For most people, the idea of eating cheesecake every day may sound delicious, but it’s not realistic. That’s what Melissa Mueller-Douglas’s friends told her when she brought them together on her 30th birthday in a rented yoga studio to test an inspired idea on a trusted circle.
She led her friends through a mindfulness practice, rewarding themselves along the way with Cheesy Eddy's chocolate cheesecake. Everyone agreed the reward was powerful. The cheesecake, however, wasn't sustainable. So Mueller-Douglas asked what would be. The answer: a little chocolate, even just one bite, was enough.
This was the beginning of Chocolate Mindfulness, a practice Mueller-Douglas, a licensed master social worker, has spent the last decade building right here in Rochester.
Her dedication to mindfulness goes back much further than age 30, beyond even her degree. When she was growing up, her mother never let her consume dye, but a store at The Marketplace Mall had a gumball machine. After they walked around the mall, her mother would let her stop at the store and get one white gumball because it didn’t contain dye. The impact of that minty reward stayed with her for the rest of her life, and it’s a practice she began doing as an adult. “Because I needed to take care of myself,” she says.
The idea began as a practitioner, when Mueller-Douglas saw people who wanted to make a positive change in their life, typically needed something they enjoyed as a tangible reward to make it sustainable. “We paired chocolate because it’s a love language for everyone,” she says. “So, when you practice mindfulness, you reward yourself with a small piece of chocolate.”
Why Chocolate?
At its core, mindfulness means being fully present in your actions, thoughts, feelings, and physical sensations. Mueller-Douoglas started with cheesecake, but chocolate has become the anchor of her practice.
“You’re using all of your senses, color, texture, shape and size, shine, dullness. Taking a deep breath in, we do different ways of breathing, so you’re learning some breathing techniques. You're of course tasting the chocolate and reflecting on what that experience is like. We get pretty deep pretty fast,” Mueller-Douglas explains. “It's really fascinating how it quickly expands from a simple piece of chocolate to something more powerful and impactful.”
Beyond the Trustfall
In the years since she first began sharing this practice, it’s evolved beyond her friends and into corporate team-building events, pop-up experiences across the country, and a mindfulness retreat for women executives. As it says on her website, “Team building with chocolate, not trust falls.”
When she tells teams to “raise your hand if you’ve ever done a trustfall when you joined a team,” and keep it up if you enjoyed it—”it’s palatable,” she says. “There is just a visceral response to closing your eyes and falling backwards into the arms of people you just met.” And it’s not a good one.
But when you bring teams together and ask them their favorite chocolate, barriers go down, stories come out, and eyes light up. Teams work together best when they can find common ground—and chocolate is one, she explains. Those moments of intentionality and eating chocolate together have led to impactful responses, like a participant tearing up over the chocolate reminding her of the one her mom used to make when she was young. “Those essences of moments are happening all the time, where people are getting to know about one another more. They had this mindfulness experience, and then they tasted chocolate,” she explains. And when people feel comfortable around each other, it provides a sense of belonging. Like we talk about “breaking bread,” she talks in terms of “breaking chocolate bars.”
In the midst of it all, she shares Chocolate Mindfulness as a pop-up experience on a 12-city tour and regularly holds Chocolate Mindfulness and Mocktails at Alt Bar downtown.
Not every person can afford an hour of in-person chocolate mindfulness, so Mueller-Douglas created a free alternative: The MyRetreat app, where she offers two-minute mindfulness experiences paired with chocolate. Those who participate can use their own chocolate, or sign up for a subscription service through the app, where Mueller-Douglas will deliver chocolate quarterly from an Ecuadorian chocolate shop in batches of 99.
The Retreat
After years of leading one-hour mindfulness sessions, Mueller-Douglas kept hearing the same feedback from team leaders: they wanted to go deeper, either for themselves and their teams, or on a more personal level, meeting other leaders who care about the same things. So, she launched the Chocolate Mindfulness Retreat, a quarterly, six-day trip to the Grand Cayman Islands for seven executives at a time. Everything is planned in advance, down to the last detail, so no one has to make a single decision they don’t want to.
On these retreats, the women learn fast that Mueller-Douglas’s favorite word is “no,” and when one of the women commits to knowing her limits with that sentiment, they’re celebrated. Like the Disney Plus executive who said no to the welcome dinner after traveling to the islands. “She felt refreshed and rejuvenated because she made the right decision for herself,” Mueller-Douglas says.
Every day of the retreat brings a new adventure, from the Crystal Caves to Bioluminescence Bay. But, rest is baked into the retreat with equal importance. By the end of the six days, the women have settled into simply being, a flow state that she builds in deliberately. Even small touches come with intention, a photographer on the island shooting headshots for all the attendees, because Mueller-Douglas believes everyone deserves an updated, professional photo of themselves.
The masterminds are her favorite part. Every speaker at the retreat is also an attendee. Before they take the stage, Mueller-Douglas co-creates their session with them one-on-one, helping to pull their story from them and shape it into impact for the other attendees. “That’s really special to me,” she says. “Because stories matter. Part of their brain needs quantitative data, the qualitative is what makes you change your behaviors and create new habits that elevate us to the next level of where we want to be at.”
The connections between attendees turns out to be one of the retreat’s biggest benefits. Women buy from each other, hire each other, and refer to each other’s services—trusting that brand because they got to know the person behind it. And something Mueller-Douglas never anticipated was how many of the women say they want to come back.
Full Circle
The location of the retreat is no accident. Mueller-Douglas’s father is from Grand Cayman, and she has family that still lives there. Every visit teaches her something new about her heritage. During one retreat, an attendee who had to leave early, asked her to mail a postcard, as it was a tradition she keeps with her father on every trip. While dropping it at the local post office, Mueller-Douglas was making conversation and mentioned that one of her grandmothers had lived on that same stretch of island. As it turned out, the clerk did know the grandmother and was actually a cousin Mueller-Douglas had never met.
It’s an experience that mirrors the mindfulness she’s been building in yoga studios, boardrooms, and pop-ups—making connections and discovering new ways to be intentional in everything she does, like choosing the Grand Cayman Islands as her retreat home. “I put in this investment because I believe in spending my business dollars well and intentionally.”