Inspired by Judy Chicago, I’ve created a virtual dinner party: One category of my blog will be dedicated to honouring women who I want to be a part of my soul community. Each woman at my virtual table has a lesson to teach, even if it’s simply to inspire us with her ability to hold greater aspirations for ourselves than we’d ever thought possible. Each one will be a manifestation of the Goddess, a Wise Woman, a pilgrim on the road of the Sacred Feminine. I want to share the wisdom of these women as part of my community of support.

I have yet to meet a woman who doesn’t like, crave, need and/or have a daily dose of chocolate. It seems to have become a part of the shared female-experience, along with cramps and birth stories.

Our love of this dark delicacy has sparked any number of studies and investigations into its benefits: the antioxidant load, the blood pressure- and cortisol-lowering properties, the magnesium.

Fortunately, the availability of good chocolate has started to shift along with the interest. Like all of us, my early experience of chocolate was limited to the candy – lots of sugar, milk-infused – brought to us by Hershey and Cadbury and Nestlé. As an adult I graduated to Godiva, then truffles, then gourmet combinations with salty or tangy or pungent flavours.

But there’s so much more to chocolate than meets the eye:

• Were Theobroma cacao grown and harvested as it was meant to be, it would be worth more than gold.
• The Aztecs used it as currency.
• The word theobroma means “food of the gods”.

Yet, like so many things in our lives, we’ve taken the unique qualities of a commodity and industrialized them to a point where they become commonplace. Think salt or sugar. Think a fresh tomato in the middle of winter, or the rows of candy bars in every grocery and convenience store in the world.

In these quantities (and lower quality), chocolate isn’t good for us.

But what IS chocolate? Why are we so fascinated by it?

Is there a way that we can honour the value of chocolate and enjoy it in a way that’s more nourishing?

To answer these questions, I brought in chocolate aficionada, Sue Ann Gleason. What fun it was to chat with her about chocolate for an hour! Yes, it ended up being quite a long conversation, but like a good piece of chocolate, perhaps it’s best savoured in small bites.

To quote Sue Ann from her website, Chocolate for Breakfast, my intention with this post is to take us one more step towards “enjoying the sensuous, sumptuous, voluptuous nature of the food we eat”.

Listen to our conversation to find out

• The health benefits of chocolate: we riff about the good, the potential for bad and the difference between a treat and a treatment;
• Why you might want to eat chocolate for breakfast;
• How chocolate is like a good bottle of wine;
• And, as part of spiritual self-care: How to create a chocolate ritual as a means of treating yourself exquisitely.

Sue Ann shares details on how to choose good chocolate – the most important step of all! – as well as many online resources for purchasing the best kinds.

want a version you can download to enjoy on your commute in the morning? Grab it here.

Though I only had commercial chocolate during the recording, I just bought some Marou from Vietnam. I’ll be tasting it on Friday with my girlfriends, along with other types I found while out exploring bean to bar chocolate in Montreal.

I found them at

La tablette de Miss Choco
Les chocolats de Chloé

Now it’s your turn to get in on the conversation:

What is it about chocolate that appeals to you? We’d also love to hear what you learned when you take the time to honour this “food of the gods” and taste it with the ceremony and reverence it deserves. When you share in the comments, you open the possibilities for others.

To learn more about Sue Ann, you can connect with her in a few different places. (Delicious freebies await you!)
Chocolate Lovers’ Guide: www.chocolateforbreakfast.com <http://www.chocolateforbreakfast.com>  <http://www.chocolateforbreakfast.com>
No Longer Asleep at the Meal ebook: http://consciousbitesnutrition.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/chocolateforbreakfast

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