Attuning to the Week Ahead with Cacao
Welcome to the first edition of Soulful Sundays, a weekly ritual where we come together with a cup of ceremonial cacao to attune to the energies and intentions for the week ahead. Each Sunday, you’ll receive a guide that will assist you in creating a sacred space to connect with your inner wisdom and the universal energies for the coming week. This will help you align your focus and purpose. Using cacao as a heart-opening tool and an oracle deck to guide us, we tap into the Hermetic principle of “as above, so below; as within, so without”—recognizing that our internal state mirrors the external world, and vice versa.
In each session, we’ll work with the Light Code Oracle Deck by the talented artist Izzy Ivy, whose cards offer us practical tools and inspiration to amplify our life force. This week, we pulled the Toroidal Tree card, a powerful reminder of how we bridge heaven and earth in our daily lives.
The Power of Ritual for Wellbeing
Engaging in a regular ritual like Soulful Sundays isn’t just about tuning into spiritual energies; it has tangible benefits for your mental, emotional, and spiritual well-being. In a world that’s constantly pulling us in different directions, this practice offers a moment of stillness, reflection, and alignment. Here’s how this simple act of setting intentions can impact your holistic wellness:
Mental Well-being: Taking time to pause and reflect at the beginning of each week helps you clear mental clutter, focus on what matters, and create a sense of clarity. Cacao is known to release feel-good chemicals like dopamine and serotonin, enhancing mood and helping you feel more focused and balanced. This clarity allows you to start the week feeling grounded and purposeful rather than overwhelmed by the hustle of everyday life.
Emotional Balance: Rituals like these help you slow down and reconnect with your emotions, offering a chance to process what’s happening inside. As you sip your cacao and reflect on the energy of the card, you create space for emotional release, which is key for emotional resilience. The cacao, with its heart-opening properties, supports this process by encouraging self-compassion and openness, making it easier to handle emotional ups and downs.
Spiritual Connection: Practices that involve reflection, breathwork, and visualisation deepen your connection with yourself and the world around you. By aligning your energy with the universe, you tap into the flow of life, helping you feel supported and guided as you move through the week. It’s a simple but powerful way to remind yourself that you are not alone in your journey; the energies around you are here to help you grow and manifest your dreams.
The Hermetic Principle of Correspondence: “As Above, So Below”
At the core of Soulful Sundays is the principle of correspondence, one of the seven Hermetic laws. In simple terms, this means that what happens on one level of existence mirrors what happens on others. Just as the universe has its patterns and cycles, so do we—physically, mentally, and spiritually.
“As above, so below” reminds us that the energy of the universe and the energy within us are interconnected. When we understand this, we can align ourselves with the greater forces at play, using them to bring more harmony into our lives.
How does this apply practically? When we take time each week to check in with ourselves—through ritual, breathwork, or simply a moment of stillness—we’re able to better understand how our internal world influences the external and vice versa. This connection helps us manifest our dreams by grounding them in the physical world, just as we’ll explore today.
The Toroidal Tree: Bridging Heaven and Earth
This week’s card, Toroidal Tree, beautifully illustrates this principle. It represents the idea of bridging heaven and earth, or turning dreams into reality. Just like a tree, with its branches reaching for the sky and its roots grounding deep into the earth, we too are a connection point between two realms—spirit and matter.
The toroidal field is a donut-shaped flow of energy that circulates up and out, and then back in again, in a 360-degree motion. This field exists around everything—our bodies, trees, the earth, and the universe. You can imagine it as a continuous loop of energy moving between your highest self (your ideas, dreams, and spiritual essence) and your grounded self (your physical actions and reality).
This Week’s Practice
To make this more practical: if you’ve been nurturing an idea or vision but aren’t sure how to bring it to life, this card encourages you to use the visualisation of the toroidal tree to help you manifest it.
- As you sip your cacao this week, close your eyes and picture yourself as this toroidal tree.
- As you inhale, visualise energy as light coming down from the heavens, through your branches and into your body.
- As you exhale, visualise energy going down through your roots, deep into the earth.
- Inhale again, visualise energy coming up from deep within the earth, through your roots and into your body.
- As you exhale, visualise the energy shoot up through your branches into the heavens.
- Continue this cyclical, toroidal breath and visualisation for as many rounds as you can.
This practice helps you attune to your energetic field and clear any blockages, making space for your ideas to take shape in the physical world.
Reflection Questions for the Week
As you attune to the energies of this week, guided by the Toroidal Tree, we invite you to reflect on the following questions to deepen your connection with yourself and your intentions:
What dreams or ideas have I been holding onto that are ready to take root and grow?
- Reflect on any visions or goals you’ve been nurturing but may have been unsure how to bring into reality.
How can I better balance the energies of my spiritual aspirations and my physical actions?
- Consider how to align your higher vision with the practical steps needed to manifest it.
Where in my life do I need more grounding, and how can I create that stability?
- Tune into the areas where you feel ungrounded or scattered, and visualize bringing more earth energy into them.
What energy am I unconsciously circulating between myself and the world around me?
- Reflect on your energetic exchanges with others and how they influence your mood, actions, and decisions.
How can I embody the principle of ‘as above, so below’ in my daily life this week?
- Think about how your inner state is mirrored in your external circumstances and how you can harmonize both.
These questions are intended to help you align your inner and outer worlds as you move through the week with intention. Use them as journaling prompts or quiet reflections throughout your daily ritual.
The Benefits of this Practice
This weekly ritual brings together multiple elements—cacao, breathwork, intention-setting, and visualization—that support your well-being on all levels:
Mental Clarity: By focusing on your breath and visualizing the energy flow, you actively clear mental fog and enhance concentration. This practice can help you approach your week with a sense of purpose and focus, which improves productivity and decision-making.
Emotional Release: Visualization and breathwork allow you to gently release emotional blockages that may be holding you back. Paired with the heart-opening effects of cacao, this practice nurtures emotional resilience and helps you feel more connected to your inner self.
Spiritual Alignment: By visualizing yourself as a bridge between the heavens and the earth, you connect to both your higher purpose and your grounded reality. This alignment helps you feel empowered to bring your visions into the physical world. When you feel spiritually aligned, you experience more flow, synchronicities, and ease in manifesting your goals.
How to Use This Energy in Your Week
The Toroidal Tree card reminds us that the ideas and visions we’ve held are ready to become reality. By connecting to our energy, using the breath, and visualizing the flow of energy between heaven and earth, we can bring our unmanifest ideas into the material world. This week, try to spend a few minutes each day in mindful breathing, visualizing yourself as a bridge between the heavens and the earth. Let this practice ground your intentions and support you in manifesting them with ease.
Bringing It All Together
As we move into the week ahead, let the combination of cacao, breath, and intention serve as a reminder of your connection to the universe and your power to manifest your dreams. Whether you’re familiar with divination and spiritual practices or just beginning, know that this is a simple yet powerful way to align with your higher self. Soulful Sundays is here to help you find your flow, connect with your energy, and bring intention into every part of your week.
With the Toroidal Tree guiding us, let’s trust that our dreams are ready to take root and grow into something tangible. Your ritual awaits.
