THE FIRST YEARS OF MY LIFE: MY GRANDFATHER, THE LAND, AND THE TEACHINGS OF CACAO

My grandfather taught me about cacao without ever calling it a lesson.
He taught through presence.
Through ritual.
Through the way he lived.

Every morning, he would sit with a warm cup of cacao, rich, aromatic, unprocessed, sacred.
Not a drink. A moment. A doorway.

He would invite me to sit beside him, and although I didn’t understand it then, those mornings shaped the foundation of my emotional intelligence, my intuition, my connection to nature, and my understanding of nourishment as a language of love.

He showed me:

• Cacao is alive.
“Listen,” he would say, pressing the warm cup to my chest. “It speaks through feeling.”

• Cacao carries memory.
He explained that the earth remembers every seed, every rain, every hand that ever touched it. And when we drink cacao, that memory becomes part of us.

• Cacao is a bridge.
Between the heart and the mind.
Between the physical world and the unseen.
Between the child I was and the woman I would become.

For years, this was our ritual.
The first seven years are the most important years of brain development, emotional encoding,
and subconscious formation.
I was being shaped by cacao, long before I understood the science behind it.

Then life changed.
I grew.
I moved.
I forgot.

Or so I thought.

THE YEARS APART: WHEN LIFE PULLED ME AWAY FROM MY ROOTS

I became an orphan of the internal war in my country, migrated & entered adulthood.
My life became fast, demanding, and disconnected.
I followed responsibility, ambition, survival, all the things that pull us far from our origins.

Cacao disappeared from my life.
I didn’t notice the absence at first.
But over time, my body felt it.

My nervous system was dysregulated.
My emotions were compressed.
My heart was guarded.
My joy felt distant.
My health shifted in ways I couldn’t understand.

I tried to heal through the conventional path: supplements, diets, doctors, more work, more pressure.
Nothing brought me back to myself.

Something was missing inside, a part of me that had been buried under years of life.

Cacao restores what the world takes: Brings clarity, calm, connection, and the courage to feel.

THE RETURN OF CACAO: THE MEDICINE FOUND ME AGAIN

Cacao didn’t return gently.
It returned with insistence, like an old friend knocking at the door of my soul.

The first cup I drank as an adult was not about taste.
It was recognition.

My chest softened.
My breath deepened.
My nervous system exhaled in a way it hadn’t in years.

I felt my grandfather.
I felt the land.
I felt the little girl who used to sit at dawn with her feet dangling above the ground,
holding a warm cup with both hands.

Cacao came back to make me healthy again,
not only in the body, but in the deepest emotional architecture of my being.

It came back to make me happy, not by adding joy, but by removing the layers that kept me from feeling it.

It reopened pathways I didn’t know were blocked:
• my creativity
• my heart field
• my feminine energy
• my intuitive knowing
• my ability to love with presence
• my emotional resilience
• my cellular vitality

Cacao brought me home.

When cacao enters the body, the heart remembers its truth and the mind returns to balance.

THE SCIENCE I WOULD LEARN LATER

Years later, as I studied neuroscience, nutrition, biochemistry, and the emotional brain, I realized something extraordinary:
Everything my grandfather taught me in silence had a scientific foundation.

Cacao increases blood flow to the brain.
Cacao activates anandamide, the bliss molecule.
Cacao softens the nervous system.
Cacao enhances emotional processing.
Cacao carries natural compounds that support healing, hormone balance, and mood regulation.
Cacao opens the heart field through theobromine’s vasodilation.

My ancestral memories and my scientific mind finally matched.
The child and the doctor shook hands.