Dear Somasoldiers,

This week we write from the big smoke, where we’ve come to attend a funeral.

It’s always a shock for us to travel from our home among cane farms beside the sea to the crash and bash of the big city: it takes a few days for us to catch up with the frenetic pace, stop greeting everyone we walk past, and withdraw our overstimulated senses into their urban shell.

Gratefully, we travel armed with a bag of Soma Cacao. We make a cup each morning, and toddle down to one of the coves near Alistair’s parents’ house, to escape the breathlessness of city life, and take a slow, deep breath.

We promised a war on toxic masculinity, so I suppose we must wage it now, though it might not be what you were expecting. In our eyes, toxic masculinity has little to do with men and women, but has, instead, to do with the masculine principle.

In Eastern philosophy, the masculine principle is the principle of action, effort, analysis, discernment, self-assertion, focus, and order. The feminine principle, by contrast, governs patience, intuition, the subconscious, creativity, fertility, nourishment, connectedness, relationship, sensitivity, nature, and introspection.

Neither is better than the other; each requires the other; the ideal relationship between the two is one of balance. Walking through a big modern city, it is obvious that our society has not achieved that balance.

Everyone’s in a hurry, everyone’s overthinking, everyone’s stressed; people are competitive, people are disconnected from their own emotions and from human community, people are the slaves of efficiency and productivity.

Even our downtime we seek to fill with goal-oriented activities or image-driven physical exercise; we celebrate success, success, success! and even feel a little ashamed of our deeper sensitivities. It is not necessarily an excess of masculine energy; it is masculine energy taken out of context and stripped of its healthy fats: it is toxic masculinity, and you see it on every face - woman, child, and man, all the same.

Coffee is undoubtedly the drink of the patriarchy: dose up on caffeine, and shoot off into a crazed world of super productivity. We hope Soma Cacao is a source of balance.

A 2023 Japanese study (Effect of Flavanol-Rich Cacao Extract on the Profile of Mood State in Healthy Middle-Aged Japanese Women) showed that regular consumption of high-flavanol cacao drinks (ie Somas) reduced anxiety, tension, and fatigue, and increased positive feeling. A 2016 study (A single dose of dark chocolate increases parasympathetic modulation and heart rate variability in healthy subjects) showed that drinking cacao helped the body slow its heart rate in times of reduced stress, which means that when a moment comes to relax, cacao helps you actually relax into that moment.

But here we go, trying to convince you with facts and logic!

The proof, in this case, really does have to be felt. If you take a cup of Soma Cacao to a beautiful place with no phone and no distractions, either alone or in the company of someone with whom you can be quiet, and drink slowly, happily, savouring the flavour and warmth, feeling your eyes soften and the cells in your body dilate, and you breathe deeply, tasting the fresh air, and you let the day come to you, instead of racing after it - if you let the sounds reach your ears, and sights move across your eyes - then you are waging the real war on toxic masculinity, which is peaceful non-resistance to life and everything in it.

When people ask us about the purpose of Soma Cacao, it’s easy to answer ‘sourcing the world’s best cacaos for our customers.’ But the reason we chose cacao, and the reason we love it so much, is because it opens up little windows in the day to moments of peace and recollection, creativity and joy.

We don’t just want to sell the world’s finest and most unique cacaos; we want to help people find rest, gratitude, connection, understanding, and peace, and all the other good stuff that makes life worth the time it takes to live it.

That’s the real joy of running and sharing Soma Cacao.

With maca (prized in Mesoamerican medicine for its balancing effect) and raw honey (used medicinally for calming),

Rose, Alistair, and the team at Soma Cacao