My Journey with Cacao and the Medicine That Brought Me Home

Mar 14

By Jess | Good Vibes Wellness | Published: March 2026

I need to tell you something before I tell you about cacao.

I need to tell you that for a long time, I was a woman who had access to something sacred and didn't know it. Not because it was hidden from me. Because it was so close — so woven into the ordinary fabric of my childhood — that I walked past it every day without recognizing what it was.

That is the thing about ancestral medicine. Sometimes it doesn't come to you as revelation. Sometimes it comes as a smell. A soft evening. A cup your mother places in your hands before you're old enough to understand what she's really giving you.

The Cup I Grew Up With

I’m Ecuadorian. My lineage reaches into the Amazon basin and the Andes — into a cosmovision that understands the earth not as a backdrop to human life, but as a living intelligence that humans are in relationship with. My ancestors held cacao as one of the great plant teachers. A medicine of the heart. A bridge between the visible world and the one that hums beneath it.

I grew up drinking cacao in my home.

Not as ceremony. See, my religious upbringing in a high-control group created a very firm distance between me and the ritual practices of my ancestors. We didn't open sacred space the way the Kichwa and the peoples of the Amazon did, the way my ancestors did. We didn't call in the directions, speak to the plant, or ask her permission. We simply drank — and she was warm, and rich, and she tasted like home in a way I couldn't explain.

Looking back, I understand now what was happening even then. She was tending me. Without the ceremonial container, without the intentional invocation, she was still doing what she has always done — quietly holding the heart of anyone willing to receive her. I was in relationship with this medicine my entire life. I just didn't have the full language for it yet.

The Distance and the Weight

There came a point in my adult life when I accumulated more than I was built to carry alone.

Grief that didn't have a clean name - the loss of my father, the loss of relationships, the loss of my entire foundation in life when I was shunned from the religious group. The weight of silence that builds when you've spent years performing versions of yourself that don't fully belong to you. A disconnection from my own roots — that left me yearning for something I felt but couldn’t understand.

I was managing. I was functioning. I was doing all the things you're supposed to do.

But I was not home in myself.

I tried things. Therapy, which helped to a degree. Movement, which helped more. Breathwork, which cracked something open and showed me a door. But there was a layer beneath all of it — something dense and ancestral and wordless — that none of these approaches fully reached. Something that needed more than technique. Something that needed medicine.

That's when cacao called me back. Not loudly. Gently with the kind of insistence you feel in the sternum. A soft calling that tugged at my heart.

The First Ceremony

The first time I entered proper ceremony with cacao — intentional space, opened with invocation, with lineage called in and the plant approached with the respect she deserves — I was not prepared for what happened.

I didn’t have any expectations, intentionally. I thought maybe I’d feel emotional. Maybe a little more open than usual.

What I was not prepared for was to feel my grandmothers.

I don't know how else to say it. Somewhere in the depth of that ceremony, past the thinking mind and the defended heart, I made contact with something matrilineal and ancient. A thread. A line of women stretching back further than I could see, all of whom had held this plant, all of whom had been held by her in return. I felt the womb I came from. And the womb she came from. And the one before that.

I wept in a way I hadn't wept in years. Not from sadness — from recognition. From the particular relief of finding something you didn't know you'd lost.

That is what cacao ceremony can do when it is held correctly. Not performed. Not aesthetic. Held. With lineage. With intention. With the understanding that you are not facilitating a wellness experience. You are opening a portal to something that has been waiting patiently for you to arrive.

What Cacao Actually Is — And Why It Matters

Let me be clear about something: ceremonial cacao is not a supplement. It is not a mood enhancer, a productivity hack, or a spiritual accessory.

Cacao — Theobroma cacao, the food of the gods — was born in the upper Amazon. Archaeological traces of her reach back over 5,000 years in Ecuador, where the ancient peoples of the region were the first to recognize what she carried. From those roots she traveled — through trade, through migration, through the quiet movement of people who knew her value — spreading northward through the Americas, finding new hands and new ceremonies wherever she arrived. She has been a sacred companion to human hearts for millennia. And she began in the land that runs through my blood. Long before it was commodified into chocolate bars, it was understood as a living intelligence. A teacher with her own wisdom. A heart medicine of extraordinary potency.

In the Andean cosmovision, the heart is the seat of munay — a Quechua word that holds both love and the sovereign will to love. Most of us, by the time we're adults, have built considerable walls around this place. Not because we're broken. Because we're human. Because the world asks us to protect ourselves, to perform, to produce — and the heart learns to go quiet.

Cacao speaks directly to that place.

Physiologically, she contains theobromine — a gentle heart-stimulating compound that literally increases blood flow to the heart and brain. She contains anandamide, known as the bliss molecule. Phenylethylamine, which activates feelings of love and wellbeing. She is the only plant on earth that contains all of these compounds together. This is not coincidence. This is the intelligence of the earth expressing itself.

But the physical is only the beginning.

When cacao is approached ceremonially — when she is prepared with intention, when space is opened with invocation and the guidance of lineage, when the body is supported through breathwork to drop below the thinking mind — she becomes something the science cannot fully explain. A gatekeeper. A grandmother. A force that gently, but with absolute certainty, shows you what you have been carrying and what you no longer need to carry alone.

She composts old grief. She illuminates places in the psyche that other practices can only circle around. She reconnects you to the body — particularly the womb space, the pelvis, the places where so much of our ancestral inheritance lives unspoken.

She does not push. She invites. But once you accept the invitation, she is thorough.

What I've Witnessed in Others

Since undergoing my shamanic initiation and beginning to hold ceremonial space, I have watched cacao do things that continue to move me to my core.

I have watched a woman who hadn't cried in three years weep herself open and emerge lighter than she'd felt in a decade. I have watched people make contact with aspects of themselves that years of therapy hadn't reached. I have watched grief move. Rage soften into grief and then soften into grace. I have watched people remember — not just their own stories, but older ones. The ones their bodies carried without knowing.

What I hold in ceremony is not mine. That is the most important thing I can say as a guide. The medicine heals. The ancestors witness. I am the keeper of the container — the one trained to hold the space steady while something real happens inside it. Inside of you.

This is what lineage means in practice. It is not a credential or a marketing point. It is a responsibility. A living relationship with the medicines and traditions that have been passed to me — one that asks me to carry them with the integrity they deserve.

Why the Lehigh Valley Needs This

I want to say something about this community — about the Lehigh Valley specifically.

We live in a place that works hard. A place that carries a lot. Where people are often moving fast, doing the best they can, managing the weight of jobs and families and the particular silence of a culture that doesn't give us much permission to stop and feel what we're actually feeling.

The ancestral medicines don't care about your productivity. They care about your wholeness.

I have found, in the years I've been doing this work here, that our community is hungry for something real. Not another wellness class. Not another way to optimize. Something that goes beneath all of that and asks: who are you when no one is asking anything of you?

A cacao ceremony is one of the most accessible doorways into that question. You don't need a plant medicine journey to a distant country. You don't need years of meditation practice. You need a cup of medicine held in sacred space, a guide who knows how to hold that space with integrity, and the willingness to surrender and let something move in you.

I bring that here. To wherever we gather — and we gather in different spaces around the Lehigh Valley, always chosen with intention for the energy they hold. I bring the lineage of my Ecuadorian ancestors, my shamanic training, and years of holding bodies and hearts through this process.

And I can tell you: it works. I have never seen a ceremony where something real didn't happen. The medicine doesn't miss.

Come Sit With Me

On Sunday, March 22, I am holding a cacao ceremony and breathwork journey here in the Lehigh Valley as part of my current 5-month transformation arc, a seasonal, progressive container designed to take you from where you are to somewhere closer to who you actually are.

This ceremony is for you if:

You've been carrying something you don't have words for.
You feel disconnected from yourself, your body, your roots.
You've tried conventional approaches and feel like something's still missing.
You are simply ready to feel something real and be held while you do.

You do not need to be part of the full arc to attend on March 22nd. You are welcome to step into the river wherever you are.

If ceremony calls to you outside of this — for yourself, a small group, a private container — that is also something I hold. Reach out. These experiences are designed for real people in real moments of their lives, not just retreat settings.

The Medicine Is Waiting

My mother never called what she made ceremony. She just made it — with her hands, in a kitchen that smelled of the Amazon even though we were far from it.

I understand now that she was practicing something. That every cup was an offering. That the continuity of that act across generations was its own form of transmission — a way of keeping a thread alive even when the full ceremonial context had been interrupted.

I am taking that thread back.

And I am inviting you to hold it with me.

Cacao has been waiting for you. She is not in a hurry. But she is ready.

🌿 Ready to join us? Register for the March 22 Cacao Ceremony + Breathwork Journey → Join here

🌿 Want to go deeper? Join the 5-Month Transformation Arc

Want to bring ceremony to your space or community? ✉️ Book a Private Cacao Ceremony → info@goodvibes-wellness.com

Follow the journey: 📲 @good.vibeswellness on Instagram

Jess is the founder of Good Vibes Wellness and a lineage-rooted practitioner of Amazonian and Andean healing arts, breathwork, meditation and cacao ceremony. She holds a shamanic initiation and serves the Greater Lehigh Valley and beyond. Her work is rooted in reclamation — helping people return to the truth of who they are beneath everything the world has asked them to perform.

Jessie Mino