Like Yoga for Chocolate

By Gina Hyams

a delicious retreat at Kripalu

Last Valentine’s Day weekend, forty women joined Los Angeles-based yoga teacher David Romanelli and chic chocolatier Katrina Markoff, founder of Vosges Haut-Chocolat, for a retreat titled “Yoga and Chocolate: Melt Your Heart, Free Your Mind” at Kripalu Center for Yoga & Health in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.

Romanelli and Markoff have been best friends since their Vanderbilt College days in the early 1990s. Several years ago, they realized that their careers each involved unique types of fusion. She was fusing French chocolate with roots, herbs, and flowers discovered on her world travels and he was fusing the 5,000-year-old practice of yoga with a rock n’ roll sensibility, creating soundtracks for his vinyasa flow classes that ranged from Frank Sinatra to Puff Daddy. Together they brainstormed that combining yoga and chocolate would be a recipe for bliss.

An altar adorned with flickering votive candles and a striking bouquet of yellow lilies and corkscrew willow graced the yoga studio. The rich sweet smell of dark chocolate permeated the air.

The two alternated leading the retreat. Romanelli quoted the Buddhist monk Taisen Deshimaru: “Time is not a straight line, but a series of now points.” He explained that yoga is about building the capacity to accept life in all its complicated glory without running, flinching, or hiding.

He led the class through a series of strenuous yoga postures, encouraging beginners to make adjustments as needed and to have fun. He described the seven chakras of energy swirling from the tip of the tailbone to the crown of the head and guided the class through journal-writing exercises related to creativity, love, and finding one’s life purpose.

Markoff explained that chocolate comes from a plant called theobroma cacao, which translates to “food of the gods.” As early as 600 A.D., the Aztecs ground cacao beans with chilies and water to make sacred offerings. Participants sampled an array of chocolates infused with unexpected ingredients, such as ginger and wasabi, curry and coconut, and lemon myrtle and lavender. Markoff instructed the class to breathe in the aromas of the chocolates, to listen to their various crunches and snaps, to observe their shapes and textures, and to appreciate their many nuances of flavor.

The lesson was that a scattered mind diminishes one’s sensory awareness. When one is fully present – as you typically are after a yoga class – a single note of chocolate yields a symphony of flavor.

For more information about chocolate retreats visit www.yeahdaveyoga.com or www.vosgeschocolate.com. For more information about Kripalu visit www.kripalu.org.

May/June 2007