inspiration that followed that famous Rainbow Rub. (IYKYK!)

In the coming weeks, I will continue to celebrate our unlikely coming together as two very different people, who did not see sparks fly at all when we first met, yet somehow grew into lovers who gush over each other, and admire each other daily.

I’ll share seven stories and insights about our relationship.

Each one comes with a simple invitation and practice that you might explore in your own life.

There are more nourishing practices along these lines in our book, Cacao Ceremony, which you can find here.

These are seven truths of our dynamic that work particularly well for us.

This isn’t to say that these techniques are “one size fits all,” but hopefully they will inspire you to live your wildest dreams as your most unmasked, authentic self; in your work life, your spiritual life, and your intimate life.

After all, you are the only one who has to live that life every day.

I generally don’t post personal pictures or moments with my partners (and I rarely have).

You may have noticed, I don’t post Gavin very much on my Instagram.

Why?

For the same reason you’ll rarely catch a picture of my altar, or private ceremonies.

I don’t “hard launch” (as the kids say these days) the most intimate moments of my life online, or in any public space.

I tend to be fiercely private about most of the sacred parts of my life (thanks, Scorpio Sun!).

But it’s Virgo season, and I want to be intentional and organized about celebrating our love, and what it has taken to reach a place where we often complete each other’s thoughts before we even speak them aloud.

After the psychedelic stroke that brought us into orgasmic art, and after the first of many months of honeymoon and hot sex-educator sex, we found ourselves living in a simple cottage on a vast forest property, getting to know each other in the most intimate ways, sharing every waking moment together during COVID lockdown.

We found ourselves in a country where we knew almost no-one, as we began to unravel together.

We slowly learned what true trust, interdependence, and partnership meant to each of us through fumbling, making mistakes, getting pissed off, and sometimes running away.

Finally, we surrendered to the fact that we are life partners, and the perfect spiritual partnering for our soul’s evolution.

I came to understand that God and the Bwiti put Gavin in my life forever so that we could build the best versions of ourselves, and joyfully fulfil our mission together, day by day.

And guess what? To a lot of people, that life and that mission look pretty freaking weird.

Confession 1: Reclaiming silence and resolving resentment

Gav and I don’t talk for the first two to three hours of the day (and it’s okay for you to do that too!).

I remember the first time I worked with a couple who came to me for a relationship session.

They were going through a rough patch.

I explained that despite Gav looking at me like a wide-eyed SpongeBob as soon as he wakes up, I am still floating in the unconscious, and don’t have a word to my name.

I like to preserve that pristine and silent state when returning from the dreamworld.

At the beginning of our relationship, I would sit in silent protest as Gavin chirped all of his morning meditations at me first thing in the morning.

He’d tell me everything he had received in prayer and ritual before the sun came up.

I would sip my maté and lament sullenly about how my own dreams and sense of center had slipped away while listening to him.

Yet I never said anything.

This led to me being snappy, annoyed that my peace had been so rudely jolted, which meant I wasn’t fully present for anything he shared in those one-sided morning conversations.

We were both left frustrated and feeling disconnected at the start of the day, rather than sharing a sense of togetherness.

Then came one bright morning after I had stayed up late playing music.

Gav had already been awake for hours and couldn’t wait to tell me everything from his morning readings.

After he began to share, and I could barely muster a nod, I registered the disappointment spreading across his face.

I wasn’t showing enthusiasm for the brilliant concepts he was recounting from his studies.

I paused, ready to pull the chain on the annoyance motor, when I suddenly thought to communicate instead: “Why don’t you share this with me later when I’m fully awake so that I can bring my full presence to it?”

He responded enthusiastically, “Sure!”

I was so surprised that he wasn’t upset or sad at my communication; in fact, he was even more stoked to share with me after my own morning routine.

Our morning silence worked so well that it became our rule.

I get to have silent time in my woman-cave first thing in the morning.

A kiss and a wave might be all I have in me during those morning hours.

Once I emerge from my cave, we cheerfully share cacao (restock your supply here), all that we’ve learned, and what we are going to be working on for the day ahead.

In our most important relationships, silence can’t be peaceful when it is built on unexpressed annoyance; instead, we must learn to notice that internal friction, and muster the courage to request what we actually need, or discover together what we both need.

Shifting from silent protest to direct communication honors both our autonomy and our partner’s presence.

As Betty Martin explains in The Art of Receiving and Giving, “Resentment is a sign to ask: what did I want that I didn’t ask for?”

Similarly, John and Julie Gottman remind us in Fight Right that “our partners are not mind readers, no matter how well and how deeply they know us.”

Rather than letting resentment fester, making a direct, loving request clears the field for genuine connection.

Practice: Interrupting acquiescence

Betty Martin describes enduring (or “acquiescence”) as going along with something reluctantly, without protest.

Are there any places where are you enduring parts of your relationship, rather than finding genuine pleasure in your interactions?

What rules, requests, and structural changes can you put in place to create a new, mutually nourishing dynamic?

Confession 2: Relational shape-shifting, and celebrating friendships with ex-lovers

We are friends with each other’s ex-partners and lovers.

When Gavin and I met, we had both experienced long-term, loving relationships that we knew would last a lifetime, even if they shifted shape or form.

True relational liberation allows connections to evolve over time, without losing their underlying love and commitment.

Welcoming ex-partners into your community rejects fear-based rules of ownership, celebrating instead a more expansive reality of love.

When I traveled to the UK, I met up with Gavin’s ex-partner of six years, brought her gifts and souvenirs, and jokingly but seriously asked if she had a training manual to operate him successfully!

Meanwhile, when Gavin came to visit me in New Orleans, my own ex-partner picked us up from the airport, and we shared a ceremony together within the first few days of our arrival. (If sharing ceremony with those you love inspires you, our facilitator training guides you on that beautiful and nourishing journey.)

We still hold an open invitation for him to come and live with us whenever he’s ready.

I remember my first boyfriend getting upset with me because I stayed close friends with past lovers, and often slept over at male friends’ houses.

He believed it was totally inappropriate.

I often see relationship coaches claiming that platonic friendships between men and women are impossible, or that exes must be erased from your life to prevent temptation.

I find those rules incongruent with my own lived experience.

In fact, my own rule is simple: if a person I am dating doesn’t have friends of the opposite sex, how can I trust that they see me as anything more than an object of desire?

Practice: Weeding your relational garden

To protect your relationship from smothering or projection, you must actively examine the rules you inherited from your upbringing.

We cannot build authentic connection until we identify which of our relational fears are built on faulty ancestral premises.

In Loving Relationships, Sondra Ray warns that “a pattern is a repetitive unconscious behavior” that often mirrors the disapproval or struggle of our parents.

Similarly, Emily Nagoski writes in Come Together about the vital task of going through our emotional gardens, row by row, to weed out the “toxic crap” we inherited from our families and culture.

Think about the rules or phrases you repeat, or the stories your parents echoed, that you continue to carry.

Are any of these patterns built upon a faulty premise, or a fear that leads you to smother or reject your partner?

Confession 3: Cultivating intimacy through separate space and solo adventures

I take two to three solo trips each year, as a rule.

I have spent most of my life in polyrhythmic living.

I travel often for music or research, which often means being thousands of miles away from my partner for months at a time.

In my twenties, I also lived by myself for many years, which was one of the most informative and nourishing times of my life.

Protecting your personal space and taking solo trips is not a rejection of your partner; it is a vital nutrient for a polyrhythmic lifestyle.

Maintaining a healthy relationship requires balancing intense togetherness with separate, sacred sanctuaries of your own.

I am completely in agreement with Sondra Ray, who talks about the importance of “giving each other space,” even designing a relationship house with a shared bedroom, alongside adjoining private sanctuaries for each partner to retreat to in solitude.

She explains that having space allows partners to “maintain their independence and creativity without developing secret resentment.”

One of my top recommendations for couples is ensuring enough space and separation to track your own thoughts, feelings, and energetic centers, so they remain distinctly yours, rather than merging with your partner’s.

The second thing I recommend is traveling without your partner on occasion.

When we enter completely new situations, our decision-making, perception, and sense of joy must shine on their own.

Practice making decisions and spend nourishing time alone.

Practice: Venturing out lonesomely

Is there a place you are dying to visit that your partner just isn’t into?

Do you tend to coax or force them into tagging along on adventures, when they’d rather be doing something else?

What if you let go of the expectation that they accompany your every step, and instead start planning that adventure with a friend, or, perhaps, all by your lonesome?

(If the thought of such a trip sparks joy, and you are feeling the call for an adventure of your own, I am guiding an immersive journey to Bahia, Brazil in January, 2027. Drop me a message if you want to get on the wait-list!)

As always, we value and appreciate your reflections as you read our love letters, and look forward to sharing the rest of my relational and erotic confessions in the next instalment.

Until then, with love,
Diane x

In a world that pulls you in a thousand directions, cacao brings you home to your heart…

1. Order ceremonial cacao, sourced directly from Asháninka growers in Peru. (Subscribe and save 20%!)

2. Join our facilitator training and learn to hold space with the integrity this medicine deserves.

3. Order our book Cacao Ceremony, a guide for anyone called to share this medicine with the people around them.

4. Join Gavin’s mini-course and learn to carry an open heart from ceremony into everyday life.

My relationship with Diane is polyrhythmic.

It is not the poly style most people think of when considering relationship structures outside the cultural norm, but it’s a way of creating a life together that is lasting, secure, surprising, and, most of all, deeply fulfilling.

This love letter is truly a love letter to my beloved: a celebration of our union and an exploration of how the way we’ve chosen to create a life together is a deep reflection of what I believe to be the most natural way humans have evolved to love.

Two rhythms at the same tempo

A polyrhythm is a musical structure where two or more independent rhythms are played together, at the same tempo. Two (or more) rhythmic loops repeat in the same timeframe, but they are divided into a different number of beats. For a simple visual of how this works, I love Robert Inventor’s Bounce Metronome in this old YouTube video.

How does this musical structure influence ways of relating in intimate union? First, both rhythms are anchored to the same starting point. When we fell in love (I wrote about my unlikely first encounter with Diane in my last letter), we made a conscious decision to do this together. Diane told me, with a smile, that “we’re gonna have so much fun.”

For polyrhythm to work, both rhythms must begin at (and return to) the same starting point. In relationship, this could be the same life vision, the same dreams, or the same core values.

As I write these words, I’m emerging from a ceremony in one of the initiatory traditions we practise, and the core insight from my journey is at the forefront of my mind. I had never really considered the full depth of what it truly means to choose to live a life together before.

As one participant shared with me after his own journey, “we are born alone and we die alone, and the time we are given in between is so precious.”

Indeed, and therefore what a monumental thing it is to make a decision to share that precious time, that’s ever ticking away, with another person.

Returning to the one

We start from the same place.

Time, and our own rhythm of living, springs forth from this beginning, and we return to that starting point again and again. This returning to the one is what transforms any arrangement of noise into rhythm, the recognisable and reassuring return home. Then we repeat.

There is a delight in that coming back together, time and time again, as we move through our lives. At different times, one rhythm might be moving quickly, and one more slowly, and we might take on different rhythms through our different life phases. The conscious return, day after day, month after month, to that same, shared point of orientation is what builds secure attachment, and what reminds us why we are doing this together in the first place.

Returning to the one is a replenishment of our emotional, intimate and spiritual selves, each round of the song adding new layers of life experience to the unfolding groove of a shared life.

A hermit and a dérive

In my relationship with Diane, this principle expresses itself across multiple frames of time.

I work best, and feel most alive, when I spend most of my day in solitude and silence. I feel a deep sense of gratitude that my life affords me the possibility to live in this monastic way.

Diane is more social, and finds nourishment in spontaneous adventures. She is a champion of the dérive, the psychogeographical concept, popularised by Guy Debord, of setting out on unplanned and spontaneous journeys through the urban landscape. He considered this a necessary response to the increasingly predictable and monotonous experience of everyday life in advanced capitalism.

I relish a day at home with a joy comparable to Diane’s social spontaneity, moving mindfully through a slow, steady routine of my work, spiritual and musical practices, with the minimum external input. The life of a hermit is my not-so-secret fantasy!

This is how we live on a week-to-week basis. Every year, Diane also spends a few months travelling alone, in an extended dérive, while I have the solitary pleasure of extended hours, days and weeks in a slow, monastic rhythm on our homestead.

We always return to the one. The expectation, anticipation and eventual resolution of this rhythm are what give so much life, vibrancy and sustainability to our love.

We have an unfettered freedom together to be who we most truly are, in our individuality, yet still cherish the shared vision, love and intimacy that comes from choosing to live this adventure together.

When you and your partner get so close that you’re now a fusion rather than two separate people, you no longer have anyone to connect with. You have to reintroduce distance if you want to reintroduce desire. This can be psychological distance, for example, asking your partner to ignore you rather than immediately greet you when you get home from work. Or it can be literal ⁠— one of you leaves for a while. Either way, it can be helpful to think of the distance-creation as sexual play rather than a rejection. It can also help to remember that the closeness you and partner have established gives you a strong foundation to return to.

— Esther Perel, Mating in Captivity

The health of the whole system

The more experience I gain working the land, the more I see this way of relating as a reflection of the forest’s innate wisdom. In a syntropic system, our practice is to continuously return to a vision of the whole. What is the health of the ecosystem? Which parts of the tree lines are flourishing? Where are the areas that need more attention? Where do I need to water more liberally, or mulch more heavily? The parallels to a healthy, vibrant relationship are obvious, but perhaps less so is the understanding that in an abundant system, trees have different purposes, and therefore different lifespans.

It is fascinating to observe a forest from afar during a windstorm. If you watch the treetops, you will see how each tree moves slightly differently when the wind hits it. Some right themselves as others begin to bend. This means that when one tree is bending over, the tree next to it is providing support. The whole forest moves, but each individual tree moves to its own rhythm, protecting its neighbors and making the forest strong in the face of the storm.

— Peter Wohlleben, Forest Walking

In agroforestry, there is no taboo against cutting down trees; the issue is always not planting or replanting enough.

I was reading a lively exchange on Instagram this week in which (yet another) conversation had been sparked about the validity of the term “ceremonial grade” in relation to cacao. It’s a conversation I’m somewhat weary of at this point; however, what caught my eye was a list put forward by a group of people who had attempted to create a set of concepts to define the term. One principle was that in a “ceremonial” approach, trees that are not productive are not cut down, but are allowed to live out their full life span.

This is a romantic idea, and one that could only come from people who don’t actually work the land. Agroforestry is hard work, and even walking up and down tree lines over a modest two-acre plot like ours to inspect the life and vitality of the system requires a significant expenditure of energy each day.

As humans, we are active and engaged participants in a system teeming with life. If we are growing trees from seed, we always plant significantly more seeds than we’ll eventually allow to grow to maturity. Humans have been doing this for as long as we’ve tended our plots, selecting for vitality, vigour and sweetness. A tree that has struggled to establish itself will be removed, its branches and trunk chopped, and returned to the earth with gratitude as it breaks down and feeds the microbes of the forest floor.

To return a tree to the earth like this is a beautiful process. It’s a gift to the earth, and one offered in gratitude and knowing that it will allow more vibrant life to follow in its wake.

The pulse of living

In our relationship, we have always taken the same approach. Whenever one of us realises that there is some aspect of our relating that’s not living in full vibrancy, we first observe what’s going on, and then attempt to identify together the root cause. We collaborate on forming a remedial plan. Is more nourishment required in this area of our lives? Is this something we need to remove entirely, and give thanks for the insight it’s brought us, to make space for new life to emerge in the space left behind?

This is a co-creative process, and reframes “problems” as invitations and experiments for change. It also creates a pulse of living, and each round of the rhythm offers its own obstacles and gifts.

After we set off once more from our shared starting point, we have the spaciousness to live by our own design, our own feel through life. To be held so deeply in the love of another, while simultaneously experiencing the freedom to pursue the dreaming of our own hearts, is a very precious gift. It’s one I don’t take for granted in my relationship with Diane, and it’s an invitation I encourage all lovers to explore in their own unions.

Over time in a relationship, as long as you’ve got clear communication skills, as long as you’re processing your stuff, as long as you’re holding a space where past traumas of previous relationships and things that have gone wrong can be witnessed and healed and released, you drop into a deeper and deeper space of love together.

— Sarah Rose Bright, Making Love Last

Holding that kind of space is a practice in itself, and if you feel ready to offer conscious guidance to others, our facilitator training takes you step-by-step along that journey.

This week’s invitation

This week’s invitation is to plan a date with your lover, or a date with yourself if you are not in union, as, of course, our primary relationship is always with ourselves.

Schedule at least an hour, and mark it in the calendar.

Prepare a cacao using your favourite recipe (restock your supply).

Take turns to ask each other the following questions, and listen with your presence, allowing your awareness to settle in your heart space.

If you are performing this ritual alone, ask yourself the second set of questions, and free-write your answers in your journal. There are more nourishing practices along these lines in our book, Cacao Ceremony, which you can order here.

Questions for lovers

1. When you think back to the moment when we chose this life together, what part of that choice feels most alive in you now?

2. What is the area of your life where you most appreciate the freedom to explore your own rhythm, your own way of living and doing things?

3. Is there anything I could do to provide more spaciousness for you here?

4. When we come back together after time apart, what tells you that you’ve arrived home?

5. What comes alive in you when you are away from me?

6. What are you moving towards in your own life that I might not have noticed yet?

7. What is something you do alone that you would love me to understand more?

8. Is there a rhythm you used to live by that you miss?

9. What would you do with a week entirely your own, if nothing had to be arranged around me (or our family)?

10. Where in your life do you feel the pull to slow down?

11. Where do you feel the pull to move more quickly?

12. What small thing could I do this week that would make your own rhythm easier to live by?

13. What would you like us to give thanks for, before we let it go?

14. What phase of life do you feel we are now entering, and what will it ask of us?

Solo questions for your journal

1. How would you describe the current rhythm of your life?

2. What does it feel like in your body when your pace is right?

3. What nourishes you that you can only find alone?

4. What nourishes you that you can only find in company?

5. Who or what do you return to, again and again, that feels like home?

6. Which area of your life is flourishing right now, and what have you been doing to make that so?

7. Which area needs more of your attention, and what would attention actually look like there?

8. What seeds have you planted and never tended?

9. What have you been giving your energy to out of habit?

10. What freedom do you have now that you would want to keep, if you ever chose to share your life with somebody else?

11. What commitment would you want to make to yourself, before you make one to anyone else?

12. What phase of life do you feel you are now entering, and what will it ask of you?

With love,
Gavin x

In a world that pulls you in a thousand directions, cacao brings you home to your heart…

1. Order ceremonial cacao, sourced directly from Asháninka growers in Peru. (Subscribe and save 20%!)

2. Join our facilitator training and learn to hold space with the integrity this medicine deserves.

3. Order our book Cacao Ceremony, a guide for anyone called to share this medicine with the people around them.

4. Join my mini-course and learn to carry an open heart from ceremony into everyday life.

It’s about to be the seven-year anniversary of my relationship with Diane.

When we met, the stony ground I was sitting on was a bit cold, biting through the poncho that my friend Hannah had given to me as a gift.

I was glad for the hot water in my gourd of mate, the South American leaf, which, like cacao, also contains theobromine.

Autumn in Glastonbury is always a beautiful time of year, as the mists descend and brown leaves trail the winding roads up towards the Tor.

I’d turned up early after a morning walk, and was waiting for the person with the key to the building to arrive.

It was the first day in a two-week immersion of this year’s Sexological Bodywork training.

I was part of the teaching faculty, and so was Diane.

I knew this, because for the past 18 months, the founder of the school had told me that when we would eventually meet, we were going to fall in love, and end up together.

Diane knew nothing about this; it was only me who was informed of our emerging fate.

At the time, I remember that I’d checked out my future spouse on Instagram, but didn’t really give this future much thought, occupied as I was with my current life trajectory.

We met for the first time that morning.

She was the first person to show up, finding me sitting on the cold, stony ground, drinking a steaming mate.

We still reminisce with a smile today that neither of us felt any particular kind of attraction to one another at first.

A few days into the training, building upon foundational work of consent, we began our morning practice of orgasmic yoga, specifically an erotic massage meditation.

With her typically wicked sense of humour, the matchmaking founder of the training invited Diane to demonstrate a penis massage in front of the class of student sex educators.

She followed up without missing a beat by inviting me to be the recipient volunteer.

The stroke Diane demonstrated that morning is called Rainbow Rub, an erotic practice developed by Joseph Kramer, the school’s founder, in the 1980s.

This class demonstration happened to be our first actual encounter with each other, aside from casual greetings each morning when we showed up for class.

I suppose I have Joseph to thank for bringing us together that morning, as we became closer friends as the weeks unfolded.

Around the training days, we shared some very beautiful and memorable ceremonies together in Glastonbury, then when the course finished, Diane stayed in the UK for a few more weeks, and, as predicted, we fell in love.

We long-distanced for a while, and then she came back to the UK and spent Christmas with my parents.

After that, I left the UK to make a new life with her in New Orleans.

I loved my time there, and my morning cacao ritual encountered some serious competition from chicory-coffee and the frosted-sugar beignets that are so famous in the city.

A month later, we were invited to play music at a ceremony in Kenya.

The first lockdowns happened, and the two weeks we were supposed to spend in East Africa became six years, with a spirited Great Dane, 2,000 trees, and a thriving cacao nursery on two acres of land near the forest.

We haven’t sent a love letter for while. Diane has been travelling in the US (we launched Cacao Love stateside at the beginning of the year), and I’ve been pruning my life away as our burgeoning food forest is exploding with growth following the late rains this summer.

In this time away from Diane, aside from missing her in the way that I always do, I’ve found myself thinking back to that Rainbow Rub, seven years ago.

A single, slow stroke

What happens when we remove the endless possibility of any given moment, and narrow our awareness and our presence to a single point of focus?

That’s the essence of Rainbow Rub: a single, slow, genital stroke, repeated for twenty minutes.

In this way, it is a meditation of sensation, with no goal, and no momentum that builds to ejaculation, although if that happens then it’s welcomed as another part of the experience, rather than its inevitable conclusion.

The psychedelic root of Sexological Bodywork

When I began my training as a Sexological Bodyworker, Joseph Kramer, the founder of the modality, joined our training as a guest.

After finding out about my work with mushrooms, he shared with me the true origins of the training.

He had experienced deep revelations with mushrooms, and wanted to guide people who couldn’t or didn’t want to use psychedelics into the altered states he’d discovered, and so he set out to use erotic touch as the gateway.

To safeguard the credibility of the practice, he hadn’t publicly shared this aspect of his inspiration, but now that the psychedelic boom was underway, with Western institutions reopening their labs, he told me that he was “coming out of the closet” once more!

Rainbow Rub, the practice that brought Diane and I together, is a single penis massage stroke, created by Matthew Simmons in 1988, and filmed by Joseph Kramer for his sex education video, Fire on the Mountain.

A version for vulvas, called Rainbow Caress, was also developed, based on similar principles.

Despite the fact that it has been taught to thousands of students for almost 40 years, it is scarcely known outside of a small cohort of sex geeks who have encountered the universe of sexological bodywork.

To uncover how a single stroke can lead to so much expansion, we’ll begin with the structure of the practice itself: the separation of giving and receiving.

Taking turns

In so much conventional lovemaking, partners engage in a mutual play, where both people “do” and are “done to” simultaneously.

While this offers a pleasure of its own, the separation of giving and receiving into turn-based erotic practice offers hidden depths of sensation and elevation for both people exploring together.

The simple nature of the practice, the fact that it consists of one single stroke, repeated for usually twenty minutes, provides a boundaried exploration with gifts of its own.

The paradox of less choice

Since the invention of the electric lightbulb, we’ve lived in a world where all activity is possible, all day and all night.

It’s an existence without the boundaries of natural time, and when anything can be pursued, anywhere, at any time, it becomes more difficult to find meaning and fulfilment in the necessity of space and time.

In my own work as a Sexological Bodyworker, so many of my sessions involved the creation of boundaried micro-experiences, where participants could explore previously unfathomable depths of sensation by the drastic reduction of possibility.

It is the same skill as holding the clear, boundaried space that our facilitator training teaches, for those ready to offer conscious guidance to others.

I realise how counter-intuitive this may seem.

One way to think about it is the way that water bursts through the end of the hose pipe when we partially cover the opening with our thumb. The introduction of a deliberate limitation increases the force proportionally.

Similarly, the limitation of movement and freedom of thought in meditation increases the power of our concentration and presence.

A boundaried practice time of twenty minutes combined with a single massage stroke creates a deliberate limitation where depth of experience intensifies.

With nowhere to go, and the removal of novelty, new vistas of sensation begin to open up within.

By sharing a practice that has a clearly defined beginning and end, plus a planned course of action, we have the opportunity to allow ourselves to relax more deeply into the ever-emerging present moment.

The paradox is that by removing the element of surprise or the unknown, we open up more possibility to surprising and previously unknown inner discoveries.

One reason for naming the stroke Rainbow Rub was the curved shape of the hand of the giver, but another reason was the inner, psychedelic, rainbow visions many receivers of the practice report.

There is a way to deepen this even further, by preparing the ground with cacao before the practice begins.

Bliss molecules and blood flow

My invitation for readers who have partners or playmates is to explore these practices as an expression of your practice with cacao. (If you’re running low, you can restock your cupboard here.)

N-acylethanolamines found in cacao inhibits a fatty acid called amide hydrolase, the enzyme that breaks down anandamide. Anandamide is the endocannabinoid that binds to cannabinoid receptors in the brain to reduce pain, anxiety, and fear.

The effect of this mechanism is that both the ingested and the body’s natural “bliss molecules” accumulate and linger for longer in our bodies, a perfect precursor to enhance intimate touch.

Cacao’s flavanols stimulate the release of nitric oxide (NO) in the vascular endothelium, the inner lining of our blood vessels, dilating them and increasing blood flow throughout the body.

The brain’s reward pathways use NO as their main neurotransmitter, and its rise amplifies the neural circuitry of pleasure and desire. It could therefore be described as the messenger of sense-memory in sex.

Cacao also helps to calm the activity of the brain’s Default Mode Network, bringing us out of hyper-rational, thought-riddled overthinking, and into a more present, grounded, and “heart-centred” state.

Cacao’s methylxanthines are powerful vasodilators that widen blood vessels and improve microcirculation throughout the body. Clinical trials show that blood flow to the skin increases by up to 70% within two hours of consuming cacao. This dramatic rush of oxygenated blood to the cutaneous tissues creates a literal “sensual glow,” and a highly noticeable physical warmth that directly elevates physical sensitivity to touch, skin-on-skin contact, and temperature.

Dipping our toes into the science of cacao reveals why I recommend partnering pleasure with our favourite, sensual drink for such a joyous combination!

How to practise Rainbow Rub

Here is my guide to Rainbow Rub, adapted from Joseph’s original instructions.

Start with a shared cacao ritual, and schedule a full hour for this practice.

Each person receives a 20 minute massage, with space for rest and integration afterwards, before switching roles.

1. The receiver lies on their back, either on the floor, bed or on a massage table. Drape their legs over the giver, in a position similar to the yab-yum of Tibetan Buddhist iconography (you’ll find many illustrations online). If you have a backjack meditation seat, the giver might want to use this for more comfort. Place a small hand towel under the genitals of the receiver to catch any oil that might drip or spill. Set a timer for twenty minutes.

2. Position the oil within reach. I prefer cold-pressed coconut oil for this massage, but grape seed oil works well too. The giver cups their partner’s genitals with their hands. Spend a few minutes breathing deeply together, releasing each exhale with a gentle sound.

3. The giver uses their non-massaging hand to pull the skin or foreskin of the penis towards its base, so that the area beneath the frenulum becomes taut. (The area below the frenulum is very sensitive, and is sometimes called the clitoris of the penis.) By doing this, the concentrated cluster of nerve endings in this small area is available to be touched, whether or not the penis is erect. Erection is entirely unnecessary for this erotic practice. Note that the area to be caressed here is not the head of the penis, but the area 2-3cm below.

4. A small amount of oil is placed on the heel of the massaging hand. No other oil is necessary, either on the penis itself, or the hands of the massager. By keeping the fingertips and head of the penis unlubricated, it’s easier to anchor the rainbow position in place.

5. The giver rests the finger tips of the massaging hand against the topside of the penis, just below the rim of the head. The massaging hand thus forms the shape of a rainbow.

6. Begin the massage by squeezing the shaft of the penis between the fingertips and the heel of the palm. While squeezing, glide the lubricated heel of the palm up to just below the head of the penis. The stroke doesn’t include the frenulum itself. Move the heel of the palm back down, and repeat the stroke. If the penis is soft, stroke in one direction, upwards towards the head. If the penis is semi-erect, or erect, it can be rubbed up and down. There is no need to squeeze during the downstroke.

7. The speed of the stroke is slow, and can be synchronised to steady, deep inhales and exhales.

8. After twenty minutes, cup the genitals to signal the end of the massage.

9. Both partners spend a few moments in stillness.

Practising the Rainbow Caress

Despite the simplicity of the Rainbow Caress, its single, slow, one-finger stroke stimulates most of the erectile tissue of the vulva and vagina: the glans and body of the clitoris beneath the hood, the vestibular bulbs, and the urethral sponge, briefly entering the vagina, and ending with a gentle pressure on the perineal sponge.

1. The receiver lies on their back, in the same yab-yum variation as before.

2. Place a small hand towel under the genitals of the receiver to catch any oil that might drip or spill. Set a timer for twenty minutes.

3. The giver positions the oil nearby, and begins by cupping their partner’s genitals with their hands. Spend a few minutes breathing deeply together, releasing each exhale with a gentle sound.

4. The giver applies oil to the pointing finger of the massaging hand.

5. Caress slowly downwards with a gentle but firm pressure, passing the urethral opening and briefly entering the vagina, until the finger tip rests on the perineal sponge.

6. Pause momentarily, withdraw the massaging finger and return it to the starting position to continue. There is no upward stroke in the rainbow caress.

7. If you feel any friction, or the receiver asks for more oil, apply as required for a smooth, gliding stroke.

8. After twenty minutes, cup the genitals to signal the end of the massage.

9. Both partners spend a few moments in stillness.

Joseph Kramer has kindly published an instructional video for the Rainbow Caress here.

An invitation to explore

Perhaps the simplicity of the practice is why these meditations are so little known.

Reducing an infinite realm of intimate possibility to two, simple strokes, an almost endless inner landscape awaits you both.

In the whole realm of erotic massage I’ve explored in the past two decades, it’s this meditation that I’ve found to be the most revelatory.

I am ever grateful to the thousands of you who read these love letters, and I hope by making this practice more widely known, we can together spread more joy and more pleasure in more bodies around the world.

With love,
Gavin x

In a world that pulls you in a thousand directions, cacao brings you home to your heart…

1. Order ceremonial cacao, sourced directly from Asháninka growers in Peru. (Subscribe and save 20%!)

2. Join our facilitator training and learn to hold space with the integrity this medicine deserves.

3. Order our book Cacao Ceremony, a guide for anyone called to share this medicine with the people around them.

4. Join my mini-course and learn to carry an open heart from ceremony into everyday life.

Continuing our Cacao Love celebration of the recent World Chocolate Day, here is the second part of our lesser known history of cacao, taking us up to the Spanish invasion in 1519, and how cacao reached Europe soon after.

If you are just joining us, you can read the first part here, and if you’d like to enjoy a warm cacao as you read, you can restock your kitchen cupboard here.

The Toltecs and Post-Classic Maya (900–1168 CE)

From 900 CE, as larger cities began to fragment, a new political power appeared in central-eastern Mexico in the form of the Toltecs, about whom little is known today.

At this time, Chichen Itza emerged as a city that seems to have been run by a nobility with far more military and strategic influence than was wielded during the theocratic Classic Maya era.

Its economy depended on warfare and commerce, including the trade or seizure of large quantities of highly valued cacao.

Chichen Itza is one of the most mysterious and studied ancient cities, remembered for the extraordinary feats of its people.

Its urban design revealed an intricate landscape of pyramids, temples, and ceremonial plazas.

The name Chichen Itza means “at the mouth of the well of the Itza,” referring to a people known as “Water Magicians” for their mastery of the sacred element that sustained their world.

The pyramids of Chichen Itza stand as testimony to their brilliance in architecture, mathematics, and astronomy.

The most famous structure, El Castillo, displays a breathtaking phenomenon: during the equinox, light and shadow form the image of a serpent undulating down the pyramid’s steps, a vision of Kukulcán, the feathered serpent deity.

These alignments reveal a culture whose constructions were both scientific instruments and sacred temples.

Within this city, rituals were performed to honour the gods, especially Cháak, the deity of rain.

Sacrifices at the temples were offerings to secure balance and fertility, ensuring that water, the lifeblood of the Maya world, would continue to flow.

The Toltecs practiced human sacrifice as a religious rite, removing still-beating hearts as one of the highest offerings to the gods.

During this era, the Yucatan Maya continued to cultivate cacao using traditional methods within their cacaotales: cacao orchards grown as part of biodiverse agroforestry systems.

A single hectare of land could accommodate over 600 cacao trees, with the first pods available for harvest three to four years after planting.

As in other parts of the Maya world, cacao was the main ingredient in several hot and cold drinks and was incorporated into maize porridges, the primary subsistence food of the people.

Cacao was also eaten as a toasted snack, and bartered with salt and metal tools.

For over two hundred years during this period, the city-state of Mayapan was ruled by noble families, with the support of local Mayan aristocracy.

It eventually fell, however, to an uprising in 1441, leading to a new phase of tribal warfare in the Yucatan.

The Mexica (1300–1521 CE)

While Toltec-Mayan city-states crumbled, the Mexica established themselves in the Valley of Mexico, developing a tribute system so powerful it would reshape trade, warfare, and even the role of cacao across Mesoamerica.

The so-called ‘Aztec empire’ was not a single territory, but a collection of states that paid tribute to the Mexica.

It was a powerful trade-based system.

The term ‘Aztec’ was invented by the German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt in 1810.

It comes from the Nahuatl word ‘Aztecatl’, which means ‘from Aztlan’, the Mexica’s mythical homeland.

As the Maya had done before them, the Mexica used cacao as currency, as well as a key ingredient in elaborate chocolate drinks.

This made cacao a luxury commodity in the Mexica capital, but now its consumption was restricted by law to nobles, warriors, and the royal household.

The Mexica also continued the tradition of using Psilocybe mushrooms in their rituals, as well as the vision-inducing seeds of morning glory vines, revering the spirits of these plants, and passing down sacred baskets to hold their seeds through generations of medicine carriers.

In a well-documented example, Montezuma celebrated his rise to the throne with a four-day ceremony where more than 2,000 dancers ingested sacred mushrooms.

This ritual induced connection with the gods, immersing participants in visionary states as the emperor’s divine purpose on earth was consecrated and celebrated.

The Spanish invasion (1519–1521 CE)

In 1519, Hernán Cortés arrived with a small band of Spanish invaders.

On their journey inland, they forged powerful alliances with Indigenous peoples who were long rivals of the Mexica, namely the Tlaxcalans.

With these coalitions numbering in the tens of thousands, they advanced toward the Mexica capital.

In late 1519, Emperor Montezuma II cautiously received Cortés and his entourage into Tenochtitlán.

The Spanish invaders soon held the emperor hostage, sparking unrest that plunged the Mesoamerican world into turmoil.

By 1520, a devastating smallpox epidemic swept through the city, killing nearly half of the population, including Montezuma’s successor, Cuitláhuac.

Only after more than a year of warfare, and with massive Indigenous support, did Cortés and his allies finally manage to capture Tenochtitlán in August 1521.

The fall of the Mexica was not a sudden or inevitable triumph of European superiority, as it is often purported.

It was a bitter struggle marked by shifting alliances, epidemic catastrophe, and the brutality of siege warfare.

Indigenous resistance was present at every step.

There were those who desired a powerful alliance, and fought beside the Spanish, and there were those who resisted throughout the invasion.

Spanish chronicles later claimed that Montezuma mistook Cortés for the god Quetzalcoatl, but there is no evidence that such a prophecy existed before the invasion.

These tales, likely embellished after the fact, served to portray the invasion as divine destiny, rather than the violent upheaval it truly was.

When the Spanish reached the Mexica capital, they entered a city where cacao was deeply embedded in ritual and daily life.

This cacao was grown in tributary provinces under Montezuma’s control, particularly in Chiapas, Veracruz and Oaxaca.

After the invasion, the Spanish demanded cacao beans as tribute, and introduced European farming techniques.

Disease and slavery decimated the Indigenous population, leading to a drop in cacao production as resources were depleted.

The area became flooded with European migrants and their Afro-Caribbean vassals, who were individuals forced into servitude, given land, and required to work in exchange for protection.

They implemented the encomienda system, which allowed representatives of the Spanish king to grant individuals land ownership rights, along with control over the indigenous people on that land, who were then forced into slavery.

During the invasion, cacao orchards like Izalco in El Salvador accommodated over 30,000 trees, each yielding 400,000 beans per year.

After just a few years of forced labour, poor land management, overtaxation, and corruption, however, Izalco’s production plummeted to almost nothing.

The colonists relied heavily on slave labour for cacao cultivation, which increased output but caused immense human suffering, and depleted traditional Mesoamerican sources.

As a result, Europeans who had developed a taste for cacao began searching for new farming locations in South America and the West Indies.

At the same time, the Spanish adopted the Yucatec Maya tradition of drinking cacao hot.

They sweetened it with cane sugar and replaced most native spices with cinnamon from Sri Lanka, black pepper from the Indies, and aniseed from Europe.

Vanilla was the only Indigenous spice they retained.

They also refined the molinillo, the carved wooden whisk still used today in Mexico to froth cacao into a bubbly, luscious drink.

Thus cacao entered European life already transformed, no longer the sacred and restricted food of the Mexica nobility, but the foundation of a colonial trade economy, its meaning shifting even as its spirit endured.

Cacao in Europe

Despite its growing popularity, cacao was still new to most Europeans.

In the late 1500s, English and Dutch pirates burned two Spanish ships carrying cacao, mistaking the beans for sheep dung.

Chocolate introduced European courts to stimulating alkaloids like theophylline, theobromine, and caffeine, well before the arrival of tea and coffee.

Cacao became fashionable in the Spanish courts, leading to the creation of the mancerina, a saucer with a raised ring for holding a small cup.

When chocolate reached England, it was adapted further to suit local tastes.

It was boiled in water, and sometimes mixed with milk and eggs in London’s coffee, tea, and chocolate houses.

This simpler preparation produced an inferior product compared to traditional cacao, but became the basis for modern chocolate.

By the 1800s, chocolate drinks lost popularity in Europe, giving way to coffee owing to the high cost and labour-intensive preparation of cacao.

In 1828, Dutchman Coenraad van Houten created the ‘Dutching’ process, where cocoa nibs were treated with an alkaline solution to reduce their acidity.

The nibs were then roasted, the fat was pressed out, and the remaining substance was ground into powder.

This resulting product was easier to mix with water but was of course also less flavourful and potent.

The industrialisation of this process of producing what we now know as cocoa powder enabled global distribution of cacao for the first time, though what was sold was a pale imitation of the original rich and complex cacao beverages from its homeland.

One celebrated aspect of the modern cacao movement is the returning reverence to full-bodied and full-flavoured drinks, much closer to the ancient preparations than the sweet, milky chocolate that so many of us grew up knowing.

Colonial suppression of indigenous culture

Meanwhile in Mesoamerica, the Spanish invasion continued to unleash a campaign to dismantle native culture and enforce European ways.

Colonial authorities outlawed indigenous languages, traditional attire, and ceremonial practices, branding them as pagan or “savage” and threatening violence for those who persisted.

In missionary schools and churches, speaking Nahuatl, Maya, or other native tongues was banned; donning customary dress or performing ancestral rituals often resulted in brutal punishment.

Forced conversions to Christianity were coupled with the destruction of sacred objects and texts.

The goal was nothing less than the eradication of Indigenous religion and the adoption of colonial Spanish norms.

Millions of Indigenous people perished from war, disease, and oppression in the early colonial period, yet survivors did not surrender their heritage.

Despite these horrors, Indigenous peoples forged a path of cultural resilience that endures five centuries later.

In the face of this suppression, cacao’s sacred significance lived on.

Though Europeans turned it into a commodity, Indigenous peoples continued to weave it into ceremony, healing practice, and daily life, sometimes openly, and sometimes in secret.

Tribute systems and colonial records reveal that rituals honouring cacao trees and deities persisted well into the sixteenth century, often hidden beneath Christian festivals or practiced discreetly in private households.

Cacao remained a drink of marriage, community, and offering.

Across generations, elders safeguarded these practices.

Despite persistent campaigns to erase their languages, symbols, belief systems and rites, Indigenous communities carried cacao forward as a living thread of memory and meaning.

To drink it today in ceremony is to acknowledge and honour that resilience: a continuity of spirit that survived invasion and colonisation, and remains a giver and sustainer of sacred life.

Questions for reflection

• Can you imagine walking through an ancient Yucatan agroforest with over 600 fruiting cacao trees?

• How do you envision the scene at Montezuma’s coronation ceremony, with 2,000 revellers having consumed Psilocybe mushrooms?

• How does it change your relationship to your current cacao practice knowing that the plant’s spiritual lineage was kept alive through five centuries of active, dangerous suppression?

• How do you balance the narratives of cacao as both a modern sacrament of heart-opening connection and a historical catalyst for colonial greed?

• We describe cacao in this love letter as a “living thread of memory and meaning.” What does holding that thread feel like to you today?

With love,
Gavin and Diane x

In a world that pulls you in a thousand directions, cacao brings you home to your heart…

1. Order ceremonial cacao, sourced directly from Asháninka growers in Peru. (Subscribe and save 20%!)

2. Join our facilitator training and learn to hold space with the integrity this medicine deserves.

3. Order our book Cacao Ceremony, a guide for anyone called to share this medicine with the people around them.

4. Join my mini-course and learn to carry an open heart from ceremony into everyday life.

It was World Chocolate Day on Tuesday, and we thought it would be a fitting time to share some of the lesser known history of cacao, including the archaeological discoveries that have rewritten it in recent times.

In offering this exploration, we are indebted to Fabiola Ramirez, an Indigenous scholar from Chiapas, Mexico. Her decolonial perspective obliterates many myths that continue to surround indigenous history in Mesoamerica.

We also want to say a great thank you to Marcos Patchett for his fascinating and in-depth book, The Secret Life of Chocolate.

Millennia ago, vast equatorial rainforest blanketed great swathes of the South American continent. Amazonia, as it was known, was a land of lush vegetation interlaced with flowing rivers, with dense forest covering a significant part of what we now call Central America.

We begin our journey through this lush terrain with a brief history of cacao and the civilisations who revered its potency and power.

The Mayo-Chinchipe-Marañon (5500–3500 BCE)

Though it is commonly thought that cacao originated in Mesoamerica, the oldest evidence of cacao domestication hails from the Palanda region of modern-day Ecuador with the Mayo-Chinchipe-Marañon cultures.

These are some of the oldest living cultures on the edge of the Amazon, whose polytheistic cosmology centred on shamanism, complex forest management and ceremonies to bind and reinforce their social structures.

They are possible ancestors of the current Bracamoro and Shuar peoples.

Although it is impossible to know the exact practices of this time, the oldest known cacao remnants were found on a ceramic mug alongside stone, crystals, shells, and gold. There was even a stone mortar shaped like a cacao-pod that was found at the site.

Archaeologists posit that the site of discovery was the grave of an important shaman.

Similar discoveries of cacao remnants on ceramic pottery were found in Jaén, Peru at a site known as Huaca Montegrande.

Archaeologists have unearthed an enormous temple built in the form of a being with large stones that form the shape of a head, body, and a spiralled womb centre.

The site has been excavated slowly over the past two decades and the centre of the spiral has not yet been reached.

Experts presume that, similar to the Ecuadorian discovery, they will also uncover the tomb of a high-level religious leader at the centre.

The Olmecs (1500–400 BCE)

The Olmecs are the first known civilisation of Mesoamerica, often referred to as the mother of Mesoamerica, and builders of the first pyramids of the region. They are recognised by their enormous stone head carvings, and their half jaguar, half human gods. The Olmecs were renowned for their trade networks dealing in precious substances, including jade and obsidian.

Little is known about how they lived, but the archaeological evidence suggests that this was a society with complex agricultural systems and bustling urban centres.

Though concrete evidence of the Olmecs cultivating cacao has yet to be unearthed, historical consensus is that they did, primarily because the Mayan word ‘kakaw’, from which the word ‘cacao’ is derived, is known to be of Olmec origin.

While there are earlier archaeological discoveries of cacao traces on ceramic pottery, the current historical consensus is that the Olmecs were the first society to drink cacao as a beverage of ground cacao beans, water, and herbs.

Evidence also suggests that the Olmecs used an array of psychoactive plants and substances in their worship and healing practices, notably the secretions from the parotid glands of the Bufo marinus toad, known for its potent hallucinogenic effects when smoked.

In a phenomenon not too dissimilar to that of the modern cacao ceremony, contemporary rituals using the secretions of the toad’s secretions form one part of what’s been termed the psychedelic resurgence, currently sweeping through the modern world.

Archaeological finds suggest that the Olmecs used bowls and calabashes for drinking cacao-based beverages, with such artefacts located on the Pacific coast of Chiapas and the Gulf coast of Tabasco, areas renowned for their cacao production.

The earliest known traces of cacao found in the area are on fragments of broken pottery discovered in other cacao-growing districts like the Soconusco, west of Lake Atitlan on the Pacific coast of Guatemala and Mexico, and the Olmec region on the Gulf Coast of Mexico in modern-day Tabasco, indicating that cacao beverages have ancient origins.

Pottery shards from the Soconusco region, dating back to 1900 BCE, have been found to contain cacao residues. These residues were detected through tests for theobromine, a stable compound exclusive to the Theobroma species in Central America.

By 1000 BCE, cacao is believed to have become the main commercial crop in southeastern Mesoamerica, traded for valuable items such as salt, feathers, hides, and obsidian.

The earliest verified depictions of Theobroma in Mesoamerican archaeology are high-relief cacao pods on a clay vessel from Peru, dating between 1100 and 700 BCE. This vessel also features spider monkeys, known to aid in the tree’s propagation by consuming the fruit pulp and dispersing the seeds.

It is thought that the initial human consumption of the cacao tree focused on its sweet pulp, which was eaten and also fermented to create alcoholic beverages.

This is a preparation that continues to this day, as we discovered during our stay with Asháninka growing families in Peru in 2023.

The Peruvian vessel just described, therefore, may have been a container for a type of cacao fruit beverage or wine.

Teotihuacan and the pre-Classic Maya (600 BCE–200 CE)

Teotihuacan (tay-oh-tee-wah-KAHN), a large city north of what is now Mexico City, was home to at least 200,000 people.

The word in Nahuatl (NAH-waht-ul) means “the place where Gods were created.” It rose around 50 BCE and reached its peak until a catastrophic fire around 725 CE led to its decline.

The Teotihuacanos were the first-known people to honour the ‘feathered serpent’, a deity central to later Mexica theology, known as Quetzalcoatl (ket-sahl-KOH-ah-tul), who the Mexica believed to have discovered cacao.

The Teotihuacano feathered serpent deity was initially depicted as less human than in later versions, first appearing as a water-sky god, a surreal fusion of sea snake and bird, reminiscent of ancient Chinese dragons, which were powerful elemental beings.

This figure eventually became known to the Classic Maya as the waxak-lahun-ubah-kan, or ‘feathered serpent of war’, and was ritually invited to reside in special battle standards carried by the army, bringing the palpable power of a war god to the battlefield.

The Teotihuacan battle standards featured a feather-rimmed disc atop a globe, mounted on a staff, and often included a war owl, a messenger bird from the underworld.

Acting as a central point in many Central American trade routes, Teotihuacan is now known for its magnificent ruins, including an impressive series of monumental temple pyramids.

Cacao was a major component of Mesoamerican trade, considered a high-status commodity in great demand.

Used for trade and tribute, cacao tithes were paid by regions under the influence of the leading city from traditional growing zones.

Teotihuacan managed the cacao trade for a few centuries until the Tlaxcalans (tlash-KAH-luhnz) took over the supply after Teotihuacan’s civilisation declined and collapsed around 750 CE.

Following this collapse, control of the cacao trade shifted to the Mayan states in the Chontal region, which is now Tabasco, Mexico.

Throughout pre-Colombian times, owning cacao-growing regions was highly desirable, and areas producing the finest cacao beans were fiercely contested.

The present-day regions of Chiapas in Mexico and Suchitepequez in Guatemala, known for growing the criollo variety of cacao, were frequently the sites of such territorial conflicts.

The Classic Maya (200–900 CE)

The Maya advanced earlier technologies and discoveries in writing, mathematics, astronomy, architecture, and the production of cacao drinks.

They also incorporated numerous medicinal and entheogenic plants into their cosmovision, including hallucinogenic mushrooms. Evidence of this practice predates the Classic era, as mushroom sculptures and small grinding stones, similar to those used by twentieth-century Mixtec shamans for grinding Psilocybe mushrooms, have been found, revealing the ancient origins of this plant medicine combination.

As modern explorers have discovered, cacao can effectively potentiate other plant medicines, and the combination of cacao and visionary mushrooms is one that’s played a small but significant part of the contemporary cacao movement.

The Maya are the earliest known people to have used cacao beans as currency: in this case a small, portable exchange system whereby a set number of beans could be swapped for particular items.

Early Classic period vases depict feasts featuring large cylindrical pots filled with frothy kakawa drinks. Some illustrations show the liquid being poured from one vessel to another from a height to create a foam on the surface of the drink, one of its most desirable aspects.

The varieties of kakawa evolved over time, with specialised pottery vessels identified for serving different types of kakawa. These vessels often feature hieroglyphic inscriptions detailing their contents, such as ‘tree-fresh kakawa’ (possibly a drink made from cacao fruit pulp) or ‘honey kakawa’ (an early sweetened chocolate drink).

The Maya typically drank hot and cold cacao from clay bowls, though they predominantly enjoyed their cacao as a warm drink, a practice that has continued in the modern cacao movement (restock your supply here).

As an interesting aside, mole negro, a complex-flavoured cacao sauce from contemporary Mexican cuisine, is often reported to have been created by seventeenth-century Mexican nuns.

Archaeological evidence, however, reveals that mole, from the Nahuatl “mulli” meaning sauce, was already central to Indigenous cuisine.

These chocolate-chilli concoctions served as both ceremonial offerings and culinary staples.

In a nutshell, or, perhaps more appropriately, in a seed pod, cacao occupied a central role in Mayan societies and was commonly traded between cities.

Its importance was such that the last three rulers of Tikal, a prominent city in present-day Guatemala, were honoured with the title ‘Lord Kakaw’.

Questions for reflection

• What feeling does it evoke that the word “cacao” likely comes from the Olmec, the “mother culture” of Mesoamerica?

• How do you relate to cacao being used first as a fermented, alcoholic drink from its fruit pulp, rather than the beans?

• What did you feel reading that spider monkeys were cacao’s first companions in spreading its seeds through the forest?

• How do you sit with the idea that a war god’s battle standard once carried cacao’s symbolic weight into conflict?

• Does it change how you feel about cacao, knowing that entire cities rose and fell partly over control of its trade?

• How do you relate to the idea of cacao beans once being an actual currency?

We warmly welcome any reflections to these questions, and if this letter raised more question of your own, please share!

The second part of this history is coming next week.

With love,
Gavin and Diane x

In a world that pulls you in a thousand directions, cacao brings you home to your heart…

1. Order ceremonial cacao, sourced directly from Asháninka growers in Peru. (Subscribe and save 20%!)

2. Join our facilitator training and learn to hold space with the integrity this medicine deserves.

3. Order our book Cacao Ceremony, a guide for anyone called to share this medicine with the people around them.

4. Join my mini-course and learn to carry an open heart from ceremony into everyday life.

For about 96% of the time that anatomically modern humans have walked the earth, we lived as hunter-gatherers.

If we expand that timeline to include our earlier ancestors, we have been hunter-gatherers for over 99% of our existence.

A cognitive flaw in the human brain makes it impossible for us to conceptualise deep time, so biologists often use the analogy of a single day to illuminate vast expanses of historical time.

Here’s one example of that evolutionary day:

00:00
Homo sapiens emerge in Africa at midnight. For the next 23 hours, we hunt mammoths, gather berries, paint on cave walls, and adapt to life in the Ice Age.

23:02
The Agricultural Revolution begins. We begin to settle in place, and plant the first crops.

23:34
Cacao is domesticated by humans in the Upper Amazon, transitioning from a wild rainforest fruit to a cultivated crop. In the tropical rainforests of Ecuador, humans no longer simply eat the sweet-sour pulp of the cacao fruit, but now begin to actively cultivate the trees, and process the seeds.

23:36
The first writing systems are invented in Mesopotamia, and pyramid construction begins soon after.

23:42
Cacao travels north. It reaches Mesoamerica, where the Mokaya and Olmec cultures process it into a soon-to-be-famous bitter drink called xocolatl.

23:59
The Industrial Revolution begins, and less than a second before midnight, the internet is invented. The modern digital world begins to emerge.

This last second in our evolutionary day brought with it a very different world to anything we’d previously known. Our sedentary, indoor lifestyles are fundamentally at odds with the environments our brains evolved to inhabit. Despite us being the most stimulated and most entertained humans known ever to have existed, we are living in bodies that express unprecedented rates of depression and anxiety.

It is easy for us to blame ourselves for these negative feelings, and of course there are financially motivated incentives for us to do just that.

The root cause of this malaise operates at a deeper level than our conscious mind, however, and the nefarious hijacking of our primal drives by exploitative technological culture is, as I’ll go on to expound, mostly to blame.

Our attention is being harvested for profit.

This letter unravels how that’s happening, and, more importantly, what we can do to take it back in a less than supportive world.

To understand how our drives were hijacked, let’s first explore how they were built.

A mind out of time

Evolutionary mismatch is a biological term that describes what happens when a trait that once kept us alive becomes a liability.

Our bodies and brains were shaped slowly across the first 23 hours of our historical day. In real time, that is close to 290,000 years as hunter-gatherers, set against roughly 12,000 years since we settled into farming, and about 35 years since the internet arrived.

Evolutionary adaptations emerge over time, and are tested against the pressures of the surrounding environment. They are then either passed down through genetic and cultural lines, or abandoned as we revert to the habitual ways that things have always been done.

Since the industrial revolution, and especially in this last second of our evolutionary day, the pace of life has accelerated in a way that hasn’t allowed our biology to catch up.

We experience this timeline mismatch most jarringly in our dopamine systems.

Dopamine is the neurotransmitter commonly misunderstood as the chemical of pleasure. It is actually the primary driver of motivation and craving; it fuels the pursuit and effort to go and get something, and so is responsible for the wanting of a reward, rather than the liking of it.

In contrast, the liking system runs mainly on opioids and endocannabinoids. These are the molecules that produce the actual sensations of pleasure we feel: the satisfaction and comfort of a reward once you have it.

Neuroscientist Kent Berridge discovered that pleasure itself is generated in tiny patches of the brain he called hedonic hotspots. When these regions are stimulated with opioids or endocannabinoids, sensations of pleasure emerge.

In animal studies, when dopamine is removed from an experiment, animals still register pleasure when consuming something sugary; they just don’t have the urge to invest effort in getting more of it.

Similarly, dopamine can be driven sky-high in animals to produce intense desire, even when there is no pleasure that accompanies the effort to get the reward.

This is one understanding of addiction: a dopamine system cranked into overdrive while the pleasure system flattens, or even fades, so the chase grows more desperate even though the payoff delivers less and less.

In short, addictive behaviours spike craving without delivering anticipated satisfaction, so the chase continues for a reward that never arrives.

Scientists therefore use dopamine as the universal currency to measure the addictive potential of a behaviour. The more dopamine a substance or behaviour releases, and the faster it does so, the more highly addictive it is considered to be.

There are two biological drives that evolved during our ancient past that utilised the dopamine system to ensure our survival as a species.

The problem we now face is that the technological era has allowed capitalist mass marketing to hijack these drives, and cause dopaminergic chaos in our brains and bodies.

These two drives are:

1. The hunger drive
Originally utilised to motivate hunting expeditions and to exert effort gathering wild foods. It has been hijacked by sugary foods and online shopping. Gambling hooks into the same machinery through the logic of the forage: the next bush might be bare or heavy with fruit, and our brains release most dopamine when looming rewards are possible but uncertain.

2. The belonging drive
Originally utilised to motivate social cohesion. It has been hijacked by social media. Human sexuality is also highly social. Although the urge to reproduce is not technically a survival drive, people often use sex to fulfil their actual biological drives for connection, pleasure, and feeling wanted. This is how sexual imagery and pornography hijack the brain’s primal wiring.

As a result of these drives, we are all highly vulnerable to modern digital drugs.

In the palms of our hands, we hold the ever-present possibility of seizing massive, unearned dopamine that stimulates these ancient pathways, but ultimately leaves us feeling isolated and disconnected from real human attachment.

The body’s ledger

The neural centres responsible for processing pleasure and pain are situated side-by-side in the hypothalamus. Due to this shared physical location, they function like a balancing scale. In her book Dopamine Nation, Dr Anna Lembke popularised the metaphor of the see-saw to explain this. On one side is pleasure; on the other is pain.

The human, like an old growth ancient forest, seeks to maintain homeostasis.

If we add weight to the pain side of the see-saw by doing challenging things, the system responds, and we are rewarded with the experience of pleasure. If we lean into pleasurable activities that require little effort on our part, the system works similarly, and we feel depleted. This is a beautiful mechanism that reinforces the performance of difficult tasks that helped us to thrive, and disincentivised behaviours that were likely to threaten our long-term survival.

A frazzled dopamine system, worn down by too much fast dopamine from social media, sugar, or drugs, tips the brain’s balance of pleasure and pain into a chronic place of discomfort, a condition known as a dopamine deficit state.

When the system is burnt out, it shows up first as demotivation and anhedonia, the inability to enjoy simple, everyday pleasures. We feel lethargic, apathetic, and exhausted, often struggling to muster the drive to get out of bed, or finish ordinary tasks.

A depleted baseline also closely mimics the presentation of ADHD. We grow distracted and impulsive, unable to hold our focus, and with our reserves exhausted, we chase the next cheap thrill, instead of sustaining the effort that long-term goals require to accomplish.

Emotionally, a frazzled system brings chronic anxiety, low mood, irritability, and dysphoria. To counteract these artificial spikes, our brains release dynorphin, a neurochemical that induces discomfort, and we are left with lingering emotional hangovers.

In contrast, when our baseline dopamine is high, it shows up as motivation, the ability to sustain focus, and genuine excitement for life. Constructive tasks stop feeling like agonising chores and become achievable, worthwhile steps. Most importantly, a restored baseline renews our capacity for joy in simple, everyday pleasures, like a walk in nature or a meal with friends, free from the depressive crashes of neurochemical exhaustion.

Small acts of devotion

If all of this sounds daunting, the good news is that it’s fairly straight forward to turn things around. Just like a syntropic agroforest can restore scorched earth to a thriving food forest in just a few years, we can reclaim our attention and rebuild our ability to focus and pursue meaningful goals with a prescription of steady, attainable practices that are easily within reach of anybody.

The goal is to avoid chemical crashes by building a naturally elevated level of dopamine.

When your dopamine baseline is high, you will immediately notice an increased desire to be productive, along with a renewed zest for life.

Tasks that are beneficial for your well-being suddenly seem much easier to tackle, and your overall motivation and enthusiasm will surge.

The simplest of things become inherently pleasurable.

After all, the bodies we have inherited have been optimised to make this state desirable for a literally unimaginable length of time. This tech-distraction aberration has been happening for just a split second from the perspective of our evolutionary selves.

In my own explorations, there are the three ways that I’ve found to be most effective at optimising my own dopamine system.

What continues to fascinate me is that they all connect to the ways of living in ceremony that I know most of our readers are naturally drawn to.

It is a path many of us are called to walk alongside others, and if you feel ready to offer conscious guidance, our facilitator training teaches you to hold space with the integrity this medicine deserves.

1. Creating a sacred space

This can be as simple as making your bed when you wake up. Clear up anything left on your bedside table, and whatever you choose to keep in place, arrange it so it’s neat. This is a gift of beauty you offer to your evening self that you will receive when you return to rest. I love to leave gifts for my future self throughout my day, and I encourage you to explore this pleasurable act of self-love in all of the creative ways you can think of.

As you settle into the rhythm of this small and simple act of devotion, you might repeat the process with your desk, or work space, or reading corner, or wherever you spend time through your week.

Ask yourself, what can I do to make this a space of tranquility or radiance? You rarely need to buy new “things” or upgrade your belongings; often all that’s required is letting go of the items that, as Marie Kondo would say, no longer spark joy.

You might gather some leaves or flowers from your garden, or bring in some found, natural objects that you cultivate appreciation for in the days that follow, before returning them with gratitude to the earth as they wither.

All of these things require some effort, but they are manageable and worthwhile.

By leaning into the resistance of prioritising beauty in your life, you are rewarded by the dopamine see-saw when you bask in the pleasure of casting your eyes on a space that has been consecrated by love.

2. Entering meditative flow states

Beyond formal meditation practice, which has benefits of its own, carving out spaces to drop into deep focus opens us up to what are often called flow states.

To practice this, clear the space you are about to spend time in (quickly and radically if you need to), and leave your phone in another room, on silent mode.

I do this when I write, while listening to field recordings of forest soundscapes from around the world. The first fifteen minutes are always the hardest, as I notice compulsions to distract myself arising, often relentlessly. The magic begins after this initial period, when time dissolves, and the creative flow of the practice takes on a life of its own. Writing is one of my first loves, but any creative pursuit can be used in this active meditative practice.

Overcoming the resistance to begin, and then persisting through the initial boredom deliberately adds weight to the pain side of the see-saw, and the wonderful pleasure that comes from any artistic endeavour is the reward as the see-saw tips back towards feeling good.

3. Drinking cacao

The seeds of the cacao pod, fermented, sun-dried, roasted and ground, are one of the marvels of the forest, and for those of us who have built a relationship with its spirit are seldom surprised that the tree has been revered for over 5,000 years. After all, humans domesticated wild cacao even before we developed our first systems of writing.

Creating a sacred space to drink cacao (restock your cupboard here), and choosing it as a creative partner in meditative practice, contributes to these first two explorations in a beautiful way, but the chemistry of the seed also carries a force in its own right.

Rather than directly flooding the brain to cause a spike in baseline dopamine like addictive, stimulating drugs do, cacao supports and amplifies the brain’s dopamine system through more subtle, synergistic mechanisms.

There are three main ways this happens.

1. Cacao preserves existing dopamine. Cacao contains monoamine oxidase (MAO) inhibitors, such as salsolinol and various polyphenols, which block the enzymes that normally break down dopamine, allowing it to temporarily build up in the brain.

2. Cacao prevents dopamine suppression. Chronic stress and high cortisol levels naturally suppress the brain’s production of dopamine. Because cacao is proven to effectively lower cortisol and adrenaline, it indirectly helps to maintain healthy dopamine production, and therefore motivation.

3. Cacao amplifies dopamine signals. Trace amines in cacao, such as phenylethylamine (PEA) and tyramine, activate trace amine-associated receptors (TAARs) in the limbic system. Instead of triggering a huge release of new dopamine, these receptors act like amplifiers, magnifying the neurons’ response to dopamine and the feel-good signals that are already present.

We recover our attention in the same way that we regenerate degraded soils, little by little, with acts of care: planting seeds that slowly sprout into new, vibrant life.

The practices of earth-keeping and life-weaving soon take on a spirit of their own, and we are guided as much as we guide.

There are more nourishing practices along these lines in our book, Cacao Ceremony, which you can order here.

This is a far cry from any kind of self-improvement gospel. This is a pleasure-first, earth-first approach to introducing small changes to our lives, leaning into the resilient edge of resistance, and loving ourselves enough to create the space to appreciate the gifts that life gives us back.

Given the right conditions, any piece of land will return to its natural state as a forest, and in the same way, every human life holds the possibility to come into alignment with its highest potential for artistic magnificence.

My prayer is that this letter inspires you to take the next step, no matter how small, in that direction, knowing that even the smallest step is a worthwhile act of devotion.

With love,
Gavin x

To deepen your journey of the heart…

1. Order ceremonial cacao, sourced directly from Asháninka growers in Peru. (Subscribe and save 20%!)

2. Join our facilitator training and learn to hold space with the integrity this medicine deserves.

3. Order our book Cacao Ceremony, a guide for anyone called to share this medicine with the people around them.

4. Join my mini-course and learn to carry an open heart from ceremony into everyday life.

If you slice open a ripe cacao pod, you’ll find that the seeds are arranged in five distinct rows.

Cacao trees flower and fruit at the same time, and if you look closely at the blossom, you’ll see it is also structured in multiples of five.

This five-fold pattern is called a quincunx and its design has been used for millennia in traditional Maya ritual with cacao, as I explore in this letter.

Inspired by this sacred geometry, I have created a personal devotional built around a five-step practice.

A five-fold prayer with cacao

The modern cacao movement draws influence from a deep well of mystical traditions that share one commonality: connection begins by slowing down.

As humans, we’ve always sought ways to anchor ourselves to the earth, the breath, the divine, and the ever-emerging present moment.

This letter shares one expression of that universal spiritual impulse; a guided method to orient the inner self to the sacred, to the ancestral, and the spirit of the cacao tree.

When you step outside and engage with the world in quiet listening, prayer will happen, and it will take on its own way of being for you. Perhaps prayer is just poetry, and we are living the expressions of what it means to be human. This is why Creator gave us gifts to remember. This is why, when I burn sage or lay Tobacco down, I know that I am tethered to a love that has remained steady throughout the centuries and that always calls me back to its own sacredness. And that sacredness will always lead me back out to the world to do the work of love. Prayer is always an invitation.

— Potawatomi author Kaitlin B Curtice, Native: Identity, Belonging, and Rediscovering God

This meditation evolved as my own response to the invitation of prayer Curtice explains so beautifully.

Its intention is not to reach for something out there, but simply to deepen with the breath and the body, here and now.

We’ll use the acronym CACAO:

C - Connect

A - Attune

C - Cultivate

A - Awaken

O - Offer

Each letter forms part of the practice, and is based on the five-fold anatomical pattern that cacao expresses.

Each cacao blossom has five petals, five sepals, five sterile stamens, and five fertile stamens, all surrounding an ovary that is separated into five distinct divisions.

In traditional Maya ceremonies, cacao seeds are often offered in counts of five. This represents a sacred geometric pattern representing the four cardinal directions anchored by a central point, the axis mundi.

In ritual, Maya healers deliberately place cacao beans at these five points to sanctify the space, orient the patient to the cosmos, and open a portal between the physical and spiritual realms.

With that pattern held in mind, the practice itself is simple to begin.

My invitation is to prepare a warm cup of cacao (restock your supply here), and set aside fifteen minutes to journey through the steps, reading a line at a time, then closing your eyes as you follow each prompt.

Once you’re familiar with the practice, you might also like to begin your mornings with a shorter, five-breath version, taking slow, full inhales as you feel the essence of each element.

It is also a beautiful offering to share with a group as a longer, guided meditation.

If you’re called to walk with others through these inner landscapes, you can join our facilitator training and learn to hold space with the integrity this medicine deserves.

C – Connect

As you take a full breath, open a connection to your ancestors, bringing to mind your grandmothers and grandfathers, known and unknown, reaching back through the generations.

Feel a sense of gratitude for their perseverance, their resilience, and the lives they lived that led to the possibility of the body you find yourself in today.

Bring your awareness to your feet, and their contact with this ancient ground, the same earth your ancestors also walked.

Connect to the soils that make up the surface of the earth, and allow your awareness to glide along the vast networks of mycelia that bind this ecological web together.

Trace these threads across the planet until you reach a cacao orchard in a cool, humid forest in the upper Amazon basin.

This is the ancestral home of cacao, and the place where its greatest genetic diversity still resides.

Move closer to a cacao tree you’re drawn to, and visualise its taproots reaching into the deep earth, drawing up moisture and nutrients.

Feel your branches gently stretching upwards as you notice the taller canopy trees sheltering you in this calm place of restoration.

Spend a few moment in the presence of this old growth forest, noticing the sounds of birds and insects around you, and the musky scent of leaf litter carried on the breeze.

Allow the image to fade, and take a slow, cleansing breath before moving on to the next part of the practice.

A – Attune

Grounded in the stability of ancestral connection, you now attune your consciousness to the elements of nature, recognising them as the dynamic, interactive physical forces that actively sustain our bodies, the cacao tree, and the earth herself.

• Air: On your next inhale, feel your lungs slowly expand with air as you participate in the great cycle of breath that replenishes both your body and the planet. In the humid understory where cacao grows, tiny cacao flowers broadcast a perfume of 78 aromatic compounds. The breeze carries this seductive aroma to the midges and stingless bees that pollinate the tree. As you exhale, attune your breath to this delightful process, allowing your consciousness to drift through the forest on this fragrant breeze.

• Water: The forest is misty and humid. It functions as a biotic water pump, drawing life-giving moisture from the ocean across hundreds of kilometres. Without this ecological mechanism, land-locked interiors would soon become arid desert. On your inhale, connect to the currents of moisture sweeping from the open seas to the sheltered, damp forest, and on your exhale, visualise the condensation settling on the damp, decomposing forest floor.

• Fire: Attune your consciousness to a cacao tree in the forest. Sense the fiery energy of the sun at its zenith in the sky above, and inhale your gratitude for Madre de Cacao, the companion tree that towers above you, sheltering you from the blistering noon heat. On your exhale, feel the dappled light warm your skin, radiating the pleasure of thriving in a community of care.

• Earth: Let your roots sink into the ground and penetrate the fertile, alluvial soils that hold you steady through the changing seasons of the year. Feel a tingle of connection with the subterranean “wood wide web” of mycorrhizal fungi that connect you to all other trees in the forest. On your inhale, draw up minerals from the earth, and feel your body strengthen, then exhale the carbon sugars that you’ve drawn from the sky, nourishing the fungi in this act of reciprocity.

Feel yourself return back to your physical, human body, and take a slow, cleansing breath before moving on to the next part of the practice.

C - Cultivate

Cultivate the stillness of a tree. Allow your next breath deepen as you align with the biological tempo of nature.

Trees live in the forest’s slow lane.

When a leaf is damaged by an insect, electrical warning signals travel through its tissues at a sluggish pace of less than a centimetre per minute.

Similarly, the tree’s lifeblood of water and nutrients flow upward from the roots to the crown at a speed of just one centimetre each second.

Sense the slow pulse of your neighbouring trees, and with easeful breaths, cultivate a a feeling of oneness with the steady, resilient rhythm of the forest.

A – Awaken

If you are drinking cacao as you practice this devotional, your heart space will be beginning to awaken.

Bring your awareness to heart, and sense how cacao’s flavanols are increasing the production of nitric oxide in your body, dilating your blood vessels, and allowing more blood to flow into your gently beating heart.

Let this opening awaken your innate biophilia, the extension of your love of life to the sphere of all sentient beings.

Awaken a feeling of kin with the forest, taking your place as a living, breathing participant of this ancient family.

Embrace this inner wilderness as your own true nature, as you feel your heart continue to expand with each slow breath.

O – Offer

As this meditation draws to a close, offer a blessing to the loved ones in your life, and a blessing to earth, our original mother.

A healthy forest thrives as a cyclical gift economy, where nothing is hoarded and everything is shared.

Towering shade trees drop their nutrient-rich leaves to enrich the soil, and the sweet fruit of the trees feeds the birds, bats and monkeys who scatter their seeds, enabling new life to emerge.

Take a few moments to fill your heart space with gratitude for everything you have been given in this life, and inwardly offer thanks for this bounty.

Allow whatever images that have arisen to fade, and take a final, slow, cleansing breath to complete your practice.

Seeds of reciprocity

In many traditions, it is customary to ground the effects of ritual with an action on the material plane, and so you might wish to send an actual message of gratitude to anybody who came to you in this meditation.

If you felt gratitude for the earth, or your non-human kin, an offering of fruit left in nature is always a meaningful, sacred gesture.

I warmly welcome your reflections after you practice this meditation, especially if it unfolds for you in new directions.

If you want to explore more ways to weave ritual into your life, you can order our book, which shares more meditative practices like this.

As a diverse group of people working with cacao, we are co-creating a living tradition of plant spirit medicine that, just like the forest itself, deepens through reciprocity, and thrives through diversity.

As the cacao movement continues to unfold across the world, its fruits will be carried forward by the seeds we scatter now, together.

With love,
Gavin x

To deepen your journey of the heart…

1. Order ceremonial cacao, sourced directly from Asháninka growers in Peru. (Subscribe and save 20%!)

2. Join our facilitator training and learn to hold space with the integrity this medicine deserves.

3. Order our book Cacao Ceremony, a guide for anyone called to share this medicine with the people around them.

4. Join my mini-course and learn to carry an open heart from ceremony into everyday life.

The town of Satipo is located on the forested edge of Peru’s Central Highlands. It’s where our cacao is ground into paste in a community-owned workshop, part of Peru’s first all-Indigenous cacao co-operative.

On 21st October last year, Satipo also became the home of a remarkable world’s first.

The provincial municipality of the town granted legal rights to the native stingless bees of the Avireri-VRAEM Biosphere Reserve.

No government anywhere in the world has ever done this for an insect, but groups in the US, Bolivia, and the Netherlands are now hoping that their governments will follow Satipo’s lead.

Stingless bees are the oldest species of bee on earth, and are responsible for pollinating over 80% of the region’s flora, including cacao and avocados.

They are known to have been kept by Indigenous people for at least 500 years.

This new law recognises bees as beings with an inherent right to exist and to flourish in a healthy forest.

When they are harmed, they can be defended in court, and a company that poisons them or razes their habitat can be sued on the bees’ behalf.

This letter explores the marvel of the stingless bee, and their deep cultural significance to the Asháninka people.

The sweetest honey in the forest

The bee’s place in Asháninka life begins with masato, the drink at the centre of the community’s daily rhythm.

It was always the first offering we’d receive when we’d arrive at a new homestead.

It was shared by everybody, including the children, and was the breakfast taken before a day’s work in the cacao orchard began.

Masato, or chicha, as it was called in the villages we stayed at, is made by boiling and mashing yuca over an open fire.

The women preparing it chew generous mouthfuls, before spitting them back into the pot, the enzymes in their saliva initiating the process of fermentation.

Once cooled and strained, the chicha forms a delicious, slightly sweet yoghurt-like drink.

Its origin story has been passed down through generations in the forest.

Once, long ago, an Asháninka woman became known for preparing the most delicious chicha in the region.

People would travel from afar to taste it, as word travelled through the forest.

Eventually, the story reached the creator god, Avireri.

He visited the woman’s village to taste the brew for himself.

As he and others drank, he waited for the pot of chicha to run dry, but it never did.

Avireri was so impressed with the Asháninka woman’s skill, he turned her into the first stingless bee, so she would always make sweetest honey in the forest.

This ancestral story provides the framework for what has now been enshrined in law.

The stingless bee is no longer an it, but a being, and a being with a very close cosmological connection to humans.

Apu César Ramos, president of EcoAsháninka, says that, “Bees are part of the family. They are ancestors.”

The reserve where this ordnance was passed is called the Avireri-VRAEM Biosphere Reserve, honouring the name of the creator god and Asháninka origin story of the bee.

Things that never happened, but always are

To understand how a spiritual narrative can successfully dictate modern environmental policy, we can borrow a lens from classical philosophy.

Sallustius the Philosopher, who lived during the twilight of the Roman Empire, described myths as things, “that never happened, but always are.”

By this, he meant that myths are not historical facts, but eternal psychological, spiritual, and metaphysical truths that are continuously happening within the cosmos and the human psyche.

The labour of an initiate in any school of the mysteries is to give expression to eternal principles in the physical realms of time and space.

Beyond the clear benefits to the ecosystem as a whole, this groundbreaking legislation is one such sacred act.

It brings the eternal to the temporal, giving material expression to a story which resides in the mythical realm, beyond the material plane.

In his book The Great Work, Thomas Berry wrote: “The present urgency is to begin thinking within the context of the whole planet, the integral Earth community with all its human and other-than-human components. When we discuss ethics we must understand it to mean the principles and values that govern that comprehensive community.”

Berry believed that the natural world is the physical manifestation of the divine. The survival of both religion and science depends not on one winning (because then both would lose), but on the emergence of what he called a twenty-first-century story—a reunion between humans and nature.

— Richard Louv, The Nature Principle

In a further unfolding of this act of reunion, the story of the woman becoming bee, and the creator god Avireri has now been recorded in an academic journal.

Richar Antonio Demetrio is the first Indigenous Asháninka scientist to publish in a high-impact journal, combining traditional ecological knowledge with scientific methodology to study meliponiculture, the farming of bees.

Published in Ethnobiology and Conservation in March 2025, the study documents, for the first time, traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) about stingless bees.

While of course Asháninka creation stories don’t need academic approval to be validated, the pioneering work by Demetrio contributes to the TEK of the Asháninka people being taken seriously by the dominant culture.

This is a crucial step forward if we are going to make serious attempts to mitigate the irreversible harm industrial civilisation has wreaked on the natural world.

To step fully into the mysteries of this plant work, we welcome you to join our facilitator training and learn to hold space with the integrity this medicine deserves.

The scentless flower’s secret perfume

Beyond its place in story and law, the bee holds a practical role in the forest that bears directly on cacao: a relationship that is ancient and interdependent.

Cacao’s main pollinators are tiny midges that breed in the damp litter of the forest floor.

In places where the canopy is thin, the sun dries out the fallen leaves and the midges die.

Here, the stingless bees take over as the cacao tree’s most important pollinator.

Plants like coffee and citrus drug pollinators by lacing their nectar with caffiene that alters the bee’s memories and guarantees return visits.

Meanwhile, the cacao flower has its own unique form of chemical seduction.

To humans, the small, delicate flower is scentless, but to insects it broadcasts a perfume of 78 compounds, including monoterpenes and heavy hydrocarbons.

These compounds are pheromone-like attractants, and the stingless bee is irresistibly allured by their intoxicating fragrance.

The bees force their way into the hooded base of the flowers to reach their reward, pollinating the flower as they go.

Alongside their work in the flowers, these bees produce a honey like no other.

What wild honey reveals

The honey produced by stingless bees differs from honeybees.

It is thin and faintly acidic, more reminiscent of a tincture than a syrup.

It is used in traditional Asháninka medicine as a salve for wounds, and to treat respiratory infection.

When trees in the forest are cut, caustic resins ooze from the wound, which the bees then gather.

The resulting honey is rich in antimicrobial and anti-inflammatory compounds, hence its traditional medicinal use.

Groundbreaking research on this honey has been led by another Satipo scientist, Rosa Vásquez Espinoza.

Espinoza is a chemical biologist of Indigenous Andean and Amazonian descent who founded the nonprofit Amazon Research Internacional.

Her grandmother was a traditional healer who made remedies from medicinal plants, and she has spent years mapping wild bee hives and analysing the chemistry of their honey, working alongside Asháninka beekeepers in the region.

Espinoza has received Peru’s Order of Merit for Biodiversity and Conservation, the nation’s highest award in the field, and she was named among the BBC 100 Women in 2024.

Bees collect pollen across a wide geographical radius, and so the honey produced in a hive carries a chemical record of everything they have foraged, including pesticides and pollutants.

Espinoza’s chemical analysis of this honey has allowed each hive to become a living monitor of the ecosystem’s health as a whole.

When photos of Espinoza with a hive of stingless bees were published in National Geographic, she was inundated with messages from Indigenous women who were inspired seeing a scientist who looked like them.

In response, her NGO hosted a national conference for Peruvian women, exploring the intersection of ancestral wisdom and modern science.

Espinoza shared how the conference was attended by many women from Indigenous communities who held the dream of pursuing a career in science, inspired by her lead.

We’re making Indigenous people in science normalised. That’s evidence that we’re heading in the right direction.

— Rosa Vásquez Espinoza

The emergence of Indigenous women stepping into roles historically dominated by men is one we have seen in our own supply chain.

In our book, Cacao Ceremony, Diane wrote about one of the values we hold that contributes to our understanding of the term “ceremonial grade,” when describing cacao.

In the co-operative we collaborate with, the manager in charge of bean selection, roasting, and grinding is a young Indigenous woman, representing a new generational wave of women taking on leadership roles in Peruvian cacao production.

We give thanks to the sacred work of the Indigenous women who are leading the way in these new times of change.

This is truly the rebuilding of kametsa asaiki, the good life of the Asháninka, where the wellbeing of a people and the health of their forest are one and the same.

By acknowledging the beingness of bees, by protecting the ancestor of the Asháninka woman whose delectable masato never ran dry, this groundbreaking law ensures that her story lives in on every hive in the forest.

With love,
Gavin x

To deepen your journey of the heart…

1. Order ceremonial cacao, sourced directly from Asháninka growers in Peru. (Subscribe and save 20%!)

2. Join our facilitator training and learn to hold space with the integrity this medicine deserves.

3. Order our book Cacao Ceremony, a guide for anyone called to share this medicine with the people around them.

4. Join my mini-course and learn to carry an open heart from ceremony into everyday life.

There were two moments during our last trip to Peru to visit the Asháninka farmers that hit me. Hard.

I think about them often, in idle moments, rolling the memories between my palms like dough, allowing the lessons to warm and rise with time and care.

The first was when we were walking with one of the Indigenous engineers of the co-operative who produce the cacao we share.

I was asking eagerly about the ayahuasca tradition.

”You are interested in all of that?” He scoffed.

“Yes, we are very interested in all of that.”

I looked at Gav, who was oblivious of our Spanish quips, and laughed sheepishly.

He shrugged and told me that there are parts of the tribe that still remain uncontacted, and they are deeply connected to those plants, especially ayahuasca.

My eyes brightened in amazement.

“They come sometimes and we tell them that they can labor for the day, help to harvest the cacao, and in exchange they take a machete or a metal pot, things that they can’t make in the forest.”

I almost trip over the emergent roots of a low sweeping tree, and rush ahead to try to keep up with his long stride and his story.

“They teach you about the ayahuasca, and the songs, and the rituals?”

He snorted, and turned his head sideways at me in disbelief.

“Me? No! I don’t have any interest in that stuff. I hope that I can lure them in enough with work that eventually they can come to get proper schooling. We can civilize them, you know? They are still quite brute and barbaric. They don’t speak Spanish and they will ask you for the clothing from off your back.”

My heart sank to the pit of my stomach like a coin in a wishing well.

Is this how he sees his own people?

Is this how he sees himself?

Please God, I thought to myself, let them stay in the forest, and let them know that they are the original civilization. They don’t need to take on our habits to be more loveable.

As an outsider, as someone who benefits from the logistical capacities of Asháninka export managers who went to Peruvian schools, as someone who also understands that regenerative business can be a form of liberation, I allowed myself to be still and to be silent.

My heart crumbled into pieces under the forest canopy.

This Asháninka man, a man who comes from a lineage of great wisdom and rebellion, from a society that has refused to be dominated for hundreds of years, no longer loves the root and the essence of his people.

He no longer values the direct connection to the forest and its non-human beings.

I ventured one more question, “Nobody here still studies with them?”

“Oh yeah, they do, you can meet the guy who does.” He shrugged again.

I imagined him thinking, “If jungle behaviour is what the gringo wants, then jungle behaviour is what the gringo gets.”

A spark of hope was reignited.

I had the privilege of sitting and singing and dancing and sharing a day of masato (fermented cassava) with the elder, and former president of the co-operative who insisted on going into the forest with the parts of the Asháninka tribe who want nothing to do with “Western” civilization.

He spoke very quietly, and I had to strain to hear him most often. He would stare off into the distance in reflection with an unmistakable look of pride for his people.

Suddenly, he broke out into a song, a song at first that sounded a bit like drunken murmurs. Then Gav and I looked at each other when we realized that this was an icaro, a sacred song of his ayahuasca tradition.

When he was finished, he explained that though many were afraid, and others still were not invited, he made sure to continue to study his lineage, the traditions of the forest.

“We must preserve our culture. Our culture is everything that we have. We must love and protect our traditions. We must love ourselves.”

My heart soared. Outside I kneeled and listened to him, my head cocked towards his soft spoken reflections. Inside, I was dancing in celebration.

My hope sprung from a well of love.

I knew that as long as there were people who loved their culture, who loved THEMSELVES as who they are, that they would be “ok.”

What would it mean to be ok?

It means that their culture would evolve and change, as all living cultures do, that they would still have fights from the government, outsiders calling them barbaric, fear from the city people who called them cannibals, but they would always have a place to return to.

As long as there were those who knew the importance of the foundation of their traditions, they would always take refuge in the LOVE that they had for themselves.

Even as an outsider visiting his forest home, I recognised his politics of the heart: a person from a people the world has called unloveable, choosing to love themselves anyway.

His refuge illuminated my own, and the one I have been labouring to build for my sisters.

These moments still percolate in my memory, and the dough from these memories has risen to perfection like a golden loaf of bread.

This week’s love letter is an offering to myself, and to my Black sisters.

As I could sink into the pleasure of witnessing this student of the forest declare love for himself, his people and his tradition, I invite you too to join this celebration, and witness this radical act of self-love.

In celebrating myself, and us, I hope to inspire you, too, to affirm your own identity, your own traditions, your own body, your own skin, and your own divinity.

As the revolutionary civil rights group the Black Panther’s always said: “All power to all the people!”

Rage and refuge

This letter emerged from months of struggle, and of triumph.

I have been heavy with grief, and also bright with expansion and hope.

I’ve been teeming with righteous rage, and simultaneously overflowing with bliss and joy in my community.

The home and refuge that I have returned to is the LOVE that I have for my community, for my people, for my lineage, for my sisters, and for myself.

On one hand, I’ve (still) been working behind the scenes in relation to the sexual and spiritual predator in our Kenyan community.

On the other hand, I’m still receiving messages from folks around the UK about Liam Browne’s public statements that we unpacked in our recent letter.

Both of these harms happened in realms we call sacred; spaces where participants hoped to find a sense of safety. That is part of what makes them cut so deeply, and what makes repair matter so much.

To change the culture of these spaces from the inside out, our facilitator training is a course that teaches you to hold space with the absolute integrity this medicine deserves.

For the record, we didn’t receive a response back from Liam, and there hasn’t been an acknowledgement of our offer to support him and his colleagues to recognise their blind spots that cause harm to those in the cacao community.

(Shrug. Yawn.) Anyways…

Precious gifts

There have also been precious gifts that have emerged from these two tragedies!

One relates to the letter that Gavin wrote last week: the gift of connection and beauty.

The way that across nationalities, across languages, across classes, and across all of our differences, we can build bridges over these personality parts and mold deep and nourishing relationships.

I have been gifted dozens of new friendships and genuine connections with the many women who wrote to me after our recent letters.

I have been gifted the possibility of catalyzing online circles of women who are coming together to support each other after unspeakable harm.

Every day, I speak to women who signed up to start a family with a Kenyan man who promised he would support them, that he would get married to them, that they would have a baby together, and that they would stick together through thick and thin.

These women are navigating states of confusion and wariness whenever the predator who fathered their child, or who promised them a life together, tries to reach out.

These women are supporting their children entirely on their own, while he continues to hide, reappear, reinvent himself, and try to salvage the sinking ship that is his life and reputation.

Guess what? Every single one of these women are Black and African.

I’ve also made so many connections after expressing my hurt and disgust at the comments that Liam Browne made about Indigenous people, and Black women like myself.

He called Indianna Hill crazy, insane, and chocked up her critiques to being “obsessed with him.”

Essentially, he hit back at her with all of the tired tropes that are used to discredit Black and Indigenous women around the globe.

(Never heard of these tropes? Don’t worry, I break them down in this letter so you can easily spot them when they appear in your own circles.)

All of us have found the precious gift of rediscovering our dignity, individual and collective, by taking refuge in our love of self.

I love Black women

I got the privilege to connect with Indianna, and countless other Black women who wrote to me privately, sharing their experiences living while Black, in the UK.

This for me, has been a special homecoming, because I love Black women.

I love being a Black woman.

My academic career has been researching and publishing articles with and about Black women.

I did my tantra training and apprenticeship with Black women.

I currently study with two teachers who are Black African women.

I love being able to support Black women, and to choose Black women to love.

This is important to me, because, frankly, we are people who the world does not often choose to love.

We are the people that society often treats as grotesque, consumable, and unloveable.

If you are thinking that this is not true in your experience, I’ll soon share my own experiences and realities.

I know it’s hard to hear this.

Before I share the most BEAUTIFUL parts of these painful two months with you, let me hit you with the more difficult facts.

3 ways Black women are abused

Scholars have a word for this: misogynoir. It described the specific way racism and sexism overlap onto Black women.

Across history and in contemporary society, this intersectional oppression has expressed itself as physical, medical, and psychological abuse.

Here are 3 of the ways that this happens.

1. The “Jezebel” stereotype. For more than 400 years of transatlantic slavery, Black women were raped to produce unpaid labour. To justify it, slavers create the lie that we were inherently “loose” and hypersexual, so the violence wasn’t really violence. It is a lie didn’t die with slavery, and is why Black women’s bodies are still treated as more sexual, more available, and more “exotic” by default.

2. Medical racism. American gynaecology was literally built by experimenting on enslaved Black women without anaesthetic. The “father of modern gynaecology,” J. Marion Sims, performed dozens of operations on women named Anarcha, Lucy and Betsey. Anarcha alone endured around thirty surgeries, because doctors at the time believed Black women didn’t feel pain the same way. Today in the UK, Black women are still around four times more likely to die in pregnancy and childbirth than white women. Serena Williams almost died after giving birth because nurses dismissed her when she told them, repeatedly, that she was having a pulmonary embolism. If it can happen to her, with all her money and access, imagine the rest of us walking into a GP surgery saying we’re in pain.

3. The “Angry Black Woman.” When a Black woman is assertive, she’s “aggressive.” When she sets a boundary, she’s “difficult.” When she names harm, she’s “obsessed” or “crazy,” exactly the words Liam Browne used about Indianna. You’ve seen this trope in the loud, neck-rolling, finger-snapping Black woman who exists to be laughed at or feared.

Taken together, one message comes through clearly: we are less human, less worthy of tenderness, less believable, and less loveable.

This is reflected in current relationship data. Only around 20% of Black women in the UK are married. White women are 1.5 times more likely to be married than us, both here and in the US.

Living while Black

In the United States, we use the term “living while Black” to refer to the compendium of extra burdens that we carry due to the historical and structural inequities that exist in the lives of Black people.

Here are three common ways this manifests:

1. The dangers of driving or being around the police while Black.

2. Having to shop while shopkeepers follow you around the store.

3. Having people finding it hard to believe that you are the one in charge, the owner, or an expert at what you do.

For example, in an ayahuasca ceremony here in Kenya, a German participant who has fathered two mixed race children assumed that the only Black African participant was the maid, when they first met in the luxury resort.

“Are you here to help me?” He asked, before he began to rattle off his needs for the room.

She froze. She is, in fact, the CEO of a multi-million dollar, life-changing NGO that employs hundreds of Kenyan women.

“No,” she smiled in disbelief, “I’m here for the retreat just like you.”

He launched into a story about how “helpful” that she appeared, rather than admit the fact that his unconscious bias assumed that the only Black woman present was the one who would do his domestic bidding.

She was unimpressed, but also unfazed.

It wasn’t the first time that as a globally recognized and immaculately dressed Kenyan woman, others had assumed her to be hotel staff, rather than the CEO that she was.

It’s hard for anyone who hasn’t lived this on a daily basis to understand what it feels like, or the daily stress that scientists call allastic load.

These things literally take years off our lives.

The majority of white people have no idea that these parameters of living while Black exist; studies show that most white people have mostly white friends and white networks.

This explains why such unexamined stereotypes are perpetuated.

This week, I write to express and share my growing and teeming and beautiful love for my Black women everywhere. (And for myself!)

Thank you for sending me the messages that you have over these past months.

Thank you for trusting me with your stories.

I will not let you down!

These poems are for you, and these stories are for you.

For those of you who would like to connect as Black women, or women of color in the wellness world, please reach out to me.

So many of you in the UK are also daughters of immigrants, and I can imagine that to see the alarming growth of extreme political ideologies such as repatriation can feel like a stab in the heart.

So here is some love for you.

As Gavin wrote about last week, modern cacao ceremonies are a folk response to an age of increasing division. These are the poems and love letters I have been sharing in my circles.

Let us give offerings and love to lineages of Black women who work on cacao plantations all over Africa, often in exploitative conditions.

Let us give offerings and thanks to the Black enslaved women who toiled to keep their ancestral traditions alive while toasting, grinding and frothing the daily cacao for the entire household.

Let us give thanks and praise to the Black women who found refuge and companionship with the Indigenous women in the Spanish colonies and who infused their herbal and magical traditions together to protect and support each other.

(You can read about them here in my historical fiction series.)

Read these poems.

Read these poems at your cacao ceremonies.

Read these poems and put melodies to them.

Read these poems to your body. to your dreams. to your ancestors. and to your loves.

Read these poems with your lovers, your girlfriends, your mothers, your babies.

Hug a black woman when you see her.

Tell her that you see her.

Tell her you recognise her.

Trust her when she tells you her story.

Recognise her when the world doesn’t.

Here are poems to read out loud to yourself, to come back home to yourself.

They are not romantic. They are anti-romantic.

They are made of an unconditional love: a love that roots from the spiritual and the magical of earth and blood and bone.

Love Letter to Black Women.

This love letter is in the name of the greats.

In the name of Audre Lorde, who taught us to tap into our erotic power.

In the name of mother Oxum and her absolute presence and clairvoyance.

In the name of bell hooks, who reminded us that decolonization is an act of self-love.

In the name of Ingrid Lafleur, who reminded us that pleasure is a revolutionary act.

In the name of Joan Morgan, who declares that there is no justice for Black women without pleasure.

These are actual love letters that revel in the pleasure, in the joy, in the immense beauty that is loving a Black woman.

These words are prose and poems of love and lust and admiration to be poured warmly into ears, shouted from rooftops, recited in the mirror, to be read around a fire under the moon.

These are for us – from the depths of the sacredly profane, unabashedly and in the name of sensual flow of the Spirit.

Dear Black Women,

When your pleasure becomes you and you ripen into your Spirit,
They will sniff after you,
You reek of honey and glory, your steps land sweet and great.
Your smile lifts the curtain, your glare tugs at the seams.
You are a gift to humanity!
Did they hear of your coming?
Did the gravity of your arrival disturb them?
Did it undo their unknowing without a word?
Were you aware?
Did you care?
Your hands outstretched and serving,
Let them be fed
Your heart outstretched to open portals,
Let their spirits be wed
Your mind outstretched across the shells on the table,
Let them be read
Your vision outstretched past the material,
Let them be led.

Ode to the Earth and Moon

i wonder what you taste like with guava...i wonder how you sound with music, i gave rise to the moon, i picked her like a pearl out the sea one day.

Silken hues, oh, sister moon
Ever unfolding towards me
Your path of soft light
Gaze never shifting
Steps without making traces
Your wolves always about you.

Holy Gratitude

How many times can I say thank you in a day?
With what impunity may I bury myself in the soils and dirts of humility and gratitude until all doubt dies and my spirit sprouts anew just seeking sun and water and your loving gaze and to give breath back to the world.

Give the breath back to the world that I take. Fuck making America great....we want air again. We want to care again, we want to spare ourselves of the romanticisms of longing and just be bare again.

Oh Holy Mother; let us be clean. Let us be cloaked in white cloths and reek of rosemary tea. Let us live this life and this love supreme.

The Justice of Pleasure Alive

All of my parts feel so alive. All of the things seem real. All of my breast is bared And I kneel and send my prayer, to the spirits that keep my tongue juicy to taste you, to Oxum’s laughter that electrifies my spine, to my ancestors whose ovaries sparkled like emeralds, the men they made fathers.

The angels who made queer love drunk on wine, Dionysius, forgive me for abandoning your tribe but my senses have delivered me to a much different time, yes. now? yes! It’s called:

Lord, give me strength
For me to take more life in
For me to swallow all of my pride
For me to feel so deeply.
All of my parts so alive.
All of the things so real.
All of my breast is bared.
All of my good is here.

Love in the Digital Age

I’m clicking little hearts as little symbols to show a little something of just how much your words and world bring joy and hope to my ideas of existing.

This utopia as a science fiction of fulfillment and faith and fun that flashes through me, lights me up and guides me like a map through each moment...

I’ve crossed many oceans before, but now I feel that I’m skipping across time. instead of constantly chasing it about with my palm raised, like a nuisance fly, I’ve spread my arms through yesterday, slipped them round tomorrow and I’ve invited the now to lay down and just snuggle into my breast.

And now. You. You kiss my neck. And you are my air. And you’ve meet me here.

Is this what it feels like to come home? Is this how it feels to sleep in a bed of lush new growth, blossoming vegetation of hope, and an ever sprouting “ours” n “yes”?

And you take my hand. gingering me slowly, past the gates of my own disbelief, into the cages and snarling teeth of doubts and grief, and we do what we do best and now our heads n fall to our knees.

Just white cloth, shells, candles, water, and leaves.

Axé and so it will be.

Amun ra praise to all that we see.

Thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you.

Bassé.

Re-remembering US

she was born out of silken robes and crystal grains etched her name on papyrus before there was a canvas...her feet like it, bronzed in shea butter, now, she uses cocoa and baby oil... breathes the wind and speaks fire, brow furrowed out of will and spirit, so much that a simple one dimensional image in my mind’s eye is enough to give me...life...
Each moment one must reflect on where it is that the heart is beating towards.
Each moment it is only time for that moment
And...something about the thought of you....
that’s all it takes
so many memories
yet this time, we create...
can i just hold you....for God’s sake,
for like 20 years......?

Affirmation!

Dear Black Woman,

I believe in you, utterly and totally and my tummy churns when I think about the potential you hold in this incarnation in both inner and outer worlds.

I feel touched by grace to have the opportunity in this life to be able to hold you, to serve you, to be able to create with you.

I suppose what I was really trying to say is that I celebrate all of the things and all of the possibilities I see in you, and it brings me the utmost joy to be dreaming in a future where I can support you in every way I know how to flourish in the fullness of your being.

I adore you so much.

Thank you for it all.

Diane x

To deepen your journey of the heart…

1. Order ceremonial cacao, sourced directly from Asháninka growers in Peru. (Subscribe and save 20%!)

2. Join our facilitator training and learn to hold space with the integrity this medicine deserves.

3. Order our book Cacao Ceremony, a guide for anyone called to share this medicine with the people around them.

4. Join Gavin’s mini-course and learn to carry an open heart from ceremony into everyday life.

The Druids taught that wherever you find two, look for a third.

Every binary contains a hidden third element that brings resolution.

This is one meaning of the Awen, the three rays of light at the heart of the Druid tradition.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the concept of oneness, the fundamental unity of existence, and how if that becomes conflated with the dual nature of life as we experience it, we risk causing harm by flattening the lived experience of other people.

This week I want to take that further, into a practical exploration about how we can actively seek out that third factor to bring more harmony, justice and healing to our lives, and to the world.

Most spiritual traditions discuss the nature of duality, which is the binary expression of life as we experience it on a day-to-day basis.

Every conceivable manifestation, whether mental or material, has its opposite pole, from obvious pairings such as night and day, and certainty and doubt, to the side we are on, and the side we are against.

The primary method of instruction throughout Celtic history was via triads, three parts or dimensions that form a complete expression of a single concept.

My favourite modern triad comes from the French Druid Francois Bourillon:

When you die, only three things will remain of you, since you will abandon all material things on the threshold of the Otherworld: what you have taught to others, what you have created with your hands, and how much love you have spread. So learn more and more in order to teach wise, long-lasting values. Work more and more to leave the world things of great beauty. And love people around you for the Light of Love heals everything.

Aspiring Druids are sometimes given lists of binaries, and instructed to locate the third factor, traditionally called a ternary, in meditation.

A ternary is not a fixed right or wrong answer. What’s important is how it functions: it must resolve the binary without simply being either a compromise or a midpoint between two extremes.

Night and day are resolved by the ternary of twilight. It exists as a place of threshold, hence the ancient Celts marking their sacred days at these hinges.

Self and other are resolved by the ternary of relationship. The nature of the bond changes who both parties are, and what they hold as potential to become.

Inhale and exhale are resolved by the pause between breaths, described as the “place of possibility” in some lineages of Zen.

These ways of thinking, explored over a lifetime, lead to the slow ripening of wisdom.

In any school of the mysteries, teachings are shared as lenses to view the world through, not as dogmatic positions that need to be accepted or rejected.

Belief and disbelief are beside the point; the important question to explore is always how would my life look if this was to be true?

Here again, the ternary of using a certain perspective as a tool is what resolves the binary of belief and disbelief.

The great English occultist Dion Fortune expressed the same idea by presenting her teachings as ways to train the mind, not to inform it.

If the Druid mysteries train the mind to look for the third where most people see only two, then modern politics is a useful place to practice.

It offers binaries in abundance.

In recent years, I’ve been disheartened to see from afar how the British political landscape has unfolded.

The distance between opposing viewpoints has widened drastically.

As trust in institutions erodes, polarisation inevitably increases.

This pattern is well documented in history, but I still find it somewhat unnerving to witness in my own lifetime.

What, then, might be the ternary that resolves the binary of our current state of affairs?

To explore this, it is first necessary to rule out what doesn’t lead to any kind of resolution: debate.

In her debut book Don’t Talk About Politics, Sarah Stein Lubrano describes how our minds have evolved to crave consistency, especially when involving anything that relates to our identity, or sense of self.

We typically experience painful cognitive dissonance when considering ideas that might require us to change the beliefs we hold about who we are.

For those readers who have been following our ongoing critique of structural privilege in the modern cacao movement, this is obvious to see in the defensive reactions that flare up when blindspots are pointed out that challenge somebody’s existing worldview.

Lubrano demonstrates how when we watch debates or read opposing arguments, our minds work quickly and automatically to explain away or rationalise an opposing point of view.

Confirmation bias is the mechanism by which we instinctively distrust information that contradicts our existing beliefs, while selectively trusting ideas that favour our views.

As spectacle, debates are alluring, but we are rarely influenced by them when it comes to actually changing our minds about the world.

The meme of somebody sat at a table in a public space requesting passers by to “change my mind” is entertaining as street theatre, but useless as a method to reach consensus, or even a shared point of nuance.

The function of any system is what it does, not what it claims to do.

What does political debate actually do in the UK?

It draws battle lines that force onlookers to choose sides.

This is not the same as thing as thinking clearly, or developing our points of view.

Like many working class people in the UK, I grew up without a formal political education, so when I watched a televised debate in the House of Commons for the first time as an adult, I was astounded at the level of emotional immaturity on display, and, less comically, the futility of the whole charade.

On the public stage, debates are often set up by those in power to keep things exactly the way they are, while creating the appearance of a space for dissent.

Not for the first time in recent months, Terrence McKenna comes to mind:

“We are led by the least among us: the least intelligent, the least noble, the least visionary. We are led by the least among us.”

If we’ve identified the problem, and critiqued the futility of the top-down solutions on offer, what do we do as individuals of conscience, with deeply held convictions for justice?

Biologically, we are a social species, and so perhaps it is no surprise that it is by cultivating meaningful friendships that we are most effectively able to diminish our prejudices, creating openings to see the world in new ways.

Social connections form the basis of much of what we come to believe about the world.

Like the Celtic knot, there is a spiral dynamic at play here.

By becoming less prejudiced, we become more open to spending time with people who are not like us, and in doing so, become less prejudiced still.

Relationships are the foundation of effective political action, as it is through connecting to another’s story that we learn what other people’s lives are really like.

If we long to live in a more just world, we have a special responsibility to actively dismantle our own inherent biases.

One way to do this is to actively seek out perspectives different to our own, and to consider what life experiences led this person, or group of people, to come the beliefs they hold about the world that they do.

This is a courageous and inherently creative act.

It is an act of resistance that requires no force or tension.

Like many subversive strategies for change, it hides in plain sight.

I invite you to consider what you might be able to do this week to actively and open-heartedly engage with somebody who sees the world through a different lens than your own.

In his beautiful interpretation of the Tao Te Ching, William Martin renders verse 65 thus:

The great teachers of this path taught with humble simplicity.

No cathedrals, no books, no ado at all.

Just one person talking to another about ordinary life.

Today the experts babble about everything under the sun, seeking to gather crowds and control circumstances by their clever words.

Everyone is cheated.

Similarly, in the Celtic tradition, we say that we live in the shelter of each other.

Here, the shelter is the ternary that resolves the binary of self and other.

We need shelters; places to gather.

Over the past two weeks, I met one of Diane’s closest friends, Dr Sonasha Braxton.

As circumstances unfolded, Sonasha and I ended up in Nairobi together while Diane was sharing ceremony on the coast.

Our time together is something I hold dear to my heart: the opportunity to get to know somebody who is so important in Diane’s life.

As we unraveled our personal histories, I found myself recounting childhood visits to The Everyman Bistro in Liverpool.

The Everyman Theatre was founded in 1964 on the principle of bringing radical, relevant art to the masses.

The theatre championed working-class voices, launching the careers of local playwrights like Willy Russell (Educating Rita) and Alan Bleasdale (The Boys from the Blackstuff).

The Bistro underneath was a social extension of the stage above.

The theatre’s plays gave a voice to working-class experiences in Liverpool, while the Bistro below introduced many local people to new foods, new people and new ideas.

Visiting as a child, it was likely the first time I’d ever eaten a salad, and possibly the origin of my lifelong passion for creative cooking.

The Bistro served nutritious and very cheap meals in an environment where no one felt out of place for not knowing proper restaurant etiquette.

It was also a sanctuary for political dissent.

During the 1970s and 1980s, Liverpool faced severe economic hardship, mass unemployment, and intense political friction with Margaret Thatcher’s government.

The Bistro was a hub of grassroots organisation where people could share ideas and build solidarity.

Although my visits began in the decade following this politically tense period, the air of rebellion still lingered in this underground den.

It was intoxicating.

It was only in reminiscing with Sonasha about this unassuming eatery that I realised what a formative experience this place had been for me.

In modern cities, there are fewer and fewer physical spaces available where people of different backgrounds can come together and participate in power equally.

This is why I believe gatherings such as cacao ceremonies are so important as a folk response to an increasingly divisive social landscape.

A circle is not automatically a refuge, however.

It is imperative for people holding these spaces to become scrupulously aware of the dynamics of structural power that exist, often invisibly to those who benefit from them, throughout our society.

This is much of what we work with in our facilitator training, learning together to hold space with the integrity this medicine deserves.

When we gather in settled bodies, we begin to see beyond the identities that we have been assigned, that we have inherited, and that we have constructed as we navigate the world.

In such spaces of collective vulnerability, we open the door of possibility to reach a communal oneness.

The paradox is that such a unity happens in states of deep relaxation, yet it requires significant effort to build the infrastructure and create the conditions for our bodies to be able to settle in the first place.

Cacao supports us in this endeavour.

By calming the activity of the amygdala, our conditioned fear responses relax.

This is known as an “anti-phobic” mechanism.

Cacao reduces the fear of being seen, supporting us to stay present, and softening the dread that might otherwise close our hearts.

Using plants as supports to mediate social relationships is an ancient part of our human inheritance.

The ceremonial cacao we source at Cacao Love comes directly from Asháninka families in Peru, as one living strand of this much older lineage.

In Asháninka cosmology, it is understood that a person’s human quality can be lost if they move too far away from their inter-human relationships.

The forest, far from being a safe haven, is a dangerous wilderness environment.

This is true both physically, where poisonous insects are a literal threat to life, and metaphysically, as when a person enters the forest alone or strays from their companions, they become vulnerable to attack from malevolent spirits.

The binary formed by the safety of the village and danger of the forest is resolved by the ternary of utilising the power of plants.

When tracking deer, for example, Asháninka hunters rub the freshly squeezed juice of the maniroshi plant on their faces.

This plant is considered to be the “mother of the deer” and mediates between the hunter and his prey.

By wearing this essence, the hunter magnetically attracts the deer, pacifying its natural instincts and compelling it to present itself to be killed.

Similarly, to protect oneself from poisonous snakes such as the common lancehead, a hunter might use the leaf of sachajergón to make himself completely invisible to the reptile.

The plants chosen for each purpose become the living bridge between the human and the non-human realms.

In our fiercely divided political climate, we are constantly pressured and manipulated to choose between the safety of our ideological villages and the perceived, dangerous wilderness of those who are other.

My invitation is that we work in our communities to build spaces of encounter, in whatever ways our own circumstances allow, to form new bonds of belonging in the shelter of each other.

When we die, as Bourillon reminds us, it is the love we’ve spread that remains.

Cultivating that love across divided lines is the ultimate ternary, and the deepest gift a medicine like cacao has to offer.

With love,
Gavin x

If this story stirred your heart:

1. Order ceremonial cacao, sourced directly from Asháninka growers in Peru. (Subscribe and save 20%!)

2. Join our facilitator training and learn to hold space with the integrity this medicine deserves.

3. Order our book Cacao Ceremony, a guide for anyone called to share this medicine with the people around them.

4. Join my mini-course and learn to carry an open heart from ceremony into everyday life.

Chocolate is one of the most beloved flavours on our planet.

Millions of people consume it daily.

Many women crave it monthly.

Its mere mention conjures visions of romance, decadence, comfort, and love.

And yet the milk chocolate most people reach for in their pantry is a far cry from its ancestral form: smothered with sugar, stripped of its fats and fibre, and heated to smithereens until most of its bioactive compounds are degraded.

In this, our ten year anniversary of Cacao Love, we propose that this near-universal human desire for cacao is not actually a craving for sweets, but part of an ancient dialogue between plant and human consciousness.

Archaeological evidence suggests exactly that.

Two of the oldest ceremonial temples yet excavated in South America are in present-day Peru and Ecuador. Ceramic vessels recovered from these sites contain residues of theobromine, the primary alkaloid in cacao.

Six thousand years ago, cacao seeds were already being crushed and consumed in ritual contexts.

From its origins in the Amazon basin, cacao was carried thousands of miles northward, domesticated across Mesoamerica, and woven into daily and ceremonial life.

When the Spanish invaded, cacao was enthusiastically adopted. It was consumed across every social stratum, and ranked among the most valued substances in the known world.

Across dozens of civilisations, cacao never represented just one thing, but held importance and meaning wherever it was encountered.

Cacao was always more than a stimulant or a trade good; it was medicine for the heart and a lubricant of intention.

It accompanied divination, wedding rites, diplomatic exchanges, and preparation for battle.

It was said to bring “lightning” to the blood.

In the sacred Mayan text, the Popol Wuj, human beings are described as being formed from a mixture of maize and cacao, a cosmological teaching that positions these two plants at the core of our existence.

Its scientific name, Theobroma cacao, was assigned in acknowledgement of this stature: Food of the Gods.

The more modern researchers study cacao, the more we understand why human devotion to this plant has persisted for so long.

Minimally processed cacao supports the cardiovascular system by improving the flexibility of blood vessels, the kind of deep circulatory health that keeps the heart resilient over time.

Its natural stimulants, theobromine and caffeine, lift energy and focus without the spike-and-crash of coffee.

It contains precursors to anandamide, the body’s own bliss molecule, and phenylethylamine, which stimulates the production of dopamine.

Its fibres and polyphenols feed beneficial gut bacteria and reduce systemic inflammation.

The cumulative benefit of these actions is better circulation, more stable mood, clearer thinking, and a nervous system that is more at ease.

Cacao literally gives you more life!

It is this living tradition that we honour in the cacao we share, grown by Asháninka family farmers in the Central Highlands of Peru.

Historically, cacao was revered as a spiritual entity and prepared with ritualistic intent, grounded in a cosmology that gave this experience depth.

As Gavin wrote about recently, modern science is now catching up to these ancient traditions, acknowledging that expectation, belief, and relational context are all biological modulators. Put simply, the ritual surrounding cacao is not separate from its medicine and power, but an integral part of how the medicine works.

It’s for this reason that our facilitator training attends as much to the inner work of holding space as to the outer mechanics of the ceremony itself.

Today, ceremonial practices incorporating cacao are flourishing everywhere, among both communities without an inherited tradition, and within communities working to recover and reshape their own.

In our book Cacao Ceremony, we explore this modern phenomenon, its connection to the ancient past alongside its new vigour, and the ways it continues to shape both physical health and human consciousness.

Below are two recipes that honour these lineages: one in honour of an ancient preparation, and one a daily tonic to carry you through the season’s turn.

Lightning In The Blood

A delicious creation inspired by Mesoamerican preparations of cacao, with links to source unusual ingredients in the UK.

Ingredients (serves 2)

• Ceremonial grade cacao, 4 tbsp

• Water, 2 cups

• Dried ancho chilli, seeds removed, 1 small pinch

• Vanilla pod (split), ½ pod

• Annatto seeds, crushed powder in a pestle and mortar, ½ tsp

• Ground allspice, ¼ tsp

• Masa harina (ground dried corn flour), 1 tsp

• Piloncillo or raw honey, 1 tsp (optional)

Method

Toast the chilli in a dry pan for 30 seconds, then simmer in the water with the vanilla pod for 10 minutes. Add achiote, allspice, and masa harina until the water turns amber-red. Remove the chili and vanilla. Reduce heat, add cacao paste in pieces, honey, and stir or whisk until dark and unified. Blend for 30 seconds to generate “espuma,” the foam the Maya considered the breath of the cacao spirit.

Daily Immune-Boosting Cacao

As the warmer days arrive, we shake off winter’s slowness. Take this blend daily for a few weeks to support immunity, circulation, and vitality.

Ingredients (serves 2)

• Ceremonial grade cacao, 4 tbsp

• Astragalus powder, 2 tsp

• Reishi dual-extract powder or tincture, 1 tsp

• Ashwagandha powder, 1 tsp

• Fresh ginger, finely grated, 1 tbsp

• Water, oat or almond milk, 2 cups

• Ground cinnamon, 1 tsp

• Ground cardamom, ½ tsp

• Black pepper, 1 pinch

• Raw honey, 2 tsp

Method

Gently heat the water or plant milk with the grated ginger or blend the ginger with the hot water or plant milk. Stir in the astragalus, reishi, ashwagandha, cinnamon, cardamom, and black pepper. Add the cacao in pieces and stir until smooth and creamy. Remove from the heat and let it rest for 2–3 minutes. Stir in the honey. (Our personal preference is to put everything in a high-speed blender for 2-3 minutes on high for maximum creaminess and froth.)

Set your intentions and savour!

It’s always a joy to receive your reflections and photos when you prepare at home the recipes we compile.

Please get in touch and share your cacao moments with us; we love seeing how you make them your own.

With love,
Diane and Gavin x

In a world that pulls you in a thousand directions, cacao brings you home to your heart…

1. Order ceremonial cacao, sourced directly from Asháninka growers in Peru. (Subscribe and save 20%!)

2. Join our facilitator training and learn to hold space with the integrity this medicine deserves.

3. Order our book, our guide to sharing the medicine of your heart.

4. Join Gavin’s mini-course and learn to carry an open heart from ceremony into everyday life.

This month, Indianna Sea Cloud Hill raised serious public concerns about Liam Browne, the founder of Full Power Cacao.

Posts shared on Instagram included allegations of sexual harm, homophobic and racist rhetoric, and structural questions about how Indigenous cacao is sourced, sold, and held in Western ceremonial spaces.

Liam responded with a video posted to the Full Power Cacao Instagram page on 16th April, 2026.

This isn’t the first time that public criticisms have been levelled at Liam, but it is the first time that Diane and I have felt that we have something useful to contribute to the collective conversation.

This letter is both a critique of the structural narratives that permeate the modern cacao and wellbeing domains, and an invitation to all people participating in this space to consider how meaningful change can take place.

I have written the first part of this letter, and Diane has written the second part.

My intention is to illuminate the hidden psychological structures that white men (and women) like me have inherited from our culture, and to show a pathway by which they can begin to be dismantled, in service of a more just world.

This is not a personal attack on Liam, nor on his followers who have had meaningful experiences at his events.

My criticisms are structural, though structures are always inhabited and upheld by the people who enact them, and in that sense this cannot be entirely impersonal.

I will explore these structures using quotes taken mostly from Liam’s response video.

Again, this letter is not an attempt to vilify Liam personally, his work, or the people who have been clearly moved by it.

To situate myself: I won’t endeavour to offer an opinion on the various claims made against Liam, but I am taking a position.

Structural critique is never neutral, and pretending otherwise would uphold the very patterns this letter sets out to examine.

I stand with the substance of many aspects of Indianna’s critique, and I share my own perspective on what the conversation itself reveals to me.

I hope to show how that can become a pathway forward toward a more harmonious participation with cacao, with the Indigenous peoples whose ancestral medicine it is, with the communities who cultivate it today, and with the facilitators who share it in their businesses.

For historical context, I have known Liam for over a decade, and have welcomed him to my home in the days before cacao was the focus of his work. I also reached out to him privately when he was first publicly criticised, and shared my perspective on what I thought could be a helpful response.

I have also had supportive exchanges online with Indianna over the last few years, although we have never met in person.

I come from an almost identical background to Liam; I am a white, working-class man from a Northern city in England. My family history is patterned with alcoholism, serious drug addiction, and domestic violence. This background is relevant because the psychological structures I will be describing are structures I have had to recognise in myself first.

I’ve had the benefit, over twenty years, of living in different cultural environments, among people from many different backgrounds, and of long apprenticeships with teachers from a number of lineages.

That gave me a particular angle from which these patterns became visible to me, and I hope in sharing this, it can help bring light to these structures as they manifest in this shared space we belong to.

Part 1: We Are All One

I do not pinpoint individuals, or classes, or creeds. And I actually always speak about it: it’s regardless of your sexuality, your race, your religion. If you’re too old, you’re too white, you’re too black, you’re too gay. Whatever it is, it’s irrelevant. The thing is about this non-duality, it’s about the oneness.

— Liam Browne

From an Indigenous perspective, we see through the lens of oneness to describe our interconnected relationship with all beings. It is part of who I am, imbued in my bones and Spirit, and this is a beautiful and sacred truth from an Indigenous worldview…

In our current world, this includes honoring the differences in another’s experience and the injustice and inequity that BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Colour) experience. Sadly, this teaching has been twisted and overused in our spiritual and New Age communities, erasing the real and lived experiences of BIPOC folks.

Using the phrase “We are all One” can cause harm, and as Yoga Unity Activist Susanna Barkataki says in her book Embrace Yoga’s Roots, “To get to true oneness, we have to face the ways we may have been complicit in causing separation.” She further explains that this statement doesn’t acknowledge privilege, racial bias, or the power imbalances that exist in our world.

In the last couple of years, I have started to reflect on how to bridge these two truths and what my role is in walking this in the world… To deepen this practice, I commit to dismantling my own privilege and inherent bias daily, as I believe that we all need to do this work.

— Asha Frost, You Are The Medicine

Liam’s opening statement sets the framework for everything that follows. It comes from the beginning of the response he made to Indianna’s claims. A defence video can be an unusually honest document. Under pressure, underlying worldviews often come clearly into focus, in ways that they usually don’t. What follows is a reading of some aspects of that worldview, beginning with the concepts of non-duality and oneness.

Non-duality is the English translation of the Sanskrit advaita, literally “not-two.” It is a teaching most closely associated with Advaita Vedanta, a school of Hindu philosophy systematised in the 8th century, which says that the apparent separation between the individual self (atman) and ultimate reality (brahman) is illusory. What appears to be two, the self and the absolute, the perceiver and the perceived, is, at the deepest level of reality, one.

In the branch of Druidry I practise, a similar ultimate unity is recognised, called Awen. It is the Absolute, the single source from which all existence flows.

What it is important to realise, and what is often missed in modern spiritual discourse, is that even if, at the most fundamental level, we are all united in One Life, our daily experiences are not one and the same, because our society treats people in different bodies differently.

The day I started writing this letter, a report was published showing that Black children in England and Wales are almost eight times more likely to be strip-searched than their white peers, and five times more likely to have force used against them by police officers.

When sharing this news story with a friend who also works with cacao, she replied: “Even in Leicester, the second most multicultural city in the UK, when my mixed Nigerian kids step outside, it’s a worry constantly.”

Privilege exists in a body where that worry doesn’t exist to the same degree, in the face of the structural inequality of our society.

The most common response to people who are unaware of this privilege is to become defensive when it’s pointed out.

Why should I have to apologise for being white?

— Liam Browne

Privilege is not something that needs to be apologised for, defended against, or explained away, but something that needs to be acknowledged.

If we are committed to co-creating a more just world, we must work to dismantle its impact in the ways that we are able to, in our own spheres of influence.

The idea of privilege existing is not a belief, or a political perspective.

It is an objective, measurable reality that anybody can verify for themselves if they care to look.

The passport privilege afforded British citizens means that I can travel freely to Kenya as I please, and Liam can visit America and expand his Full Power Cacao business without issue.

Meanwhile, our friends Pegah and Yar, who we play music with in ceremonies, are simply not able to enter some of countries we travel to, because they hold Iranian passports.

A child who exists in a black body is more at risk of encountering physical force like restraints and tasers from the police than a child who exists in a white body.

These structural realities of our global society can’t be dissolved by transcendence through spiritual practice, or by changing one’s perspective.

They can’t be overcome by declaring that they don’t exist, nor by affirming the concept of the ultimate non-dual reality of existence.

As Asha Frost, member of the Chippewas of Nawash First Nation explains, a mature spirituality has to be able to hold both truths at once: the ultimate unity and the material inequality.

Part 2: Colour-blindness

Not seeing race does little to deconstruct racist structures or materially improve the conditions which people of colour are subject to daily. In order to dismantle unjust, racist structures, we must see race. We must see who benefits from their race, who is disproportionately impacted by negative stereotypes about their race, and to who power and privilege is bestowed upon – earned or not – because of their race, their class, and their gender. Seeing race is essential to changing the system.

— Reni Eddo-Lodge

Colour-blindness is the idea that race should be ignored. I don’t see colour. On the surface, it might sound like the opposite of racism: the position a non-racist person arrives at once they have overcome prejudice.

However, racial inequality is built into the very structures that make up our world: housing, schooling, policing, wealth, hiring, and law.

Refusing to see race does not dismantle those structures. It only makes them more difficult to name, and therefore impossible to change.

When Liam says, “you’re too white, you’re too black… it’s irrelevant,” the missing words are to me. Race can be irrelevant to him, and to me if I allow it to be, because we exist in bodies that the social hierarchy has placed at the top. For people whose bodies are placed elsewhere, race is a daily and unavoidable condition of life.

I’ve got white privilege. Like, oh my God. Like, I wish I had black privilege ‘cause they’re better at running than us, better at sport, better at loads of things.

Indian privilege. They all know the mantras already. They’ve got a spiritual connection. They all pray to Krishna.

— Liam Browne

The trope of black people being “natural athletes” is one of the oldest racist stereotypes, with roots in eighteenth and nineteenth century race science that used supposed physical advantage to justify the denial of intellectual equality and political rights. It is a form of racial essentialism, which is the belief that racial groups possess underlying, immutable, and biological essences.

The cultural flattening of South Asia by stating that “Indians all pray to Krishna” erases hundreds of millions of Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, Jains, Buddhists, Parsis, Adivasis, and non-religious people.

As this letter lays out, the concept of privilege refers to unearned structural advantage distributed by systems. Liam’s family background was genuinely difficult. None of that is in dispute, and none of it is trivial.

And the thing is with all my people, like, everybody that’s with me, the real fucking people, they’re not snowflakes, yeah? None of us are from money. We’re all from fucking poverty, yeah? And like, I don’t know, maybe it is people who’ve got a trust fund like attacking us.

— Liam Browne

Liam clearly recognises the structural disadvantages of class privilege, but the structural advantages of whiteness remain invisible to him. Class disadvantage does not cancel racial advantage. They are different axes. A white man raised in poverty still does not get stopped and searched at the rate a Black man raised in the same postcode does. The concept of intersectionality describes exactly this: how multiple axes operate at once. You can carry real class disadvantage and real racial advantage in the same body. Both are true, and neither one cancels the other.

Part 3: Keith, the “Cacao Shaman”

In our book Cacao Ceremony, we offered a detailed critique of Keith Wilson’s contribution to the modern cacao movement.

Wilson, who died in early 2024, recounted that Indigenous shamans and healers he had spoken with identified him as the first non-Indigenous person to engage with cacao in the way he did for more than five centuries. Over the past twenty years, his activities have introduced cacao ceremonies to a worldwide audience.

What he established on his porch in San Marcos La Laguna in Guatemala gave rise to a movement that now shapes a great many contemporary spiritual communities.

At present, the ceremonial cacao movement stands on the cusp of mainstream visibility, following a trajectory not unlike that of yoga, which has settled into the cultural fabric of nearly every town across the Western world.

Sadly, this movement often bears the familiar marks of what so often occurs when Western practitioners take up the practices of Indigenous cultures without first reckoning with their own assumptions and inherited sense of cultural superiority.

One of the more problematic illustrations of this is that the cacao cultivated and processed by Kaqchikel Maya women for Wilson’s company reaches the market under the name “Keith’s Cacao,” carrying the strapline: “The Original and World’s Finest.”

This branding effectively erases the deep and varied history of Indigenous communities who have been growing and preparing cacao for many centuries before Wilson laid claim to any “origin” of his own.

The global reach of Keith’s Cacao could have made room for the Kaqchikel Maya women whose work the product depends on to be heard in their own voices.

Instead, the public-facing material has consistently centred Wilson.

Liam has continued in this legacy, seen not only in his branding but also on his website, where any history or living tradition of the cultures stewarding cacao is conspicuously absent. The platform Liam now occupies, the largest of any Western cacao seller, could be used to bring the voices, names, and stories of the people who grow and prepare the cacao into view. To date, it has not been.

“The only definition of ceremonial grade is made by Keith, the cacao shaman, the guy that is behind all of this… no one else’s opinion really matters other than Keith’s.”

— Liam Browne

Colonial entitlement is the assumption that the resources, knowledge, and traditions of the Global South are freely available for Western consumption, profit, and redefinition.

This statement is its epitome. The cacao shared by Western businesses is a commodity sourced from Indigenous growers, and there are multiple living lineages who have been in relationship with the plant for millennia.

To declare that the only definition of ceremonial grade comes from one white American man is to reroute the authority of those living traditions through a Western gatekeeper, and to install him above the very lineages whose ancestral knowledge produces the product he sells in the first place.

None of the peoples for whom cacao is ancestral medicine need Keith Wilson to certify what is ceremonial. The claim that “no one else’s opinion really matters” places a white intermediary above the living Indigenous traditions from which the ceremony’s “authenticity” is borrowed.

Part 4: You Have No Witnesses

Then someone’s jumped in with a sexual assault allegation. Take it to the police then. If you’ve been sexually assaulted by me, take it to the police. Because that has never happened. You have no witnesses.

The person who’s done the sexual assault claim... like, when have I worked with you? Like, I’ve always had a girlfriend, like, at my ceremonies. Like, I’ve always been with a partner.

— Liam Browne

Liam himself names this as a very serious allegation, and it is. But to respond with ‘take it to the police then’ ignores the documented reality that the criminal justice system systematically fails survivors of sexual violence, particularly in cases lacking physical evidence.

In England and Wales, the proportion of reported rapes that result in a conviction has been under 3% for years, and the majority of assaults are never reported at all, in part because of the treatment complainants receive from the system.

Furthermore, claiming “I’ve always had a girlfriend” as proof innocence is a well-documented fallacy; proximity to women does not preclude a man from causing harm to women.

The absence of a witness is not a proof of innocence. The overwhelming majority of sexual assaults occur in private, without witnesses, by known associates.

Demanding witness evidence is a standard which almost no genuine complaint could meet.

The three points Liam offers here (take it to the police, you have no witnesses, and I’ve always had a girlfriend) are known as rape myths. They are used to discredit a complaint before its substance has been examined.

A different response was available, and remains available.

It would begin with: I take this seriously. I will not adjudicate it in public, and I will support whatever process the complainant chooses, including doing my own work to understand how this allegation has come to be made.

That response would not require him to admit to anything that has not been established. It would only require him to refuse the rape myths.

—

I am grateful to everybody who is engaging with this letter, for taking the time to be with the ideas I’ve shared.

My prayer is that my words are received in the spirit in which they have been written, as a sincere and open-hearted attempt to co-create more just world for all.

From here, Diane’s writing begins.

Part 5: Why I Can’t Just “Mind My Business”

Y’all, it’s been a heavy two months of writing for me. After a series supporting victims of spiritual predators, I was relieved to get back to writing whimsical historical fiction about cacao.

I was completely minding my own business, in my lane and moisturized, as they say. ;)

But then the messages started coming.

Cacao lovers were asking what I thought about the allegations involving Indianna and Liam.

When I tuned in and watched the videos, I realized it was absolutely imperative to speak up.

It is important to demarcate our values in regards to how we are working with cacao, its guardians, and the forests in the public commons.

After reviewing the discourse, it is clear that the perspective shared by Liam is full of racist, sexist, and essentialist views.

I don’t allege these are all conscious or malicious beliefs.

On the contrary, unconscious but unexamined belief systems are often the most noxious, as they create blinders of invisibility for those who hold them.

However, if you want to hold “safe space” in 2026, you simply must have an awareness of how the world works for people who don’t look like you.

The spiritual world is the root of our material world.

We are born into bodies with specific shapes, colors, and realities, and those realities have very real consequences in our day to day life.

They impact our safety, our sense of belonging, and our biological health.

To ignore this reality is a dangerous form of cognitive dissonance that has detrimental effects on both white bodies and bodies of color.

Part 6: Snowflakes

“I know why it is, yeah? It’s like the worst thing to be on the planet at the moment is a strong, masculine, white, successful male.”

— Liam Browne

Personally, the thing that made me feel both rage and incredible sadness is the idea that there are white men engaging with Indigenous and Indian cultures who still believe in this “post-racial” slop.

I lived through these falsities in the Obama era: the idea that systemic oppression magically ended because one Black man got a job as president.

To claim that being a successful white man is “like the worst thing to be on the planet” is, to put it plainly, absolute bullshit.

I will demonstrate that both philosophically, and with empirical evidence.

The creation of the victimhood story for white men in the world is what James Baldwin described as the disorientation of the white man, who is finally asked to share a world he previously owned.

It is a classic case of White Fragility.

This is a term coined by the sociologist Robin DiAngelo.

It names the set of defensive reactions that white people often produce when they are asked to look at race: anger, withdrawal, tears, claims of being attacked, and the insistence that they are the real victims.

Stories of “suffering white men” and “snowflakes” create a fantasy world where white men are the primary victims of the world, and can continue to uphold the systems of their privilege without receiving critique.

Preaching this, as someone who calls himself a spiritual leader, creates a generation of uninformed followers who continue to perpetuate the same ideas in their own “healing” spaces.

Part 7: Women In Pretty, Flowery Blouses

“This is a girl called Fernanda... Fernanda sang a beautiful Portuguese song, an Indigenous song in our last ceremony. She’s from those lands.”

— Liam Browne

Tokenism is the inclusion of a single member of a marginalised group as a way of signalling that a space is inclusive, without any change to the underlying structure.

Audre Lorde wrote, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”

Tokenism is one such tool that creates the appearance of transformation while leaving the existing order intact.

What Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has called the danger of a single story describes how when a people are encountered through one image, they are reduced from a complex political and cultural reality to a prop that lends authenticity to someone else’s brand.

The image does not need to be hostile.

It is the act of reducing that does harm: reducing the immense diversity of South America to “those lands,” Indigenous people to women “in a pretty, flowered blouse,” and Black bodies to running and jumping for sport.

Imagine how someone like myself would feel coming into a space to witness this type of tokenism of people of color.

Part 8: The Science Of Survival

Dr. Arline Geronimus coined the term “weathering” to describe what happens to bodies of color under sustained systemic stress: we age faster.

Our organs bear the cost of a world that was not built for us.

The University of Manchester published a study in 2021 that showed how systemic racism is a fundamental cause of health inequalities.

This accumulated biological damage is known as “allostatic load.”

Then there’s the wealth gap, which is its own kind of day-to-day violence.

The Runnymede Trust found that for every £1 of wealth a white British household holds, a Black African household holds 10p.

And we are told the system is fair, that hard work is the great equalizer, and that we are all one.

Professor Kehinde Andrews calls this a “societal psychosis.”

When Black men are four times more likely to be detained under the Mental Health Act, when leaving the house requires a constant background calculation about safety, our nervous systems stop distinguishing between danger and daily life.

This state of chronic hyper-vigilance leaves chemical markers in our genes.

There is growing evidence that the biological effects of chronic stress can be transmitted across generations through epigenetic mechanisms.

Trauma is inherited, passed down into the bodies of our children.

The state’s hostility becomes part of our biological inheritance before we are old enough to even understand why we are afraid.

Every one of these conditions, the weathering, the wealth gap, the detention rates, and the inherited stress describes a cost that someone is paying, and the cost is not equally distributed.

The cumulative weight of this research demonstrates that being a white man in the West remains one of the most structurally protected positions in the contemporary world.

Part 9: Harm Is Not A “Stage of Healing”

“All change is uncomfortable at the beginning: disgusting, horrendous, horrific, just violent in the middle, and then glorious and magnificent at the end.”

— Liam Browne

This is Liam’s operating theology of healing.

By framing change itself as horrific and violent, this theology pre-authorises harm.

Anything that happens in the middle of the process is, by definition, supposed to feel that way. Within this framework, anyone who experiences harm during a ceremony or training is told they have not yet stayed long enough to see the change become glorious.

This is a closed loop of logic that leaves no room for valid critique, with complaints interpreted as evidence that more work is needed.

When a teacher is the only person authorised to define what counts as harm, they become structurally untouchable.

This destroys the possibility of informed consent. You cannot safely agree to a process where the person in charge is the only one allowed to define what harm looks like.

Pressuring people to push through distressing experiences, and dismissing the experiences they report, produces exactly the conditions in which psychological harm becomes harder to recognise, both for the person being harmed and for the person doing the harming.

Healing with safety occurs under conditions of slowness and gradual integration; what trauma researchers call titration.

Healing does not need to be disgusting or horrific.

We do not need violent triggers to evolve.

Where Do We Go From Here?

Sometimes I react. Sometimes I speak too fast. Sometimes I have to apologise. That’s the truth. Heart medicine… is about taking responsibility instead of hiding behind spirituality. I’m building [this brand] because I’m committed to mastering myself.

I’m always reflecting and I’m always trying to do better and I’m always learning. So if there is anything specific someone thinks that I need to like learn, become better at, like I’m up for it.

— Liam Browne

Gavin and I both believe real, meaningful change is possible.

We would love to see Liam come forward, take accountability for the ways that his words and blindspots can cause harm, and untangle and critique the views that we have explored in this letter.

I encouraged Gavin to reach out to Liam before we published this letter, and offer our support in finding ways to come into harmony with his blind spots.

They had a supportive voice note exchange, and Gavin suggested that there were blindspots in Liam’s view, to which he responded positively.

Gavin also sent a draft of the first part of this letter to him.

Our offer of support to unpack these issues, in order to build a more inclusive worldview remains open.

To the Black and Brown women in our community: I understand what it is like to exist in these spaces in your body. I am here for you as you navigate your business and your spiritual life. You have the right to exist in spaces that don’t require you to “bypass” your own reality just to belong.

We as Black, Brown, and Indigenous people have the right to exist, to create, and to be whole aaaaaand fully moisturized, in our lane, and fully seen.

With love,
Diane x

Ways to walk alongside this work:

1. Order ceremonial cacao, sourced directly from Asháninka growers in Peru. (Subscribe and save 20%!)

2. Join our facilitator training and learn to hold space with the integrity this medicine deserves.

3. Order our book, our guide to sharing the medicine of your heart.

4. Join Gavin’s mini-course and learn to carry an open heart from ceremony into everyday life.

For five thousand years, the Asháninka lived in the Selva Central, self-governing through a network of autonomous communities. They traded across the Amazon basin through networks that predated the Inca by thousands of years. They successfully resisted every attempt by outside powers to subjugate them, including the Inca, whose eastward expansion into Asháninka territory was repeatedly repelled.

The Inca Empire, known to its people as Tawantinsuyu, the Realm of the Four Parts, was the largest empire in the Americas at the time of Spanish invasion. Rising from the Peruvian highlands in the 13th century, it expanded rapidly to dominate the western edge of the continent.

When the Spanish landed, the empire was already acutely vulnerable. A devastating smallpox epidemic had swept down from Central America, arriving before the invading army themselves, killing the emperor and triggering a bitter civil war between his two sons.

Francisco Pizarro, the leader of the Spanish invasion of Peru, exploited the fractured state in 1532, capturing and executing the Inca ruler Atahualpa.

The empire was dismantled within a year through a combination of disease, internal division, strategic alliances with Indigenous groups opposed to the Inca, and the weaponry the Spanish brought with them: steel, gunpowder, and horses.

After establishing their dominance over the coast, the highlands, and the remnants of the empire, the Spanish turned toward the Amazon.

In 1595, an expedition led by Juan Vélez, accompanied by Jesuit priests Juan Font and Nicolás Mastrillo, made the first documented European attempt to colonise Asháninka territory.

It failed, as did repeated attempts over the following century.

Franciscan missionaries arrived in 1635, and were expelled. They returned in 1673, and the following year, an Asháninka convert called Mangoré killed five missionaries in an uprising against attempts to outlaw polygyny, a fundamental part of Asháninka social organisation.

In the 1700s, the missionaries changed tactics. They built iron forges to monopolise the supply of metal tools, and used the distribution of steel axes, shovels and knives as a way of attracting and controlling the Indigenous population.

From an Asháninka perspective, life in the missions was associated with death and the terrors of disease. As a result, most maintained strict isolation, negotiating occasional trades through Asháninka leaders just to get the metal goods.

Son of the Sun

In 1742, against this backdrop of encroachment and disease, an organiser of Andean descent called Juan Santos Atahualpa led one of the most successful Indigenous uprisings in the history of the Americas.

He had been educated by Jesuits in Cuzco, and had travelled through Europe and Africa alongside a priest.

In May of that year, accompanied by a Yine Indigenous leader called Bisabequi, he arrived at Quisopango in the Gran Pajonal region of Peru. He announced himself as the Son of the Sun, and the rightful heir to the Inca empire. He called upon his Indigenous kin to unite, expel the colonisers, and reclaim what had been taken from them.

Word spread quickly across the Selva Central and the highlands.

The Asháninka, Yanesha, Yine, and Shipibo-Conibo abandoned the Franciscan missions and gathered in the Gran Pajonal.

Atahualpa issued an ultimatum to the Spanish to withdraw to the highlands. They refused, and war followed. It lasted a decade. By 1752, Atahualpa’s forces, with the Asháninka forming their core, had expelled every missionary and colonist from the Selva Central and captured the highland town of Andamarca.

The Spanish were reduced to guarding access points at the edge of the highlands.

The Asháninka would control their own territory for the next century, longer than the Inca had existed as an empire.

At the time of Peru’s independence from Spain in 1822, the Selva Central still remained outside colonial control.

The rubber boom

The global demand for rubber in the late 1800s devastated the Asháninka people.

Between 1870 and 1913, it is estimated that up to 90% of the entire Asháninka population were killed, died from introduced disease, or disappeared into the forced-labour camps of the rubber economy.

Two species of rubber were extracted from the Amazon: jebe (Hevea brasiliensis), which allowed workers to tap living trees along fixed routes, and caucho (Castilloa elastica), which required felling the tree entirely. Because caucho harvesting destroyed its own source, it drove rubber barons to push ever deeper into Indigenous territory in search of fresh trees, and fresh labour.

Both economies ran on systems of debt peonage, called aviamento in Brazil, and habilitación in Peru.

Debt peonage is a system of forced labour in which a worker is bound to an employer by debt. The employer advances wages, tools, food, or other goods to the worker, and the worker is required to work off the value. The terms of exchange are rigged so that the debt can never be fully repaid.

The patrón was the boss or landowner who controlled the whole chain. No money changed hands between him and his workers. Wages were an abstraction. Basic goods were priced at whatever the boss decided, and the worker was held in permanent, unpayable debt. In practice, it was slavery.

The Peruvian rubber baron Carlos Fitzcarrald built his operation on Asháninka enslavement, exploiting existing rivalries between Indigenous groups and breaking Asháninka prohibitions against internal warfare to turn communities against each other.

Those who refused to work for him were killed.

When rubber prices crashed in 1912, the extraction economy collapsed and the institutionalised slave raids ended. Expanding Peruvian settlement then drew many Asháninka into ranching, logging, and agricultural labour on their own ancestral lands.

Asháninka responses to the rubber era varied. Some took up arms while others fled east across the border into Brazil or south into Bolivia, where Protestant and Evangelical missions offered a measure of protection. The missions were another form of colonial presence, but ones that did not, at least, require the Asháninka to fell rubber trees at gunpoint.

The Shining Path

Asháninka cosmology holds space for a returning messianic figure: Itomi Pavá, the Son of the Sun, whose eventual arrival would restore sovereignty to his people and expel those who had taken their land.

This messianic expectation shaped Asháninka responses to colonial incursions across the centuries. Juan Santos Atahualpa’s 1742 uprising drew on the same cosmological vision, with Atahualpa declaring himself the Son of the Sun and the rightful Inca heir.

In 1965, a faction of the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria (MIR), a Peruvian Marxist guerrilla organisation inspired by the Cuban Revolution, entered the Selva Central as part of a short-lived armed campaign.

The MIR aimed to overthrow the Peruvian state, redistribute land, and end the country’s entrenched class and racial hierarchies. They chose the central jungle for its guerrilla-friendly terrain, the limited military presence of the state in the region, and the long-standing grievances of rural and Indigenous peoples, whom they believed could be mobilised into a revolutionary base.

The MIR’s regional leader was Guillermo Lobatón, a philosophy student and Afro-Peruvian revolutionary. An Asháninka shaman called Ernesto Andrés had a vision that Lobatón was the return of Itomi Pavá, Son of the Sun.

Lobatón himself never made this claim; it was the shaman’s reading of him, drawing on the same theological framework through which Juan Santos Atahualpa had been recognised two centuries earlier.

The Peruvian military crushed the campaign within a year, deploying napalm, torture, and summary executions. Lobatón was captured and killed in January 1966.

A second wave of armed conflict arrived in the 1980s.

The Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso), a Maoist organisation founded in 1970 by Abimael Guzmán, launched its armed struggle in 1980 and pushed into the Selva Central shortly after.

Maoism is an interpretation of Marxism developed by the Chinese revolutionary leader Mao Zedong. It holds that peasant-led armed struggle in the countryside is the path to communist transformation.

The Shining Path’s aim was to destroy the Peruvian state through protracted rural warfare and replace it with what they called a “New Democracy” under the dictatorship of the proletariat, modelled on Mao’s China.

It was soon joined by the MRTA (Movimiento Revolucionario Túpac Amaru), founded in 1982 by former MIR members and other political sympathisers. Both groups vied for control of the rural population and the cocaine trade that funded their operations, while also fighting the Peruvian military’s counter-insurgency campaign.

The Asháninka were caught geographically and politically in the middle of a three-way war.

Wilfredi Ríos Pancho, who lived through the conflict as a child, described what it meant for daily life and cultural continuity:

When they arrived at a community, they took almost the whole town. And the others who remained had to escape, go to another place, hide. The people started forgetting their customs. They lived, perhaps, for years deep in there, right? Like nomads. There was no time left to practice their customs. There wasn’t any, because everyone had to escape. You’re here today, tomorrow you’re over there, and so the people forgot themselves.

The war decimated villages and fractured the thread of transmission between generations. Songs, ceremonies and knowledge of the forest that had been passed down for millennia was lost.

Survival and cultural erosion became inseparable.

The conflict brought the assassination of community leaders, systematic torture, mass executions, forced recruitment, and military training of children taken from their families.

Fernando Sánchez Pérez witnessed the execution of his father and brother.

He was taken as a child.

Decades later, he shared with us how the grief has not left him:

Yes, of course, every time it is mentioned to me, I cry. When I think about it... I always remember my dad, my brother, everyone who was murdered. It always hurts me. It always hits me right here in the heart. Tears always fall.

The violence did not end suddenly. By 1990, the Shining Path had seized the Ene and Upper Tambo regions and was holding an estimated 10,000 Asháninka in what were effectively forced-labour camps.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which reported in 2003, estimated that 6,000 Asháninka had been killed, 10,000 displaced, 5,000 held captive, and some 40 communities destroyed altogether.

It remains one of the most catastrophic episodes in modern Indigenous history in the Americas.

Economic sovereignty on ancestral land

In the years after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s report, the work of rebuilding fell to the Asháninka themselves.

Communities had been shattered, and leaders had been killed.

Thousands of children had been taken from their families.

The Peruvian state, which had overseen the military response, offered little in the way of reconstruction.

The political response was Asháninka-led.

In 1993, while the violence was still unfolding, a group of community leaders founded the Central Asháninka del Río Ene (CARE) to defend territorial rights, repopulate the Indigenous communities, and begin the long work of recovery.

Ángel Pedro Valerio, who now represents the organisation, described its origins:

CARE emerges, is created, to be able to recover our brothers and sisters who had disappeared; to repopulate the native communities with our brothers and sisters who had escaped as a result of the presence of the Shining Path in our communities. And this organisation has the great responsibility of being able to lift them up after this social conflict, to lift them out of poverty and seek development for the well-being and common good of our native communities.

CARE helped establish Peru’s first all-Indigenous cacao cooperative, from whom we source our cacao today. Before this, Asháninka farmers had been at the mercy of middlemen and landowners who set prices and controlled market access. Peanuts and sesame had sold for as little as 50 cents a kilo. The cooperative gave farmers economic sovereignty over their crops for the first time in generations.

Pérez remembers how when he returned to the village, there was nothing left. He has now joined a neighbouring community where he tends plots of cacao.

We are here, thank God, and we have come to make another life. We are here, we are working. Thanks to the hands that have planted us here. Now I have four plots of cacao.

The story is not one of simple restoration. Recovery for the Asháninka has meant navigating a broader project of development that they are determined to undertake on their own terms.

Valerio was clear about what this looks like:

The Asháninka people also want to develop. The Asháninka people want their children to be professionals, to prepare themselves to continue facing the problems that are coming our way. Before there wasn’t this need, but as globalisation advances, there are many more problems, much more need. So, cacao is what is allowing us to provide this possibility.

The work also continues under new threats. The VRAEM region, the Valley of the Apurímac, Ene, and Mantaro rivers, is now the epicentre of Peru’s illicit cocaine economy. Narco-traffickers, illegal loggers, and the gold mining industry bring deforestation, chemical contamination, and violence.

Indigenous leaders who resist are frequently criminalised by the state, or assassinated.

When we met him on our last trip to Peru, Valerio himself was facing fabricated legal charges relating to a disappearance case in the Indigenous community of Puerto Copa, a community he is not part of, and an event he says he had no role in.

He refuses to be silenced, and he rejects the framing that puts the burden of ecological survival on Indigenous shoulders alone:

If the developed countries of the world do not become aware, the Asháninka people will not die alone. We are all going to die. We will simply no longer survive, not just the Asháninka people, but the whole world.

The cultivation of cacao is one part of what renewal looks like in Asháninka territory today.

It funds education, pays for school supplies, medicine, and tools.

It allows families to rebuild lives broken by violence.

The Asháninka have a phrase for the way of being they are working toward: kametsa asaiki, the good life. This is a communal peace, intrinsic to a healthy territory and to relationships of mutual care between human and non-human kin.

Claudio Vasco Manuel described what this looked like before the decades of displacement:

The pride of the Asháninka from before, was that we have the jungle, we have food to eat, we have everything. Nobody had to say, “You know what? I’m going to buy from a big market.” Because you go hunting, you go fishing. That is the pride for us as Indigenous peoples.

That self-sufficiency has been eroded by deforestation, contamination, and loss of animal populations. Rebuilding kametsa asaiki now means both restoring this old knowledge, and navigating the new market economy.

Cacao does not, by itself, bring this about, but it does offer what has so long been denied: economic sovereignty on ancestral land, through Asháninka organisations, on Asháninka terms.

I ask that blessings fall upon everyone who drinks our cacao, so that the blessings of our forest plantations can continue to support us. May our brothers and sisters continue to be imbued with more strength in their search for wellbeing with cacao. Pasonki.

Ángel Pedro Valerio

With love,
Gavin x

Ways to walk alongside this work:

1. Order ceremonial cacao, sourced directly from the Asháninka growers in this letter. (Subscribe and save 20%!)

2. Join our facilitator training and learn to hold space with the integrity this medicine deserves.

3. Order our book, the full length guide to holding sacred space.

4. Join my mini-course and learn to carry an open heart from ceremony into everyday life.

For over a decade, we have sourced cacao from Asháninka growers in Peru’s Junín province, and more recently through the country’s first all-Indigenous cacao co-operative.

This two-part series shares some of the story of the people who grow it: their culture, their survival through genocide and displacement, and the role cacao now plays in rebuilding life in the forest they have called home for millennia.

Interspersed with anthropological research are first-hand interviews with the growers we work with, conversations that took place during two trips to the Central Highlands in 2024.

For many of the farmers we spoke to, the cultivation of cacao represents a stark pivot from a recent history of exploitation and terror toward autonomy and community solidarity.

Wilfredi Ríos Pancho, a community chief, explains to us what cacao means to him:

“Cacao, for me, means life, because it’s also a plant that captures oxygen. It brings change for our families, because with cacao, we can now educate our children. Thanks to cacao, many people have changed their lives. Many Asháninkas are now working. They have sustenance in their home, gathering with their family. Before, we didn’t have this, because there was little work, and there was also exploitation.”

The forest as kin

The significance of cacao cannot be separated from the Asháninka cosmology within which all life in the forest is understood.

The most powerful spirits in the cosmos are called the Tasórenci: gods who possess the ability to bring about transformation through their breath, and who form a pantheon that governs the universe. The Tasórenci are usually invisible, though under certain circumstances, they are able to manifest in human form. At the top of this hierarchy is Pává, the most powerful of the Tasórenci, revered as the father of all creatures.

As an oral tradition, there are variations in the stories of how these high beings came into existence. In some traditions, there is not a figure of a creator but a transformative hero, Avireri, who changed humans into animals, plants, mountains, and rivers.

According to some accounts, Pává was born when Kashiri, the moon, who is male, mated with an Asháninka woman. She gave birth to Pává, the sun. The moon, therefore, is the father of Pává, and lived on earth with the sun, before they both rose to the sky.

In other versions, especially in the Amônia region of northwestern Brazil, Pává is said to always have existed, and is responsible for all creation, including the sun and moon. Kashiri, the moon, cyclically battles the sun in a process that can be witnessed on earth during an eclipse.

It was Kashiri, the moon, who gave the Asháninka the gift of kaniri, manioc, which transformed the subsistence diet of the people, and gave rise to the sacred fermented drink called masato that was the cornerstone of community gathering in the villages we visited.

Just as the moon consumes the sun during an eclipse, it is also Kashiri who is responsible for bringing humans closer to death: the eventual fate of all Asháninka is to be devoured by him at the new moon. He brings them to a star called Pitsitsiroyki, where they are ritually cleansed and anointed. Pává visits this star from time to time, and recognises his true children, keeping them by his side.

This deep spiritual interconnection extends to the physical environment.

Ángel Pedro Valerio, an Asháninka Indigenous leader, explained to us:

“The forests, the bush and the trees mean a lot to us. They are like human beings. They also have life, and when we enter the forest, we connect with them. We have beliefs that many of the trees, animals, and birds are like people, brothers of ours, and if these brothers ever disappear, it will affect us too.”

The rhythm of the forest

The Selva Central is the central jungle region of Peru, the area where the eastern Andean foothills drop into the Amazon basin. This is the heartland of Asháninka territory, where they have resided for at least 5,000 years. The region is distinct from the lowland Amazon in that it is higher in elevation, more rugged, and characterised by cloud forest that transitions into tropical forest.

The Asháninka are one of the largest Indigenous groups in the Amazon basin. They are organised as a network of autonomous communities, a political structure that has sustained their resilience across centuries.

Population figures vary. State censuses, NGOs, and anthropologists have published different numbers, with estimates ranging between 50,000 and 100,000 in Peru, and around 1,000 in Brazil, who were forcefully displaced or fled during the violent enslavement of the rubber boom in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

On our last trip to the Junín province, we learned from the families we stayed with that many communities have chosen to remain uncontacted in the forest. When they need specific items such as machetes or clothing, they travel downriver and exchange labour in the cacao orchards for tools, before heading back to their villages.

The word Asháninka shares a root with amacénka, the term used for benevolent spirits who reside in henoki, the cosmological “above” realm. Both words carry the sense of “our people” or “our kin.”

This traditional kinship and way of life has been severely disrupted by decades of violence, particularly during the internal armed conflict of the 1980s and 1990s.

The arrival of the Shining Path forced many Asháninka to abandon their ancestral homes.

Fernando Sánchez Pérez, a cacao farmer who survived the conflict, recalled the sheer devastation that displaced his people:

“I mean, my dad died, my family died, my brother died. A lot of them died because of the subversion They killed you just like that. Point-blank. They killed the healthy, the sick, so we figured it was better to leave this behind.”

The trauma of this era reshaped their relationship with the land and neighbouring populations, but the core value of mutual aid remains intact.

Valerio elaborated on what distinguishes the Asháninka from outsiders:

“The Asháninka people differentiate themselves from many other cultures in that they want to live quietly. They want to live in peace. What differentiates us from those who come from the outside, or as we also call them, settlers, is that we like to share. When a relative arrives at our house, to our family, the first thing we do is offer what we have. Beyond whether we are rich or not rich, that is our culture.”

The Asháninka are traditionally semi-nomadic, their settlements moving periodically as game depletes. They live by a rhythm that enables the forest to regenerate behind them.

Despite this resilience, modern realities challenge any romanticised vision of Indigenous abundance.

Valerio offered a sobering correction to those who view the modern Amazon as an untouched Garden of Eden:

“Many mention that our forests are a market. I always say it’s not like that. Currently, our forests no longer have the same animals that we had here many years ago. As our forests have been lost, our animals are no longer there like before. It is the exact same thing with the fish we had before. Now they aren’t there anymore. And if there are, they are contaminated. When we talk about the market of our forests, many of our brothers who are true hunters, sometimes they don’t bring anything back.”

In traditional Asháninka land management, small plots of forest are cleared to plant gardens called owãtsi.

Here, women grow manioc, yams, peanuts, sweet potatoes, plantains, pineapples, pumpkins, and peppers, which are rotated after several crop cycles. This varied diet is supplemented by honey, ants, edible larvae, mushrooms, palm fruits, and a root called mabe.

Asháninka men are renowned hunters, using both spears and bow and arrows to hunt tapir, wild boar and monkeys. Diane and I joined in a practice session with the young boys of the village we stayed at, and became the source of much amusement when our skills were reliably terrible!

Men also fish from canoes called pitotsi, that, along with planted gardens and houses called pãkotsi, are said to have been part of Asháninka culture since the beginning of time.

Woven identity

Asháninka people are immediately recognisable by their traditional woven garment, known as a kushma, a word of Quechua origin, and one of many examples of the long exchange between Asháninka and highland cultures.

In their own language, the garment is called kitharentsi, a word that refers to the robe, the cloth, and the loom it is woven on.

Distinctive among lowland South American peoples, the Asháninka have a long tradition of woven clothing, and traditional lore credits the daughters of Pává with teaching Asháninka women to weave and to make the kitharentsi.

During our visit, we noticed that the women of the village made theirs from store-bought cloth, in bold and bright colours. As climate change has made the entire region warmer, traditional woven kitharentsi are very hot, and so it was common to see men working in the cacao orchards wearing contemporary, cooler sportswear.

This kind of adaptation is nothing new. The Asháninka have always absorbed useful elements from the cultures around them, adopting metal tools through Inca-era trade, borrowing the word kushma from Quechua, and shifting their settlement patterns in response to changing conditions.

Despite the adoption of western clothing in some areas, traditional garments remain a powerful symbol of cultural survival.

Wilfredi Ríos Pancho emphasised the enduring importance of these items:

“Our grandfather used the kushma, zarato, and crown. That is our symbol. Our symbol of the Asháninka: the kushma. The crown is like clothing. Since we are indigenous, that’s why we use the crown. Sometimes now, people are ashamed, right? But we should not forget moving forward. We must continue our customs.”

When we visited the families who grow our cacao, the boat ride was about six hours upriver from the nearest town.

When we stopped at villages near the town, almost everybody wore western clothes, and we attended a Catholic vigil commemorating the tragic death of a community member in his place of work.

The entire community were practising Christians, a fact that carries its own complex history, given that Christianity first arrived in Asháninka territory through Franciscan and Dominican missions that functioned as instruments of colonial control, and that the Asháninka famously expelled in the Juan Santos Atahualpa rebellion of 1742.

The further upriver we travelled, the fewer obvious signs of Christianity we saw, and the more people were still wearing traditional cloth. This gradient reflects the intensity of contact with the non-Indigenous world, and the different adaptions and accommodations each community has made in response to this.

For community leaders, a challenge lies in balancing globalised economic needs with ancestral pride.

Claudio Vasco Manuel, a former president of a local cooperative, reflected on this intersection:

“There is a crossroads, and a contamination has begun. Indigenous people have started to lose their customs. Sometimes the young men, the guys, they say, ‘No, I don’t like it, I want to dance [to modern music].’ But as for me, I was born for my people, and I will continue practicing my culture. I mean, we have needs: our children have to study. There is the difference: how we are going to work? Right there, the culture of our indigenous people changes, but for me, I will not lose those things.”

The tension between adaptation and continuity is visible everywhere, including in what people choose to wear and when.

The Asháninka headdress is called amatherentsi, and is woven from the straw of a forest palm called kõtaki. It is adorned with macaw feathers. The kõtaki carries political and spiritual weight, and although it’s not worn every day in the village, we noticed that elders would always wear it with the kushma when travelling outside.

The traditional necklace is called txoshiki and is worn diagonally around the body. It is decorated with shells, seeds and bird feathers that hang down the back. The most traditional design is the kenpiro, which depicts the cosmic serpent, one of many ways that Asháninka adornment encodes interdependent and reverent relationship with the non-human world.

Visible markers of identity are the outermost expression of a cosmology that is woven through all aspects of existence in the forest. These complex relationships are sustained through ceremony, in particular kamarãpi.

The sacred songs of the night

Kamarãpi, which means vomiting, or to vomit, is the Asháninka name for ayahuasca: both the drink and the ritual itself.

Ceremonies take place through the night, and unlike some Indigenous Amazonian groups where only the shaman drinks the brew, Asháninka consumption is much more egalitarian, with anybody able to participate.

Kamarãpi is traditionally used for healing, but also for social cohesion, conflict resolution and personal spiritual guidance among family and friends.

The sole musical expression in an Asháninka ceremony is the sacred chant of the kamarãpi, sung unaccompanied. These songs facilitate communion with benevolent spirits of the forest, deliver healing, and give thanks to Pává, who, along with his gift of the knowledge of weaving, bestowed the sacred drink upon his children, so that they could gain knowledge and learn how to live in harmony in the forest.

An Asháninka shaman or spiritual healer is called a sheripiari, a word whose etymology comes from tobacco (sheri), rather than ayahuasca. While anybody in the community can drink kamarãpi, it is the sheripiari who dedicate their lives to navigating its realms.

By journeying with kamarãpi over many years, the answers to all questions of the human condition can be answered. Knowledge can be retrieved that is used by the sheripiari to alleviate illness or misfortune that affects the people of the village.

When we visited a village where a sheripiari lived, I expressed my interest in experiencing a vigil with kamarãpi. She was bemused that me, as an outsider, would want to participate in this, and told me that one has to be very ill to need to drink kamarãpi.

She offered me a small tub of tobacco paste, that had been cooked down in a similar way to how the medicine is prepared. I was familiar with such a preparation that is made in some parts of Colombia, and eagerly dipped my finger in the pot and rubbed the sticky-sweet goop on my gums. It was a source of much hilarity as I spent the next ten minutes violently vomiting in the bushes, completely underestimating the strength of this paste compared to the much more gentle Colombian variety I knew and loved.

This botanical knowledge makes up a forest pharmacopeia, and prominently includes cacao.

Valerio explained how cacao has always been a vital medicine for the Asháninka:

“Cacao served us as a medicinal plant. When a woman is pregnant and is about to give birth, this plant serves so she can give birth faster. It is very important to us, especially the bark. It serves us as medicine. We also consume the mucilage of the cacao. We make a smoothie out of it, like a juice.”

The growing global demand for cacao with ethical, transparent origins is a recent chapter in a much longer story.

In my next letter, I will explore more of that story, including how the Asháninka survived the rubber boom, the Shining Path, and centuries of missionary and settler incursion, and how cacao has become one part of a renewal that is entirely their own.

With love,
Gavin x

P.S. You can read the second part of this series here.

To participate in this story:

1. Order ceremonial cacao, sourced directly from the Asháninka growers in this letter. (Subscribe and save 20%!)

2. Join our facilitator training and learn to hold space with the integrity this medicine deserves.

3. Order our book, the full length guide to holding sacred space.

4. Join my mini-course and learn to carry an open heart from ceremony into everyday life.

I quit “a dream job” because I had a prophetic dream.

In the dream, I was watching my colleagues on a carnival ride at the edge of a cliff.

They were strapped into a metal carriage that with each moment lurched closer to the abyss.

Every time it creaked forward, the metal would screech, rocks would crumble below, and everyone would gasp at being a tiny bit closer to falling to their death.

Yet no one ever died.

The carriage never fell.

I woke up with the excruciating feeling of near-death, without the satisfaction of a resolution.

I understood: this company would simply lurch, indefinitely, toward an edge it would never reach, so I quit.

The endless near-resolution of a story is exhausting.

I felt it the morning after that dream.

I feel it again now.

Welcome to Part III of Predators in Power.

I am Diane, and I unknowingly enabled a spiritual and sexual predator for years.

In this series, I am publicly sharing what I’ve learnt as I collect stories from dozens of women and men who were harmed.

If you are just joining us, here are the links to Part I and Part II.

The altar

We didn’t invite SS back into our sacred space.

Two and a half years ago, after everything we had discovered — the stolen materials, the people put at risk, the women lured into ceremonies he had no training to hold — we could not invite him back into our house.

Instead, we built a small altar outside on the patio with a mask, libations and a single flame.

When he shuffled into the compound, he arrived fiddling with his hands and his head hung low.

We told him simply: present yourself to the altar and speak your mind. You are in the presence of spirit.

What followed was a confession of sorts.

He admitted to running ceremonies without any knowledge, and to endangering people.

He admitted serving an addict who had collapsed unconscious.

He told us how he feared that he had died under his care.

His justification for sharing ceremonies without experience was his belief that tradition should be made available to all.

He then admitted to charging somebody $1,000 for a session.

He apologized and asked what he could do to gain our forgiveness

We told him the first step was to completely stop what he was doing.

Stop telling people he was a shaman, stop giving ceremonies, and return every sacred item he had borrowed from us, including a harp that had been bought for him, that had been carved by one of our teachers.

He agreed, but within a few hours confessed that he just couldn’t.

He wouldn’t.

Over the following days, he danced between humility and arrogance, apology and accusation, sometimes within the same message.

When he finally admitted that he had lied at the altar, then lied about lying, we knew this was a pathology far deeper than his own sense of self.

Gavin blocked his number, and has never spoken to him since.

I archived his number and barely spoke of the situation again to anyone.

I suppose it was because, partly, I didn’t know how to speak about it, and partly because I blamed myself for being duped.

His name would surface occasionally through the grapevine, and I would absorb the information with a nod and then move on.

There was one occasion, about a year and a half ago, where I tried to warn E, a woman who he’d told was his divine partner and his future wife. He had told her that he wanted her to be the mother of his children.

I begged a friend to tell E that he really wasn’t who he says he is, but by then SS had already shaped the story and the information that reached her.

(Later I found out that he had told her that the reason I was upset was because Gavin and I had wanted him to have our baby.)

I put it out of my mind as best I could.

For almost two years, I did.

Then, six months ago, E wrote to me.

She spoke enthusiastically about joining our cacao training.

We didn’t speak about SS for weeks, and then, little by little, we did.

I wanted her to know that it wasn’t her fault, and that she had been harmed.

The conversations were fragmented as I was constantly traveling.

One day she sent me a link to a TikTok account that had posted a 15-part series titled I Got Pregnant by a Pathological Liar.

E revealed to me there was another woman who had been brought into the web under the guise of “ceremony.”

Another woman who had been promised marriage, and a sacred divine union.

Another woman who he had asked to give him a baby.

A fourth baby mother.

Another amongst dozens who were brought into sexual relations with the promise of healing.

It took two months before I was able to watch it fully.

I cried and cried and cried, and then felt strangely validated by the saga.

What followed was the gathering of an unlikely coalition of women, and a few men, from different parts of the world, converging to tell their stories.

More women came forward.

Then more.

Each one arrived with a version of the same promises, the same lies, and the same arc of harm.

Then, this week, after seeing my posts on Instagram about spiritual predators, he wrote to me, and several of the other women:

“I am ready for an accountability process.”

I braced myself for the tactics that I knew would follow.

Tick tock, like a clock.

Forty-eight hours later, he sent another long and winding message with the hopes that I would willingly re-enter his labyrinth.

In this letter, I break down what was sent in his message to show commonly used manipulation tactics.

The costume of the sacred

For me, one of the most important parts of this process is to share the learnings that have sprouted from these painful situations.

Over the past month, many women and men have written to say they have experienced something similar along their path.

To move through a terrain of manipulation with our dignity intact, we must first learn to recognize the patterns and techniques that are used by master manipulators.

While there seems to be a public fascination with cult documentaries and even true crime stories, it’s becoming all too trendy to pronounce people as narcissists and psychopaths.

It’s important to be aware that these more extreme cases of abuse and brain washing can begin very subtly and benevolently, as they did in the case of many the victims of SS.

The following terms circulate widely online.

What I want to demonstrate is how they actually function as lived experience along this path.

To understand how someone like SS operates, we must first grasp two concepts.

The first is spiritual materialism, a term coined in 1973 by the Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche.

Ironically, this is the same teacher who founded an international spiritual community called Shambhala, married seven spiritual wives, and died due to the complications of an alcohol addiction.

He has been discredited due to the systematic sexual and physical abuse that he levied on his followers and children.

Spiritual materialism describes what happens when the ego, unable to accumulate status through money or beauty or professional achievement, finds another currency.

Spirituality is one of the most powerful of these, precisely because it is so difficult to audit.

A vision, after all, cannot be fact-checked.

With SS, this looked like inventing credentials he had not earned.

He positioned himself as an expert and a shaman to people in vulnerable states of consciousness.

He used our names and reputation to bolster his authority.

The second concept is spiritual bypassing, coined by psychologist John Welwood.

It describes the use of spiritual ideas to sidestep accountability.

It often emerges in the guise of compassion and spiritual insight.

It is one of the most devastatingly effective tools for silencing dissent that I have ever encountered.

It sounds like this:

You express a boundary or discomfort with something that has happened, and you hear, “Your soul chose this experience. Everything happens for a reason. This was all a divine occurrence.”

These phrases take legitimate grievances and reframe them as a curriculum the victim chose to partake in.

The person who caused harm disappears from the picture entirely.

In the case of SS, the woman left alone with a newborn child, asking for basic support, became someone generating “negative energy” that was preventing him from growing.

The arc: six phases every spiritual predator moves through

What follows is not unique to SS.

These phases appear across spiritual communities, ceremonial spaces, domestic relationships, and anywhere that authority goes unquestioned, without peer support or checks and balances.

Many of these are unconscious survival mechanisms that developed through childhood trauma.

Their unfortunate origin doesn’t make them any less devastating to the people on the receiving end.

As is common in cult settings such as Shambhala, the rinpoche was able to physically and sexually assault participants, and the solution to those attacks would be for them to meditate more, and receive further spiritual teachings from him.

He repeated the mantra, “there is neither bad or good”.

These half digested spiritual piths as ideology would allow people within the group to get away with rape, assault, and various other crimes.

What follows is the blueprint of six phases that map how spiritual authority becomes a tool of predation, drawn from the exposed pattern of SS’s behaviour across every testimony we have gathered.

Phase one: the approach and groom

The first contact was framed as a divine recognition.

Each woman was contacted specifically, often months in advance, through social media, Reddit, Substack, or the revolving door of his past.

He would study them first, observing their wounds and their gifts, then he would show up with exactly what they needed to hear.

This is called supernatural baiting.

It is a kind of contact that feels like finally being seen by the right person at the right time.

That feeling is a hook that can mimic something real; genuine spiritual recognition might in fact exist.

The difference is in what the contact does to your world afterward.

This kind begins immediately contracting it: toward him, toward his framework, toward his interpretation of who you are, and what you need.

Watch for the person who seems to know you before they’ve had time to know you.

Phase two: the framework of authority

Once inside, he built legitimacy through fabrication.

He told each person about forty-day fasts in the forest, and initiations that never happened.

He shared plant medicine expertise supposedly passed down through his grandmother, and transmitted information channeled directly from his ancestors.

This is fabricated lineage and it exploits a gap in spiritual communities.

Most of us don’t have easy access to verify someone’s initiatory history.

We rely on reputation and referrals, and on the way someone carries themselves.

A skilled fabricator understands this, and builds credentials specifically designed to exist in that unverifiable space.

They cultivate a space where they are always the expert.

Phase three: the divine election

To many of the women he deceived, he would reveal that the spirit had spoken to him about them specifically, and that they too carried special gifts.

He told them that their union with him was cosmically ordained.

Alongside this came the fabrication of purity.

He told these women that he was celibate, and that he was waiting.

Breaking his vow for them meant that they were the chosen ones.

Meanwhile, he was sleeping with multiple women, without protection, sometimes multiple on the same day.

The chosen one dynamic is one of the most effective tools in this arsenal because it weaponizes something most of us genuinely carry: the longing to matter, to be seen, to have our gifts recognized by someone who moves in the spirit.

When that longing is activated, a part of the critical mind shuts down.

Phase four: transgressional intimacy

He would use the post-ceremony state, when the brain is at its most open and suggestible, to initiate sexual relationships.

He framed pregnancies as divine visions, removing the woman’s agency from the conversation entirely.

This is reproductive coercion, not spiritual destiny.

It is one of the most severe violations in this entire arc of abuse.

The ceremonial state is not a neutral context.

The brain in deep non-ordinary experience is neurologically vulnerable to suggestion in ways that ordinary waking consciousness is not.

Using that state to initiate sexual contact is a fundamental breach of the ethics that every genuine tradition builds its container around.

When someone blurs the boundary between sacred space and sexual initiation, that blurring is not accidental.

Phase five: the spiritual discard

When the reality of a child or financial need arrived, the ancestors would suddenly change their guidance.

The divine union was no longer aligned.

He abandon the relationship as its reality became inconvenient, leaving each woman to come to the same painful realization alone.

The spiritual discard is particularly cruel because it removes even the ordinary language of a breakup.

There is no conversation to have, no argument to make.

The ancestors have decided.

The exit is constructed to be airtight because disagreeing with the discard would mean disagreeing with the divine will itself.

Notice when spiritual language is used to close down conversations that a person has every right to have.

Phase six: the post-discard loop

Each woman was given almost zero integration or financial support afterwards.

Then blame would arrive: her “negative energy” was the reason he couldn’t show up as he’d promised.

He would confess his grief and tears, before recommencing with his requests for forgiveness.

This performance of remorse is what psychologists call hoovering: an attempt to reset the cycle, without changing the pattern.

The post-discard loop is recognizable by its rhythm.

It never moves toward resolution.

It is a constant cycle of blame, then grief, then tenderness, then absence, then blame again.

The anatomy of manipulation: his message decoded

Forty-eight hours after writing that he was ready for accountability, SS sent a long, carefully constructed message to several of us women.

What follows are eight moments from that message, in the order they appear.

Each one demonstrates a tactic, and together they show one particular arc of manipulation in sequence.

Boundary testing

When I received his first message, I replied that somebody would be in touch with him when we were ready.

I set the boundary that I would not be in touch because I understand that his technique was often begging for forgiveness, telling me he was ready to take accountability, and then slowly trying to hoover me back into a cycle of excuses, blame and deceit.

After all, despite the fact that I had never answered any of his message since 2023, he continued to write me countless times, expressing his affections and visions.

Instead of waiting for someone to be in touch, he tested my boundaries.

“I know you said to wait for someone to reach out, but this evening I was unable to sleep because the voice within has been protesting for so long.”

Boundary testing usually manifests as vulnerability, urgency, or spiritually justified compulsion.

It is something so sincere and pressing that enforcing the boundary can suddenly feel cruel.

The mechanism is simple: the violation is named and immediately justified in the same breath.

If you continue engaging, the first test has been passed.

The boundary has been established as something that can be crossed when the feeling is strong enough.

Every subsequent boundary will be measured against that precedent.

Trauma dumping

“I was a sad man contemplating ending my life, and I was on the edge.”

In this particular passage, he stacked paragraphs of childhood trauma and suicidal ideation before he acknowledges that any harm was done.

This is a way to soften potential anger that might arise, and to invoke warmth and compassion in the face of his suffering.

The introduction of suicidal ideation at this specific moment serves a precise function.

It makes righteous anger feel dangerous.

It makes accountability feel like the punishment of a suffering person.

The reader becomes a potential cause of harm rather than a the victim of it.

When someone’s trauma dumping arrives reliably when consequences loom around the corner, pay attention to the timing.

Spiritualized grandeur

“I died on this planet as a healer in this lineage who had overstepped traditions, was purified by fire and thrown into the sun and back into the earth.”

Spiritualized grandeur is the construction of a cosmic identity so vast that ordinary human accountability cannot reach it.

By positioning himself as a soul undergoing purification by fire in the astral realm, his physical actions become secondary to this spiritual narrative.

This tactic is particularly effective in ceremonial communities where visionary experience is considered to be real and respected.

It borrows the language of genuine mystical encounter and uses it to build an identity that floats above consequence.

The question to ask is whether someone’s spiritual experiences supported grounded action in the world, or instead serve to explain away their harmful behavior toward others.

Usurpation of authority

“I asked the medicine whether you would let me do it, and I heard that you would forbid it, but to understand you and not be bound to that.”

This is the admission at the center of everything.

He knew that he was told no, and was given guidance in how to walk this path with integrity.

He specifically constructed a spiritual framework to override that no.

Usurpation of authority happens when someone claims a direct line to the divine that supersedes the guidance of teachers, lineage, community, or basic ethics.

It is recognizable by its convenient specificity.

The ancestors always seem to confirm exactly what the person already wanted to do.

When someone’s inner voice consistently overrides the boundaries of those with more experience, knowledge, and responsibility, that voice is worth examining carefully.

DARVO

“I release all resentment I felt towards you and Gavin for not understanding me, and for showing me this tradition without proper preparation and for ditching me... I forgive you.”

DARVO is an acronym documented by psychologist Dr. Jennifer Freyd.

It stands for: Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender

It is the hallmark of predatory defence.

His denial of responsibility came in the form of “the medicine” telling him not to be bound by our guidance.

His attack is in the form of his three criticisms outlined here: first, we didn’t understand him; second, we weren’t sufficiently prepared to show him this tradition; and third, we ditched him.

The reversal of victim and offender comes as he offers us forgiveness for the wrongs we’ve done to him.

The mechanism works by shifting the emotional center of the conversation.

Suddenly, I am the one whose behavior requires examination, and he is the one generous enough to release his grievance.

The moral burden has been moved from his shoulders to mine without a single direct accusation.

DARVO is recognizable by the disorientation it produces.

If you begin a conversation wanting accountability for someone’s actions, and end it feeling like you owe them an apology, that disorientation is the tactic working as designed.

The special relationship trap

“Our spirits are not enemies. They are intertwined. And we love each other, in whatever way this story holds that.”

By declaring a cosmic bond, he reframes any legal or public action as a betrayal of something sacred.

These are declarative statements made without my consent, pulling me into a cosmic contract I have never proposed, agreed to, or acknowledged.

If our souls are one, then opposing that means opposing love itself.

Watch for the person who insists on a bond you have not chosen, particularly when that bond arrives precisely as consequences approach.

Pseudo-accountability

“I am ready to face the public and the law. Anything feels better than hiding.”

The message closes with a surrender that costs him nothing and changes nothing.

Pseudo-accountability is recognizable by the gap between declaration and action.

Real accountability is taken and demonstrated over time in ordinary life.

Read in order, the message travels from boundary violation through manufactured sympathy, through cosmic self-mythology, through spiritual justification for harm, through the reversal of victim and offender, through the relocation of his shame, through the declaration of a bond designed to make you hesitate.

It eventually arrives at the performance of surrender.

Each move creates the conditions for the next.

This breakdown of psychological, emotional, sexual and spiritual manipulation maps precisely onto every story that has been shared with me about SS so far.

It is as transparent and predictable as it is ubiquitous.

What they do with your name

Most women who have been through this did not see it happening.

These tactics are designed to be invisible from the inside.

You cannot recognize a system you have no name for.

Learning the language is how you reclaim your agency.

When women come forward with evidence, with testimony, with the specific and detailed account of what was done to them, one of the fastest ways to discredit her is to take whatever emotion she is carrying and inflate it into irrationality.

She is crazy.

She is so angry.

Her friends put thoughts into her head.

For Black women, there is an additional layer: a cultural stereotype that reduces the full weight of our testimony to a single word: angry.

The emotion becomes the story, and the story of our emotion replaces the story of what was actually done.

This week, as more women came forward, I finally saw the full shape of what was built using my name.

I learnt that he told people we were sexually involved.

I want to be clear about what I feel when I write this.

There is rage.

A clean, clarifying rage that I am not interested in performing or suppressing.

And underneath it, an understanding that divine justice is more precise than anything my survival instinct would push me toward.

The most important work has been weaving together with the other women in this situation to affirm our dignity, to confirm each other’s reality, to document the strategic abuse enacted by him, and to arrive no longer alone.

Every woman I have spoken to who was harmed by SS, and those harmed by teachers like him, had a sensation of being alone.

Alone with the pregnancy.

Alone with the lies.

Alone with the shame of having trusted someone who had refined the performance of trustworthiness over years.

Together, we are weaving a tapestry of truth and accountability.

We are no longer alone.

We are no longer ashamed.

We are no longer afraid.

I am continuing to work with the women whose lives have been touched by SS to build a collective, public record.

We will not accept silence as the price of dignity.

This is the final instalment of this series, and I’m grateful for the outpouring of support and solidarity I’ve received in bringing these stories to the light.

Our work continues behind the scenes.

With love,
Diane x

For those who want to walk this path with care:

1. Order ceremonial cacao, sourced directly from Asháninka family farmers. (Subscribe and save 20%!)

2. Join our facilitator training and learn to hold space with the integrity this medicine deserves.

3. Order our book, the full length guide to holding sacred space.

4. Join Gavin’s mini-course and learn to carry an open heart from ceremony into everyday life.

   We’d be overjoyed if more people read our love letters, so please share with anybody who you think might love it too!

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Whether you are aware of it or not, the room you are in right now is influencing your health.

I’ve been exploring the research of neuro-immunologist Esther M Sternberg, who demonstrates how our felt environment interacts with our brains, generating chemical signals that either support or suppress the body’s ability to heal.

Her work penetrates the heart of how we live, how we gather, and how we cultivate wholeness in a world that too often leaves us feeling fragmented.

In this letter, I investigate how this works, and how the technology of ceremony and sacred space can support you in awakening your immune system’s innate capacity for restoration.

The toxic legacy of modern design

Few of us will ever have had a say in the design and architecture of the places where we spend most of our time.

Unlike the civilisations who constructed their buildings according to sacred geometric proportions, modern construction prioritises cost efficiency and convenience above all else.

As occupants of the spaces we inhabit, we rarely think to ask ourselves whether or not our spaces are conducive to healing.

Sick building syndrome is a condition where people develop acute health symptoms linked to the time they spend in a place, with no specific illness or cause identifiable.

Symptoms can include headaches, dizziness, nausea, fatigue, difficulty concentrating, irritation of the eyes, nose, or throat, and dry or itchy skin.

Sternberg’s work provides the neurobiological mechanism for the symptoms that sick building syndrome describes, and shows that even without the manifestation of physical ailments, the spaces we occupy can slowly be unravelling our health.

If we understand that our surroundings are actively shaping our biology, our questions become more practical, and also more urgent.

• What kind of space am I inhabiting?

• What effect is it having on my wellbeing?

• What changes can I make to turn my space into an environment that heals?

How ambient stress rewires your brain

City life is permeated with chronic, ambient stress.

The threats that shaped our evolutionary biology were specific and acute:

• predators

• exposure to cold

• venomous insects

• drought and storms

• territorial confrontations

Danger appeared, demanded a response, and was, most of the time, resolved.

As a result, the body’s stress system evolved to match this rhythm.

When activated, your nervous system takes milliseconds to mobilise a fight-or-flight reaction, and then your endocrine system takes over, releasing cortisol and adrenaline into your bloodstream to sustain vigilance while you move to safety.

Once the danger passes, your parasympathetic nervous system engages like a brake, causing your heart rate to slow, your breathing to deepen, and your immune function to return its full capacity.

The problem is that the stress factors of modern life almost never fully resolve.

Places of work seal their employees under low ceilings, bathed in synthetic and fluorescent light.

Cities climb in concrete and steel, while the relentless din of traffic grinds below.

The human brain faithfully reads these sensory inputs, but because of their continuous presence, doesn’t ever receive the follow up signal that it is safe to stop releasing stress hormones.

The emerging field of neuro-immunology demonstrates that the brain and the immune system are in constant, bi-directional communication.

When immune cells detect an infection or injury, they release signalling molecules called cytokines.

The vagus nerve, a bundle of nerve fibres running from the major organs to the brain, senses these cytokines, then relays the information to a specific region in the brainstem.

The brain responds in two ways.

1. It releases hormones into the bloodstream that travel to immune cells throughout the body.

2. It sends signals via the nerve endings that contact immune system organs (like the spleen) directly.

This mechanism in the brain is also activated by sensory experience: what you see, hear, and feel in the places you inhabit.

When your environment is stressful, your hypothalamus initiates a hormonal cascade.

The pituitary gland sends a signal to the adrenals to release cortisol and adrenaline.

A region in the brainstem called the locus ceruleus releases norepinephrine.

Together, these chemicals create the physical experience of stress: racing heart, rapid breathing, heightened alertness, muscle tension, and, crucially, the suppression of immune function.

This suppression was beneficial for short periods of time when it served survival, redirecting resources toward the immediate threat.

When stress became chronic, however, and this suppression continued unchecked, the body’s capacity to fight infection, heal from surgery, and resist illness began to steadily erode.

Like all repetitive experiences, the activation of the stress pathway strengthens the neural connections involved, making the stress response not only more efficient, but also more easily triggered.

A study in rats found that even a single acute stressor caused the locus ceruleus to fire more frequently, and this heightened activity persisted for over a week.

In humans, those whose locus ceruleus responds most strongly to emotional challenges are more likely to develop anxiety and depression under prolonged real-world stress.

This suggests that a stress response primed to react intensely may leave you increasingly vulnerable to the very conditions your environment sustains.

The regulatory balance between immune activation and inflammation control breaks down under such chronic stress in two devastating ways.

First, cortisol stops working effectively.

After prolonged exposure, your cells develop what is called glucocorticoid resistance, meaning cortisol can no longer suppress the inflammatory signals triggered by noradrenaline.

Second, persistent stress damages your gut.

The amygdala sends continuous signals through the vagus nerve that shut down glands in your small intestine, eliminating the beneficial bacteria that seal your gut lining.

Without this bacterial protection, your gut becomes permeable, allowing foreign molecules into your bloodstream and triggering systemic inflammation that reaches the brain itself.

This impairs the functioning of the hippocampus, the prefrontal cortex, and the amygdala, and undermines the cognitive functions that might help you recognise (and change) the conditions causing your stress in the first place.

Empathy, oxytocin, and immunity

In contrast to this bleak sequence of events, when you feel calm and safe, the vagus nerve initiates the relaxation response.

Your heart rate slows, your breathing deepens, and your immune system mobilises its full defensive capacity.

B cells begin producing antibodies, which are proteins that recognise and bind to pathogens, marking them for destruction.

Your body also activates its white blood cells (T cells, natural killer cells, macrophages, and neutrophils) to kill or engulf the invaders the antibodies have marked.

At the same time, positive emotional states such as the experience of feeling loved, hopeful, or peaceful, trigger the release of endorphins, dopamine, and oxytocin, creating what Sternberg describes as the neurochemical conditions for healing.

This insight undoubtedly illuminates one of the reasons why cacao ceremonies have spread across the world.

A well-held ceremony, where experienced facilitators are skilled in supporting participants to find a felt sense of safety, is an environment fundamentally designed to signal safety to the nervous system.

There are certain elements that define such a healing space, and they are almost universal when people gather to connect to what’s sacred.

• Lighting is soft and natural

• There is a clear beginning and a clear ending

• People sit in a circle, so everybody can be seen

• There is no rushing; the pace is unhurried and spacious

• Meaningful and sacred objects are arranged intentionally

• Fragrances are calming: incense, essential oils, and fresh flowers

• Participants are met with the authentic warmth of compassionate presence.

These sensory inputs shift the brain away from the stress response and toward the parasympathetic state in which healing becomes possible.

The vagus nerve is central to this transition.

By linking the major organs directly to the brain, it enables gut sensations, that is, literally what you feel in your body, to inform how your brain interprets your surroundings.

When the vagus nerve signals safety, it induces the beneficial physiological changes Sternberg describes: slowed heart rate, deepened breath, antibody production, and immune cell activation.

This effect is enhanced by ritual components that are often incorporated in modern ceremonial practice:

• breathwork

• altar building

• singing together

• guided meditation

• the burning of incense

• anointing with essential oils

• the lighting of candles as prayer

• humming, toning, and chanting mantra

What these practices share is their capacity to deepen the felt sense of safety in the body. Via the vagus nerve, that safety directly supports immune function.

This pathway between brain and body evolved to support social instincts like empathy and cooperation, and the result is that your body treats social safety as inseparable from physical safety.

Your ability to accurately read “I am safe” or “I am in danger” in a space is wired into the same system that determines whether your immune cells activate or your stress hormones spike.

Ceremony, in the most literal sense, is an environment of healing.

The care with which a space is prepared, and the depth of intention brought by those who hold it, are instruments of healing as real as any pharmaceutical intervention.

States of communal joy, prayer, and witnessing release endorphins into the bloodstream.

Oxytocin flows through a circle of bonded participants.

Dopamine released is stimulated by beauty, music, and meaning.

These are the molecular signatures of the relaxation response, and they carry the immune system toward its full, vibrant capacity.

An ancient prescription

If ceremony is a technology of the vagus nerve, then the question becomes: how do we access this technology beyond the occasional retreat, festival, or conscious gathering?

Many of us have witnessed people “getting hooked” on ceremonies, especially in ayahuasca communities where the lines between committed inner work and recreational tripping can sometimes become blurred.

The answer I propose lies in the cultivation of daily micro-rituals.

These are small, intentional, consistent practices that replicate the conditions of longer ceremonies, and sustain the parasympathetic activation that supports immune function over time.

This is really what integration is: not simply processing what happened in ceremony, but weaving the conditions of ceremony into the fabric of daily life.

In the Druid lineages I’m initiated into, we are taught to devote at least twenty minutes each day to our foundational practices of ritual, meditation and divination, with a longer session each week for deeper study and practice.

It is encouraged, and in some traditions required, for a part of that practice to take place in nature.

This prescription, sustained across centuries of transmission, aligns with the modern discoveries of neuroscience and environmental psychology.

Since Roger Ulrich’s landmark 1984 study, in which surgical patients with views of trees left the hospital sooner, required significantly less pain medication, and had fewer post-surgical complications than patients surrounded by brick walls, researchers have discovered that the healing effect of trees operates through a specific cognitive mechanism: attention restoration.

Psychologists distinguish between voluntary attention, which requires effort and becomes depleted over the course of a day, and involuntary attention, which arises when something catches your eye without effort.

Trees, with their fractal branching patterns, prompt involuntary attention in a way that allows voluntary attention to recover.

I can’t think of anything more necessary (or more pleasurable) in a time of frazzled Tik Tok attention spans than contemplating a tree, in all of its multi-dimensional wonder.

The visual structure of a tree is scale-invariant, which means that it contains the same degree of detail whether you observe a single twig, or the whole canopy.

This property allows your brain to process trees more efficiently than the scale-variant patterns of buildings, stairways, and screens, offering a form of cognitive rest that human-made environments cannot replicate.

The sacred proportions used by the cathedral and temple builders were themselves derived from the geometries found in the natural world.

The knowledge that certain structural ratios induce healing effects is part of our shared human commonwealth, and is another example of how sacred knowledge has been discarded in our time.

Yet the living world still offers this geometry freely, to anyone willing to step outside and receive it.

Attention restoration happens naturally when the shape of a branch, or the play of sunlight through leaves, catches your eye and activates the parasympathetic nervous system.

Your body shifts into rest-and-digest mode and stress hormones begin to recede.

This physiological shift produces emotional benefits such as reduced anxiety, as well as enhanced immune function and decreased perception of pain.

The druidic instruction to spend regular time in nature is therefore a prescription for immune health as much as it is part of a path of spiritual cultivation through reverence for the natural world.

It is not necessary to trek into the wilderness to receive these benefits.

Walking among trees provides the most significant health effects, but viewing trees from a window, and even looking at photographs of trees, measurably activates the parasympathetic response and reduces the release of stress hormones into the bloodstream.

In other words, the healing gifts of the natural world meets you wherever you are willing to look.

The invitation, then, is to weave contact with the living world into the fabric of your day: a morning practice beside a window overlooking branches, an evening walk under the canopy of a park, or a weekly immersion in whatever wild or semi-wild place is available to you.

The micro-rituals you build around this contact are limited only by your own creativity.

• Words of gratitude offered to the trees

• A few slow cycles of conscious breathing

• The slow and deliberate drinking of a cup of cacao

Like the benefits of all good habits, these small acts of intentionality, built around daily contact with the natural world, compound over time.

Every repetition is a signal to your nervous system that you are safe, that the moment is worthy of your presence, and that you are choosing spaciousness over urgency.

These micro-rituals activate the vagal pathway that connects your sense of safety to your immune capacity.

Practised with consistency and devotion, they begin to rewire the stress pathways that chronic modern life has reinforced, gradually restoring the rhythmic balance between alertness and rest that your biology has evolved to sustain.

With love,
Gavin x

To help make your environment a space of healing:

1. Order ceremonial cacao, sourced directly from Asháninka family farmers. (Subscribe and save 20%!)

2. Join our facilitator training and learn to hold space with the integrity this medicine deserves.

3. Order our book, the full length guide to holding sacred space.

4. Join my mini-course and learn to carry an open heart from ceremony into everyday life.

   We’d be overjoyed if more people read our love letters, so please share with anybody who you think might love it too!

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I shared sacred knowledge with someone who used it to dupe dozens of people out of their money, build relationships of co-dependency where he played the all-knowing shaman, and left multiple women pregnant and alone.

For now, we will refer to that person as SS.

Read part one here.

It turns out, speaking out about predators is absolutely fucking exhausting, a bit scary, and immensely fulfilling all at once.

This week has been an emotional roller coaster.

Fits of violent rage.

Ugly crying in public.

Feeling naked in the streets.

Gratitude for all of it.

Thank you, rage, for becoming my fuel to keep pursuing justice and naming harm.

Thank you tears for teaching me that overwhelming emotion is not something to be ashamed of.

Thank you, vulnerability, for teaching me that someone has to undress first, and it might as well be me.

Just when I think, "What the fuck am I doing? And why am I doing this? This is so scary because what if the person retaliates, and this is so hard, because their life and karma is their business anyways…”

I get another DM.

Thank you for speaking out.

Thank you for breaking this taboo.

You’ve inspired me to speak out too.

Over a hundred women, and some men, have come forward with their own stories of abuse, manipulation, and predatory behavior in ceremonial spaces.

So I just want to say THANK YOU!

One of my initiatory names means she who carries the village in a basket.

Thank you for reminding me why I write, and why I speak.

Thank you for reminding me of my greatest purpose, both materially and spiritually: to bring all of us together and forward, in the name of the mission.

To pick up the basket… and the pen… and to write, and to tell stories, and to liberate the emotions that exist in our bodies.

I know that as I tell my story, I am also connecting to the collective pain of the women trapped in trafficking rings, the women broken by senseless wars, and the women subjected to sexual violence at the hands of soldiers who’ve lost their humanity.

Each time we gather the courage to speak for our sisters, we restore a piece of our collective dignity.

In the world of spirituality, not every situation is “love and light.”

Not everyone should be welcome into your sacred grove of trust, but it’s true that every single moment is here to teach you something.

Even as you give yourself the gift of forgiveness, you don't have to ACCEPT what does not serve your growth.

You can CHANGE, and create boundaries around what you recognize as patterns of violation and abuse.

This is your soul’s evolution.

This is your way of learning to be an adult and protect your little child parts.

This is your way of learning discernment.

So hold that little one.

We're going in.

Here to heal

When I read back the text messages, it seems so obvious that this would become a disastrous situation, but in the moment, neither Gav or I imagined that he really was capable or audacious enough to create the harm and damage that he did.

None of us imagined that he would lie so blatantly and put so many lives at risk.

We were accustomed to his love-bombing and his humility.

HIM: “I don't know if I can say this enough. You and Gavin are the most amazing humans I have ever met. Real magicians. You have healed me from a lifetime of affliction. I love you so so so so so so so so much. Like forever you are a part of my life.”

We understand that after ceremony, the euphoria and gratitude can feel so deep and infinite that these kinds of declarations are common.

We often tell people not to make any big life decisions until you've grounded and integrated from the expanded state.

Don’t quit your job, don’t divorce your husband, and don’t make any big bets or business deals.

We also know it's not right to accept money, proposals, or even promises from people immediately after ceremony.

That would be exploiting that moment where the heart feels like is bursting open and desperate to give everything away.

This is also why we weren't too alarmed when we would periodically receive messages like this from him:

HIM: “The message I’ve received is very clear, you guys need to initiate me, I need to rid myself of this addiction, not only to weed, but also to using lies and deceit to weave my way through life. And then I have to spread the love and find a way to make my message about healing this planet. If I let the mother sing through me, many will listen! I just need to trust.”

It's not uncommon for people to leave a ceremony believing it is now their mission to share the medicine with everyone and heal the world.

I was also hopeful that he was recognising that his deceit was not getting him anywhere.

However, I thought the extent of his lying was minor.

I didn't realize that by the end of our two years, the pathological lying would be so grave that I would end up questioning absolutely every conversation that we ever had.

He reported ancestors appearing, telling him that he didn't need to be initiated.

He was instructed that he would work directly with them, and they would guide him to heal others, and heal the earth.

He had a friend who was an addict that he needed to help.

Then there would be multiple young woman who needed his help urgently.

When it became clear this feeling of God choosing him to heal the world wasn't fading, we knew it was time to sit him down for a serious re-orientation.

We told him plainly: you are in no position to work with addicts or anyone else.

You're not initiated.

You've barely glimpsed the tradition.

You have no training whatsoever.

Your lack of experience makes you a danger to others who are vulnerable.

We told him honestly: the most effective healing you can do right now is stabilizing your own life.

Become a more present father.

He would nod, and tell us how right we were.

And thank us SO, SO, SO much for our guidance along this path.

He would put on his cloak of humility so that we were disarmed, and would affirm everything that we said.

Then, as always, we'd find out later that the moment we weren't around, he did exactly what he wanted.

The seizure and the shadows

In the first letter in this series, we moved away and took space from SS because we realised we couldn’t trust his discernment in our sacred spaces.

We realized that he was justifying crossing our boundaries by saying that his ancestors had guided him to do so.

By now, enough time had passed, and enough conversations had transpired that we imagined that this chapter was closed.

When we allowed him back into our lives, it was because there were so many opportunities that we wanted to be able to share with him.

It felt like a shame for him to be excluded from our burgeoning network.

It came slowly.

We would hear the sound of his instruments from a few doors down wafting into our courtyard.

Re-entry always began with a faint, beautiful sound of how warm things used to be and how harmonious things could be in the future.

I was running events and ceremonies.

I had organized a trip for international digital nomads who were coming to live in Kenya for a month.

We had a canoe ride and buffet dinner at a restaurant, and I invited him as an honored guest, but he wouldn't come sit at the same table with everyone.

He sat at an adjacent table, in the shadows.

I walked over, embraced him, and asked why he was hiding instead of greeting everyone.

He smiled sheepishly and answered: “It may surprise you, but I'm actually quite shy.”

I laughed to myself.

A musician, a performer, a DJ, who prefers to stay unseen, hidden in the shadows.

I'd come to understand that when he hid, it was usually because he was hiding from the glow of something, somewhere, on fire.

The Return of the MAC

By the time we let him back into our home, the months apart had softened everything.

We were holding another ceremony and invited him back to play his gorgeous music.

It was powerful.

He shared an incredible set on the guitar and kalimba, but Gav and I both laughed at how completely incapable he was of actually holding space.

He could pierce our hearts with his singing, but someone could vomit in front of his face and he wouldn’t even notice or think to pass them a tissue.

He would be staring out into space, contemplating his own visions and missions.

During the day, he couldn’t bare the stillness.

He disappeared for hours on end, leaving concoctions of tea on the stove that almost burned the house down.

Twice.

Despite our jokes, we were swelling with a sweetness towards him again.

At the end of one ceremony, as the sun as coming up, I had the urge to make offerings at my grandfather's shrine, in the gazebo in the yard.

He was there, faithfully rolling up my weed by the altar, and I joined him.

I took the joint to make a prayer, made some offerings, blew some smoke onto my grandfather's photo, and as I stood up, I don't remember a thing.

Sounds faded in first, then colors bled back in, then the realization of where and who I was.

I woke up clutching SS tightly on one of the day beds in my shrine.

I didn’t realize it yet, but I had experienced an epileptic seizure.

The months of not sleeping, ceremonies, overworking; all of it had brought me here.

It was also a physical manifestation of the spiritual warning from beyond of what was to come.

He centered himself in my crisis.

He told me he'd been having visions of me crying, and that he’d been shown that it was his job to take care of me.

He was the only person who could do it.

I slowly crawled out of the shrine towards the house and lay on the kitchen floor.

My brain was mush.

My body was still quivering.

At that moment, there were questions that I had to answer.

As I came back to consciousness, Gav appeared above me.

We had things to talk about: ways that I was out of integrity.

The seizure smashed me into a thousand pieces.

It was an alarm, loud and unmistakable, showing me every way I wasn't walking in integrity.

Drawing the boundary (again)

A few weeks later, Gavin and I packed our big suitcases to head to South America to visit the cacao farms.

We organized work for SS before we left.

We paid him for filming some content, as well as for playing music at the ceremonies.

We made sure that at least he’d have something in his pocket before we left.

We made a prayer together before we left and we told him to try really try to ground himself and stabilize himself while we were gone.

There is a lesson when you are constantly trying to support someone, more than they are trying to support themselves.

Somewhere between continents, the texts started.

First about how much he was missing me and loving me.

Then, as the month neared its end and rent came due, the messages would shift to how much he needed me right now.

I told him bluntly: you are turning this relationship into a rent payment, and that crosses my boundary.

If you want to observe a person’s true character, see what happens when you tell them no.

When I pulled the plug on the money train, the humility facade cracked, revealing a massive spiritual arrogance:

HIM: “I can feel your anger and frustration. I've done my internal searching and I found that I am not feeling guilty for asking for help. Me, I give you love. And I forgive myself for dishonoring your wishes.”

I repeated myself firmly: stop calling on me, stop coming to the house, and stay out of our shrine.

I had too much respect for myself to keep tolerating this.

Over the next six months, during our second separation, he would surface periodically with photos of hedgehogs.

He knew my deep love for animals would soften me into a smile.

I recognized the pattern SO clearly, and still, I left the back door of my heart unlocked.

Revelations in Kilifi

It's a hollowing feeling, the one of being duped.

The space where the hole in the pit of your stomach grows into a mouth of shame.

I recently had minor surgery on my foot.

The doctor said, “I'm going to have to scoop this flesh out like an avocado.”

I looked on as a grape-sized piece of me was scraped out.

I knew I was numb for now, but the moment my nerves came back online, I would feel every bit of the scooping and the stitching of my flesh.

That is exactly how it felt to discover that someone I cherished, someone who had a key to my house, who ate from the care of my hands, had been lying to us and using us for years.

In our tradition, synchronicity brought on by divine intelligence has a specific taste, feel, and texture that is undeniable.

The deeper your relationship with the tradition, the more clearly that sensation arrives to tell you: pay attention.

The divine is at work.

When we came back from Peru, I just knew something big was going to happen.

A dear friend had invited us down to her birthday celebration in nearby Kilifi.

It had the feeling of an important convergence.

We piled into a familiar eco-accommodation: cheap and cheerful, surrounded by trees and permaculture projects, with the faint reek of piss from the compost toilets.

Everyone crowded into a treehouse.

My friend introduced me to Wamuhu: big chunky jewellery, half her head shaved, the other half in braids, trailed by a big black dog named Zulu.

Soon, she and I were deep into a conversation about our tradition, when we heard a voice who had crept up the stairs.

Interruption: “Hi guys, do you mind if I butt into your conversation? Are you talking about the sacrament? Yeah, I overheard. And I've had the sacrament. It's wild. SS gave it to me.”

My jaw tightened.

I understood the thick sensation I'd been carrying all day.

Before anything else, I looked up and thanked my spirits for showing me the truth.

The next morning, the physical reality caught up to the spiritual.

I woke up violently and ran to the compost toilet to vomit my insides away.

My stomach wrenched in circles for hours.

Something was fighting to get out of me, and I could barely move.

When it was time to meet my friend again, she confirmed my intuition.

Confirmation: “Sister, I have something to tell you. Your friend has been giving many ceremonies around here, calling himself a shaman. There are at least 4 people that I know who have done ceremony with him. One of them was an addict.”

There was the truth, revealed in splatters like my vomit across the bowl of the compost toilet.

As he was nodding in humility and asking for our advice, he was out pronouncing himself as a healer.

While he was telling us he was broke, in need of our money, and too weak to ground his life, he was secretly running ceremonies, charging clients, and pocketing the money, using the exact medicine Gav and I hold, using the keys we gave him.

Lies under oath

By the time we were in the car heading home, my hands had stopped shaking but my stomach was still churning itself into knots.

We texted him before we hit the highway.

Come to the house. Let’s sit at the altar in front of the mask. It's time to talk.

We told him to assume that we already know everything.

It's time for you to tell us the truth, in front of the altar.

We had to face it: the entire time he was coming to us for guidance, sitting at our altar, receiving our sacrament, and asking questions about the tradition, he was secretly running his own ceremonies, calling himself a shaman, and lying to our faces.

I chided myself for overriding my signs, but my body wouldn't let me hold the lie anymore.

These are the 9 brutal lessons we had to learn, offered in the spirit of reclaiming what discernment really means:

1. Adoration is not the same thing as integrity. Post-ceremony euphoria creates an instant closeness and infinite willingness to trust. If someone is flooding you with gratitude and devotion, it can be a way to fast track themselves into a foundation of trust. Be sure to observe and make sure their actions match their words.

2. Always question divine mandates. When “spirit” only ever tells someone to do exactly what they already wanted to do, the spiritual ego is at play. Visions used to fast-track power, bypass training, or justify crossing boundaries are huge red flags that shouldn’t be ignored.

3. Performative humility has a tell. They nod at everything you say. They affirm your wisdom. They wear the cloak of humility to your face, then do exactly what they wanted the moment you look away. The tell is the gap between what someone agrees to and what they actually do.

4. Visions don't make you a healer. Someone can receive profound visions during ceremony while not having the capacity to hold space for another in their process. Someone lost in their own experience cannot hold yours. Presence and practice, not just vision, is what makes a space holder.

5. Beware of self-appointed saviors. Predators move in when you’re vulnerable. They will often frame themselves as your divinely ordained caretaker, or the only person sent by “spirit” to help you.

6. Stop supporting them more than they support themselves. If you are consistently organizing someone’s life opportunities, and your generosity has removed their need to stand on their own feet, you are enabling them.

7. No is a complete sentence. You will learn more about a person the moment you deny them than in years of saying yes. Responses in passive-aggressive spiritual jargon: “I forgive myself for dishonoring your wishes.” Notice when someone absolves themselves of harm without ever acknowledging the wound.

8. Entry granted in love can be exploited in betrayal. Be intentional about who has access to your home, your community, your sacred spaces.

9. Seeing the pattern is not the same as breaking it. You can identify every pattern in real time, have it in black and white, and still go back. This is why community accountability matters. We cannot see our own blind spots alone. Check with your peers or teachers to get support on patterns you are having a hard time seeing or breaking.

This story and these lessons are not just my own.

They live in ceremonial spaces everywhere.

They lurk in the shadows, in the sappy messages, in the convenient visions, in the keys handed over in love.

We protect each other by learning to see clearly; by recognizing the patterns before they become wounds we spend years trying to heal.

Next week, as we bring this story to a close, we will explore what it means to develop spiritual discernment and accountability as we walk this path.

If you work in ceremony, hold space, or are called to this path, I want to invite you into that deeper learning.

A decade of holding space has taught us lessons we couldn't have learned any other way.

Our expanded cacao facilitator training exists to develop practitioners who are grounded, accountable, and genuinely safe for the people in their care.

Explore the training and enroll here.

With love,
Diane x

Read the final part of this series here.

For those who want to walk this path with care:

1. Order ceremonial cacao, sourced directly from Asháninka family farmers. (Subscribe and save 20%!)

2. Join our facilitator training and learn to hold space with the integrity this medicine deserves.

3. Order our book, the full length guide to holding sacred space.

4. Join my mini-course and learn to carry an open heart from ceremony into everyday life.

ME: “I love you and I thank you. I'm so excited to have true company. I've been really, really lonely these past few years.”

HIM: “It is such a beautiful feeling!! And thanks for sharing such a big part of yourself. Thank you so much for this, Diane.”

It's hard to believe that they would end up like this:

HIM: “Tell me what I can do.”

ME: “Just fucking stop it. Stop fucking lying. Stop fucking pretending. Stop fucking doing what you are doing. Just fucking stop it. I don't believe anything that comes out of your mouth.”

Hi. My name is Diane. I enabled, encouraged, and financially supported a spiritual and sexual predator for almost two years.

I shared sacred knowledge with someone who used it to dupe dozens of people out of their money, build relationships of co-dependency where he played the all-knowing shaman, and left multiple women pregnant and alone.

My own shame kept me quiet for a long time, until recently when I found out the harm that this mentally sick and wounded character continues to inflict upon others.

I'm done being quiet.

This is a story about what he did, what I allowed, and how I got back to right relation with myself.

I'm sharing it because the ceremonial space is full of people like this spiritual predator, and the conditions that made me vulnerable to him are not unique to me.

I’m sharing it because this is a trope, a pattern, and a something that is becoming more and more common.

I deserve to tell the full story because I deserve to be heard.

You deserve to hear the full story so that you might recognize the same patterns, and protect yourself from them.

Over the next few weeks, I will share my story.

I'll share the stories of others who have been harmed, and I'll share what we've learned about ourselves, and the spiritual predators that are showing up in our spaces.

Loneliness and the merciful heart

When I met SS, I was starving for friendship.

Gav and I met just before COVID hit, and spent two years in a crucible.

It was just the two of us, on the Kenyan coast, in one of the most beautiful but isolated places in the world.

We built our daily rituals together, and built our life in a very new place.

Both of us are people who are used to full and bustling homes.

We were used to running events.

We were used to holding ceremonies.

We were used to being the ones who would open up our doors to you, even if you’d landed unexpectedly in the city at 2am with nowhere to go.

That version of us hadn’t found its place to blossom yet on the Kenyan coast.

Instead, we had found multiple disappointing cycles that led us to believe that maybe we would never really fit in.

I missed my friendships across the world.

I missed singing in the streets.

I missed the sparks and the magic of beautiful people, new rhythms, getting dressed up, looking cute, and seeing what the day would bring.

So when festival season finally opened back up and a good friend flew in from the States, I was ready.

More than ready.

We ended up at a 2am jam full of talented artists passing around instruments, and that bohemian electricity I hadn't felt in years.

And there was SS sitting quietly and unassumingly in the corner.

The first thing that I remember about him was the way his fingers moved across the guitar.

His rhythms made me feel like I was a child again at a Cameroonian party, weaving between the raucous adults as they swayed and cackled between the melodies of Makossa plucking.

The first thing I said to him was: “That! That! The way you play is how I'm supposed to play the guitar. Can you teach me?”

He agreed.

Our friendship grew during our informal guitar lessons.

He taught me local Kenyan rhythms that felt at home in my fingers.

And when I asked him the story of his teachers, he told me that he'd simply downloaded this type of playing.

No one had taught him.

That was the first lie he told me.

The first of hundreds.

Maybe thousands.

A masterclass in disarming

Were there signs?

Fuck yeah, there were signs.

There are always signs.

I saw them.

Sometimes I pointed at them loudly.

Sometimes I cussed and huffed and puffed.

Sometimes I even took a different far away route away from a particular sign.

Then, over time, I would reconsider.

I took each sign down letter by letter, rearranged them, and painted beautiful murals over their urgent warnings.

Within a few months he had a key to our house, free range of the fridge and the ganja stash, and an apartment in our compound that I helped him secure.

I was cooking for all of us every day.

Whether we were home or not, he came and went as he pleased.

It didn’t take long for the initial shiny veneer to begin to decay.

One day, my phone lit up with a few voice messages from a woman I'd never met.

She was confused, and in turn, so was I.

She was trying to confirm promises I had supposedly made; statements that I had supposedly said.

All things that I definitely did not say.

I forwarded the message to SS with few words:

ME: “wtf is going on here???”

What followed would become the defining pattern of the next two years.

A young musician was reaching out for understanding with a broken voice.

She had been promised a place on our ceremony team.

She confessed that SS had given her some of our sacrament, without our knowledge, without our permission, and without any of the years of preparation that sharing it requires.

When I had first given SS the sacrament, I was very explicit with the instructions:

“This is for you only. We move slowly in this tradition because there is real karma attached to the sharing of this plant.”

He listened, and nodded.

He promised to stay true to his word, then he left to do exactly what he wanted.

I remember that day clearly.

He was sitting our kitchen table, eating the food I had cooked with love, looking directly into my face… and lying to me.

He was calm and unwavering.

There was a rage that rose up in my chest at his meek nature.

You gave out this sacrament, something you promised you wouldn’t do.

Now, you are lying to this girl AND you’re lying to me!

I raised my voice.

I waved my arms around wildly and I cussed him out.

His response was a masterclass in disarming that all of his victims are familiar with.

He didn't get defensive or angry.

He got small.

He used soft, poetic language to describe his “confusion” and his “overwhelming love.”

He asked for forgiveness with such genuine-seeming remorse that by the time the conversation ended, I had gone from a growling panther to docile house cat, purring with sympathy and understanding.

There was so much of my dream riding on this relationship.

Would I throw it all away over a misunderstanding?

Sure, he lied, but he had done it out of love.

That was the story I told myself.

That was the way that I soothed myself, the first time.

The owl and the crow

The second breach of trust was just as shocking.

One night, mid-euphoric rant about a private ceremony he had conducted for himself, he casually mentioned that he had taken items from our altar.

ME: “I'm sorry. Repeat that. Are you saying you took sacraments and items off our personal altar without asking? Is that what you just said?”

He confirmed it briefly, then kept speaking, furiously, as if it were a minor detail and I was missing the real point of the story.

The owl and the crow spirit had told him things.

They had revealed Important things.

Couldn't I see that it was necessary in that moment?

ME: “There is nothing okay about this. Particularly after you already gave away sacraments that were never yours to give. Nothing.”

The breach of trust settled into his line of vision.

He seemed genuinely sorry, then he told me that the owl had instructed him to take those things.

That spirit had directed him.

There it was: the moment when everything should have changed between us.

Gav and I recognized that his operational framework was this:

Spirit could tell him to lie, to steal, to cross every boundary of every person who loved and cared for him.

The “spirits” and the voices in his head gave him counsel that his transgressions were not only acceptable, but that they were sacred actions.

I called someone who I trusted from his circle of friends.

I needed to know if I was overreacting.

“Actually,” one of them told me, “since he's been working with you, his delusion has improved a lot. Before, when he was taking a lot of synthetic drugs recklessly, he was much worse.”

I thought: Yikes. This is more serious than I imagined.

I encouraged him to ground himself in his day-to-day practices, in his music, to make sure he was eating food each day, and to make sure that he was taking care of his basic needs.

A few mornings later, I woke up to pages and pages of prophecies, dreams, spirit characters and animal messengers.

They were all instructing him, giving him advice and showing him what to do.

He was convinced he needed to give up his life as a musician and start “doing the work.”

He believed that he should no longer take money for “secular work,” but only spiritual work.

He was writing to me all of the visions that he was having and what they meant for the future.

I looked at Gav.

“We have to move. Now.”

Carrying your own world on your back

We moved fast.

I found a house the same day I decided.

I got on a bike, told the rider to take me somewhere vacant, and the first place he showed me was absolutely perfect.

We were out within days.

I made Gav promise not to tell SS where we lived.

On the first day in the new house, we found a tortoise in the yard.

I took it as a message: Move slowly. Carry your own world on your back. Always have your own protection.

Our first ceremony in that house happened the day we moved in.

When we collected the last of our things from the previous place, I had another conversation with SS.

“You don't know the difference between what comes from a dream realm and what comes from your imagination. The only way to develop discernment is through daily practice: grounded work, study, journaling, meditation. Years of it. You are not a mganga. Healers are made slowly. We can't trust you. We've given you every opportunity and you have taken from our most sacred space, and you don't seem to understand what's wrong with that.”

He nodded, his head bowed to the ground as if he was genuinely sorry.

Then he confessed his confusion, as the spirits that were communicating with him had instructed him to take those things.

I had nothing left to say.

I gave him a hug, closed the trunk of the car with the rest of our boxes in, and we left.

Over and over and over

I wish I could tell you that was the end.

I felt like taking some distance would be our protection.

I believed that having those humane conversations with him would really help him to understand the consequences of his lack of integrity and his lies.

Then, somehow, SS showed up living yards away from us.

He was unable to keep up with his rent in the previous place, so he had moved into a shared artistic space that happened to be almost next door to us.

Though I shake my head at our decisions back at the time, it would only be a matter of time until we would reconcile.

We let him back into our house, our lives, our temple, and our most sacred spaces.

The breaches in trust would be many.

He would lie to us for almost two years, secretly declaring himself to others as a gifted healer, inventing a spiritual lineage for himself, and creating ridiculous stories about the spiritual initiations that he had gone through.

By the end, he would have swindled dozens of people into sexual intimacy as part of his “healing.”

He used and manipulated visions during ceremony to encourage women to have sex with him or “marry him.”

He sold people the dream of a community he was building, only to act as if he had never said such a thing.

He would use my name and reputation for clout, even telling others that he had asked for my permission to do certain rituals or proceed with ceremonies.

It’s only recently that I’ve come to recognize the measure of the harm and the patterns that have repeated over and over and over.

I want to share what I’ve learned from this story, and what I continue to learn from listening and collecting the stories of those others affected.

Five signs of a spiritual predator

My heartbreak came from someone who wore falsified humility like a cloak.

It came at a time where I wore my loneliness on my sleeve and was desperate to make new, friendly connections.

Your heartbreak might have come from a peer, a colleague, a teacher, a proclaimed “healer.”

Before you trust anything sacred, whether that be your knowledge, your body, your consciousness, or your healing, into anyone else's hands, consider this:

1. The Downloaded Wisdom Trap 

If someone claims their gifts are purely channeled, with no lineage, no study, and no grounded practice, be immediately wary. Human consciousness is capable of receiving deep and profound messages, but true mastery requires the humility of being a student first.

Red flag:

High spiritual claims with zero physical-world accountability.

2. The Weaponization of Spirit 

When someone uses the divine to justify crossing a boundary, stealing, lying, or violating consent, it is spiritual bypassing. Spirit will never ask you to violate another person's sovereignty.

Red flags:

“I was guided to do this.”

“Spirit is showing me what’s going on for you.”

“I can see what you are thinking.”

3. The Math Ain't Mathing 

Trust your cognitive dissonance. If you're working harder to maintain someone's image than they are, something is wrong. If you've explained away the same lie more than once, if there are huge gaps in practical knowledge, if stories seem too large for life or incredibly over the top, make sure you do some research.

Red flag:

You keep rewriting the story so the signs make sense.

4. Loneliness as a Filter 

Loneliness is a disconnection from ourselves and and then from our discernment.

Predators hunt at the watering holes where the thirsty gather.

Red flag:

You feel so seen by this person that you overlook what you're seeing.

5. Sacraments and Consent 

The unauthorized distribution of sacred medicine is a violation of the lineage, the recipient, and the tradition, no matter how generous it appears.

Red flag:

They share what isn't theirs to share.

I kept quiet for a long time.

I'm not keeping quiet anymore.

In the coming weeks, I'll share the stories of others who were harmed by this same person and the same patterns.

With the consent and support of the other women affected, we will also name him publicly.

The more of us who recognise these signs, the harder it becomes for these predatory men to live in our sacred spaces.

With love,
Diane x

Read the next part of the series here.

For those who want to walk this path with care:

1. Order ceremonial cacao, sourced directly from Asháninka family farmers. (Subscribe and save 20%!)

2. Join our facilitator training and learn to hold space with the integrity this medicine deserves.

3. Order our book, the full length guide to holding sacred space.

4. Join Gavin’s mini-course and learn to carry an open heart from ceremony into everyday life.

It is older than language and older than the first words spoken by our earliest ancestors.

As above, so below: the planets of our solar system that trace their elliptical orbits around the stars do so with a rhythm that has held for billions of years.

A compulsion to drum has been loosed on this blue/green planet.

The drums play in Japan when the rice is planted. They played in Cameroon when the king died and in the United States when an assassinated president was buried. In the Basque provinces the drum beats at the birth of the baby, and in Russia at the anniversary of the revolution.

Planet drum.

— Mickey Hart, Drumming at the Edge of Magic

Long before the first civilisations learned to name the stars or plant their first gardens, humans were keeping time.

New research by Dr Roberta Bianco at the Italian Institute of Technology in Rome shows that newborn babies can detect and predict rhythmic patterns in the music they hear.

In a study published in Plos Biology, Bianco’s team used EEG to record the brain activity of sleeping newborns as music played through their earphones.

She found that the human brain is innately tuned to predict what comes next when we hear music, and that this anticipation is strongest when it comes to rhythm:

Importantly, these predictions go beyond simply anticipating a regular interval: they involve detecting patterns in the music and learning how those patterns unfold over time… Before birth, the foetal environment is dominated by regular rhythms, such as the mother's heartbeat and the repeated motion associated with her walking.

This fascinating discovery demonstrates that rhythm is truly our first language, older than both speech and melody.

It follows, then, that the deepest truths about how to live well, how to love, how to create, and how to tend the living soil beneath our feet are not instructions to be followed, but rhythms to be felt.

Hardwired for anticipation

The musical bow, or mouthbow, is widely considered by ethnomusicologists to be the first stringed instrument.

It is a direct evolution of the hunting bow.

Variations of the mouthbow exist in almost all cultures, and it is especially prevalent among hunting societies, including the Asháninka, who grow the cacao we share.

Among the Asháninka, the mouthbow is called piompirintzi.

Further down the river, the Shipibo call their version the jonoronati, and use it as a bridge between the healer and their spiritual allies.

In the forest traditions of Central Africa, it is called moungongo. Its curved arch represents the human spine, and the single, vibrating liana symbolises the umbilical cord between humanity and the creator. In 2019, I recorded this video of the Gabonese nganga Maviango demonstrating the instrument.

Dr Bianco's research was able to identify the anticipation of rhythmic structure in the brains of newborn babies.

The ancestral rhythms of the moungongo tap into this hardwired capacity, guiding the listener's consciousness to specific realms.

This journey is intensified by the mind-altering effects of consuming the root bark of the iboga shrub.

If you listen to Maviango's recording, you'll notice that sooner or later, you unconsciously “catch on” to a particular rhythmic loop.

However, no sooner has this cadence become “known,” Maviango introduces an unexpected variation.

Even more skilfully, he imperceptibly switches from one part of one rhythm, to a different part of another, with the mind only “catching up” to what's happening once the second rhythm begins its full cycle again.

This is a marvellous and masterful ancestral technology of consciousness.

Its effect is inherently pleasurable, a sonic expression of the visual game of peekaboo with an infant.

The surprise of seeing the caregiver's eyes through the sudden revelation of hands moving apart fires the same neural circuitry as when the listener to the moungongo realises that a new rhythm has been revealed.

Before your life depends on it

Rhythm is also a fundamental factor in the cacao orchard.

Time and timing are everything.

Whether it's germinating seeds, building a nursery, or pruning the intercropped trees in the orchard itself, the moment chosen for each activity is one of the deciding elements in the success of the operation.

Growing food is an art and science that takes time to learn.

I've been growing some of my own food for over a fifteen years now, and here on our two acres of land in Kenya, we are just a few years away from pretty much self sufficient.

One of the most valuable pieces of advice I was given at the start of this journey was simply to begin.

Right now.

It's a steep learning curve, and the mistakes, lessons and adjustments along the way (especially in the first phase of experimentation) are many.

It’s wise to get them out of the way as soon as possible, or as my end-of-the-world friends would say, before your life depends on it.

All growers know that living processes don't happen in the realm of abstract ideas; they happen in time.

It's for this reason that all forest peoples live by a sacred rhythm that pulses with the natural environment and the cycle of the seasons.

It is also why wherever it is found, the traditional time-keeping instrument of the mouthbow is revered as a sacred vessel that unites the cycles of life with the realms of spirit and the divine.

Harmony is found in the forest. Through the sounds of the musical bow, the soul connects to the Divine to transmit the spiritual messages of man's life with man, man's life with Nature, and man's life with the creator, Nzambé Kana.

— Makondza, Gabonese traditional healer

In a different forest, the Asháninka spiritual leaders guide their people in the cultivation of kametsa asaiki (pronounced: kah-MEH-tsa ah-sah-EE-kee).

Kametsa means good, beautiful and harmonious.

Asaiki is the verb to live, to be alive.

The purpose of existence in Asháninka cosmology is this pursuit of “living well.”

The good life.

The expression doesn't refer to wealth or comfort in the material sense, but to living harmoniously with the forest, the spirits and with oneself.

It is a relational meaning: life is good when our relationships are good.

Safety in routine, joy in surprise

Nourishing relationships also follow and respond to rhythm.

Diane and I have been building a life together for the past seven years.

On a soul level, we share a beautiful, flowing and complementary dynamic, but as anybody who knows us personally will attest, our personalities couldn't be further apart.

I wake up each morning before 3am, and begin a solitary morning routine that lasts for twelve hours.

It's split into four sections of three hours each: reading and writing, my Druid practices, playing instruments, and my work on Cacao Love.

The last three hours of my day are spent gardening, or on a date afternoon with Diane.

For the first part of my daily round, Diane sleeps, surfacing mid-morning before eventually coming to life with creativity, vigour and productivity in the evening hours while I rest.

Over the years, we've found our own idiosyncratic ways of managing our time and our lives, creating beautiful touch points in our schedules for conversation, creativity and intimacy at specific times of the day.

These places of union create anticipation, just like the rhythmic surprise of the mouthbow, or the feeling I'm noticing as I write this sentence of the rainy season’s imminent approach.

We've found a pleasurable, creative tension between predictability and spontaneity.

As an autist and contemplative, I feel safety and assurance in routine, but also appreciate the new experiences Diane brings to my life with her lust for adventure and the unknown.

This same creative tension runs through every living forest, and the deeper we walk this initiatory path, the more clearly we see that the forest's flourishing mirrors our own.

In the secret language of the Bwiti tradition, pindi describes the forest and man becoming one.

The case for complexity

In the thriving cacao orchards planted by Asháninka forest guardians, cacao trees receive their physical structure from the nutrient-dense soil, which in turn enables vital metabolic processes like photosynthesis to take place.

The tree's metabolism reciprocates, returning gifts through root exudates in the form of sugars, acids, and other compounds that nourish microbes in the soil.

This vibrant microbial life enriches the earth, further strengthening the structure that supports the tree.

If you are interested in this specifically, I wrote about this creative tension in cacao trees in a letter last year.

The pattern repeats and amplifies over time, forming a living knotwork of exchange.

Like the Celtic knot, there is no endpoint; only a rhythmic, expansive loop.

As we root more of our lives in the wisdom of the forest, we begin to feel its rhythms as our own: expansion, contraction, rest, and renewal.

Growth brings expansion and tension.

Pruning brings contraction, relief, and stimulation for later successional plants to emerge.

All of this requires presence.

No algorithm or AI can replace the time it takes to observe how things are moving and changing in nature.

These systems are living organisms that develop through motion and through time.

As we begin to consciously create a life that is more harmonious with the rhythmic world of nature, there comes a temptation to reduce complexity in order to make things easier to manage.

Simplification and minimalism are often touted as the remedial strategies when coping with the overwhelm of modern life.

On our land, we practise syntropic agroforestry, a method rooted in the ancient forest management strategies of Indigenous Amazonian peoples.

In this approach, we view complexity as the climax and goal of the system, not as something to eradicate.

Complexity is where the magic happens.

Instead of stripping that away, our intentions are to participate meaningfully and pleasurably in the creation of a complex, interconnected and interdependent system that we love to be a part of.

We allow for chaos.

We encourage overgrowth and unpredictable expansion.

Yes, this creates increased necessity for presence and management, but we are cultivating a place that brings us joy to observe, to plant, to dig, and simply to be.

When you love the system, time spent managing it is no longer a burden.

This is truly kametsa asaiki, the good life of the Asháninka.

Regaining vitality

Modern life has severed our connection to natural timing.

We eat at all hours, work around the clock, and ignore biological signals.

As a result, we lose vitality.

When we re-tune ourselves by eating, working, and resting in alignment with our natural rhythms, we begin to regain the energy needed to live well.

Our lives are unique, with children, work, responsibilities, and limitations.

Depending on your current life situation, and in no small part by the circumstances of your birth, culture and hereditary, you may have more or less scope to shape the course of your day.

No matter how restrictive the moment you currently find yourself in is, however, there is always some wiggle room.

Once again I draw upon the timeless wisdom of St Francis of Assisi:

Start by doing what is necessary, then what is possible, and, suddenly, you are doing the impossible.

The forest of life that you create will inevitably be as unique as you are.

Only then will it become more resilient and abundant over time.

Six slow breaths

As you prepare your next cacao, spend some time in reflection.

How do you spend your time?

Are you creating enough space to rest?

To be creative?

Where could you add one minute of meaningful, non-urgent activity per day?

This could be a pause before opening your laptop, and taking 6 slow breaths.

Or it could be pleasurably rolling through a mental list of things you are grateful for as you shower off the stresses of the day.

These micro-practices have larger implications than might at first be apparent.

In these seemingly tiny changes, we begin to reclaim our rhythm.

This happens slowly at first, but with the hypnotic groove of consistency, we might just find ourselves doing what now seems impossible.

With love,
Gavin x

Join the rhythm of life:

1. Order ceremonial cacao, sourced directly from Asháninka family farmers. (Subscribe and save 20%!)

2. Join our facilitator training and learn to hold space with the integrity this medicine deserves.

3. Order our book, the full length guide to holding sacred space.

4. Join my mini-course and learn to carry an open heart from ceremony into everyday life.

If you came into an inheritance tomorrow, what should you do with it?

A. Buy some expensive gifts

B. Donate it to the church

C. Marry another wife

D. Buy a property

The answer, I discovered, if you are studying at a private and reputable Kenyan boarding school is to donate it to the church.

Yes, this passage is 100% real.

I found it as we flipped through our friend Mercy's daughter's school textbook, curious to find out exactly what she was studying.

When I asked what the right answer could possibly be, she quickly leafed back to the answer section of the text book and told us that the answer would be B, donate it to the church.

My friend Mercy shrugged.

Gavin and I howled with laughter for a while, but once we were alone, we could talk about how absolutely fucked up it is.

These schools are the foundation for the intellectual consciousness of Kenya's youth.

They are full of absolute colonial, evangelical crap.

Excuse my language but I don't think I have any other articulate way to put it.

Colonial classrooms

Gavin and I have lived in Kenya for five years now.

This country is often called the cradle of humanity.

This is where human consciousness leapt forward; where Bantu, Nilotic, and Cushitic peoples have spoken dozens of languages, and lived inter-culturally across vast lands for thousands of years.

How is it that a land with this complex cultural tapestry, a history stretching back to some of the oldest lineages known to humanity, still has schools that act as pipelines for self-hatred and cultural erasure?

Most Kenyan schools serve up a heaping plate of British history, complete with old school corporal punishment and shame.

British customs and manners are enforced as rules.

On top of all of that?

A nice heaping dollop of Christian missionary education.

In the 1840s, British anti-slavery enforcement became stricter and stricter.

Many enslaved Africans were freed from Indian Ocean slave boats, but Christian missionaries were afraid of letting them go back to their original communities.

They claimed that they could “rehabilitate” them after their slavery experiences by putting these freed Africans into small, supervised settlements.

These settlements weren't merely schools; they were factories for a new identity.

Christian “rehabilitation” schools taught:

• English, Biblical instruction

• Vocational training

• Culture “reformation,” where formerly enslaved Africans were given new names, new norms, and new identities anchored in the Christian missionary community.

Were these schools really about rehabilitation, or were they paternalistic ways of creating a subjugated and well-behaved labor force to enforce the church's bidding?

I’ll let you ponder that one on your own…

The Scramble for Africa

The “Scramble for Africa” began in the 1880s, a period when European nations raced to carve up the African continent, claiming territory and establishing trade routes for resource extraction.

The psychological groundwork laid by the missionaries made what came next possible.

British powers violently inserted themselves onto East African land.

They established corporate bases first, then governmental structures to officially colonize the region.

The word “colonize” feels sanitary, and almost clinical, but let me make this viscerally clear.

Colonization meant burning down villages that resisted.

It meant confiscating livestock, and destroying ways of life.

It meant raiding and raping villages.

It meant employing African soldiers, called askaris, to enforce British rules against their own people.

It was an extremely brutal, violent, and purposefully soul-crushing process.

By this point, the British government and many European monarchies had been actively doing it for hundreds of years.

The colonization playbook

British colonization did not just afflict the African continent; it also reared its head in places such as the United States, India, Hong Kong, and Jamaica.

Most British colonization followed the same playbook:

• Tax the local people into dependence, forcing them to labor for colonial rule.

• Seize lands, displace communities, and deny them the possibility to keep livestock or their own traditional ways of living

• Install new leaders who could be controlled by British rule, denigrate the traditional healers and elders, and enforce this new order with violence.

• Establish cultural and psychological dominance by demonizing African traditions and replacing them with the rules of colonial law.

• Impose English as the “civilized” and proper language of law.

• Discredit indigenous systems of authority and governance.

• Hold up European norms as the standard of civilization, and dismiss African traditions as barbaric.

Indigenous ways of being were replaced, then demonized through education and religion, within the people's own minds and on their own land.

This is what African scholar Cheikh Anta Diop described as the most serious damage of colonization: “the cultural and psychological destruction of the colonized.”

If you can control a people's culture, you control how they define themselves in relationship to the rest of the world.

The illusion of independence

Kenya was pronounced “independent” in 1964, just 62 years ago.

We mark that year as independence from colonialism, but only on paper.

The British government still profits from Kenya.

They maintain military bases, control trade deals, and extract resources through “partnerships.”

Independence was a rebrand into softer ways of exacting power from the former colonies.

Kenya, and many other African nations, have never truly become independent from their colonial powers.

This is why, in 2025, when a school that my friend works her butt off to pay for puts a question like this in the textbook, no one thinks to question why it's there in the first place.

How colonialism normalizes the abnormal

When I expressed my astonishment that “donate to the church” would be the obvious answer, my friend Mercy shrugged at the answer with neutrality.

On another occasion, she told me that Kenyan boarding schools often mix paraffin (kerosene) into students' food.

Schools claim this suppresses sexual desire, a belief with no scientific basis but deep colonial roots in the obsession with controlling the sexuality of Black bodies.

She shrugged at that too.

This neutrality is the sickness of a colonized soul who has lost touch with the essence of their own traditions.

It is the same reason that when I say hello to those who were not educated in elite international or British schools here in Kenya, they often mumble a, “Hello Madame," and look at the ground.

It is this same neutrality that allows Kenyan judges to preside in white wigs without anyone batting an eye.

People who practice traditional spiritual practices are labeled “witches,” persecuted, sometimes murdered.

That same neutrality ensures nobody blinks.

Author Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o says, “Colonialism normalizes the abnormal.”

In day to day life, soul-crushing abnormality becomes invisible.

People stop noticing what hurts them.

They stop noticing that the ones now carrying on the enforcement of colonial rule usually look just like them.

If you are facilitating ceremony in the West, you are doing so in societies built on this same logic.

The same forces that taught Kenyans to hate their traditions taught your ancestors to fear theirs.

Capitalism creates this same fog.

It makes it seem normal that people don't make a living wage, can't feed their children, and live on the streets, while a billionaire class continually consolidates its power.

The pattern repeats: Peru

This isn't just Kenya.

Colonialism is a silent presence around the world.

You probably weren't taught about its effects in school, but if you pay attention, you'll see this fog everywhere you look.

We saw the same patterns in Peru with the Asháninka leaders, the indigenous communities who grow our cacao.

Some Asháninka who had gone to university came back with the understanding that they must civilize the rest of their community.

Some elders continued meeting with the uncontacted Asháninka members who still lived deep in the forest.

These were people who chose not to learn Spanish, who stayed in the forest after the indigenous genocides began during colonial times.

Other Ashaninka leaders wanted to lure them out and get them “civilized.”

They wanted to get them to sit down at desks and go to school, wear Western clothing, learn Spanish, and begin to labor for money.

These leaders genuinely felt they would improve the legacy of their people.

And of course, once anyone has entered the money economy, it's hard not to want to earn money and find ways of “bettering ourselves” within the conditions provided.

The assumption that civilization is always akin to whiteness and Europeanness is one of colonization's deepest hangovers.

It shows up whether it's British colonization in Kenya, French colonization in Cameroon, or Spanish colonization in Peru.

The belief that indigenous ways are barbaric and need to evolve into modernity is the moral judgment of white supremacy at work.

Navigating as outsiders

Collaboration with indigenous co-operatives will always be complex for those of us who grew up outside of small, earth-based communities.

I shared with the Asháninka leaders we spent time with that their self-reliance was the most advanced achievement possible as a people.

I told them that what they model is what the modern world desperately needs to relearn.

I admired their communal food distribution, their slow-crafted jewellery and clothing.

Even when many preferred to wear Under Armour to the traditional kushma, I kept pointing back: what you have managed to maintain in your communities is what so much of the world has lost: culture, tradition, care, and meaning.

It is our responsibility as bridge people to attempt to dismantle the hierarchy that positions European culture as superior, and everything else as primitive.

We must build something different.

In our Cacao Love project, we have been very slow to invite people to stay with the indigenous communities in Junín, Peru, who grow the cacao we share.

We would eventually love to be able to invite folks with us to spend time and share ceremony with the Ashánkinka people in Peru, the Ekang and Baka people in Cameroon, and our Mijikenda neighbours here in Kenya.

But an influx of visitors who are positioned as “more civilized,” “more rich,” and “more educated” can unconsciously and very quickly shift community dynamics and erode self-reliance.

This is something we must constantly be aware of.

When liberatory moments break through

When we come into contact with liberatory sensations and possibilities, something shifts.

In those moments of recognition, we become able to question the structures that operate so silently within our society.

It’s in moments where we feel in our bodies what it is like to be lost in rhythm, in song, in connection, that we recognize the full potential of our possibility on the earth.

This is the gift of ceremony.

It returns us to people who know what their lives mean; people whose purpose lives in their soul, their hearts, their communities, their faith, and their lands.

The revolution in the temple

Here lies the power of traditional ceremony in Kenya, and of true ceremony everywhere.

Over the past few years, I've been inviting my drum teacher, Sipi, from the local Duruma healing tradition to teach drum and dance to those who work on our team in Kenya.

Sipi is training to become a mganga, a traditional healer who uses a mixture of herbs, dance, drumming, and ceremony to bring people into an integral state.

Sweet and unassuming in her presence, she is staunchly and unapologetically dedicated to bringing forward her culture.

She refuses to call herself a Christian in front of the students that she educates, and she proudly teaches the youth about their own origin stories and cultural dances.

This brings her endless persecution within the traditional school system, but she refuses to water down what she teaches: knowledge of self, and love for her lineage.

The university-educated members of our team would come to her sessions, but those from local schools, many of whom grew up with the same language and traditions as Sipi, often felt very uncomfortable joining.

This was partly because they are Christian, and to be associated with healing or traditional medicine invites accusations of witchcraft.

It was partly because foreigners were often around, which creates a divide.

People feel inferior because of their education, and it leaves them silent and sullen.

It was also partly because working people here don't have much time for themselves.

Between taking care of their homes and their children, there is very little room for leisure.

Last week, I witnessed a small but powerful revolution in our temple here in Kenya.

There was multiple people present who had been educated to be quiet and obedient in front of white people and foreigners.

These were people who had been shamed for speaking their own language and taught to hide any connection to their own spiritual traditions.

We had already had difficult situations that allowed us to understand that there is no simple language that would be able to bring everyone together in confidence.

We had multiple instances where the chef in our center would not prepare meals for those who were Black Africans, despite her being a Black African herself.

There were other instances where another one of our team members called traditional practices devilry, and eventually ran away from our house and pronounced us devil worshippers.

These are symptoms of the sickness of a colonized mind that learns to hate itself.

The transformation

This gathering was the first time where the entire team came together for ceremony, and it was such a beautiful, transformational epiphany for all of us.

In the first fifteen minutes, they barely moved.

Eyes down and bodies rigid with the weight of everything they'd been taught about their own traditions being primitive, demonic, and backwards.

Then the drums began to touch something that rang true, a truth that is much older than the colonial school system, older than missionaries and older than their learned shame.

Shoulders started relaxing down the back, and shaking freely.

Feet felt free to dance the steps that their grandparents had danced.

Giggles floated everywhere, as the lightness of being flooded the temple.

Because the teacher was speaking in their own language, and giving space for the freedom of expression, laughter abounded.

For those who often don't say more than one sentence out loud in English, Sipi had everyone dance in the center, sing on their own, drum on their own, and also share how they were feeling in their own way.

By the end of the session, they were calling out in Duruma, claiming and taking up space they'd been taught didn't belong to them.

The university-educated staff caught on slowly as they watched, and before long they were the ones who didn't know the steps.

One woman who had worked with us for two years and had never spoken more than necessary stood in the center of the circle and sang.

Her voice was full and strong and a part of her that was completely foreign to me within her professional profile.

You could see the shyness slowly melt away as the rhythms vibrated through all of us.

Ceremony as decolonial education

These ceremonial sessions are the decolonial education.

These ceremonial sessions allow people who have had their value taken away from them to feel the swell of liberation and beauty within their hearts and within their bodies.

These ceremonial sessions around the drum in the temple bring back the natural spirits of the land, and provide a place where those who speak the language and have grown up with the rhythms can remember how natural it feels to be within their own flow.

They see how awkward it is for me to sing in their language, and how many more tries that I have to make to catch up to them.

It flips a dynamic of belonging and value that supports pride and worth.

This is the power of ceremony.

When we sing and uplift our voices, it literally brings our hearts to beat together.

When we dance together, it brings us all into the same frequency.

When we pray together, we are able to tap into the most valuable and universal part of ourselves to remember we are really of one body and one mind.

What we're all subjected to

We have all been culturally entrained, meaning our societies have synchronized us to their particular rhythms of thinking, believing, and behaving.

No matter where we grew up, this process has shaped our ideas, the stories we accept as true, and the possibilities we believe exist within ourselves and on the planet.

Silently and stealthily our schools, our government, our hospitals instilled in us very particular ways of being, of valuing information and knowledge.

It told us who is right and who is wrong.

It defined science and dismissed other ways of knowing as superstition.

It showed us the boundaries between logic and magic.

If we grew up in spiritual communities, it showed us how we can hold both the present reality and faith in a new reality simultaneously.

It provided to us the ecstatic feeling of possibility beyond what is reasonable.

In our songs, we felt the transcendence of this present moment into all possibilities, meaning our realities could take quantum leaps of faith.

This is still the power ceremony holds.

Questions for ceremonialists

If you share ceremony with your own community, ask yourself:

• Whose cosmology animates my ritual structure?

• What power dynamics am I unconsciously replicating?

• How do we welcome in those who are different than me?

• Who feels comfortable speaking in my spaces, and who stays silent?

• Am I creating ceremonies that require people to perform “civilized” spirituality, or spaces where varied cultural memory can surface?

• What colonial values are present in how I structure my offerings, my pricing, my accessibility?

With a full heart, I give thanks.

Thanks to my teacher Sipi.

Thanks to the ancient technology of Duruma ceremony.

Thanks to constant reminders of the ways I might reinforce colonial value systems.

After some years, I feel more and more connected to this land and to my community here in Kenya.

My invitation, as you sit with your next cup of cacao, is to contemplate the “unspoken education” that has constructed your own life.

Cacao is a plant intelligence connected to a tapestry ancestral technology of the heart, mind, body, and spirit.

It does not speak the language of the British textbook or the capitalist grind; it speaks the language of the gnostic moment.

Ask yourself:

1. What worldview informs the decisions you make each day?

2. How have you learned to value information?

3. What do you dismiss as “superstition,” and why?

4. How do faith and reason dance together in your own heart?

Somewhere right now, a Kenyan student is contemplating whether the right answer to the question is to give that money to the church or buy a new property.

They haven’t considered whether the answer would be to support their local traditional healer, or to build schools that bring back holistic education that supports local languages and traditions of the land.

Somewhere else, in a temple in Kenya, the drums are still beating a rhythm that in danger of being toppled and erased, like a heart fighting for its own life.

Those who were taught to stay silent are reconnecting with their own song.

People who were told their traditions were demonic are kicking up dirt in the temples as they dance them back to life.

This is how our ceremonies can serve as the root of a revolution.

This is how we can relearn what liberation is through the sensations of our own bodies.

This is how we can re-remember how to build the path home, for ourselves and for those around us.

With love,
Diane x

Help build what the world is longing for:

1. Buy ceremonial grade cacao, and begin each morning with warmth in the chest. Subscribe and save 20%.

2. Join our facilitator training and learn to hold space with the integrity this medicine deserves.

3. Order our book, the full length guide to holding sacred space.

4. Join Gavin’s mini-course and learn to carry an open heart from ceremony into everyday life.