Steph Le Gros is a health coach, personal trainer, Reiki practitioner, and qualified Yoga teacher based in Nelson. She completed her 200 hour Yoga teacher training with us in 2021. In this three-part article, Steph talks about her passion for cacao as an important part of her yoga practice. She introduces us to yoga and cacao as practices of homecoming; shares a delectable recipe and ritual; discusses the tradition of cacao; and finally shares some of her poetry and practices inspired by yoga and cacao:
Meeting cacao in the wholeness of the bean has opened up something within me. I feel that to know my wholeness, I need to meet life in her wholeness. In all her arcs and expressions. When we meet life in fragments, we will only know fragments of ourselves.
Steph Le Gros
Website: stephlegros.co.nz
Email: steph@legros.co.nz
Instagram: cacao_conversations
Facebook: @stephlegrosyoga
Sometimes I wonder if there are two parts of me. One who misses where I am not. And the other who exhales in relief to be exactly where I am. Home.
Yoga has always been a practice that invites me home
to breathe with a quiet relief
at being exactly where I am
of being exactly who I am
in this moment.
A home where I remember my wholeness.
The dictionary defines practice as “an act or method followed with regularity and usually through choice” (Merriam Webster). What began as a practice solely of asana, has become a choosing from many practices that allow me to be with the part of me that is unshakeable, pristine, 100% OK, could never be damaged:
To let her answer, what is yoga for me today?
Sometimes it is the ink of my pen on paper that feels most yogic to me.
Some days it is movement, seeded from silence.
Some days the joy of folding into the hum of my body at rest.
Widening my lens of what yoga is has allowed me to find many ways to anchor myself in the world. Again and again. It has also invited depth to my morning (daily) practice. To meet what is known, what is familiar. Then dissolve through the membrane between the surface of known and what is still yet to be discovered.
The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali begins with ‘atha yoganusasanam’ which translates as an invitation ‘to be present’. The seed of yoga then becomes an intention. The intention to be present. A practice of listening and learning the many different ways of presence. When you find a practice, a ritual, an act that says:
‘This. I don’t know why. But this’.
Listen to that. Follow that.
Meeting Cacao
Cacao is my ‘this’. In this season it has become a thread, now woven into the container of my morning ritual. The gentle anchor I was seeking. I first met cacao when I lived in Brasil, over a decade ago. Unaware of who she really was: The medicine of her: The ritual of her:
I knew her in her fractured powdered form,
Delicately mixed with a sweet condensed milk
Moulded into the infamous dessert of Brasil,
Brigadeiro (truly delectable and joyous to eat).
Meeting cacao in the wholeness of the bean has opened up something within me. I feel that to know my wholeness, I need to meet life in her wholeness. In all her arcs and expressions. When we meet life in fragments, we will only know fragments of ourselves.
I know cacao speaks to the exhale in me. To the part of me that breathes in relief at being home. Again.
The more I practice with cacao the more I understand that cacao doesn’t offer answers. It relieves the need to sum it all up. Instead, it invites questions. Curiosities. The understanding, possibility, that there is always something to discover if you pay attention:
Atha yoganusasanam.
As I write these words I am 191 days in to my practice of a daily cacao ceremony. My intention is to continue to show up as long as cacao calls to me. A daily invitation to practice Aparigraha (non-grasping). To meet myself in the newness of who I am each morning and ask ‘what calls to me today’. Showing up daily to my morning ritual has cultivated self trust. A self trust of being the person who does what I say I am going to do and also trusting in the seasons of my heart.
This temple is within.
A micro of the great macro.
The temple of unknowing.
In the quietness.
Where the essence of all that is, is.
Unspoken, yet voiced.
Unformed, yet formed.
Let this temple of unknowing permeate.
Let us dissolve into the wonder of not knowing.
To meet curiosity.
To be open to her rising to meet us.
Perhaps this is depth.
To meet what is known, what is familiar.
Then dissolve through the membrane between what is known and what is still yet to be discovered.
And practice.
Practice.
Practice.
This. I don’t know why, but this …
Part 2: We are the Ceremony: Practicing Yoga with Cacao >>
Part 3: Learning the Spirit of Cacao >>
Part 4: Integrating Cacao >>