About "Cacao Ceremonies"

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Contemporary cacao ceremonies are the subject of some debate today, less because of the practices themselves than because of the way they are named, presented, and sometimes connected to ancestral traditions.

The expression “cacao ceremony” is indeed often associated with the Maya worldview and, more broadly, with Mesoamerican traditions, and may therefore suggest a lineage with ancestral spiritual practices that is not always established.

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At One Love Cacao, we deeply respect the diversity of approaches, as well as everyone’s freedom to create spiritual, ritual, meditative, or creative spaces around cacao.

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Our position is, above all, a choice rooted in ethics, transparency, and recognition of Indigenous Peoples who have cultivated, preserved, transformed, and honoured cacao throughout the centuries. We wish to respect their sovereignty over their own traditions and to avoid attributing to their worldview contemporary practices that do not belong to them, particularly since our knowledge of the forms that ancestral ceremonial practices involving cacao may have taken remains very fragmentary.

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For this reason, One Love Cacao chooses to speak of cacao gatherings, cacao circles, circles of connection, or other forms of gathering around cacao, rather than “cacao ceremonies”, when referring to our own activities, without in any way renouncing their ritual or sacred dimension.

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We deeply believe in the freedom to create new ways of connecting with the living world today, through ritual, creativity, meditation, prayer, or sharing. Cacao can be a wonderful ally in this journey: a plant around which we can gather, slow down, listen, create, and connect — with ourselves, with one another, with the Earth, and with the living world.

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It is therefore not about defining what can or cannot be experienced around cacao, but rather about naming what we offer with integrity, while respectfully honouring what belongs to other peoples and traditions.

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Sakara, on behalf of the One Love Creation Association, One Love Cacao Project