It’s no surprise I love chocolate and to be fair if you’re reading this I imagine you’re also a little bit of a fan?! And I imagine some of you might have some chocolate giving and/or consuming planned for this weekend?
Personally I spread my chocolate joy out over the entire delicious year but I find the Easter period a very precious window to express our gratitude for the gifts mama cacao offers while also honoring the beauty of the Heart through ritual and stillness. For me it’s an invitation to pause, take a moment of silence and listen more deeply to my own Heart.
But did you know, in Australia more than 75 % of the annual chocolate sales are made over the easter buying period. How wild is that?
Wild, and a wee bit scary, when much of those Easter sales are with very large companies that have some catching up to do according to industry standards around pesticides, agroforestry & income livability. You can read more about the annual Chocolate Scorecard but interestingly in 2025 the company that owns Cadbury, Oreo & Toblerone, Mondelez, received the Bad Egg award for their lack of participation in the survey.
What does this have to do with ceremonial cacao and the Heart? There’s been a massive rise in the range of ceremonial cacao products these days and the variability in pricing makes it hard to know what you’re actually buying. (None of the ceremonial cacao brands make it into the Chocolate Scorecard because, well, they’re just too small in comparison to the large companies…but gosh I imagine it would be quite revealing if we demanded that level of transparency in the smaller boutique market too.)
Despite the label ‘ceremonial’ just like mainstream chocolate brands not all ceremonial cacaos are sourced or processed equally. The term is completely unregulated and has been created by the very companies that are marketing ceremonial cacao to you. So who do you trust? What do you buy? How do you know you’re not causing more destruction to our precious earth or just feeding more egos and over consumption?
At times it’s hard to hear the truth through the noise, marketing fluff, competition and commercial secrecy. The noisier the market gets the more important it is to lean back a little, and to ask questions. I still choose to work with Keith’s Cacao and Uturunku Cacao because of the way they source and process cacao. I also know the market is so wild and unpredictable these days that I need to check in before each order to be sure the brands still meet my values around ceremonial cacao (you can read more about that here).
The only way to be at peace with my decisions and actions, is to balance the ‘out thereness’ of research with some ‘in hereness’. To pause and check what is driving my actions. Is it fear or love? And rather than comparing or blaming others I’m asking – Am I in alignment with my own values? For me that’s what makes the combination of Easter and Cacao extra precious.
I believe mama cacao invites you to slow down and listen to the ‘in here’ in your own Heart. Where there is an intelligence that isn’t born from science, marketing or scorecards, but instead a much deeper inner awareness. This is the awareness so many ancient traditions guide us to through the Heart.
So I keep sitting with my cup of cacao and I listen. When I slow down and find the space to breathe and be with my own inner world I just keep hearing, follow your heart. That has always been the gift of cacao for me, an invitation to slow down and listen to the quiet, still voice inside so that whatever action I take is driven by that deeper sense of purpose and why.
So that’s what we’ll be doing in our Easter Cacao Ceremony. We’ll slow down together, I’ll share a little about the origin of the cacao we’re drinking (Guatemala) then we’ll spend the rest of our time together gently moving, breathing and listening to the subtle wisdom of our inner world and allowing space for our heart intelligence to be heard.
Whatever you choose to do over this Easter period I wish you and your family a gentle heart pause, it’s wild out there so why not take a little moment to rest in the stillness ‘in here’.
With Love
Lani
