Cacao Prayer is a short sung chant built from a handful of lines, and in its five minutes and six seconds it does something most devotional songs of its size attempt less often: it stays on the same few phrases long enough for them to change meaning. The video, posted under the names Mose and Bruna Bortolato with Matia Kalli featured in the title, opens with a thanks to the cacao, moves into a plea for cleansing, and keeps circling back to both. According to the video's own description, this is a prayer that has already lived a life in group settings, passed from one Cacao Dance to another around the world, carried by Bruna's voice and by "all the voices that joined along the way." The recording is an invitation to take it somewhere new.
The first sung words arrive around the 0:18 mark, after a short passage of instrumental music. The core line is simple enough to memorize in one pass: "Thank you cacao for your medicine. Thank you cacao for your love." The transcript captures it repeating, with the phrase breaking and re-forming across the first half-minute, the pulse of the music sitting underneath like a floor the singers can stand on.
"Thank you cacao for your medicine. Thank you cacao for your love." (sung refrain, from roughly 0:18 to 0:48)
What matters here is the grammar. The prayer addresses the cacao directly, as "you," and it names two gifts, medicine and love, without explaining either. There is no narrative and no doctrine. The song is a form of gratitude spoken to a plant, and the repetition does the work that explanation would otherwise do.
Repetition is the mechanism that lets a group sing a song they have never rehearsed together. A line that returns every few seconds gives a newcomer time to find the words and gives the room time to lock onto the pitch. That is the practical logic of a circle, and the video is built for it. The transcript shows singing layered over the music and over itself, with voices entering and dropping out. That overlapping texture matches what the description says about the prayer: it was never a single voice's property. It accumulated voices as it traveled.
A reader who has never sat in a cacao circle should understand that the repetition is not padding. A chant like this is meant to be lived inside for minutes, not admired for its lyric structure. The five-minute length is itself a statement about how long the singers are expected to stay with it.
Around the 0:55 mark the prayer changes direction. The thanks gives way to a request: "Clean, clean, clean medicine. Cleanse, cleanse, cleanse your heart." The object of the sentence moves. In the thanks, the cacao is the medicine that is given. In the cleansing, the medicine is what does the cleaning, and the heart is what gets cleaned. The singer is asked, in effect, to hold still and be made clear.
The chant then compresses. By around 2:00 the phrase has shortened to "cleanse, cleanse heart," with the word "your" dropped and the rhythm tightened. Compression is a common move in group chanting: as a song gets more familiar, the words get smaller and the feeling gets larger. Listeners who return to the track will likely hear this as the point where the room stops reading the lines and starts simply inhabiting them.
The thanks returns around 2:53, "Thank you cacao for your love," and the prayer ends by folding both halves back together. Near the 4:00 mark the cleansing lines resolve into "Clean, clean, clean heart," a small but meaningful change: the medicine is no longer named at all. What is left is the heart and the act of clearing it. The final fragments dissolve into music and stray syllables, which suits a prayer meant to be picked up by whoever is in the room next.
The material behind this piece is a five-minute recording and its short description. It does not say when the prayer was first sung, who wrote the lyrics, how the melody came together, or what the cacao ceremonies themselves involve. Those are real and worthwhile questions, and this article does not answer them. Any account of the prayer's origin would have to come from the artists themselves, and the description offers only that it has moved "from circle to circle."
The most useful way into Cacao Prayer is the one the video suggests: listen to it as a prayer you could sing yourself. Play it through once for the thanks and once for the cleansing, and notice where your own voice wants to enter. The release link sits in the video description for anyone who wants to stream or download the recording. For a deeper understanding of the circle it came from, the next step is to hear it sung live, where the layered voices the recording only hints at are the whole point.
