About
A Cacao Circle offers people in the community an opportunity to come together, to make new connections and foster a sense of belonging.
A Queer Cacao Circle offers people in the community an opportunity to come together, to make new connections and foster a sense of belonging. It's a moment to pause and be still, allowing us to reflect and access the inner wisdom which drinking cacao in ritual can provide.
The theme of this Circle will be around queer creativity and the new moon.
The Circle starts once everyone is seated comfortably in a circle on the ground.
After a brief introduction to the facilitator and a description of the sequence of events, we begin with a guided meditation to help us arrive in the space.
Everybody is then invited to share their name and briefly tell us what brought them to the Circle today.
After the sharing, the facilitator, Chui-Yee, will talk a little bit about cacao, its ancestry and its properties, the lunar cycles, and the Circle's theme, before inviting everyone to spend some time reflecting, maybe writing down some thoughts, while Chui-Yee prepares the cacao.
Once the cacao is ready, it is served in individual cups and passed to everyone in the circle. We hold the cacao for a moment in mindfulness, before starting to take small sips. Chui-Yee will invite people to continue reflecting and journalling any insights or new thoughts which might come up for them.
After this, everyone is invited to share with the group what their experience of cacao was like, but this is not obligatory — only if folks feel comfortable doing so.
At the end of the final sharing we close the ritual by inviting everyone to draw an oracle card from the centre of the circle.
About the facilitator
Chui-Yee (she/her) is a 200hr qualified yoga teacher, as well as a Queer Sex Therapist and Relationship Counsellor. She uses the yogic practices of breathwork, mindfulness and gentle movement with the aim of healing the mind-body connection through somatic awareness.
The first time she experienced the restorative power of drinking ceremonial cacao was during the pandemic, when the world felt very unsafe for a queer person of Chinese heritage. She attended her first Cacao ceremony and discovered that drinking cacao gave her a profound sense of inner wellbeing, especially during a very challenging time.
Further research revealed that drinking ceremonial cacao not only offers emotional and spiritual medicine, but it also provides a variety of health benefits, due to the cacao plant being rich in bioactive compounds.
Chui-Yee now facilitates Cacao Circles in the hope of sharing the therapeutic properties of ceremonial cacao with the wider community.
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