Mama Cacao: Courage & the Quiet Yes

Sometimes someone tells you “Hey! I think you should go do this thing…” and while the rational part of your brain is like, “Wow, that sounds great I wish I could” your gut just knows “yes, you must” and somehow the momentum begins.

Winnowing the cacao - an art of letting go as the shells move away from the body. Photo: @throughlindseyslens

It’s often the quiet kind of yes—the one that doesn’t spike your heart rate but gives you little truth bumps and a secret smile.

I’ve met that yes before. This time, it arrived at the cusp of the April 8, 2024 solar eclipse. I was in Costa Rica, having just left my full-time position as a yoga instructor—what I thought would be my inspired alternative career to engineering in biotech.

It turns out that whatever I do, I give my whole heart and soul to it. So yes and no are really important decisions. While full time teaching yoga was different, it brought a new kind of burnout I didn’t realize I could face.

As I smelled the freedom of having quit all of my jobs and renegotiated life in the tropics for a while, I realized it was time to place some dream-stones along my path. It would only be a matter of time before I committed to another collection of work projects and I knew I wanted more intentional purpose in these commitments.

So there I was, walking through the streets of Nosara under the eclipse, feeling as though it had vacuumed out my brain—in the way I’ve felt after a deep, restful dream, or on the edge of a concussion. I sat down and wrote, a cup of cacao in hand and my friends across the table.

It wasn’t the first time I had sat with her, and it wouldn’t be the last. But this time, I began to notice her voice. And when my friend Ana chimed in and offered, “Hey, you should go study with cacao on the East Coast—there’s a farm out there where I apprenticed. You clearly connect with her and she’s surprisingly healing too,” my brain thought, “Wow, sounds fun, I wish I could do that” and set it aside. But my gut whispered yes, this you must figure out a way.

There was more in motion than I could have predicted.

My little tea note that drew me into an afternoon of reflection.

And so, on April 8, 2024, under the solar eclipse, I wrote about everything I would let go of—the fears, the pieces I had been chasing, the spaces that lived in hope in my heart.

I let it be.
I waited to see.
And I sipped my cacao.

Which was only the beginning.

Reflections…
How does it feel to say yes and not act immediately, take time to allow commitment to simmer into action - and eventually see it come to fruition? Perhaps the time in between and the continued return to “yes” is our signal this is a right path.

How do you find commitment without expectation, and instead, pure curiosity? Can you allow that aspect control to dissolve into the mystery of confident discovery?