Lifestyle
Ayahuasca-lite? Why cacao ceremonies are showing up all over L.A.
Walking barefoot across the cool tile floor, her silver face gems twinkling in the sunlight, sound bath practitioner and energy healer Maya Andreeva distributed paper cups filled with brown liquid to the 20 mostly youngish adults seated on yoga mats and blankets on the ground.
They had gathered this Saturday morning on Abbot Kinney Boulevard in the courtyard behind the Japanese skincare store Albion Garden to attend Echoes of the Heart, a two-hour cacao, breathwork and sound bath workshop that promised to guide participants toward “deep self-exploration, energetic healing and profound relaxation.”
“Just allow yourself to feel the intention within you,” said Greta Ruljevaite, founder of the wellness brand Xpansion who co-led the workshop with Andreeva. “Speak it into the cacao, your intention, your wisdom, what you choose to let go of. Anything and everything: Speak it into the cacao.”
Maya Andreeva and Greta Ruljevaite, co-leaders of the Echoes of the Heart workshop, put their intentions into cups of cacao.
(Jean Marc Bertolet)
Around the room, participants gazed reverently into their paper cups, some of them mouthing words silently.
“Now bring it up to your heartspace, connecting to your heart,” she continued, as ambient music droned in the background. “Bring it down to the earth for grounding, and then back to your heartspace. … One more inhale together … and drink your cacao.”
With great gravity, they drank.
Over the next two hours the group was first led by Ruljevaite through a breathwork series, and then a sound healing session facilitated by Andreeva. The cacao part of the workshop may have been minimal, but afterward, attendee Saim Alam said the warm, slightly bitter beverage deepened his experience of the event.
“I was genuinely in such a state of bliss the whole time,” he said.
Cacao, the main ingredient in chocolate, has been showing up at an increasing number of wellness events in the L.A. area in recent years. In March alone, Angelenos can attend a Women’s Circle and Cacao Ceremony in Hollywood, a Women’s Day Goddess Circle and Cacao Ceremony at the Grove, a New Moon Cacao Renewal Ceremony at Yoga NoHo Center and the Somos Cacao Ceremony at an undisclosed location in Woodland Hills.
Small edible flowers float on the surface of a cup of cacao at a recent cacao, breathwork and sound healing workshop in Venice.
(Deborah Netburn / Los Angeles Times)
If you want to make the drink yourself, Holy Cacao sells Ecuadorean cacao at farmers markets in Hollywood, Mar Vista, Malibu and Marina del Rey. Local farmers market vendor Arcana Apothecary sells a $60, one-pound block of cacao that is made entirely by women in Guatemala, and pure organic cacao powder is available at Erewhon.
“People hosting cacao experiences continues to grow,” said Nick Meador, who sells ceremonial-grade cacao (an unofficial designation that suggests minimal processing) online through Soul Lift Cacao, the company he founded in 2018. “People want something that gives them a sense of embodied spirituality and cacao is so gentle, you can’t even say there are side effects.”
Practitioners claim that consuming cacao opens the heart, helping drinkers feel more compassionate, blissful, energized and loving. And because it does not have psychedelic properties like other substances labeled “plant medicines,” it is a safe and easy way to experiment with consciousness-altering natural compounds. Consider it ayahuasca lite.
“I was genuinely in such a state of bliss the whole time.”
— Saim Alam, cacao ceremony attendee
“It’s not like any drug I’ve ever taken,” said Kat Ho, who started leading cacao ceremonies in 2021 after being introduced to the drink during the pandemic by an influencer on YouTube. “It’s so mild. Your mind feels a little more loose and you feel a little more clear in the things you want to do.”
When folklorist Taylor Burby was researching cacao ceremonies for her recent graduate thesis, she found that more than 89% of the 118 participants she interviewed said they like to consume cacao because it is a legal, more accessible plant medicine.
Attendees of a cacao, breathwork and sound healing workshop hold cups of cacao at their heart center.
(Jean Marc Bertolet)
“If you take mushrooms you don’t know what’s going to happen,” Burby said. “With cacao you might feel yourself getting warmer or giddy or peaceful, but you have more control over your experience.”
The physical effects of cacao have not been studied as much as coffee, but research suggests that chemical compounds present in cacao can affect mood by increasing both alertness and cognition, and also improve cardiovascular health by lowering blood pressure. And because cacao has much less caffeine than coffee, fans say it gives them an energetic boost without making them jumpy.
“I can feel my shoulders drop, my chest opens,” Andreeva said. “I have felt the energy running through my body like little tingles in spaces where I don’t usually feel that.”
Making ceremonial cacao is a multistep process that traditionally begins with fermenting the seeds of the cacao fruit in their own pulp, drying them in the sun, roasting them over an open fire and then grinding them until they form a paste, which gets poured into a mold to harden.
To prepare the cacao for the Echoes of the Heart workshop, Ruljevaite used a ball of cacao that she had purchased on a recent trip to Guatemala. The night before she meditated over the dark brown sphere, filling it with intentions, and then shaved it into small pieces; mixed it with warm water, oat milk, a little manuka honey and vanilla; and then frothed it. She brought it to the event in an electric Crock-Pot. Just before serving, she and Andreeva whistled over it for a few moments, infusing it with “light language” to give it more potency. Then they ladled the liquid into small cups.
In South and Central America cacao is often served mixed just with water, but without any sweeteners it’s very bitter.
“Our Western tastebuds are not really ready for the traditional experience of cacao,” Andreeva said. “Anywhere I’ve gone in L.A. to drink cacao, it’s never just been raw.”
Archaeological evidence suggests that cacao has been cultivated in Mesoamerica for at least 5,000 years. It was served at betrothals and other celebrations and was a favorite drink of Maya and Aztec nobility, especially in places where it had to be imported, said Rosemary Joyce, a recently retired professor of anthropology at UC Berkeley and an expert on the history of cacao. Texts from the 16th century show the plant was used by Indigenous people medicinally to treat an array of ailments and cacao was consumed in rituals and ceremonies, mostly to repair relationships between the human and spirit worlds, she said.
Joyce has been offered traditional cacao while doing fieldwork in Honduras.
Maya Andreeva, a sound bath practitioner and yoga teacher, ladles cacao from a pot into a paper cup.
(Deborah Netburn / Los Angeles Times)
“It tastes like medicine — there’s no way around it,” she said.
Despite its storied history, her research suggests that ancient uses of cacao in Mesoamerica bear little resemblance to the rituals many Westerners are crafting today.
“It’s a tricky area,” she said. “The ceremonies they did required cacao, but the purpose of the ceremony was not to commune with the spirit of cacao or have it come down and take over your body. That’s a very Western notion.”
Most modern-day cacao ceremonies trace their origin to Keith Wilson, a geologist, adventurer and founder of Keith’s Cacao, who became known as the “Chocolate Shaman.” Wilson, who died last year at his home in Guatemala, claims he was contacted by the cacao spirit in 2003 and given the mission of reintroducing ceremonial cacao to a world that had mostly forgotten about it. He began serving cacao to visitors on his porch, and friends started calling them “cacao ceremonies.” Over time, the area around Lake Atitlán where he settled became known for its cacao ceremonies. Visitors brought the practice back to their home countries.
Meador prefers to label his cacao events “cacao experiences” or “modern cacao ceremonies” to make it clear they are not derived from ancient Indigenous rituals.
“I don’t want to be like a policeman,” he said, “but I teach people to be careful with the words we choose. There are many voices in the conversation and there are people in the U.S. who don’t really actually know that much about it.”
Today in L.A., cacao ceremonies are often paired with other healing modalities such as breathwork, yoga, meditation and dance. Some facilitators will evoke the spirit of cacao, who is supposed to be loving, nurturing and even a bit promiscuous. Burby, the folklorist, once heard it described as “the grandmother that still has sex, rather than the grandma who is over and done and retired.” A facilitator might remind attendees that cacao is a heart opener, that after drinking it one might feel warm, clear and more alert. But after that, anything goes.
“There are just as many ways to practice as people practicing,” Burby said.
Back at Echoes of the Heart, Andreeva and Ruljevaite make it clear they are far from cacao experts. But they had both had positive experiences with the drink and wanted to share it with those who attended their workshop.
“I see it as this beautiful welcoming bridge back to yourself,” Ruljevaite said. “And with a lot of prayers and intention infused in it, and the power and reverence of the community, it heightens and amplifies its benefits.”
In 2021, Zhao made history as the first woman of color to win the best director Oscar for her film Nomadland. Her Oscar-nominated drama Hamnet has made $70 million worldwide.
Bethany Mollenkof for NPR
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Bethany Mollenkof for NPR
It took a very special kind of spirit to make Hamnet, which is nominated for best picture at this year’s Academy Awards. Chloé Zhao brought her uniquely sensitive, mind-body approach to directing the fictionalized story about how William Shakespeare was inspired to write his masterpiece Hamlet.
Zhao adapted the screenplay from a novel by Maggie O’Farrell, and for directing the film, she’s now nominated for an Oscar. She could make history by becoming the first woman to win the best director award more than once.
Zhao says she believes in ceremonies and rituals, in setting an intention, a mood, a vibration for any event. Before Hamnet premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival last year, she led the audience in a guided meditation and a breathing exercise.
Zhao also likes to loosen up, like she did at a screening of Hamnet in Los Angeles last month, when she got the audience to get up and dance with her to a Rihanna song.
She, her cast and crew had regular dance parties during the production of Hamnet. So for our NPR photo shoot and interview at a Beverly Hills hotel, I invited her to share some music from her playlist. She chose a track she described as “drones and tones.”
Our photographer captured her in her filmy white gown, peeking contemplatively from behind the filmy white curtains of a balcony at the Waldorf Astoria.
Zhao says she believes in ceremonies and rituals, and makes them a part of her filmmaking process.
Bethany Mollenkof for NPR
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Bethany Mollenkof for NPR
Then Zhao and I sat down to talk.
“I had a dream that we were doing this interview,” I told her. “And it started with a photo shoot, and there was a glass globe –”
“No way!” she gasped.
It so happens that on the desk next to us, was a small glass globe — perhaps a paperweight.
I told her that in my dream, she was looking through the globe at some projected images. “We were having fun and it was like we didn’t want it to stop,” I said.
“Oh, well, me and the globe and the lights on the wall: they’re all part of you,” Zhao said. “They’re your inner crystal ball, your inner Chloé.”
“Inner Chloé?” I asked. “What is the inner Chloé like?”
“I don’t know, you tell me,” she said. “Humbly, from my lineage and what I studied is that everything in a dream is a part of our own psyche.”
Dreams and symbols are very much a part of Zhao’s approach to filmmaking, which she describes as a magical and communal experience. She said it’s all part of her directing style.
Chloé Zhao used painting and dance to connect with actors on the set of her latest film Hamnet.
Bethany Mollenkof for NPR
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Bethany Mollenkof for NPR
“If you’re captain of any ship, you are not just giving instructions; people are also looking to you energetically as well,” she explained. “Whether it’s calmness, it’s groundedness, it’s feeling safe: then everyone else is going to tune to you.” Zhao says it has taken many years to get to this awareness. Her own journey began 43 years ago in Beijing, where she was born. She moved to the U.S. as a teen, and studied film at New York University where Spike Lee was one of her teachers. She continued honing her craft at the Sundance Institute labs — along with her friend Ryan Coogler and other indie filmmakers.
Over the years, Zhao’s film catalogue has been eclectic — from her indie debut Songs My Brothers Taught Me, set on a Lakota Sioux reservation, to the big-budget Marvel superhero movie Eternals. She got her first best director Oscar in 2021 for the best picture winner Nomadland. Next up is a reboot of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
“A creative life,” she notes, “is not a linear experience for me.”
Zhao still lingers over the making of Hamnet, a very emotional story about the death of a child. During the production, Zhao says she used somatic and tantric exercises and rituals to open and close shooting days.
She also invited her lead actors Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley to help her set the mood on set. They danced, they painted, they meditated together.
“She created an atmosphere where everybody who chose to step in to tell this story was there for a reason that was deeply within them,” actress Jessie Buckley told me.
Buckley is a leading contender for this year’s best actress Oscar. She said that to prepare for her very intense role as William Shakespeare’s wife, Zhao asked her to write down her dreams “as a kind of access point, to gently stir the waters of where I was feeling.”
Buckley sent Zhao her writings, and also music she felt was “a tone and texture of that essence.”
That kind of became the ritual of how they worked together, Buckley said. “And not just the cast were moving together, but the crew were and the camera was really creating dynamics and a collective unconscious.”
Filmmaker and Hamnet producer Steven Spielberg calls Zhao’s empathy her superpower.
Bethany Mollenkof for NPR
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Bethany Mollenkof for NPR
That was incredibly useful for creating Hamnet — a story about communal grief. Steven Spielberg, who co-produced the film, called Zhao’s empathy her superpower.
“In every glance, in every pause and every touch, in every tear, in every single moment of this film, every choice that Chloé made is evidence of her fearlessness,” Spielberg said when awarding Zhao a Directors Guild of America award. “In Hamnet, Chloé also shows us that there can be life after grief.”
Zhao says it took five years and a midlife crisis for her to develop the emotional tools she used to make Hamnet.
“I hope it could give people a two-hour little ceremony,” she told me. “And in the end, I hope that a point of contact can be made. That means that there’s a heart opening. But it will be painful, right? Because when your heart opens, you feel all the things you usually don’t feel. And then a catharsis can emerge.”
As our interview time came to a close, I told Zhao I have my own little ritual at the end of every interview; I record a few minutes of room tone, the ambient sound of the space we’re in. It’s for production purposes, to smooth out the audio.
Zhao knew just what I meant. She told me a story about her late friend Michael “Wolf” Snyder who was her sound recordist for Nomadland. “He said to me, ‘I don’t always need it, but just so you know, I am going to watch you. And when I tell that you are a little frazzled, I’m going to ask for a room tone … just to give you space.’” she recalled. “‘And if you feel like you need the silence space, you just look at me, nod. I’ll come ask for a room tone.’”
I closed our interview ceremony with that moment of silence, a moment of peace, for director Chloé Zhao.
Lifestyle
This spring, have a tea ceremony inside of an art installation and shop the latest Givenchy
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Givenchy’s “The Snatch” handbag.
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Louis Vuitton’s new Color Blossom collection highlights sodalite.
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Rocky’s Matcha hosts Japanese tea ceremonies in an ensō-inspired tea house from Oscar Tuazon at Morán Morán.
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The single, uninhibited brushstroke of the ensō, the circular form in Zen art, serves as a record of a moment. Commissioned by Rocky’s Matcha, Oscar Tuazon’s “Circle House” at Morán Morán shares both the ensō’s form and its call to mindfulness. In the artist’s tea house, constructed from cardboard, wood and tatami mats, architecture is inseparable from ritual: visitors will soon be able to partake in a Japanese tea ceremony inside the installation, thereby participating in a choreography of attention not unlike the act of gliding an ink brush across a sheet of washi. Open through December 31. 641 N. Western Ave. Los Angeles. Subscribe to rocky’s newsletter for tea ceremony information. rockysmatcha.com and moranmorangallery.com
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Jessie Buckley has been nominated for an Academy Award for best actress for her portrayal of William Shakespeare’s wife in Hamnet.
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Kate Green/Getty Images
Actor Jessie Buckley says she’s always been drawn to the “shadowy bits” of her characters — aspects that are disobedient, or “too much.” Perhaps that’s what led her to play Agnes, the wife of William Shakespeare, in Hamnet.
Buckley says the film, which is based on Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel, offered a chance to counter a common narrative about the playwright’s wife: that she “had kept him back from his genius,” Buckley says.
But, she adds, “What Maggie O’Farrell so brilliantly did, not just with Agnes and Shakespeare’s wife, but also with Hamnet, their son, was to bring these people … and give them status beside this great man. … [And] give the full landscape of what it is to be a woman.”
The film is nominated for eight Academy Awards, including best actress for Buckley. In it, she plays a woman deeply connected to nature, who faces conflicts in her marriage, as well as the death of their son Hamnet.
Buckley found out she was pregnant a week after the film wrapped. She’s since given birth to her first child, a daughter.
“The thing that this story offered me, that brought me into this next chapter of my life as a mother was tenderness,” she says. “A mother’s tenderness is ferocious. To love, to birth is no joke. To be born is no joke. And the minute something’s born into the world, you’re always in the precipice of life and death. That’s our path. … I wanted to be a mother so much that that overrode the thought of being afraid of it.”
Jessie Buckley stars as Agnes and Joe Alwyn plays her brother Bartholomew in Hamnet.
Courtesy of Focus Features/Courtesy of Focus Features
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Courtesy of Focus Features/Courtesy of Focus Features
Interview highlights
On filming the scene where she howls in grief when her son dies
I didn’t know that that was going to happen or come out, it wasn’t in the script. I think really [director] Chloé [Zhao] asked all of us to dare to be as present as possible. Of course, leading up to it, you’re aware this scene is coming, but that scene doesn’t stand on its own. By the time I’d met that scene, I had developed such a deep bond with Jacobi Jupe, who plays Hamnet, and [co-stars] Paul [Mescal] and Emily Watson, and all the children and we really were a family. And Jacobi Jupe who plays Hamnet is such an incredible little actor and an incredible soul, and we really were a team. …
The death of a child is unfathomable. I don’t know where it begins and ends. Out of utter respect, I tried to touch an imaginary truth of it in our story as best I could, but there’s no way to define that kind of grief. I’m sure it’s different for so many people. And in that moment, all I had was my imagination but also this relationship that was right in front of me with this little boy and that’s what came out of that.
On what inspired her to pursue singing growing up
I grew up around a lot of music. My mom is a harpist and a singer and my dad has always been passionate about music, so it was always something in our house and always something that was encouraged. … Early on, I have very strong memories of seeing and hearing my mom sing in church and this quite intense mercurial conversation that would happen between her, the story and the people that would listen to her. And at the end of it, something had been cracked between them and these strangers would come up with tears in their eyes. And I guess I saw the power of storytelling through my mom’s singing at a very young age, and that was definitely something that made me think I want to do that.
On her first big break performing as a teen on the BBC singing competition I’d Do Anything — and being criticized by judges about her physical appearance
I was raw. I hadn’t trained. I had a lot to learn and to grow in. I was only 17. I think there was part of their criticism which I think was destructive and unfair when it became about my awkwardness, or they would say I was masculine and send me to kind of a femininity school. … They sent me to [the musical production of] Chicago to put heels on and a leotard and learn how to walk in high heels, which was pretty humiliating, to be honest, and I’m sad about that because I think I was discovering myself as a young woman in the world and wasn’t fully formed. … I was different. I was wild, I had a lot of feeling inside me. I could hardly keep my hands beside myself and I think to kind of criticize a body of a young woman at that time and to make her feel conscious of that was lazy and, I think, boring.
On filming parts of the 2026 film The Bride! while pregnant
I really loved working when I was pregnant. I thought it was a pretty wild experience, especially because I was playing Mary Shelley and I was talking about [this] monstrosity, and here I was with two heartbeats inside me. Becoming a mom and being pregnant did something, I think, for me. My experience of it, it’s so real that it really focuses [me to be] allergic to fake or to disconnection.
Since my daughter has come and I know what that connection is and the real feeling of being in a relationship with somebody … as an actress, it’s very exciting to recognize that in yourself and really take ownership of yourself.
I’m excited to go back and work on this other side of becoming a mother in so many ways, because I’ve shed 10 layers of skin by loving more and experiencing life in such a new way with my daughter. I’m also scared to work again because it’s hard to be a mother and to work. That’s like a constant tug because I love what I do and I’m passionate and I want to continue to grow and learn and fill those spaces that are yet to be filled — and also be a mother. And I think every mother can recognize that tug.
On the possibility of bringing her daughter to travel with her as she works
I haven’t filmed for nearly a year and I cannot wait. I’m hungry to create again. And my daughter will come with me. She’s seven months, so at the moment she can travel with us and it’s a beautiful life. And she meets all these amazing people and I have a feeling that she loves life and that’s a great thing to see in a child. And I hope that’s something that I’ve imparted to her in the short time that she’s been on this earth is that life is beautiful and great and complex and alive and there’s no part of you that needs to be less in your life. You might have to work it out, but it’s worth it.
Lauren Krenzel and Susan Nyakundi produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Beth Novey adapted it for the web.
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