In This Dimension and All Others
Plus, A Recipe For Celebrating
An image of Cacao. © Joy LeDuc 2023
Earlier this month, I was on a video call with a friend. Though we’re not super close, we’ve known each other for many decades, remaining connected through multiple iterations of our souls.
This friend had recently moved though a death in the family and was speaking about the complexities between family members at the funeral.
As she spoke about it, expressing frustration and disappointment, I felt a rush of energy that sent tingles throughout my body, from head to toe. And then, I heard my inner voice speak within me in a tone that wasn’t entirely mine.
This happens sometimes. The more I tap into what I call my soul’s voice, the more attuned I get to other voices who wish to speak through me. I’m not a medium, I’m just magical. You are magical, too.
The more you listen to your soul’s voice, the more you will attune to the frequency of your own particular magic. And my magic now includes hearing the ancestors, whether someone else’s or mine.
I often hear my dearly departed mother speaking to me through my soul’s voice. I know it’s my mother due to the tone only she ever used. It’s playful and spicy, a resonance that always carries immense love for me.
And on this particular video call, listening to my sweet friend express what sounded like anger, I heard a voice within say, “Tell her to drop it. Tell her none of it matters.”
Between both voices—my friend’s voice through the computer screen and her deceased brother’s voice echoing within the left side of my brain—I replied to him silently, telepathically.
I said, “I can’t say that to her. She’s sad. That’s what happens in this dimension. We get into our feelings.”
Her brother’s voice got a bit louder, “You have to tell her to drop it. You know the only thing that matters. Tell her.”
I decided to trust this voice because it was also my own.
I said softly, “I don’t know if this is really a message from your brother because I don’t do this. In fact, this is the first time this has happened so directly with someone outside my own circle. But, would it be okay for me to relay what I’m hearing? Are you open to that?”
When she replied in the affirmative, ever receptive to magic and its messages, I shared her brother’s words, “He wants me to say that none of it matters. He’s dropped it all and wants you to drop it, too.”
She offered, “Well, maybe you do do this now because that resonates. I kept hearing that he would want me to drop it.”
The thing is, you don’t have to be magical to know, to learn, that the only thing that matters, truly, is love. Under all of our complex feelings—anger, frustration, disappointment, sadness—all of it is deeply connected to a recognition of love.
I felt a sense of peace and I believe, at least momentarily, she did, too.
In the Fall of last year, I hosted my first sacred Cacao ceremony.
Sharing my private practice with others was a big deal for me and my ancestors.
At the time, I had consumed Ceremonial Cacao for eight plus years but had only recently made the connection between drinking the deliciously rich, heart-opening plant medicine and hearing my inner or soul’s voice.
During a meditation leading up to my first ceremony, I heard my ancestors share how to blend Cacao with listening to soul. And shortly thereafter, what was two previously separate acts were now inextricably linked. I could clearly feel the spirit of Cacao’s connection to surfacing the soul or inner voice.
I feel like I should have made this connection sooner.
You see, Ceremonial Cacao stimulates the central nervous system, relaxes smooth muscles, and dilates blood vessels, sending more oxygen throughout the body and toward the heart.
Toward the heart. Toward the organ that is symbolically connected to our emotions.
But it’s more than a symbol. The heart is innervated, meaning many nerves supply it. The rhythms of the heart—whether rapid, steady, or slow—are reflections of the positive or negative emotions we feel everywhere in the body, along with the meaning we assign to those emotions.
So, for eight plus years, as I was moving through the death of my parents and the end of my twenty year relationship and the move from my longterm home and the total renewal of my work in the world and the call to intuitively follow my desires, I was being supported by soul, Cacao, and my ancestors. I felt into all those emotions and came through it all feeling more whole than ever, thanks to Cacao.
At the end of my first ceremony, I invited all twelve sweet souls to return from their meditative journey, to come back to the present moment. They each rose slowly, some with tears streaming down their faces.
One participant later sent me her impressions, “[Your] words of wisdom and storytelling gave me permission to provide grace and compassion toward my own soul’s voice and welcome in the depth of my own being.”
When I read her testimonial, I silently placed my hand on my heart, in gratitude.
I didn’t have tears post-ceremony but I was exhausted, much like that moment when you first wake from a deep and dreamy stretch of sleep.
As I witnessed the impact of this unique combination of Cacao plus soul plus ancestors, I realized the power of holding space for others to go inward to traverse their emotional landscape and heal themselves, kind of like I have. I realized the gift my ancestors had offered me, that I also called forth from my soul.
But all gifts come with a spectrum of expressions, and this one uses a lot of my energy.
I went home, cancelled most of my calls, pulled on wool socks, and slowly sipped Cacao from under the blankets on my bed. And, I heard that if I was going to continue to do this soul work, I needed to gather additional methods for managing my energy and developing my capacity.
Then, I got a reminder on my phone for one final meeting on my calendar. It was to explore joining a new collective for ancestral reverence and my ever unfolding emergence. And I really wanted to cancel it.
But I heard the soul say, “Just do the call from bed.” And that’s what I did.
In pajamas and under the covers on this blustery evening, I meditated for nearly an hour guided by the woman who would become my ancestral reverence mentor.
Within twenty four hours, I signed up to work with her, realizing that the request I had made of the universe just a day earlier was answered swiftly and magically by my soul, the soul who has no concept of space and time, and who, two weeks prior, had urged me to book this meeting.
Since dropping in deeper over the last couple of months, I’m learning how to become comfortable with my capacity to hear the voices of those beyond my family.
First, I don’t believe I’m developing this aspect of myself in order to know that everyone on the other side is okay because I already feel that resolutely.
In fact, one of the questions I most receive from subscribers is: “How do I find peace when friends or family members pass away?”
I’m afraid I don’t have a perfect answer to that question. Sometimes, I say, “Well, I do soul work.”
You see, I am more at peace with how okay they are than ever before in my life. Death is not desired, of course, but I feel that life persists beyond these bodies, beyond this dimension.
Second, I don’t believe I’m developing this aspect of myself in order to know how everything is going to turn out, to get all the answers, to learn how my story ends or evolves.
I understand why others wish to know those things because I have in the past. Frankly, I continue to be curious in moments of crisis. This life is incredibly complex and deeply painful, and I get that sometimes we wish for someone outside of us to tell us it’s all going to be okay.
But I am acutely tuned into the facts that feeling liberated and being surprised are part of my story. Witnessing the unfolding of the magic of my life from a kind of unbinding distance is part of my mission and magic, for myself and for others.
So, no, I’m not growing the capacity to hear all the voices, to work with the ancestors, for any of the aforementioned reasons. They are just fringe benefits.
In actuality, after several years of listening to my own ancestors and the last several months attuning to methods for reverence and the rewriting of stories across generations, I now believe I am developing this gift as a pure act of love for myself, to create space within my physical and energetic bodies.
This act opens me up to more possibility and to more love, to all the love, in fact.
Like an open vessel, I am developing this gift in order to fill myself up with all kinds of love but mainly with love, compassion, and softness for myself.
Because to give myself this gift is to also offer it to the world, to allow love to pour forth from my body, to overflow from my cup, in this dimension and all others.
As I self-heal and love myself, I do the same for some of my ancestors, in this dimension and all others.
A few weeks ago, in my ancestral reverence collective, I was deep in meditation, remembering and reimagining the story of my birth.
I was not exactly welcomed into this world by all involved. In fact, given that my mother became pregnant with me before she wed my father, there was a general air of discomfort with the idea that I was going to be born.
But Alfonse and Norma, my people, were married quickly and I was born about seven months later into a family of mixed lineages and immigrants who were never shy to voice their displeasure with how this progressive family came into being.
I sometimes imagine that my father named me after his mother, Margaret, as a kind of amends or apology for doing things differently. Perhaps, he thought, if I carried her name, I would be more welcome.
As an Aquarius sun—already energetically imbued with the desire for equality, freedom, liberation, and progressive or revolutionary ideals—I knew from a young age that my very existence was a radical act delivered from passion and desire and two people wishing to ascend from the traditions and the binds of their people.
So when I was in that deep meditation guided by my mentor a few weeks back, I invited in a new possibility for my emergence into this world.
Instead of being birthed in solitude at a hospital, with my mother forcing me from her body in front of her doctors, with my father somewhere else, I imagined a beautiful big tub of water in a picture window with a view of the ocean, allowing the soft waves to wash me from her body with ease and gentleness, my father and all the family present to whisper their welcomes.
Instead of quietly hiding me away immediately, embarrassed by my existence, I imagined Alfonse and Norma, my people, presenting me to a gathering of elders in a clearing in a mossy forest, right by the sea. The elders each raised me toward the sky, allowing the light to fill me with my gifts, with the primary gift invoked by the elders stated as, “She will remember and tell stories of remembrance.”
Instead of naming me just Margaret as an amends, as a way to appease my father’s family who so clearly wished for this new family to never take shape, I imagined that Alfonse and Norma, my people, would use the Latin meaning which is “pearl.” A pearl is a hard, roundish object, a gem actually, produced within the soft tissue of a living, shelled mollusk, often in the sea. Pearl also comes from a Sanskrit word that means “pure” and carries a metaphorical meaning of “the purity that reflects God's glory.”
I imagined all these possibilities as if they were real, because in the astral plane, they were. They are. And as I surfaced from the meditation, I felt a spaciousness in my body. I had not only given myself the gift of a new story, but I had offered the same gift to my people. A healing for me is a healing for them, too.
And, as if this dimension sensed the magic of my own healing and all its corresponding spaciousness, I received a sweet phone call from a sometimes estranged family member just a few days later.
I like to imagine that it was a gift lovingly offered from Alfonse and Norma, my people, to me, in gratitude.
Given that my birthday is so soon and a dear friend is hosting a dinner party for me out on the west coast, I have been thinking a lot about food.
Honestly, after all these years, I still think about food often. But when this dear friend asked me about my favorite dishes, I was surprised that they didn’t roll off my tongue so quickly. I really had to think about it. I really had to remember.
Just like trying all sorts of new foods in my last story to you, I had to imagine the ingredients in my mouth, in my body, to recall my favorites, to remember my love for them.
I thought about the foods of my childhood and the cookbooks I’ve written. I even thumbed through my cookbooks to remember what might feel good to me now.
I thought about my favorite dishes, those that are intensely flavored and are perfect in small amounts. For example, I love Shrimp Scampi. It helps me remember my love for the unending shrimp buffets at Red Lobster when I was a kid.
My family didn’t dine out frequently but when we did, the table would be covered with every kind of shrimp dish on the menu and we would stuff our faces until our bellies ached.
I also enjoy a perfectly cooked filet of tenderloin, topped with an au poivre sauce or a fresh, bright chimichurri sauce. What may be tenderloin today was actually just thin, scrawny minute steaks when I was young, but I remember them, and how quickly they could come to the table, fondly.
[I’ve included my recipe for the Perfect Rib-Eye Steak and Chimichurri Sauce below.]
I thought about my favorite dessert and wondered if it was still my favorite dessert. I suppose I won’t know exactly until I taste it again. But I know my soul likes celebration foods and cake is the ultimate celebration food.
My favorite cake since my twenties has been the Magnolia Bakery Coconut Cake, perhaps as much for the intense coconut flavor as for its legendary appearance in episodes of Sex and the City. I also lived near the Magnolia Bakery just before it hit popularity and I remember grabbing a slice after a raucous late night of partying.
I thought about coffee. I don’t drink a lot of coffee these days but I like the flavor of coffee very much and it reminds me of my lineage. I frequently place steaming cups on the altar to my ancestors. It’s a hot beverage that brings people together first thing, in this and all dimensions.
I remember loving Tiramisu, probably for the juxtaposition of that creamy sabayon, with the coffee soak, with the dusting of cocoa on top. And I suppose it’s no surprise that I still love an Affogato, the sweet treat that involves pouring strong espresso over rich vanilla gelato or ice cream.
Last night, a week before my birthday, I cooked a delicious meal with my dear friend. We smoked some chicken drumsticks and thighs marinated in garlic, ginger, and turmeric (using the spices in this recipe) outside on a grill. I made my famous balsamic charred peppers on a sheet plan using Alexandra’s 4-Ingredient Balsamic Roasted Mini Peppers, a recipe I’ve used for close to five years now. I also mashed some sweet potatoes with garlic, butter, and oat milk.
We put the food on white plates and all sat around a candled table. And when my friend’s wee one scooped up all the sweet potatoes into her mouth saying, “Yummy,” I knew I’d remember that meal for a long, long time, too.
A few days after the reimagining of my birth story, I received a text from a local friend. She was at the town library and saw a children’s book called “The Maggie B.” by Irene Haas.
The front cover of the book depicts a big wooden ship, The Maggie B. The top of the boat is filled with lush greenery, flowers, chickens, goats, an umbrella for shade from the sun. Maggie is painting a canvas, seated beside her brother James. On the bow of the boat and watching the waves sits a brightly colored toucan with a large yellow bill.
The inside flap of the book cover reads, “This is the story of a wish come true. Margaret Barnstable wanted more than anything else to sail for a day, ‘alone and free with someone nice for company,’ on a ship named after her. One night, she wished for it on the North Star, and when she woke up she was in the cabin of The Maggie B., with her small brother James. It was a wonderful ship, with everything she needed, included a tiny farm on the poop deck.”
It continues, “From cock-crow till bedtime, Margaret does exactly what she wants, sailing over the ocean, glorying in her independence. She scrubs the deck, she tidies the cabin, she fishes for their supper, she plays with James, she sings sea chanteys—and even when a fierce storm blows up, she is not afraid, furling the sails and battening down the hatches securely.”
It was a thoughtful outreach from someone noticing my adventures and emergence in an existence in which I feel more free than ever to remember where I came from and just how whole I am, to remember just how much I love myself.
I messaged this friend about how the bird sitting on the boat’s bow, the toucan, is the spirit animal for my core Mayan energy of Tijax. The toucan represents communication and a deep desire to be seen and heard.
She replied, “The universe, she knows how to send us messages. I hope you’re doing well out on the open sea of life.”
I thought, I am. Yes, I am.
I am more open and whole and connected than ever. And “even when a fierce storm blows up,” I am not afraid. I know how to furl the sails and batten down the hatches securely. I know how to listen to my soul and allow its continued emergence.
These recipes are from A New Way to Food, my cookbook published by Roost Books in 2019. If you don’t eat beef, no worries. My chimichurri sauce makes everything—from chicken and fish, to potatoes, eggs, and green vegetables—taste amazing. Enjoy it!
Perfect Rib-Eye Steak
Ingredients:
1/2 cup black peppercorns
1/2 cup coarse (not flaky) sea salt
1 pound (454 g) bone-in rib-eye steam, about 1-inch thick
1 tablespoon grape seed oil or other high-heat cooking oil
Directions:
Prepare the salt and pepper rub. Grind the peppercorns into a coarse grind in a mortal and pestle or electric grinder. Toss the ground peppercorns and salt together until well-mixed.
Preheat the oven to 250 degrees. Pat the steak dry with a paper towel.
Sprinkle and rub the steak on all sides with the salt and pepper rub. Use as much or as little rub as you’d like, as it keeps for up to a year. Let the steak stand for 1 hour at room temperature but if you only have 10 minutes, that’s fine too.
Place the steak on a rimmed baking sheet in the oven. Roast until the internal temperature registers 105 degrees F for rare or 115 degrees F for medium rare, about 15 to 20 minutes.
Heat a pan over medium-high heat. Add the oil to the pan, swirl it, and sear the steak for 30 seconds on all sides, until you get a golden color. The final internal temperature should be 120 degrees F for rare or 130 degrees F for medium rare.
Transfer to a plate and let rest 15 minutes before slicing and serving.
Chimichurri Sauce
Ingredients:
1 small bunch parsley, cleaned
1 large bunch cilantro, cleaned
1 small bunch basil, cleaned
1 large garlic cloves, peeled
3 scallions, trimmed and chopped
2 tablespoons lime juice
2 tablespoons apple cider vinegar
1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil
1/4 teaspoon sea salt, more to taste
Directions:
Blitz the ingredients in a powerful blender until roughly diced and loose, making sure no large chunks remain. Taste and add more salt, if you like. The flavor intensities as it sits. Store in an airtight container in the fridge for up to a week.
