This corner of my larger podcast is where I sit with the cacao plant — its medicine, its history, its agriculture, its sociology, its ancestry, and my own. It’s where I talk about what makes my cacao blends different (emphasis on blends, because I don’t grow cacao, I don’t own a farm, and I don’t pay farmers in the global South directly).

I do my best to ethically source from Mexico, Ecuador, Peru, and Guatemala — and one day, I hope to collaborate deeply with the people, the farms, and the land. Maybe one day I’ll even have a farm of my own.

But today’s conversation is heavier. Necessary, but heavy.

We’re talking about appropriation. We’re talking about ethics.

We’re talking about culture, power, history, and the invisible threads that shape how we consume, create, and build businesses in 2026.

And we’re talking about cacao — not as a trend, not as a “ceremonial” marketing buzzword, but as a plant with lineage, land, people, and memory.

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Why This Conversation Matters (Especially Now)

We’re living in a time of deep division, deep denial, and deep anger. A time of I’m right, you’re wrong rhetoric. A time when people cling to identity as a shield instead of a doorway.

And when we talk about appropriation, discrimination, capitalism — these massive forces that shape entire cultures — it’s easy to collapse everything into individual blame.

What I do acknowledge is that cultures — not individuals — create patterns.

Cultures create systems. Cultures create the conditions that allow extraction, exploitation, and entitlement to flourish.

And cacao sits right in the middle of that conversation.

Where the Word “Appropriation” Even Comes From

I always start with etymology because the root always grounds hard conversations.

Appropriation comes from the Latin appropriare — to make one’s own.

To own. To possess. Someone sees something.

They like it.

They want it.

They take it.

They reshape it.

They profit from it.

That’s the lineage of the word.

Cultural appropriation, as a term, didn’t even exist until the 1970s, when British historian Kenneth Coutts‑Smith wrote about cultural colonialism. And we’ve been trying to define, refine, and understand it ever since.

Culture is not just food, clothing, music, or rituals. It’s not just what you can taste, touch, see, or hear.

Culture is also:

- values

- mannerisms

- invisible codes

- inherited ways of being

- the things you feel but can’t always name

In Latin America, you greet everyone when you enter a home — with a hug or a kiss on the cheek.

In the U.S., you don’t.

In Europe or the Middle East, it’s two kisses.

Culture is embodied. It’s lived. It’s practiced.

So when we talk about appropriating culture, we’re talking about taking something that is lived and embodied — and removing it from its context, its people, its meaning.

Appreciation vs. Appropriation: The Line Is Commodification

There’s a version of this conversation that says:

Appreciation is fine. Appropriation is not. But the line between them is not “liking something.”

I can appreciate Holi — the Indian festival of color — without selling it.

I can practice yoga for my own healing without turning it into a brand.

I can meditate with mala beads without pretending I’m a lineage holder.

The moment you:

- extract

- distort

- profit

- whitewash

- remove context

- erase the people who created it

…you’ve crossed into appropriation.

And that’s where cacao is being mishandled today.

The Yoga Example: When Appreciation Turns Into Industry

Yoga changed my life. It found me when I was a self‑conscious high schooler shelving books in a library. It gave me breath, softness, community — something that wasn’t punishment or diet culture. But when I went deeper, I saw the commodification:

- no national regulation

- Yoga Alliance as a membership badge, not a lineage

- studios selling certifications like products

- white‑washed versions of ancient practices

- people becoming “experts” in traditions they didn’t descend from

And something in me said:

I don’t have the right to teach this.

That same instinct guides me with cacao.

Because appropriation isn’t just “taking.” It’s stripping.

Stripping the meaning.

Stripping the lineage.

Stripping the people.

Stripping the context.

Stripping the power.

It’s turning something sacred, cultural, or ancestral into a commodity — often for the benefit of people who were never harmed by its history. And that brings me to cacao companies in the U.S. that market cacao as:

- mystical

- magical

- otherworldly

- a spiritual portal

- a euphoric experience

…while hiding the farmers, the wages, the land, the lineage, and the truth.

The NIMBY Effect: Not In My Backyard

There’s a term in environmental justice: NIMBY — Not In My Backyard.

People want:

- the products

- the convenience

- the consumption

Cacao is the same. People want:

- the “ceremonial” experience

- the spiritual branding

- the aesthetic

- the wellness identity

…but not the reality of:

- farmer poverty

- land extraction

- colonial histories

- racial hierarchies

- Global South labor

That’s NIMBY. And it’s everywhere in the cacao industry.

Argentina, Whiteness, and the Erasure of Blackness

This part is uncomfortable, but necessary. Argentina is a Latin American country, but culturally, it is deeply European.

White‑skinned. Spanish‑speaking. Italian last names. European architecture. And historically, Argentina systematically erased Black people from its population — through policy, census manipulation, and cultural rewriting.

So when I see cacao companies founded by Argentinian siblings selling “spiritual cacao experiences” to white Americans, I have questions.

Not because individuals are bad. But because culture matters. And when a country that erased Blackness profits from Indigenous and Afro‑descendant plant traditions…

I have to talk about it.

Especially when, in 2024, Argentina was one of only three countries — alongside the U.S. and Israel — that voted against the UN resolution condemning the transatlantic slave trade.

Ethics: From the Greek Ethos — Character, Habit, Way of Being

Ethics isn’t a policy. It’s not a marketing statement. It’s not a sustainability badge.

Ethics is:

- what you do when no one is watching

- how you walk your path

- what you refuse to step on

- what you refuse to exploit

- what you refuse to distort

Cacao has been part of my life for years — not as a mystical portal, but as a plant I respect, a plant I descend from, a plant that is woven into my ancestry. Half of my lineage — if not more — is Indigenous and specifically Mesoamerican.

Cacao is not a trend for me. It is a return. And because of that, I refuse to:

- use the phrase “ceremonial cacao” (it’s a marketing invention)

- sell euphoric fantasies

- whitewash the plant

- extract from cultures that have already been extracted from for centuries

- pretend cacao is a spiritual awakening tool for people who don’t know its history

My business is not built on mystique. It’s built on relationships.

On ancestry. On ethics. On character.

Questions to Carry With You

As you build your business, drink cacao, or interact with any cultural practice, ask yourself:

- What am I tending to?

- What am I honest about?

- Where am I acting from character, not performance?

- What are my ethics — and how do I practice them?

- Am I appreciating, or am I extracting?

- Am I honoring the lineage, or am I commodifying it?

Because sometimes the most ethical thing you can do is simply: Let things be.

When it comes to career clarity, most people are told to just update their résumé, hustle harder, or “fake it till they make it.” But for a lot of us—especially the sensitive, soul-aware, overfunctioning types—there’s something deeper at play.

Enter: your zodiac sign.

But it can show you the patterns, defaults, and internal blocks that trip you up—especially when you’re trying to evolve.

Let’s talk about how your sign might be unintentionally blocking your career flow—and what to do about it.

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Aries: You Rush the Leap Before You Anchor the Why

You’re a starter, a spark, a firestarter. You’re also impulsive when restless. Career boredom can feel like death—so you jump. Again. And again. And again.

Your Block: Taking action before creating clarity

What to Shift: Slow down long enough to ask: Is this restlessness or a real nudge?

Your Medicine: Learn to discern the difference between a pivot and a panic

Taurus: You Stay Too Long at the Job That’s No Longer Working

You crave security. Consistency. A good benefits package. Even if your soul is screaming. You’ll wait it out because comfort often wins over growth.

Your Block: Fear of instability

What to Shift: Remember: discomfort is also instability—just a quieter version

Your Medicine: Let “rooted” evolve to include freedom, not just familiarity

Gemini: You Overthink Your Way Out of Alignment

You’re curious. Adaptable. A natural communicator. But when it comes to career clarity, you spiral in options, info, and endless what-ifs.

Your Block: Mental overdrive that clouds intuition

What to Shift: Get out of your head and into your body

Your Medicine: Choose one path for now—clarity comes from walking, not wondering

Cancer: You Care So Much It Keeps You Stuck

You’re deeply attuned. Loyal. Emotionally intelligent. But you can overstay in roles where you’re over-giving, under-supported, or emotionally tethered.

Your Block: Emotional entanglement with your team, boss, or mission

What to Shift: You’re allowed to leave even if you love them

Your Medicine: Create boundaries around care—it doesn’t have to cost you your peace

Leo: You Attach Your Worth to Visibility

You’re radiant. Expressive. Powerful. But when your brilliance isn’t seen or affirmed, you can feel invisible—and that messes with your motivation.

Your Block: Needing external validation to feel worthy of the next move

What to Shift: Remember: self-worth precedes spotlight

Your Medicine: Build a career that honors your voice even when no one’s clapping yet

Virgo: You Don’t Move Until It’s “Perfect”

You’re precise, thoughtful, and masterful with systems. But your perfectionism is paralyzing. You won’t pivot until it’s fully planned. Which means… you rarely pivot.

Your Block: Analysis paralysis + over-responsibility

What to Shift: Stop waiting for perfect. Start with what’s honest.

Your Medicine: Progress is the plan. Let clarity unfold as you go.

Libra: You Overweigh Everyone Else’s Opinion

You’re diplomatic, relational, and values-driven. But you outsource decision-making. You want harmony—so you stall instead of choosing.

Your Block: People-pleasing dressed as discernment

What to Shift: Center your voice before the committee vote

Your Medicine: You don’t owe your clarity to consensus

Scorpio: You Keep It All Too Close to the Chest

You’re intuitive, deep, and strategic. But secrecy can isolate you. You don’t ask for help, don’t share until it’s done—and end up overwhelmed in silence.

Your Block: Control + fear of being misunderstood

What to Shift: Let someone in—even just one trusted person

Your Medicine: Vulnerability isn’t weakness. It’s oxygen.

Sagittarius: You Skip Steps Because You Hate Feeling Trapped

You’re expansive. Visionary. Uncontainable. But the minute a path feels routine, you ghost it. You chase freedom but end up feeling unrooted.

Your Block: Impatience with structure

What to Shift: Ask what kind of container you need—not whether you need one

Your Medicine: Structure can be sacred, not suffocating

Capricorn: You Achieve First, Feel Later

You’re disciplined, committed, and strategic. But you push through misalignment because achievement has always been your compass.

Your Block: Hustle as identity

What to Shift: Ask: Does this role align with my wholeness—or just my resume?

Your Medicine: Let rest be part of the plan. You don’t have to earn your value.

Aquarius: You Think Your Way Out of the Body

You’re a visionary. A reformer. A systems thinker. But your detachment means you often ignore your emotional and physical signals.

Your Block: Disconnection from the body’s wisdom

What to Shift: Ground your big ideas in small, embodied steps

Your Medicine: Your nervous system deserves a voice in your career decisions

Pisces: You Absorb Everything But Don’t Always Act

You’re imaginative, empathic, and wise. But your porousness can leave you foggy. You dream big—but feel blocked when it comes time to move.

Your Block: Overwhelm + energetic burnout

What to Shift: Anchor your vision with gentle boundaries

Your Medicine: Not every calling has to be loud. Start soft, but start.

So—Now What?

Understanding your sign won’t fix your career. But it can give you language for the patterns you’re stuck in—and permission to do things differently.

Here are some of my go-to free astrology chart calculators that are easy and do a pretty good job of explaining all your signs and planets!

If you don’t have your exact time of birth, approximate/or use midnight :)

• https://astro.cafeastrology.com/natal.php

• https://alabe.com/freechart/default.asp

• https://horoscopes.astro-seek.com/birth-chart-horoscope-online

Sarah and I have been doing this podcast for over a year now. Two women, two coasts — she’s a rewilding real estate agent in Spokane Valley, Washington; I’m here in Northern Virginia making cacao and writing about the in-between. We don’t always plan our episodes the way they end up unfolding. This one came up organically, the way the real ones do — we were catching up, and the word edge came up on its own, and neither of us could let it go.

So we sat with it. What is an edge, actually?

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Longing, Desire & Direction: A Millennial Capacity Conversation

There’s a moment in every long project where you suddenly realize you’re nearing the end. Not because you planned it that way, but because the arc of the work itself has carried you there. That’s where this episode lands — the penultimate conversation in a year‑long exploration of capacity, self‑trust, and millennial reality.

The transcript opens with a simple, tired exhale — “I’m tired. OK, we’re here.” And honestly, that’s the most millennial opening line imaginable. We show up tired, but we show up anyway.

This episode — centered on longing, desire, and direction — feels like the culmination of everything the two of you have been circling for months: the tension between what we want, what we can hold, and what the world allows us to pursue.

The Millennial Condition: Untethered, Overextended, Still Dreaming

One of the most striking parts of the transcript is the shared recognition that millennials have lived through a relentless series of destabilizing events. You name them plainly: recessions, terrorism, racism, economic collapse, widening wealth gaps, unaffordable housing, and the erosion of the middle class.

As you put it:

“Millennials don’t ever rest… it’s just been one thing after another for our generation.”

This isn’t just cultural commentary — it’s a diagnosis. A nervous system shaped by instability. A generation raised on the promise of opportunity but delivered volatility instead.

And yet, longing persists.

Longing vs. Desire: A Useful Distinction

The conversation makes a subtle but important distinction:

• Desire is immediate. It’s the spark, the impulse, the “I want.”

• Longing is slow. It’s the ache, the sustained pull toward something that feels like home.

Longing requires capacity — emotional, financial, relational, structural. And that’s where things get complicated.

You describe longing for:

• A homestead

• Chickens

• Children

• Space

• Stability

• A life aligned with your values

But you also describe the structural barriers that make those longings feel out of reach:

“We can’t move… because my husband is undocumented… even if we wanted to move wherever so that we could afford less… how will they find us to continue in our legal process?”

Longing becomes a negotiation with reality. Desire becomes something you have to manage, not simply follow.

This is the millennial condition in a nutshell: We long for things we’re structurally prevented from accessing.

Direction: The Seasonality of Movement

Direction, as you both articulate, isn’t a fixed compass. It’s seasonal.

Sometimes direction looks like:

• Hustling

• Enduring

• Surviving

• Staying put

• Choosing stability over expansion

Other times, direction looks like:

• Building something new

• Rewilding real estate

• Creating intentional community

• Repurposing the corporate ladder

• Designing a life that fits your nervous system

Sarah’s reflection on truth in real estate is a perfect metaphor for direction:

“My job is to find out the truth… bad actors bend the truth to benefit themselves… I want to help people make the most informed decision.”

Direction requires truth — not the universal kind, but the personal kind. The truth of your capacity. The truth of your circumstances. The truth of your longing.

Capacity: The Container That Shapes Everything

The metaphor of capacity as a cup — finite, fillable, spillable — threads through the entire conversation.

You ask:

“Do we actually have the capacity to do all the things we want to do?”

And the answer, gently but honestly, is no.

Not because we’re incapable. Not because we’re unambitious. Not because we’re doing it wrong.

But because capacity is shaped by context, and our context is heavy.

Economic context. Political context. Immigration context. Housing context. Generational context.

Capacity isn’t just personal — it’s structural.

The Courage to Long Anyway

What makes this episode powerful is that you don’t collapse into cynicism. You name the barriers, but you also name the dreams.

You honor the ache without dismissing it.

You allow longing to exist even when direction feels constrained.

You make space for desire even when capacity feels limited.

This is the quiet rebellion of millennials: We continue to long for a life that feels like ours, even when the world tells us it’s impractical.

A Closing Reflection

This episode feels like a love letter to the millennial experience — not the aestheticized version, but the real one. The one shaped by exhaustion, resilience, structural limitation, and stubborn hope.

It’s also a testament to the power of sustained conversation. Two women, one year, one project — and a record of what it means to grow in parallel.

As you said:

“What started as a small seed became this whole tree or this whole blooming.”

This episode is part of that bloom.

Share this with a friend who’s navigating their capacity too. 🌿💛

Raquel is a clarity and work strategist, the host of The Clarity Shift podcast, and the founder of a small-batch cacao blend business rooted in Central American ancestry and holistic nourishment. She offers blends specifically designed to support the female body, to honor indigenous plant traditions, and to ground people in something physical and real alongside all the conceptual work of career and income sovereignty. Find her at farmers’ markets in the Arlington, Virginia, area in 2026.

Sarah is a rewilding real estate agent based in the Pacific Northwest, a certified yoga teacher, clinical herbalist, and the organizer of the first-ever Pacific Northwest Eco-Village Tours, coming in July 2027. She’s in the business of helping people find — or build — the village they’ve been looking for.

Thank you for being here. Thank you for listening. Capacity Conversations drops regularly wherever you listen to podcasts. Subscribe on Substack to never miss an episode.

In today’s uncertain times, with economic pressures and evolving work environments, the question becomes even more complicated. On one hand, corporate life is stable—health benefits, steady paychecks, and a structure that many find comfortable. On the other hand, there’s the freedom of working for yourself—flexibility, autonomy, and the ability to build something on your own terms.

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Why People Stay in Corporate

Many people choose to remain in corporate jobs because they offer a sense of security and stability.

For those with families to support, bills to pay, or student loans to tackle, corporate life often feels like the safer bet. The comfort of knowing where the next paycheck is coming from and having health insurance benefits is no small factor.

Corporate environments can provide opportunities for networking, mentorship, and career progression.

But here’s the catch: if you’re feeling stagnant, burnt out, or like you’re compromising your values for the sake of stability, staying may cost you more in the long run.

On the flip side, working for yourself can be incredibly rewarding.

The freedom to set your own schedule, pursue projects you’re passionate about, and build a brand that truly reflects your values—these are powerful motivators for many. But the reality of entrepreneurship is that it requires a level of resilience, flexibility, and hard work that can’t be overstated.

If you’re considering leaping into business ownership, you’re probably feeling the pull of independence. You want to make a bigger impact and create something of your own, but the unknowns of entrepreneurship can be daunting.

These are valid concerns, and they’re not to be taken lightly. But when done with intention, building your own business can offer fulfillment and the chance to truly define your career on your own terms.

Key Factors to Consider Before Making the Switch

If you’re torn between staying in corporate or venturing into entrepreneurship, ask yourself these essential questions:

1. What Are Your Core Values?

Do you thrive in a structured, stable environment, or do you crave autonomy and flexibility?

Does your current corporate job align with your deeper values, or do you feel like you’re compromising your integrity?

2. Do You Have a Clear Vision?

Do you have a business idea that excites you? Can you see a clear path forward, or is your vision still taking shape?

3. What Are Your Financial Priorities?

How important is financial security to you right now? Can you afford to transition into self-employment, or would you need to keep working part-time or on the side?

4. What Is Your Risk Tolerance?

Are you comfortable with the uncertainty that comes with self-employment, or do you need the safety of a regular paycheck?

5. What Is Your Mental and Emotional Readiness?

Entrepreneurship requires a different kind of emotional resilience. Are you ready to deal with the ups and downs of building something from the ground up, or do you need more stability at this stage of your life?

For many people, the answer isn’t all-or-nothing.

You don’t have to choose between corporate and self-employment right away. Instead, consider the hybrid approach: start your business on the side while you’re still working in corporate.

This allows you to test the waters, build your brand, and see if entrepreneurship is truly the right fit for you—without the pressure of having to quit your job before you’re ready.

Steps to Start Transitioning to Entrepreneurship

If you’re ready to start working for yourself but don’t want to jump in full-time just yet, here’s how you can begin the transition:

1. Start Small:

Launch a side hustle that aligns with your skills and passions. This could be a freelance service, a digital product, or a blog. Start working on it in your spare time to test the market and build your client base.

2. Build a Solid Financial Foundation:

Before you leave your job, make sure you have a financial safety net in place. This includes savings and a plan for sustaining yourself during the early stages of your business.

3. Leverage Your Corporate Experience:

Use your current job to build a network, gain industry experience, and refine the skills that will help you as an entrepreneur. Be strategic about how you can leverage your current position to build your future business.

4. Invest in Yourself:

Take courses, read books, or get a mentor to help guide you in building your business. Invest in your personal and professional growth to make sure you’re equipped to handle the challenges of self-employment.

Ultimately, the choice between staying in the corporate world or working for yourself is deeply personal.

What matters most is how aligned your choice is with your core values, needs, and goals. And remember, there’s no one-size-fits-all answer. Your journey will look different from others—and that’s okay.

As you weigh the decision, take the time to reflect on what truly matters to you in this season of your life.

Whether you stay in corporate or go solo, make sure your path feels authentic, sustainable, and aligned with the kind of work and life you want to create.

If you’re new here, my name is Raquel. I’m a small batch cacao blend maker, a professional career-hopper (or career portfolio-builder, depending on the day), and a lifelong learner — someone who pivots, adapts, strategizes, and teaches others how to do the same. This series lives at the intersection of all of that. It’s about the maker: me. It’s about the plant: cacao. It’s about the questions, the critiques, the cultural curiosities, and the everyday practices of infusing plant medicine and mindfulness into your life — not just mentally and emotionally, but physically, spiritually, and even financially.

This episode, we’re going somewhere I’ve been wanting to go for a while. We’re going deep into culture — what it actually means, where the word comes from, how it has been used and misused and weaponized and reclaimed. And then, inevitably, we’re going somewhere personal: my own culture, my own mosaic, and what it means to be first-generation born in the United States with a whole lot of layered, tangled, beautiful, complicated inheritance.

I’ll warn you upfront: I am not a linguist, not a biologist, not an anthropologist, not an agricultural expert. What I am is someone who researches, reflects, and speaks from lived experience. So take this as that. This is not a lecture. It’s a conversation, and I hope you feel like you’re walking through it with me.

Start at the Root: What Does “Culture” Actually Mean?

I like to begin with etymology — the root of a word — because I think the root tells you something essential. Something that all the layers of history, power, and usage can’t fully cover over.

The word culture, in English, comes from the Latin colere — C-O-L-E-R-E — which means to tend to, to cultivate, and ultimately to care for the Earth. The original use of this word was purely agricultural. Culture was what you did to soil. You tended it. You prepared it. You gave it conditions to grow.

And this lands differently for me now that I’m in the business of cacao — a plant that has its own extraordinary relationship to soil, to tending, to cultivation across almost 8,000 years of human history. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

What’s interesting is how far the word traveled from that original agricultural meaning. Interestingly, the same root also shows up in the word microbiome — and I don’t think that’s accidental. When nutritionists and health researchers talk about your gut microbiome, or your oral microbiome, they’re talking about tiny ecosystems inside your body that need to be tended. The good bacteria. The probiotics, prebiotics and fermented foods that feed those little cultures. If you’ve ever looked at the label on a bottle of apple cider vinegar and seen something about culture, that’s the same word at work. Culture is literally what you’re feeding when you tend to what lives inside you.

How a Grounded Word Got Lifted Off the Ground

Here’s where the story gets complicated.

Around the time of the Roman orators, Cicero took the word culture and used it metaphorically. He wrote cultura animi — the cultivation of the soul. Suddenly, the word wasn’t just about soil anymore. It was about the inner life. The development of the mind. The tending of what’s inside rather than what’s outside.

Still rooted in something real and true, I think. Tending your inner soil is genuinely meaningful work. But watch what happens next.

By the 17th and 18th centuries in Europe, being cultured became a social class marker. It described a type of person — refined, educated, elevated above the common. The word had traveled from the literal ground to the inner life, to a hierarchy. Now culture wasn’t just what you tended, it was a way of saying who was worth tending to — and who wasn’t.

And this, for me, is where it becomes important to hold the whole timeline at once. Because the 17th and 18th centuries are also the centuries of the slave trade. Of colonialism. Of European empires expanding across lands they did not belong to, claiming resources, people, and knowledge that were not theirs. The people who did this — the people who extracted and exploited and displaced — they were the ones called cultured. They were above it. Refined. Elevated.

Which meant that if you were indigenous, Black, Brown, outside the European Christian ideal — in dress, in language, in mannerism, in belief — you were considered without culture. Uncivilized. Primitive.

Particularly their culture. Not culture as a whole. Their culture, specifically.

Colony: The Word That Grew From the Same Root

Here’s a thing that stopped me in my research, and I haven’t been able to shake it since.

The word colony — as in colonization, as in the colonial project — comes from the same Latin root. Colonia: a settled land. The Romans used it.

And then centuries later, the European empires picked it back up and used it to mean to cultivate you, to tend to indigenous and Black and Brown peoples in a way that continued and sustained high culture, high society, high class for them.

Culture and colony. Same tree, same root. One word used to describe what you tend with care. The other is used to describe what you extract by force.

I sit with that a lot.

What Does Culture Actually Mean — Now, In 2026?

We are recording this in 2026. And the question of culture — what it is, who gets to define it, what we owe it and what it owes us — feels more alive and more contested than ever.

You can’t pin it down in one definition. It can’t be reduced to two polarities, or a single echo chamber, or a checklist of traditions and foods and holidays. It has always been layered. It has always been in motion. It has always been tended — and the people doing the tending have not always had good intentions.

Culture is food. It’s language. It’s music and stories and ceremonies. It’s things you can touch and taste and feel with your five senses. And it’s also something you can’t easily define — something you recognize more in the feeling of it than in any description of it.

I believe culture is tribal, in the deepest sense. And I don’t mean that pejoratively. I think humans have always formed groups and always will — we need each other, we need belonging, we need something shared. But I also think we’re being asked, right now, to see farther than tribe. To see that as interconnected as we are — globally, technologically, ecologically — we are, in some real sense, one tribe. And we don’t tend to that. We don’t culture that. We don’t build conditions for that kind of growth.

I don’t have the full answer to how we do. But I think asking the question honestly is the first step.

My Own Mosaic: First-Generation, Layered, and Learning

Now the personal part. And I need to say: this part is messy. I am intentionally practicing being okay with messiness, especially in conversations about culture. So here goes.

I was born in Virginia and grew up in Southern Florida. My entire family — my whole ancestry, as far back as I know — is from El Salvador. Central America. I am the first in my family to be born in the United States.

That singular fact — first generation — has carried more weight than I realized for a long time. It meant I had access to things my ancestors never had. It also meant I was in between. Not fully immersed in Salvadoran culture. Not fully American in the way the dominant culture defines that. Growing up in South Florida, I was surrounded by a Caribbean and Hispanic-Latino world, but most of the people around me were Cuban, Puerto Rican, Dominican, Colombian — also often first-generation or second-generation, also navigating their own version of this in-between.

So my sense of Salvadoran culture specifically — what it sounded like, tasted like, felt like — was distant. Arm’s length. I loved my family. I had the food, I had the stories, and I had some of the traditions. But I didn’t grow up in it the way someone who never left would have. And I didn’t grow up fully inside American culture either — not in a way that felt like home.

I have not felt 100% one culture. Ever. And I spent a long time thinking that there was something wrong with me.

The Shame Around Spanish

One place this showed up most painfully: language.

I speak Spanish. I grew up speaking Spanish at home and English everywhere else. But for a long time, I felt tremendous shame about how I spoke Spanish. I wasn’t fluent enough. I didn’t know all the idioms. I couldn’t catch every nuance of the slang that people who grew up in Latin America carry in their bodies. I couldn’t get the idiosyncrasies — the particular way Spanish sounds when it’s been lived in, when it’s in you from birth in a specific geography, in Central America, the Caribbean, South America.

I used to really question this part of my culture. Am I really Latina if I can’t speak it that way? Does this make me less than?

And then I did my 23andMe. And the results came back: approximately 40% Indigenous American, 10% West African, 47% Spanish Iberian, and a small percentage that traces through Egypt and the Middle East (the Spanish carried a lot with them, too, as it turns out). That’s the map of colonization written in my blood. Spanish mixed with indigenous. African roots were carried across the Atlantic by force. Indigenous American ancestry that goes back to the very land that cacao comes from.

And I thought: wait. The Spanish language itself — the language I feel shame about not speaking “correctly” — it wasn’t even the indigenous people’s language to begin with. The Spanish came and burned the records. Burned the books. Eliminated, as much as they could, the native languages and dialects of my people. And then they replaced them with their own.

So why am I shaming myself for not speaking a colonizer’s language fluently enough?

That question cracked something open for me. And I don’t say that to be anti-Spanish, or to erase what Spanish has become — because language transforms too, it gets tended by the people who use it, and Spanish across Latin America is now something that belongs to the people who speak it. But it released something to understand: the inadequacy I felt was not mine to carry. It was the residue of a much older violence.

My cousin, who grew up here in the United States, barely speaks Spanish but understands it. She can read it, follow a conversation, and write a little.

Does that make her less Latina? Does the language have to be spoken perfectly, in the accent and slang of a place you’ve never lived, for it to count?

I don’t think so. I don’t think culture is that rigid. I don’t think it can be, and stay alive.

Latino vs. Hispanic: The Words We Use for Ourselves

This led me down a rabbit hole I want to share because I think it matters.

The word Hispanic comes from Hispania — the Roman name for the Iberian Peninsula, i.e., Spain. So Hispanic, technically, has to do with a connection to Spain and the Spanish language. It’s a linguistic and geographic marker rooted in colonization.

Latino is broader. It refers to people from Latin America, and not everyone who is Latino is Hispanic. Brazil is part of Latin America, and Brazilians speak Portuguese, not Spanish. Indigenous communities across the Americas have their own languages, their own cultures, none of which were Spanish to begin with.

Most people I know would say Latino before Hispanic, if pressed. And I think that shift matters — even if it’s subtle, it’s a choice about which root you’re honoring. Are you naming yourself by your connection to Spain, or by your connection to the land?

I’m still sitting with what I call myself, honestly. And I think that’s okay. The tending continues.

What Reclamation Actually Feels Like

I want to end here, because I think this is where the whole conversation lands.

It doesn’t happen in one revelation or one Google search or one 23andMe result. It’s ongoing. It’s practice. And it is, in my experience, a lot like walking on a beach in the dark.

The moon is out, but maybe not fully shining. There’s some light, but mostly you’re feeling your way. The sand shifts under your feet — some of it wet and smooth and easy to walk on, and some of it dry and deep, and your feet sink in, and it takes more effort. One foot is lighter, one foot is heavier, and you’re off balance, and you’re still walking. You feel the wind. You feel the cold. You might feel alone even if someone is walking beside you, because so much of this journey is internal — it is within you, not outside you.

And sometimes a tiny crab runs across your toes in the dark, and you startle.

I didn’t choose my lineage. I didn’t choose the blood that runs through my veins or the history that preceded me. But I can choose how much to explore it, how much to embrace it, how much to tend it. How much to understand, engage, and nourish it. How much to make peace with?

That’s the work. That’s what I’m in.

You Are Part of the Next Layer

Wherever you are with your own version of this — your own mosaic, your own in-between, your own inheritance that doesn’t fit neatly into one box — I want you to know: what you’re reaching for is real. What you’re searching, embracing, questioning, feeling, and doing in response to all of it — that is real. And it matters.

You are tending. You are culturing something inside yourself. You are caring for the inner soil even when it’s dark, and you can’t see where you’re going.

And unbeknownst to you, that tending — that cultivation — is making you part of the next layer. The next evolution. The next level of growth. For your own culture, in the most personal sense of that word. And for the larger culture that we are all, whether we acknowledge it or not, tending together.

Thank you for being here. For being you. I look forward to being in your ear next time.

Take care.

Raquel Sands is a small batch cacao blend maker, clarity and work strategist, and host of The Clarity Shift podcast. She writes and speaks at the intersection of plant medicine, ancestral wellness, culture, identity, and income sovereignty. Find her at farmer’s markets in Arlington, Virginia in 2026, or reach out via email or the comments below.

This is for you.

And before we go any further, let me offer the anchor:

You don’t need to be rescued.
You already know the system is broken.
And that means you’re already rising.

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🪞 You Are Not Hard to Understand. The World Just Builds for the Shallow.

Many of us — not just first-gen or multilingual humans, but anyone who was raised between identities, between cultures, between expectations, between our creativity and the world’s demands — grew up translating ourselves constantly.

We became fluent in:

• managing tone
• shrinking to keep the peace
• softening the truth to stay safe
• performing clarity before we felt it
• making ourselves easier to digest
• holding our needs in the body instead of the room

But let this land:

What if your depth was never the issue?
What if the system simply doesn’t know what to do with people who can feel, sense, and perceive more than it can measure?

Your complexity is not a flaw.
Your emotional intelligence is not a burden.
Your intuition is not a liability.

It’s literacy.

🌿 You Don’t Need to Prove Your Integrity. You Live It.

You advocate for yourself not because you’re difficult,
but because you’ve had to.

You ask questions not because you’re negative,
but because you’re paying attention.

You feel deeply not because you’re fragile,
but because you’re awake.

You don’t need a defense.
You need space.

Your job is not to shrink your truth to fit their comfort.
Your job is to soften your body and mind so your truth can move through you more clearly.

❄️ When the World Feels Like Too Much: Four Self-Holding Practices

Think of these as winter rituals for your nervous system — grounding practices for the moments when you’re spiraling, shrinking, or slipping into old patterns of self-silencing.

1. Mirror Before Management

Before you ask for advice, ask yourself:

“Am I asking for a fix… or do I need to be witnessed?”

Start by witnessing yourself.
Your clarity begins with your own eyes.

2. Honor Over Optics

When you catch yourself worrying how it looks, pause:

“Is this aligned with my values even if it’s misunderstood?”

You’re not here to manage perception.
You’re here to live with integrity.

3. Let It Be Seen, Not Solved

Not everything needs to be made palatable.
Not everything needs translation.

“Can I hold what I’m feeling without outsourcing my validity?”

This is self-trust in motion.

4. Hold the Line — Gently

The world will pressure you to explain.
To soften.
To justify your boundaries.

You can be soft and firm.
Tender and anchored.
Gentle and unshakeable.

It’s not contradiction.
It’s maturity.

🍂 Bonus Somatic Practice: Let Yourself Fall Like a Leaf

There’s something about watching a leaf fall that feels like truth.

It doesn’t ask:
Is this the right time?
Will someone misunderstand?
Will I be caught?
Will the wind support me?

It simply lets go.

Not recklessly.
With purpose.

A leaf knows when the season has shifted — even before the tree does.
We do too.

We feel the misalignment before we can language it.
We sense the next phase before we can name it.
We know it’s time even when we don’t feel ready.

Ask yourself:

“Where am I gripping a branch I’ve outgrown?”
“Where can I trust the wind more than my fear?”
“What would letting go — even a little — feel like in my body?”

Falling is not failure.
It’s transition.
It’s season.
It’s truth.

🌬️ If These Four Practices Land for You…

I still offer 1-1 sessions if you’d like to pick my brain, decompress, and/or create some creative income options for your path to sovereignty, safety, and fulfillment!

A working session, not a discovery call. We look at your actual situation — your income, your timeline, your life constraints, what you’re building — and identify the income bridge strategy that makes the most sense for your specific situation.

🌑 Release the Expectation That the System Will Hold You

This isn’t about bitterness.
It’s about realism and reclamation.

Let go of the belief that:

• the system will honor your depth
• workplaces will automatically support your clarity
• people will validate your boundaries on your behalf
• institutions will see your needs before you name them

The system was never built to hold all of you.

But you were built to hold you.

And from that place — decisions become clearer.
Transitions become softer.
Boundaries become easier.
Next steps become visible.

Sarah and I have been doing this podcast for over a year now. Two women, two coasts — she’s a rewilding real estate agent in Spokane Valley, Washington; I’m here in Northern Virginia making cacao and writing about the in-between. We don’t always plan our episodes the way they end up unfolding. This one came up organically, the way the real ones do — we were catching up, and the word edge came up on its own, and neither of us could let it go.

So we sat with it. What is an edge, actually?

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The Word Itself

The word edge comes from Old English, and it carries two meanings folded into one: the cutting side of a blade, and a point — a tip, a limit, a place where something ends.

I find that distinction worth sitting with longer than we usually do. An edge is both a tool and a boundary. It’s the thing that can sever, and it’s also the place where something simply stops. We use the word constantly without touching either of its original meanings — I’m at the edge of something; this is an edge for me to push through — but we rarely ask what we’re actually invoking when we say it. A blade. A limit. Something that can cut, and something that contains.

Maybe that duality is the whole conversation. An edge is both what we use to create change and the boundary that defines where we are.

The Day I Said No

Before we even started recording, I told Sarah I’d had another commitment that day — another collaborator, another recording — and I didn’t show up for it. I felt guilty about that. How much capacity do I have a right to claim? How do I stay in right relationship with someone if I’m not reciprocating in the way I think I should?

I sat with that question while walking my dogs, away from my computer. And what I landed on was simple and hard at the same time: I have to honor where I actually am. Not where I think I should be.

Not where being a good collaborator requires me to be. Where I am.

That was the edge. A limit got pushed, for reasons that weren’t fully mine to control that day, and I had to decide whether to honor it or override it.

This is the real question underneath capacity: how do you define how much you have, in any given moment, with any given person? And once you know — or even if you don’t fully know, even if you can’t articulate it — are you willing to act on that information?

That sounds almost luxurious when I say it out loud. But I don’t think it has to be. I think it just requires knowing what you want, which is its own edge entirely.

Capacity Without a Container

I told Sarah I’ve been feeling disheartened lately because so much of my work — coaching people through their corporate transitions, helping them reclaim sovereignty inside or outside corporate structures — depends on people having space. A container. The earth isn’t just floating water; it has a container that holds the water, the land and the people. Take away the container, and there’s no edge to define, no limit to push against, because everything becomes nebulous.

That’s what concerns me about where we are right now.

Not just millennials — though I think we’re carrying something particular — but the generations coming up behind us too. We’re being asked to define our own edges while our edges are simultaneously being defined for us, externally, by forces with no interest in whether we have the bandwidth to do either.

Sarah brought up something that stopped me: a statistic about self-regulation. Kids of the 60s and 70s — children of World War II parents who often couldn’t offer much emotional guidance — became, in some framing, a stronger generation because they were forced to self-regulate without scaffolding. I don’t know if that’s true in any rigorous sense, but it names something real about how different generations meet their edges. Some of us inherited containers. Some of us inherited absence and called the absence - resilience.

And now we’re the adults navigating a reality saturated with information, with technology that keeps us in our own bubbles. My neighbor and I might be standing on the same street and living in entirely different realities because of what we’ve each been fed, what we’ve each been shaped by. The edges we’re colliding against aren’t even the same edges anymore. We don’t share a cutting line.

We share a planet, sometimes barely.

Profession, Identity, and the Cost of Definition

Somewhere in the conversation, I mentioned something I’d seen — unverified, just a reel — claiming that by July of this year certain professions, including physical and occupational therapy, would no longer legally be considered “professional.” I don’t know if that’s accurate.

But the commentary stuck with me: the audacity required for a government or department to declare, in a single motion, that a career path people built their lives around no longer counts the way it used to.

I never defined myself by a title.

I knew I needed to be employed because I had debt, but I never let the job become the architecture of who I was. That degree opened doors precisely because I didn’t anchor my identity to any one of them.

But I think that kind of testing is becoming a luxury too. How do you find the time, energy, and money to discover the environment that will actually support your edges — safely, slowly — when you’re also required to show up and get paid regardless of whether the getting-paid teaches you anything about yourself?

That’s the transactional bind so many of us are in. Knowing yourself and surviving financially used to at least sometimes overlap. Increasingly, they don’t.

What an Edge Actually Asks of You

Sarah named something about her own life that I think describes all of us eventually: an edge becomes familiar enough, gets pushed against long enough, that you stop experiencing it as an edge and start experiencing it as identity. She’s been the person who juggles a dozen different jobs and builds community since college.

A friend pointed that out to her — you’ve always done this — and she realized: maybe this isn’t an edge I keep meeting. Maybe it’s just who I am, and I finally let myself be known as that.

I think that’s the quiet hope buried in all of this. Edges aren’t only obstacles. Sometimes they’re identity waiting for you to stop flinching at it.

On Politics, Identity, and the Refusal to Pick a Side Cleanly

Sarah named that we’d reached our limit, politically, generationally: we’ve watched both parties shift so much in our lifetimes that we’re exhausted by the binary itself.

My father was a guerrilla fighter in Nicaragua under the Sandinista regime before he became an accountant under that same government. He carried a machete.

My mother left El Salvador by being a mom to her siblings and starting a new life in the 80s in Los Angeles — both of my parents arrived in this country shaped by a civil war that the United States had a direct hand in prolonging by playing both sides, the way it has in other countries when their politics don’t align with what’s convenient.

So when people ask why I won’t pick a clean political lane, that’s why. I come from a family that fled both a totalizing ideology and the country that destabilized everything, trying to prevent it. I don’t trust totalizing systems, on either side, because I’ve inherited the cost of what happens when ideology outpaces the people living inside it.

Re-Indigenizing, Not Decolonizing

A friend introduced me to a term recently — re-indigenizing, distinct from decolonizing. I don’t know it deeply yet, but what I understand is that it’s about rerouting, not just dismantling. And what strikes me most is how it relates to capacity: in many indigenous traditions, children aren’t expected to carry adult weight before they’re shaped enough to hold it.

I think we’ve lost some of that. We put enormous pressure on the individual — to define their politics, their profession, their values, their edges — before the self is even fully formed.

And then we wonder why everyone in their thirties is exhausted, questioning parenthood, questioning everything, beaten against the same edge of “can I actually provide for myself” over and over without relief.

What We Actually Want to Leave You With

If you find yourself surrounded by edges — external pressures, internal limits, the noise of a world that won’t stop reshaping itself around you — it is not your job to solve all of it alone. Find your people. Find the containers, the communities, the practices that let you regulate without having to carry everything in isolation.

And if you’re someone who comes from a lineage where rest was never modeled as a right — people of color, first-generation anything — let this be permission.

Sometimes I tell myself just one more email, just one more thing, while literally holding my own bladder rather than getting up. That’s not discipline. That’s a nervous system that hasn’t yet learned it’s allowed to stop.

Go drink water. Rest when your body is asking, not just when your calendar permits it.

Edges are necessary for growth. But even the edge needs a season of rest. The plant doesn’t bloom forever. Neither do you. Neither should you have to.

Raquel is a clarity and work strategist, the host of The Clarity Shift podcast, and the founder of a small-batch cacao blend business rooted in Central American ancestry and holistic nourishment. She offers blends specifically designed to support the female body, to honor indigenous plant traditions, and to ground people in something physical and real alongside all the conceptual work of career and income sovereignty. Find her at farmers’ markets in the Arlington, Virginia, area in 2026.

Sarah is a rewilding real estate agent based in the Pacific Northwest, a certified yoga teacher, clinical herbalist, and the organizer of the first-ever Pacific Northwest Eco-Village Tours, coming in July 2027. She’s in the business of helping people find — or build — the village they’ve been looking for.

Thank you for being here. Thank you for listening. Capacity Conversations drops regularly wherever you listen to podcasts. Subscribe on Substack to never miss an episode.

But if you’re like most of the folks I work with, you don’t need more hustle.

You need more self-trust.

That’s why I created the Self-Trust Career Map—a gentle framework to help you pause, reflect, and move forward in a way that honors your energy, values, and capacity.

This isn’t a linear career plan or a 10-step formula. It’s a map that helps you locate yourself—and make your next right decision from there.

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What Is the Self-Trust Career Map?

The Self-Trust Career Map is a four-phase process I use with clients who are navigating career transitions, identity shifts, or burnout. It’s designed for people who feel like they’ve outgrown old definitions of success—but aren’t sure what comes next.

The four phases are:

1. Fog – “I don’t know what I want, but I know this isn’t it.”

You’re overwhelmed, burned out, or disconnected. Something’s off, but it’s hard to name it. You might feel numb, resentful, anxious, or flat-out exhausted. The focus here is rest, reflection, and nervous system regulation.

Self-trust in this phase looks like:

Slowing down. Giving yourself permission not to know. Rebuilding your capacity to feel and discern again.

2. Frustration – “I know what’s not working, but I don’t know how to fix it.”

Clarity is starting to emerge, but it’s frustrating. You see the mismatch between your values and your current role or system. You may start questioning old beliefs about success, ambition, or stability.

Self-trust in this phase looks like:

Naming the problem without rushing the solution. Honoring your insight, even if it doesn’t lead to immediate action.

3. Forming – “I’m starting to imagine something different.”

This is where new ideas, identities, or goals begin to form. It’s often fragile at first—part hope, part fear. You might feel pulled toward a pivot, a business, a new role, or simply a new way of working.

Self-trust in this phase looks like:

Allowing yourself to explore without overcommitting. Taking small, aligned steps and noticing what feels real.

4. Forward Motion – “I know what I want, and I’m ready to move.”

You’re not 100% certain—but you’re ready. This is where you start applying, building, creating, or advocating. You’re clearer about what you don’t want and more connected to what feels right.

Self-trust in this phase looks like:

Choosing clarity over certainty. Letting your inner yes guide your next right move. Taking action without betraying your boundaries.

Why Most Career Tools Miss the Mark

Most traditional career coaching is focused on performance:

“Polish your LinkedIn.” “Network harder.” “Pitch yourself.”

Those things matter—but not before you’ve built a baseline of self-trust.

If you’ve been socialized to hustle, code-switch, overachieve, or people-please to survive, you can’t strategy your way out of misalignment.

You have to slow down, feel, and reorient.

The Self-Trust Career Map does just that.

It helps you:

• Normalize the fog (instead of fighting it)

• Find your own answers (not someone else’s blueprint)

• Move in a way that feels safe, not performative

• Build a work life that honors your nervous system and truth

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How to Use the Self-Trust Career Map

1. Locate yourself.

Read through the four phases above. Which one feels most true today?

2. Name your needs.

Each phase has a different emotional and practical need. Fog might require rest. Forming might need brainstorming. Don’t skip steps just because they feel slow.

3. Choose a next right step.

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What This Isn’t

This is not about:

• Hustling toward clarity

• Forcing a pivot before you’re ready

• Pretending you’re fine when you’re not

This is about choosing your path. On your timeline. With your truth intact.

This one is different. I want you to feel that from the start.

We’ve been doing a lot of thinking together — about the anthropology of cacao, about the etymology of culture, about colonization and language and identity and reclamation. And all of that matters. All of that is part of this series.

But today, I want us to put the thinking down for a moment. I want us to *receive* instead.

This episode is a journaling exercise—a nourishment practice. If you’re driving, if you’re at your desk, if you’re in a cubicle with people three feet away — do what you can. You don’t have to write anything down. You can just listen and let the words land and notice what comes up. There’s no interpretation required. There’s no right answer.

This is just you, getting curious about yourself.

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One Question. Four Words.

What are you nourishing?

I want to sit with those four words for a minute before we go anywhere else, because each one is doing something.

What — we’re specifying. We’re pointing at something particular. Or maybe multiple things. What asks us to name, to identify, to get honest about what’s actually there.

Are — and I promised I wouldn’t get too deep into linguistics again, but bear with me — *are* is part of the verb *to be*. Being. Not doing.

This isn’t about your to-do list or your output or your productivity. This is about your state of being.

How are you living? How you are *embodying*. Being and doing are not the same thing, and I think a lot of us have spent a long time confusing them.

You — which sounds obvious, but isn’t. Who is the you we’re talking about?

How are you identifying yourself right now? How are you feeling *with* yourself? Are you someone who knows where they are, or have you drifted a little from your center? No judgment in the question.

Just: Who is the you who is being asked?

Nourishing — which is not the same as fueling. Not the same as pushing, extending, performing, or optimizing.

Nourishing is tending. Nourishing is care. Nourishing is something you do slowly, with attention, with the understanding that what you put in determines what can grow.

Try saying it to yourself with different emphasis each time.

*What* are you nourishing?

What *are* you nourishing?

What are *you* nourishing?

What are you *nourishing?*

Notice where each version lands in your body. Notice what shifts.

For me, when I land on that last word — *nourishing* — I get a small tingle in my chest—a kind of opening. Not everyone will have a physical response, and that’s completely fine.

But just notice. Just observe. Let your body be part of this conversation.

Words Are Spells

There’s a quote I came across somewhere — I don’t remember exactly where — that says: *words are spells.* And I love that. Because literally, we have to *spell* words. And also because there’s something genuinely magical happening when we choose specific words to convey specific meanings.

We’re getting clear. We’re casting something. We’re calling things into form that were previously just floating, undefined, and unnamed.

The difference between *nourish* and *fuel* is not small.

Fuel is transactional. You put it in, it gets used up, you need more. Fuel is about the machine.

Nourishment is about the living thing. Nourishment is about the whole system — not just what keeps you going, but what helps you *grow*.

So when I ask what you’re nourishing, I’m not asking what you’re powering through. I’m asking what you’re tending to.

What you’re giving conditions for growth. What you’re caring for — inside yourself, in your relationships, in your work, in your daily life.

The Oven You Don’t Want to Clean

Here’s the thing about asking yourself hard questions: sometimes we already know the answer, and the knowing is uncomfortable.

It’s like cleaning your home. You know the oven needs to be done. You know the bathtub needs attention. And you walk past it. You find something else to do. Because getting into it feels like too much, or it’s going to take longer than you want, or you’re just not ready to see how bad it actually got in there.

But at some point, it becomes undeniable. Unavoidable. The state of it starts affecting everything else.

Our inner lives work the same way.

There are places inside us we’ve been walking past. Questions we’ve not been asking. Things we know we need but haven’t permitted ourselves to name, to want, to tend to.

What have you been walking past lately? What is the thing, the person, the practice, the need — that you keep almost addressing and then moving on from?

What specifically is happening in your life right now that requires a different kind of attention and intention?

The Through Lines (And What Changes)

Here’s something I’ve been thinking about: some things stay constant in us across all the seasons of our lives, and there are things that shift and change and need to be renegotiated constantly.

The through lines are your core. Your non-negotiables, even when you can’t articulate them clearly. For me — and I’ve only gotten clear on this relatively recently — *autonomy* has always been mine.

It hasn’t always looked the same. I’ve been a contractor, a consultant, a yoga teacher, a communications specialist, and now a cacao blend maker. The actual work has changed dramatically.

Even in the moments when I was in a role that didn’t give me as much of that as I wanted, I was always asking: Is this affording me access to autonomy somewhere else? Through the income, through the connections, through the skills I’m building? If the answer was yes, I could hold the ground. If the answer started becoming no, that was information too.

What are your through lines? What has been consistently true about what you need, even as the circumstances changed?

It might be autonomy. It might be community, or creativity, or safety, or connection, or being outdoors, or being useful. It might be something you haven’t found the word for yet, but you know it when it’s present — and you feel it acutely when it’s not.

And equally important: what has *depleted* you consistently?

Where do you notice yourself shrinking? There are certain environments, certain interactions, certain dynamics where you stop feeling like yourself.

Where you start going quiet in ways that aren’t peaceful — they’re just absent. Where you lose your energy, your clarity, your sense of aliveness. That’s information too. Depletion is data.

What Does Nourishment Mean *Right Now*?

Some things are consistent — we all need air, water, movement, connection, to feel seen and heard. Those are not optional. Those are not luxuries. They are needs, not in the sense of entitlement, but in the sense of basic biological and emotional reality. We are animals. We are living things. We have needs, and those needs are not selfishness.

They are just *needs*.

But the dial — the specific amount and form that each kind of nourishment takes — that changes. And knowing what your dial is set to *right now*, in this specific season, in this particular phase — that’s the practice. That’s the ongoing work.

Maybe right now you need something completely different. Something you’ve never tried.

Something that felt impossible or impractical before, but something is pulling you toward it, and you keep dismissing the pull. Maybe now is the time to stop dismissing it.

Maybe you need to go on that trip. Finally, have that conversation with your boss, your partner, your friend, yourself. Maybe you need to take a break from something that used to nourish you but is now just a habit. Maybe you need the mac and cheese and the familiar TV show and the deep rest of doing nothing that your nervous system has been asking for. There is nourishment in that, too. There is nourishment in simplicity, in comfort, in not optimizing everything.

And maybe — *hint, hint* — you need some cacao. But truly, only if it calls to you.

Cacao Blend Pre order + Waitlist

Sit and Simmer

I’m going to wrap this up, because the whole point of this episode was never for me to give you a lot to carry. It was for you to receive. To sit. To simmer.

This question is one I return to constantly.

It shows up in my life wearing different clothes — *what do I need right now, what am I tired of, what should I be doing* — but underneath all the different versions of it is always the same thing: *what am I nourishing?*

I think it might be the foundational question. For our decisions — financial, emotional, relational, and professional. For how we live and work and love and rest. For how we understand who we are now, who we have been, and who we are becoming.

So I’ll leave you with it. Not as a homework assignment. Not as something to get right. Just as something to carry gently, and see what it opens.

WHAT are you nourishing?

What ARE you nourishing?

What are YOU nourishing?

What are you NOURISHING?

Take care. Be well. I’ll see you next time. 🤎

Raquel Sands is a small batch cacao blend maker, clarity and work strategist, and host of The Clarity Shift podcast. This series lives at the intersection of plant medicine, nourishment, culture, and self-awareness. Find her at farmer’s markets in Arlington, Virginia, in 2026, or reach out in the comments below.

We almost did a song. We were this close to writing something and performing it for you, because — can you believe it — it has been one full year of Capacity Conversations. One year of two women, one from each coast of the USA, having honest, sometimes uncomfortable, always real dialogue about self-trust, transformation, and the reality most modern Millennials are navigating right now.

Do we actually have the capacity to do all the things we want to do?

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That’s the question this podcast was built around. And one year in, we’re still asking it — but with more texture, more lived experience, and more willingness to sit in the complexity of the answer.

For those joining for the first time: I’m Raquel Sands, clarity and work strategist, certified yoga teacher, and graphic designer, supporting freedom seekers, freelancers, solopreneurs, consultants, and anyone in a nine-to-five who is committed to sovereignty and self-sufficiency. My goal is to help you create and sustain peace, purpose, and prosperity.

And my co-host is — a rewilding real estate agent, certified yoga teacher, clinical herbalist, naturalist, and one of the most thoughtful people I know when it comes to the intersection of land, community, wellness, and work. More on her in a moment.

This episode? It’s about our Work stories. Capital W — not the job title, not the salary, not the LinkedIn headline. The deeper Work. The thing we’re planting and harvesting. The thing that provides for us and that we nourish in return. The thing that, over time, actually writes who we are.

Here’s ours.

My Work Journey: From the Library to Corporate to Cacao

I didn’t come into this world knowing what I wanted to do. I don’t think most of us do, despite what the college application process implies.

What I did know early: I wanted to get to the heart of things. Literally. I remember telling my parents I wanted to be a heart surgeon or a brain surgeon — because those are the organs we can’t live without. The heart keeps us here. The brain keeps us us. I wanted to work with what mattered most.

Then came the high school biology dissection. I couldn’t do it. There went the surgeon career.

So I turned to the next thing that felt like the heart of everything: words.

Books, writing, journaling, thinking about thinking. I lived in language. And eventually I got the degree to match — an English degree, after trying nutrition, global affairs, and a few other paths that didn’t quite fit. My logic at the time: everybody needs someone who can communicate. Writers, editors, communicators — that’s a need that never goes away. (And then AI arrived. But that’s a whole other episode.)

I always worked. Even before my first official job, I was helping my dad with his business in middle school. He ran a trade school, teaching men air conditioning, heating, and refrigeration — getting up to 20 or 30 men certified at a time. I was his after-school secretary, unofficial and unpaid, but I was working. I learned what it looked like to build something from the ground up.

And watching both of my parents shaped how I understand work to this day. My mom has a master’s degree. She went the institutional route — steady, structured, working for the school district for years. My dad pieced it together differently — teacher, handyman, maintenance worker, school founder. Two entirely different approaches. Neither one was purely about money. They were both, in their own way, about meaning. About finding a path that fits their hands.

My official first job was at the library — because I loved books and the kind of people who also loved books. After that: kindergarten STEM teacher (bubbly energy, genuinely exhausting), yoga teacher, yoga studio manager, dog walker, front desk at a physical therapy clinic. Health kept showing up in my life even when I wasn’t the practitioner — just someone in the room where healing happened.

The majority of my career, though, has been in corporate communications — writing, editing, designing, and being the jane-of-all-trades communicator in organizations. Ten years across the government sector, nonprofits, and private companies. I’ve been an employee, a contractor, a consultant, and a freelancer. (And yes — contractor and consultant are two distinct legal and financial structures with different benefit implications, which matters a lot if you’re navigating independent work right now.)

I’ve worked alongside multinational giants like Deloitte and Uber, and also inside tiny nonprofits with 13 people. And what I’ve learned across all of it is that I don’t thrive in enormous spaces — the bigger the machine, the more invisible the human. I’m a suburban person: I like access to the city, but I need a sense of intimacy and proportion. I like being able to see the whole room.

And what I’ve carried with me into everything I now teach and talk about is this: the corporate structure, whether nonprofit, for-profit, or government, is a system that may or may not be built for you.

The ladder exists. The question is whether climbing it is actually taking you somewhere you want to go — and whether the ladder is even still there.

Recently — and Sarah knew this was coming before most people did — I launched a small batch cacao blend business.

I know. It sounds like a pivot. And it is. But it’s also the most direct line between everything I’ve ever cared about: health, ancestry, plant medicine, community, and nourishment as a form of sustainability. I’m 50% indigenous from Central and South America (23andMe confirmed what I already felt in my bones), and 8 to 12% West African. Cacao is Central American. It was used by the Mayans, the Olmec, the Aztec — not as a treat, but as medicine, as currency, as spiritual practice. Stepping into this work feels less like a business decision and more like a homecoming.

There’s also a practical need I kept bumping into: corporate coaching, career strategy, income sovereignty work — it’s all in the head. It’s conceptual. You can’t hold a mindset shift in your hands. And I was craving something that could meet people in their bodies, not just their brains. Cacao does that. It’s grounding. It’s tangible. It’s nourishing in a way I can actually pass across a farmer’s market table and watch someone receive.

My relationship to work has always been a question mark. When I graduated from college, it was survival mode: pay off the student debt, pay off the car, save money. That was the work. Concrete, pressing, legible. As I’ve built capacity — and it has taken years — the questions have shifted. What do I want to be known for? What do I want to plant? What does work mean in this season of my life?

Sarah’s Work Journey: From Bait City BBQ to Rewilding Real Estate

She grew up in Napoleon, Missouri, a small population. The closest town was Bait City, four miles from the highway. And Bait City had a barbecue restaurant, and that barbecue restaurant was my first job, and she was there for eight years, on and off, starting at 16.

Bait City BBQ is having its 50-year reunion this summer. She’s going back to Missouri to be there. Some places just stay with you.

She started working because that was what you did. She started paying for her own gas in high school — that was the culture she was raised in. Work wasn’t optional. It wasn’t even really a conversation. And one of the first lessons she absorbed about work came from that restaurant. They were staffed mostly by women, and the message received was clear: a bad period is not a reason not to come to work.

That is a complicated inheritance. On one hand: resilience. On the other hand, the erasure of the body.

After Bait City BBQ, her job history reads like a tour through American labor. She worked in her mom’s printing warehouse. She worked at a Scantron Testing Center for a summer, manually entering all the tests the computer couldn’t read. She had wrist surgery and had to leave the restaurant, so she went to work at a commercial bank in a small town.

That bank job taught her something I think about often: when you work around a thing long enough, its value shifts. In restaurants, she was surrounded by food. The abundance of it changed how I related to it. In banking, she was surrounded by money. The first time she carried a stack of cash, she was floored — this was big-money energy I’d never experienced. And then months later, it was just paper. Both experiences loosened something in me about what we think things are worth.

She cleaned houses. She became a server and then a shift manager at Cafe Verona in Independence, Missouri. Then accepted a manager position at Lulu’s Thai Noodle Shop in downtown Kansas City.

Lulu’s happened to be right next door to the yoga school she started attending in 2017. That proximity was not accidental. It was that particular flavor of serendipity where you realize the path was already laying itself out while you were busy managing lunch service.

She started studying herbalism around that same time, 2016. And started experimenting: making products, giving them away, making more, giving those away too. And then she thought: what if I sell these at the farmer’s market?

That was the moment everything shifted. Selling plants woke her up. She became a bulk dry goods department manager at Tarot Health and Wellness, managing medicinal and culinary herbs in little jars — keeping them stocked, learning to love even the smallest quantity of something rare or beautiful. Plants kept teaching her: value is not fixed. Value is felt.

She launched my first herbal brand, Scorpio Rising Botanicals. Then went to yoga school and studied psychological yoga — embodied yoga principles, coaching modalities, clinical herbalism, all weaving together. In January 2020, she opened my own little studio in Independence, Missouri, in a building that had been renovated from an old hospital — specifically, the hospital where she was born. The same place that received me into the world became the place she was trying to rebirth my adult professional life.

Clinician: check. Nutritionist: check. Body worker: check. Location with actual personal meaning: check.

In February 2020, she held my first public workshop.

In March 2020, she shut the building to the world.

It took her five years to fully digest what happened. It is 2026 now, and she can finally look back and say: That was the break in her work story. That was the forced shift into the deeper layers.

She got a remote job doing social media marketing. That remote work gave her the mobility to enroll in a wilderness and naturalist school program and make the move from Missouri to Western Washington. Shortly after arriving, the company downsized and laid off. So she went back to restaurants — became a cook at Flavor Bistro in Duvall, which had an unusual menu (kangaroo, python, ingredients from all over the world) and was genuinely strange in the best possible way.

Then she took a month off — the first time in her entire working life did not work for a month — and went to Alaska with her husband, Justin. They spent that dark Alaskan month working on themselves and their marriage. That pause was its own kind of labor. The kind that doesn’t show up on a resume.

She came back to Duvall and started real estate school. She was doing the naturalist program during the day and real estate school at night. But real estate ticked every single box she’d been searching for: community, environment, nutrition of place, terrain theory, and the idea that our surroundings are part of our digestive process as human beings. She didn’t want to be a dietitian because health was never just about what was happening in one body in isolation. It was always about the body in its environment. Real estate — particularly intentional communities, eco-villages, land-based living — finally gave her a container for all of that.

She recently left a staff support role in a real estate office. And is back to being a full-time agent, focusing on what she’s always been most passionate about: eco-villages, intentional communities, rewilding real estate. The first-ever Pacific Northwest eco-village tours are planned for July 2027. I’m building that now.

What We Both Keep Coming Back To

We’ve both had seasons where we thought we’d arrived and then found ourselves back at the beginning of something new.

Here’s what we know: the lowercase w work — the bills-and-survival version — is real. It’s necessary.

But the capital W Work — the meaning, the gift, the thing you’re here to plant — that’s the compass. And learning to read it takes time. It takes getting things wrong. It takes the dissection you couldn’t do, the studio you had to close, and the job you lost a month after you moved across the country.

On Being Women in Work

We can’t write this episode without saying it plainly: work systems were not designed with women in mind. Not emotionally, not physically, not spiritually, not hormonally.

Men’s hormonal cycles are roughly the same every day — consistent energy, consistent rhythm. Women’s cycles are monthly, shifting, layered with physical demand. And then there’s perimenopause. And pregnancy. And caregiving. And the constant negotiation of whether you have children, how many, and whether you’re the head of the household.

One of my close friends is currently pregnant for the first time — and navigating it as a contractor. The fear of losing income, of being sidelined, of being quietly managed out because you’re no longer “producing” for the organization while you’re literally producing a human being — that fear is not irrational. It’s documented. It’s the reality.

We carry that. We carry all of it into work environments that were built around a different kind of body. And the first lesson many of us received — as Sarah did at 16, in a restaurant staffed by women — was that our cycles don’t matter here. Push through.

That lesson has its gifts. Resilience is real. But so is the cost.

We wish we’d considered that sooner. And we’re saying it now, on the record, in case it helps someone earlier in their journey: your body’s rhythms are not an inconvenience. They are information. And building work around them — rather than against them — is not softness. It is, arguably, the most intelligent thing you can do.

The Work of Knowing Yourself

Not once, not in a single breakthrough, but continuously — in every season, at every scale.

What was true at 22 is not necessarily true at 32. What worked in Missouri doesn’t always work in Western Washington. What corporate gave us — structure, exposure, income, humbling lessons — is not what we need to carry forward.

Sarah is a country mouse who thought she needed to be in the city. I am a suburb person who needed both the intimacy of small and the access of large. Sarah sells land and community, and the idea that our terrain is part of our health. I blend cacao and talk about what it costs to stay in a system that was never designed for your flourishing.

We are both still figuring it out. Loudly.

Where We Are Now

Raquel is a clarity and work strategist, the host of The Clarity Shift podcast, and the founder of a small batch cacao blend business rooted in Central American ancestry and holistic nourishment. She offers blends specifically designed to support the female body, to honor indigenous plant traditions, and to ground people in something physical and real alongside all the conceptual work of career and income sovereignty. Find her at farmers’ markets in the Arlington, Virginia area in 2026.

Sarah is a rewilding real estate agent based in the Pacific Northwest, a certified yoga teacher, clinical herbalist, and the organizer of the first-ever Pacific Northwest Eco-Village Tours, coming July 2027. She’s in the business of helping people find — or build — the village they’ve been looking for.

One year. A lot of ground covered. More to come.

Thank you for being here. Thank you for listening. Thank you for doing your own capital W Work, in whatever form it takes.

Capacity Conversations drops regularly wherever you listen to podcasts. Subscribe on Substack to never miss an episode.

A journey of learning about this plant — this plant medicine — and how it has traveled across continents, across languages, across civilizations, across cosmologies.

How cacao transforms us not only through consumption, but through observation, mindfulness, reflection, embodiment, and relationship.

This is Episode Two. And as always, I don’t edit these.

I like things raw, rugged, unpolished — as natural as possible.

So you may hear the wind in the trees, my footsteps on the trail, the grass brushing against rocks.

I want you to feel like you’re here with me.

Let’s begin.

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Cacao’s True Origin Story (The One Most People Don’t Know)

We often hear the story of cacao as a Mesoamerican plant — Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras.

And yes, cacao is deeply woven into those cultures.

But the cacao tree is actually **native to South America** — specifically Ecuador, northern Peru, and parts of the Amazon basin. The earliest evidence shows that 7,500 years ago, people were already working with this plant.

8,000 years of transformation. 8,000 years of meaning. And somehow, this plant survived:

- civilizations rising and collapsing

- colonization

- forced labor

- language shifts

- cultural erasure

- industrialization

- globalization

It survived all of it.

The Olmecs: The First Keepers of Kakawa

The first archaeological evidence of cacao use comes from the Olmecs — around 1900 BCE to 300 BCE — along the Gulf Coast of what is now southeastern Mexico. Archaeologists found ceramic vessels with theobromine residue, a compound found in cacao.

Imagine that traces of cacao remain thousands of years later. The Olmecs didn’t call it cacao.

Even the word itself has lived many lives. The Maya inherited both the plant and the word. And for them, cacao wasn’t just food — it was cosmology.

In the Popol Vuh, one of the oldest surviving Maya sacred texts, cacao appears as part of the Sustenance Mountain — the mythical source of life itself.

Cacao was:

- written into stone monuments

- painted on vessels

- placed inside tombs

- used in marriage ceremonies

- used in coming‑of‑age rituals

- used as offerings to the gods

- used as currency

- used as medicine

It was divine. It was relational. It was alive.

And I think about that often — what it means to hold something so sacred that it transcends time, space, and form.

Do we have anything like that today?

The Aztecs — the Mexica — had their own cosmology around cacao. In their tradition, the god Quetzalcoatl brought cacao to humanity as a gift.

Water — the most essential substance for life. Water — the thing our bodies are mostly made of.

Cacao was reserved for:

- rulers

- warriors

- priests

It was mixed with chili, vanilla, or flowers. It was poured from a height to create foam — the original froth.

Cacao beans were currency. A tamale costs a few beans. A turkey costs many more. Cacao was so valuable that people counterfeited cacao beans.

When the Spanish arrived in 1519, it wasn’t a “new world.” It was a world with complete systems — spiritual, agricultural, economic, cosmological. But because it didn’t match what the Spanish understood, they destroyed what they couldn’t comprehend and took what they wanted.

They burned the codices.

They suppressed the ceremonies.

They fractured the knowledge.

They enslaved the people.

And cacao — this divine, relational, sacred plant — became a commodity. The Spanish added sugar and cinnamon. They heated it. They processed it. They turned it into chocolate.

By 1544, Mayan delegates brought cacao to the Spanish court — one of the first documented introductions of chocolate to Europe. And from there, Europe became obsessed.

Cacao Becomes Chocolate: Extraction on Top of Extraction: Once demand exploded, plantations spread. The Portuguese transplanted cacao to West Africa. Forced labor and slavery fueled the industry. The Industrial Revolution gave us the chocolate bar.

And cacao — once a sacred plant — became a global commodity built on extraction:

- extraction of land

- extraction of labor

- extraction of culture

- extraction of meaning

A complete inversion of what cacao once was.

Why This Matters to Me — A First‑Generation, Small‑Batch Cacao Maker

I think about all of this constantly. Because I’m not outside the critique. I’m inside it.

I’m a small‑batch cacao blender — one woman, one tiny brand — trying to do this with integrity, sustainability, and reverence.

My ancestry — confirmed by DNA and lived experience — is Indigenous, West African, and Spanish. My lineage reaches into the places where cacao grew. My people’s histories are woven into this plant.

But I didn’t grow up with cacao in a ceremonial or embodied way.

That transmission was interrupted — the way it was interrupted for so many of us from colonized lineages. So I’m not reclaiming something I fully understand.

I’m returning to something I’m still learning. Something I’m still listening to.

Something I’m still tending.

With humility. With excitement.

With grief. With joy. With gratitude.

The next time you hold something made with cacao — a drink, a piece of chocolate, a bar, a blend — pause.

Take a breath.

Feel the weight of it.

Feel the history of it.

Feel the journey of it.

This plant has:

- crossed oceans

- crossed languages

- crossed civilizations

- crossed cosmologies

- crossed trauma

- crossed time

It has been a phoenix — dying, resurrecting, transforming, surviving. And now it is in your hands.

If you feel called, say thank you to the plant.

If you feel called, say thank you to yourself for listening, learning, remembering.

Thank you for being on this journey with me! Thank you for creating space for your own transformation.

Thank you for tending to your own soil.

I’ll link the references below.

If you want to refill, join the waitlist, or go deeper — leave a comment or send me an email.

Refill +Waitlist

This is about community, relationship, and growth. Take care of yourselves. Be well. I’ll talk to you next time 🤗🤗

References & Further Reading

Archaeology & Early Cacao Evidence

• Ancient Cacao Use in South America — Zarrillo et al., Nature Ecology & Evolution (2018).
  Earliest known cacao residue (7,500+ years old) found in Ecuador’s Upper Amazon region.

• Theobromine Residue in Olmec Pottery — Powis et al., Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
  Chemical analysis confirming cacao use among the Olmec.

Mesoamerican Cosmology & Cacao

• The Popol Vuh — Sacred Maya text referencing cacao as part of the “Sustenance Mountain.”

• Maya Cacao Rituals — Coe & Coe, The True History of Chocolate.
  Foundational text on cacao’s spiritual, economic, and ritual significance.

Aztec Use of Cacao

• Aztec Cacahuatl — Ethnohistorical accounts describing cacao as elite food, currency, and sacred offering.

• Quetzalcoatl and the Gift of Cacao — Nahua mythology linking cacao to divine origins.

Colonization & the Transformation of Cacao

• Spanish Conquest Accounts — Hernán Cortés’ letters describing cacao in Montezuma’s court.

• Destruction of Aztec Codices — Documentation of colonial suppression of Indigenous knowledge systems.

• Cacao in Early Colonial Europe — How sugar + heat transformed cacao into chocolate.

Slavery, Plantations & Global Chocolate Industry

• Cacao Plantations in West Africa — Portuguese transplantation of cacao to São Tomé and Príncipe (1822 onward).

• Forced Labor in Chocolate Production — Historical accounts of enslaved labor in cacao cultivation.

• Industrial Revolution & Chocolate — How mechanization created the modern chocolate bar.

Linguistics & Etymology

• Etymology of “Cacao” — Linguistic evolution from kakawa → cacao → cocoa.

• Mixe‑Zoquean Language Family — Origins of the earliest known cacao word.

Cultural Lineage, Identity & Reclamation

• Indigenous Mesoamerican Foodways — How food, plants, and cosmology intertwine.

• Reclaiming Ancestral Practices — Contemporary scholarship on cultural return and lineage repair.

• Colonial Interruption of Plant Lineages — How colonization disrupted generational knowledge transmission.

It assumes you’re climbing a ladder.

It assumes you have the same access, values, and energy as everyone else.

It rewards optimization and obedience. And it rarely makes space for what it actually means to build a career that honors your context, your nervous system, and your truth.

If you’ve ever felt like your career/path to making money isn’t yours—even when it looks “successful”—you’re not imagining it. And you’re not alone.

That’s why I created the Career Autonomy Framework—a values-based, trauma-aware, and dignity-centered approach to career clarity for people who are reimagining what work can look like on their terms.

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What Is Career Autonomy?

Career autonomy isn’t about being a freelancer or entrepreneur (though it can be). It’s about:

Making decisions from self-trust, not survival

Designing work that aligns with your energy, values, and lived experience

Reclaiming agency in systems that were never built for your wholeness

Saying no to roles, rhythms, and rules that betray your integrity

Autonomy is not going it alone. It’s choosing how you relate to your labor, your life, and your future.

This isn’t a productivity system or a “5 steps to success” plan. It’s a compass—a tool to help you orient when everything feels unclear.

1. Clarity

Knowing what you want, what you need, and what you no longer have capacity for.

It’s not just mental—it’s somatic, emotional, and spiritual.

> Ask yourself: What is my body telling me about what’s misaligned? What would be possible if I stopped pretending I’m fine?

2. Capacity

Your time, energy, and nervous system are not infinite.

Career autonomy means working in rhythm with your real capacity, not the one capitalism expects from you.

> You don’t need to “push through.” You need to learn your actual limits—and stop making them a problem.

3. Context

Your culture, upbringing, access, and identity shape your work life.

If you’re first-gen, neurodivergent, BIPOC, or navigating inherited pressure, your career path will never look linear—and that’s not a flaw.

> You are not behind. You are carrying more. Let’s make that visible.

4. Choice

Autonomy is not about freedom from all constraints—it’s about knowing what your real options are and making informed, intentional decisions.

> What am I choosing out of fear? What would it look like to choose from self-trust instead?

5. Care

Because what’s the point of career clarity if it burns you out?

True autonomy includes nervous system safety, emotional stewardship, and honest pacing.

> Self-abandonment is not required for success.

Who This Is For

The Career Autonomy Framework was built for people like you:

• Burnt-out high achievers who are ready to stop performing and start aligning

• Values-led humans who care deeply and want their work to reflect that

• Career pivoters who know they’ve outgrown their roles, but aren’t sure what’s next

• Sensitive souls who crave strategy without the hype, pressure, or productivity traps

You don’t have to be perfectly clear, or totally healed, or ready to leap. You just have to be willing to stop gaslighting yourself and start listening inward.

Career autonomy isn’t the end goal—it’s a practice.

A lens. A way of making space for your truth in a world that often demands otherwise.

Want some good good nourishment while you pivot, prepare, and/or propel yourself to your next step?

I am a small batch cacao blend maker and currently offering three blend “flavors” for pre-order, waitlist, and local pick-up.

Let me know which blend you'd like!

I’m recording this outside. Walking, actually. You might hear the trees rustling in the wind. Maybe a plane overhead. I’m keeping the microphone close so you don’t lose me — so bear with me if the world sneaks in around the edges. That feels fitting, honestly, because that’s kind of what this whole update is about: the world sneaking in, changing things, and me figuring out how to move through it on my own terms.

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Welcome back. And if you’re new here — hi, I’m Raquel Sands. Welcome to A Day in the Life, a series I didn’t plan so much as stumble into. It started about a year ago, or maybe longer, depending on how you count these things, and it evolved the way most true things do: organically, without a content calendar or a launch strategy, just a desire to be honest and share what it actually looks and feels like to pivot in work, in business, in meaning-making, in income. To live out sovereignty — whatever that word holds — across every season.

So, here’s where I am now.

From Library Shelves to Cacao Blends: The Full Arc

I’ve been a professional job-offer-hopper since, officially, 2008 — my first part-time job at a library. Before that, I was helping my dad run his business in middle school, which would put us somewhere around 2005. Unofficial secretary.

Since 2008, I’ve been a graphic designer, a writer and editor, a website designer, a dog walker, a yoga teacher, a front desk person at a physical therapy clinic, and a yoga studio manager.

I’ve worked for nonprofits, for-profits, and for the government. Most recently, for the past few years, I’ve been primarily a contractor.

A contractor, here in the US, can be treated as a W-2 employee but within a defined contract window — usually a year, with the possibility of extension or full employment.

A consultant operates differently, often on a 1099 (in Virginia, it’s typically an 888 form), more like a freelancer, project-based, without the same benefits structure. I’ve been both.

Constant change is, I think, just my Sagittarius Rising. And now — for the past two to three months — I am a small batch cacao blend maker.

Why Cacao? Why Now?

I don’t make the cacao from scratch. I source it already ethically produced, and then I blend it with spices and herbs to amplify what raw cacao already does — already is — medicinally and nutritionally.

And this is a full-circle moment for me in a way I’m still tracing.

Cacao has been part of my personal practice — my lifestyle — for years. I’d drink it with black pepper and honey, sometimes turmeric for the nutritional benefits: magnesium, iron, flavonoids.

And since I’ve never been a coffee drinker (I’ve tried multiple times, with sugar, milk, with decaf, and regular, and my body rejects the caffeine). So I drink lots of tea (green varieties, herbal anything, chai), water (carbonated/sparkly or just plain), and bone broth (because whey protein also disagrees with my tummy and who doesn’t want a natural protein supplement?) AND cacao.

Cacao became my morning ritual, my centering drink, my grounding. I started adding it to pancakes — banana cacao pancakes, which are as good as they sound — and it just became more and more an extension of me.

But there’s a deeper thread here, too.

For thousands of years, they used it for grounding, for healing, for meditation. The word itself, in Greek, translates roughly as food of the Gods, which is interesting because we’re talking about a Central American plant getting its name translated into Greek, and that alone is a whole essay about how language and history and power move.

For me, drinking cacao became tied to something I’d call ancestral veneration — which, for me, simply means a practice of honoring ancestors: mine, yours, ours. It’s less a rigid definition and more a felt sense. A practice of closeness. Of remembering where things — and we — come from.

So when I started thinking about what kind of business I actually wanted to build, cacao was already there. Waiting.

The Problem with “Just Making Money” (And Why It Never Worked for Me)

Here’s a through line I’ve been noticing across my entire working life — and I mean from 2005 to right now:

I cannot make money the priority. I’ve tried. It doesn’t work in my body. When money becomes the first thing, the only thing, the main thing — I struggle.

There’s a weight to it that isn’t even the weight of the work itself, because I actually enjoy working. I enjoy pushing myself. I enjoy becoming the next version of whoever I’m supposed to be. But money has never answered the questions that matter most to me.

It’s always been the support structure — the thing that pays the bills, the thing that helps me manage debt — not the reason I get up.

Not as an afterthought, but as a natural consequence. When I honor my skills, my passions, and my desire to support and uplift others, money can be part of that. When I flip the formula, I lose myself.

After I got my bachelor’s in English in 2014, I felt that flip happening. The world said: make money the priority, figure everything else out after. And I tried. And I couldn’t. It felt like I was constantly holding something that didn’t fit my hands.

That’s part of why I started The Clarity Shift — my larger podcast, now three years running. Not to advise the traditional sense. Not another “how to optimize your resume” show. But a space to deconstruct, decompress, dissect: how do we understand ourselves within these systems? How do we gain self-awareness — not through more personality tests, though I love my Enneagram and my Myers-Briggs and my astrology, I really do — but through critical cultural commentary? Social critique? Real questions about whether these systems are actually built for us, and how we can repurpose them?

That’s what the corporate ladder conversation became on that podcast.

Until it became something else. Until the ladder started to disappear.

AI, Instability, and the Book Nobody Asked to Open

We’re in 2026, and so much of the conversation around work has shifted.

The stability that was promised — go to school, get the degree, follow the system, and the system will hold you — that promise is gone. Or it’s changing so fast nobody can read the new terms.

AI and tech are being used by employers to remove jobs. Whole teams. Whole departments. Whole industries. And there’s this unsettling reality emerging: we are participating in our own destabilization without having first defined what stability even means for us.

I’ve had LinkedIn Lives about this. Workshops. I’ve been trying to read the room — take the temperature of other Millennials, some Gen Z, people who are going to be working for the next several decades — about what this shift actually feels like. And what I hear, consistently, is fear. Because it’s not just a new chapter. It’s a new book. Nobody voted to open.

I made my own decision a few years ago: get out of corporate sooner rather than later. Being a contractor, I had watched too many people — people who’d stayed loyal to organizations for decades — get displaced in 24 hours. Families upended. Structures collapsed overnight. I didn’t want that to be me. I want, as much as I can, autonomy. Preparation. Control over the arc of my own story.

That meant building something of my own.

Why Career Coaching Wasn’t the Answer (For Me)

I dabbled in career coaching. I say “dabbled” honestly — because I never fully identified with the title. I’m pretty anti-corporate, if you’ve read my essays or listened to the podcast. But I did want to help people repurpose the corporate ladder: use the system strategically rather than being used by it.

The problem was twofold.

First: the ladder isn’t really there to repurpose anymore. The game has changed. Second: career coaching, at least the way I was approaching it, felt intangible. Theoretical. All in the head. There was no physical result you could hold, no immediate transformation you could point to. Unlike personal training, where someone can see their body change, income sovereignty, and mindset shifts are long, invisible processes. They’re real — deeply real — but they’re hard to package, hard to sell, hard to show in a culture that wants before-and-after pictures.

I needed something grounding. Something people could hold in their hands. Something that worked on the body as well as the mind.

So: cacao.

The Three Blends (And What They’re For)

I currently have three blends, and if you’re in the DC, Maryland, Virginia area, I’m at farmer’s markets this season — 2026 —, and you can find me in Arlington, Virginia.

La Luna — The Moon Blend. This one is for women. Specifically for people who are currently menstruating or in perimenopause. Cacao is already rich in magnesium and iron, which directly support the body during menstruation (we lose iron, and cacao helps replenish it). I added vanilla, cinnamon, and a few other ingredients specifically to support calm, serotonin, and bloating relief. For the days when your body needs gentleness.

Kakawa — The Root Blend Kakawa is the indigenous word for cacao. This blend has three ingredients: cacao powder, guajillo chili (a mild, aromatic heat — not overwhelming), and vanilla. It’s a tribute to the roots. The way cacao was prepared before it became hot chocolate and chocolate bars. To the people who understood this plant first.

The Coffee Alternative Blend is for the curious coffee drinkers. Cacao has roughly 12 milligrams of caffeine versus coffee’s 100-plus milligrams. If you want something bitter, warming, and ritualistic in the morning — but without the jitteriness, the crash, or the dependency — this blend is for you. Higher in magnesium, higher in iron, rich in flavonoids. Mentally stabilizing differently.

If you’re not local, I have a waitlist. Once I’m ready to ship, you’ll be the first to know.

Pre-order and Waitlist

I also make cacao-scented candles — same plant, different form. Let me know if you want those shipped to you, or come grab them at the market.

Nourishment Is the Foundation. Everything Else Comes After.

Here’s what I want you to take away from this — from this episode, this post, this whole series. The one thing:

Mental, physical, spiritual, emotional.

In whatever combination makes sense for your body and your life. The more we can nourish ourselves — consistently, essentially, sustainably — the easier everything else becomes. The work. The income. The pivots. The failures and the course corrections. Being willing to try something new and also being okay when it doesn’t work.

Cacao is my small contribution to that. It’s not a cure. It’s not magic. But it’s something I can offer with my hands that grounds me, that connects me to my ancestry, that supports the body in real, measurable ways.

And it’s one piece of a larger offering — because I’ll still write and talk about work and income sovereignty. That’s always going to be part of what I do. I just now see it as one piece, not the whole picture.

The whole picture includes nourishment. Includes the body. Includes ancestors, plants, and practices that have been around far longer than any corporate structure.

Final Thoughts (Sent With a Big Hug😍😍 )

This was a long episode. Long post. I know. But I felt like you deserved the full arc — the evolution of this series, this podcast, this work, and this new chapter. Or maybe a new book is the better word. This new genre I’m writing myself into.

I’m grateful you’re here. Whether you’ve been reading since the beginning or stumbled onto this today while walking your own version of this path.

Keep nourishing yourself. Give yourself grace. Take time. And if you want to support me, come find me at a farmer’s market, get on the waitlist, or just keep reading. That’s enough too.

Sending you all a big hug. 🤎

Raquel Sands is the host of The Clarity Shift podcast and the creator of a small batch cacao blend business rooted in ancestral wellness and income sovereignty. She writes and speaks on work, meaning-making, career pivots, and nourishment in the DC/Maryland/Virginia area and online.

We went there for religion. On faith. On what it means to be a millennial who grew up inside systems that told us how to think, what to believe, who to be — and what happens when you decide to start discerning for yourself.

This one is long. This one is messy. This one is real. Buckle in.

Refresher: What is The Capacity Conversations series

Do we actually have the capacity to live the lives we want?

Through challenging dialogue, ancestral storytelling, nervous system awareness, social history, and honest reflections on identity, work, and humanity, this series dives into the forces shaping our exhaustion — and the possibilities for reclaiming self-trust, purpose, and aliveness.

Each episode blends:

• Millennial survival tools

• Global + ancestral context (colonization, capitalism, migration, lineage)

• Nervous system + somatic wisdom

• Spiritual and cultural literacy

• Real strategies for rebuilding capacity

• AI-era awareness + digital overwhelm navigation

• Modern identity, burnout, boundaries, and self-trust

If you’ve ever felt tired for reasons you can’t name, overwhelmed by the world, disconnected from your purpose, or trapped in roles that no longer fit — this show is for you.

In This Episode 9: The Question We Couldn’t Not Ask

Have we been betrayed by religion?

Not religion as a concept. Not spirituality. Not the human impulse to reach for something beyond yourself. But religion as a system — as an institution with rules, hierarchies, gatekeepers, and the power to decide who is worthy, who is silent, and who gets to speak.

We’re talking primarily about what we know — Abrahamic traditions, specifically Christianity in America. Because that’s where we grew up. That’s what shaped us. That’s what we’re still, in some ways, metabolizing.

And the honest answer?

For some of us — yes. There was a betrayal. Not always dramatic. Not always visible. Sometimes just a quiet, accumulating cost.

The Slap in the Uterus

Because that’s what it was for her.

Growing up in a conservative Christian environment where sovereignty — real, embodied, self-directed sovereignty — was something that had to be outsourced. To the man in the church. To the doctrine. To the institution.

And she’s not talking about the extreme cases, though those exist, and she named them. She’s talking about the subliminal messaging. The slow, ambient teaching is what your job is to submit. That your body is not your own. That the man holds the power and the woman holds the silence.

“Women keep silence in the church” — taken to its extreme in the most conservative corners of American Christianity. And even in its mild forms: a slow erosion of the belief that you are enough, that you know enough, that you can trust yourself enough to lead your own life.

The deepest anxiety for some of us is still tied to the fear of hellfire. Am I good enough? The answer, according to the system, is no. You are not, by nature, enough. You need saving.

And I don’t want to be a fish. I don’t want to be sold fish. I want to be a fisher person.

That’s the whole thing, honestly.

Religion as a System — What It Does and What It Costs

Here’s the thing about systems: they do something useful. They create a container. They provide structure when you don’t have one internally. They say this is the substrate of reality, this is how you orient, this is what the world is.

And that’s genuinely powerful. When you’re a child. When you’re in survival mode. When you don’t have the internal resources yet to build your own compass.

But here’s what happens to some of us: the system becomes a substitute for discernment.

You go. You confess. You say your Hail Marys. You’ve got your hell insurance. And then you go back to your life unchanged because the system processed your sin for you. You didn’t have to sit with it. You didn’t have to look at how it lives in your body, how it shows up in your relationships, what the fruit of your actions actually is.

You outsourced it.

And outsourcing — whether it’s to religion, to a job title, to a relationship, to money — feels like safety until it doesn’t. Until one day you wake up and realize that no one has been driving. That you’ve been sedated the whole time.

I want to be conscious at all times. Even when it’s hard. Even when nobody’s watching. Even before bed, turning over the day, asking: Did I say that the way I meant it? Did I cause harm I didn’t intend? Was I true to myself in that moment?

That’s not a punishment. That’s a practice. That’s the work.

The Slave Bible — When the System Shows Its Hand

This came up in our conversation, and it stopped both of us.

The Slave Bible. An edited version of scripture used during the transatlantic slave trade and its aftermath, in which the chapters on freedom and sovereignty were literally removed. Because if the enslaved people had access to the God who liberates, the system would have had a problem.

That is religion as a tool of control made visible.

And what it reveals is something worth sitting with: the institutions that claim to point us toward the highest good have historically had a vested interest in deciding which humans deserve that pointing.

The cherry-picking of what knowledge the plebs are allowed to have. The withholding of the higher version of truth. The cathedral, with its eyes pointed upward — drawing your attention to the divine — while the institution below controls the terms.

This is not to say that all religious practice is this.

It is to say that the impulse toward control and hierarchy will colonize anything — including the sacred — if we let it go unexamined.

Lowercase f: Faith as a Personal Practice

Here’s where Sarah and I both land, and it’s not in abandonment.

We both believe in something. We’re both people of faith in the lowercase-f sense — the inner compass, the mystery, the relationship with what we call the divine without needing to give it a specific name or gender or doctrine.

Sarah calls it the highest good. I call it the Great Mystery, the Great Grandmother, the universe, the divine — whatever language doesn’t close the door.

And what both of us are doing is placing the responsibility of our own discernment back on ourselves.

We’re not outsourcing it. Not to the church, not to a man, not to a doctrine. We’re in a relationship with the mystery directly — like calling a friend, as I said in this episode. Not through an institution. Just: Can you help me here? Can you witness me?

That’s the same thing I needed from Sarah. And the same thing the mystery offers when you stop outsourcing it.

Millennials as the Bridge Generation — And What We’re Holding

We kept coming back to this: who are we as a generation? What is our actual situation?

We grew up without the internet, and then the internet grew up with us. Flash drives, CDs, hit clips, iPods, laptops, smartphones — we didn’t get handed a world that was already formed. We watched it form. We had to adapt to every pivot. And that gave us something the generations before us didn’t necessarily have: an ability to hold uncertainty as normal.

We’re the bridge between analog and digital. Between the post-WWII baseline of at least we’re not in a global war and the new baseline of AI, gun violence, climate, economic precarity, and the ongoing reverberations of every historical trauma we were never taught was happening.

We’re in our 30s and 40s, and it still feels like we’re supposed to have figured it out. But we’re the first generation to be doing this — whatever this is — with this level of emotional awareness. With therapy language. With the ability to say I need space right now in a way that small children in Seattle apparently knew, but many of us didn’t learn until we were adults.

And Sarah said something that I keep returning to: Because we’ve never known, we can create it and define it for ourselves.

That’s the lens. Not the trauma of uncertainty but the possibility of it. We don’t have a blueprint. Which means we can build one.

What Thriving Looks Like When You Stop Waiting for Permission

The culture wars, at their core, are an argument about thriving. Everyone thinks they know how to thrive better. Everyone is fighting for the right to define it.

But here’s what I think most people are actually fighting against: the feeling that someone else is defining it for them and getting it wrong.

Religion as a pseudo-parent says: if you just do X, you’re fine now and you’re fine for eternity. The formula. The guarantee. The insurance policy.

But eternity is incomprehensible. And the formula keeps failing us. Not because faith itself fails — but because the system that packaged it was built by humans with human agendas, human hierarchies, human blind spots.

So what do you do when the system fails you?

You don’t throw away the impulse toward the sacred. You reclaim it. You do the work of discerning it for yourself — without the guarantee, without the insurance, without someone else telling you whether you’re good enough.

You ask the question at the end of the day: Was this good?

And you answer it honestly.

That’s the whole practice. That’s the whole thing.

What This Has to Do With Work and Money

I know. You might be wondering what any of this has to do with income sovereignty and cacao blends.

Everything.

The same pattern that lives in religious outsourcing lives in professional outsourcing. We hand our sense of worth to a job title.

We hand our financial security to a company that can eliminate our position in a quarterly restructuring.

We hand our daily reality to a system that was not built to steward us — it was built to extract from us.

And then we’re surprised when we feel betrayed.

The work I do — the income sovereignty work, the career transition work, the building-something-of-your-own work — is the same as reclaiming your discernment from a system that was never designed to honor it. It’s saying: I am not a fish. I am not going to be sold fish. I am learning to fish.

The cacao in the tin on my table is the same. It’s something I make with my hands from a plant my ancestors knew, in a kitchen in Fairfax County, sold at a farmers market to people who want to know where their food comes from. It’s not outsourced. It’s not extracted. It’s mine — all the way down.

That’s what sovereignty tastes like. Whether it’s spiritual, financial, or professional, or embodied.

The same.

A Few Things We Didn’t Resolve (And That’s the Point)

This episode didn’t tie anything up neatly. Neither does this essay.

We didn’t settle the question of whether faith requires a community or can be entirely personal. We didn’t resolve the tension between the genuine good religion has done — the cathedrals pointing eyes upward, the radical inclusion of Jesus walking with women when no rabbi did, the genuine comfort of a story that says you are not alone — and the genuine harm.

We didn’t fully reckon with what it means to be the children of the ones who outsourced our spiritual formation, not out of malice but out of exhaustion, out of survival, out of the limits of what they had access to.

What we did do is name it. Sit with it. Let it be complicated.

And I think that’s close to what any honest religious practice might hope for, too: not certainty, but the willingness to keep asking.

Listen to the full Capacity Conversations episode wherever you get your podcasts, or in the audio section of this Substack.

If this finds you at the right moment, forward it to one person; it might find someone else.

And if you’re in Northern Virginia, my first market day is May 23rd at the Eat Local Farmers Market in Reston. Come find me. There will be cacao.

About the Hosts:

Raquel Sands is a clarity and work strategist supporting deep feelers and purpose-driven individuals to create and sustain their peace, purpose, and prosperity on their own terms. Find her work at [your website].

Sarah Liljegren is a real estate professional whose passion and purpose is to rewild space and bring it into more connection with nature and our natural cycles. She works at the intersection of housing, community, and ecological restoration.

“I’m tired of doing the impossible for the ungrateful.”

He meant the legal system.
I hear: capitalism, corporate “family” culture, the 9–5 machine, the gig economy, the “be grateful you have a job” era.

Because let’s be honest:

A lot of us have spent years doing the impossible for systems that never protected us… and then blaming ourselves when we’re not “successful enough.”

If you’re new here and this already hits something true in you, you can:

Subscribe now

We’ve Been Doing the Impossible

We have done everything we were told would “pay off”:

• Stayed late, gone above and beyond, held entire teams together

• Survived layoffs, reorganizations, and hiring freezes

• Adapted to AI, new tools, new platforms, new expectations

• Carried emotional labor that was never in our job description

• Smiled through fake “we’re a family” speeches

• Tried to be strategic, grateful, resilient, available, flexible

We grew. We stretched. We evolved.
We did the impossible, repeatedly.

For Systems That Were Never Built to Protect Us

And what did the system give in return?

Cost-cutting.
Layoffs.
Micromanagement.
Wage stagnation.
“Do more with less.”
“Be a team player.”
“Times are tough.”

It’s not because you’re not good enough.
It’s because the game was never designed for your well-being.

But here’s the part that cuts the deepest:

At some point, we stopped just being exploited by external systems…
and started participating in our own punishment.

The Enemy Within: When the System Starts Wearing Your Face

There’s a point where the system no longer needs to actively control you.

Because you’ve internalized it.

You start hearing its voice in your own thoughts:

“I should be further along by now.”
“Other people my age are more successful.”
“I shouldn’t be this tired.”
“If I were really smart, I’d have figured this out already.”
“I shouldn’t need help.”

That’s the enemy within.

Not because you’re self-destructive.
But because you were trained to believe:

• Your exhaustion = laziness

• Your burnout = weakness

• Your need for rest = a flaw

• Your slowness = failure

• Your boundaries = attitude

• Your desire for more = ingratitude

This is how structural problems become personal shame.

It’s how capitalism maintains itself without even lifting a finger:
by turning the worker into both the engine and the enforcer.

The system doesn’t have to punish you.
You punish yourself.

And that’s where the enemy within shows up most loudly:
When you sincerely believe you are “behind”
for not thriving in a collapsing system.

The Past Is Just a Story We Tell Ourselves

There’s another line I keep coming back to, from the movie Her:

“The past is just a story we tell ourselves.”

And yet so much of our self-criticism and “not enough-ness” comes from a past we’ve never re-examined:

• Old workplaces

• Old bosses

• Old performance reviews

• Old expectations

• Old relationships to work and worth

• Old versions of ourselves we’ve already outgrown

We are still measuring ourselves with rulers we didn’t choose, built by people who never lived our lives.

If the past is a story, then:

We don’t erase it.
We re-interpret it.
We re-claim it.
We re-narrate it.

We stop using our past as evidence against our present potential.

We recognize: “Oh, I was surviving a system, not failing as a person.”

The enemy within weakens the moment you decide:

My past is not a sentence.
It’s context.
I get to decide what it means now.

The Collapse Is Here. But So Is Our Power. 🔥

We are not imagining this moment.

• Capitalism is cracking in visible ways

• Entire sectors are being rewritten by AI

• Jobs are unstable, contracts end suddenly

• Cash is being replaced by digital transactions

• Wages are not matching the cost of living

• Companies are cutting people before profits

And yet, within all of that, we still have to make very real, very immediate decisions:

How do I pay my bills?
Do I stay or leave my job?
Do I go all in on my business?
Do I pivot to something more “practical”?
How do I position myself in this job market?
What does “stability” even mean now?

This is why I created my Crisis Ranking System in a previous post — to help you identify what kind of crisis you’re actually in and what level of decision-making it calls for.

👉 Read: The Crisis Ranking System post

We can’t control the system.
We can control how clear we are, how grounded we are, and what the next step looks like.

Not the 10-year plan.
The next step.

Full Circle: The New Era of My Work

When I look back over the past few years of this business, here’s what’s true:

• I experimented with a lot of ideas and angles

• I thought I had to keep reinventing the offer

• I thought I had to keep inventing new containers to “earn” legitimacy

• I doubted myself every time something didn’t instantly sell

But when I zoom out, one pattern is very clear:

Welcome to Eat Loco MetPark Saturdays🌱 2026

I’ll be selling my home-made drinkable cacao blends (cacao powder with spices) at

Amazon’s HQ2 in Arlington, VA (1400 S Eads St) from 9 am - 1 pm!

If you’re in the local DMV area, come find me and say hi (and pick up some nutritious cacao)

May 23rd

June 6th

July 11th and 18th

August 8th

If you’re in another state or country, no worries! I have a waitlist open so that once I’m set to ship/take online orders, I can do so 😍

Waitlist and/or Pre-order

I’m Raquel Sands. Daughter of Salvadoran immigrants. Cacao blender. Autonomy advocate.

Professional job hopper with 20 years inside corporate and government systems.

I’ve navigated 10+ jobs, 2 recessions, layoffs, getting fired, quitting without savings, and paying off $100K+ in debt.

Now is your time.

Now is our time.

The mold has broken. The systems and machines made to profit and extract from us are in turmoil.

Nourish yourself.

Beautiful packaging. Earthy tones. Language about ritual, about heart-opening, about ancient wisdom. The founder is white. The cacao comes from Guatemala, Ecuador, or some other Latin American country.

• I don’t know how much the farmers get paid.

• I don’t know if there’s a fair trade certification, a community reinvestment fund, or a genuine relationship with the people whose hands touched that cacao first.

Maybe there is. But I notice something when I look at the brand: the face of it is not the face of where the plant/and the plants’ people come from.

And that noticing — that small, persistent itch — is hard for me to scratch.

Subscribe now

Because this isn’t new. This is a pattern. Yoga. Sage. Ayahuasca. Kambo — the frog medicine from the Amazon. Matcha elevated to a $14 latte. Cacao transformed from a kitchen staple in my grandmother's house into a "ceremonial experience" that can cost $40 a bag.

There is a throughline. It usually goes like this:

a white person (or a Western brand) discovers something from a Black or brown culture. They fall in love with it — genuinely, often. They feel called to share it. And then, because they exist inside a system that rewards commodification, they build a business around it.

The original communities — the ones who held this thing, who passed it down, who never separated it from its spiritual and cultural context — often didn't commercialize it.

Not because they lacked entrepreneurial spirit. But because some things weren't for selling.

Or because they didn't have access to the capital, the platforms, the social trust, the permission that the marketplace quietly extends to some people and quietly withholds from others.

And then someone else does it for them. And profits from it. And becomes the expert on it.

Let's talk about cacao specifically.

Cacao is Mesoamerican. It is Mayan, Aztec, and Olmec. It is from the same soil that my ancestors walked.

It was medicine, currency, and ceremony — not separate things, the same thing.

When I see a white woman in linen pants leading a "cacao ceremony" on a retreat in Tulum, Mexico, I'm not just seeing cultural appropriation as a concept. I'm seeing the continuation of a very old story: the extraction of value from land and people who were never fully compensated — economically, politically, or spiritually — for what was taken.

And then my husband asked me something that stopped me.

I sat with that for a moment. And I said, it would hurt. But I would do my best to respect their wishes and do something else with my passion and time.

That answer surprised even me.

Because I have ancestry that connects me to this plant — Central American roots, West African roots, a lineage that held cacao long before it was a brand. And still, I'm willing to be turned away.

Still willing to say: your right to define your own sacred things is more important than my desire to be included.

That posture — the willingness to ask permission and genuinely accept no — is exactly what's missing from most of these conversations. Most people who appropriate never even ask the question. They discover something, fall in love with it, and the love feels like enough justification.

It isn't.

The "local" problem

This conversation got more complicated when I was navigating a farmers’ market application that prioritized locally sourced products.

The plant's native origins are in South and Central America. My ancestral relationship to it is older and more intimate than any supply chain. And yet a market framework built around a particular geography would categorize me — and cacao — as not local enough.

This is what broken frameworks do.

They were built around a certain kind of producer, a certain kind of place, and they quietly exclude the very people whose relationship to an ingredient is the most local relationship that exists. I am more local to cacao than the soil I'm standing on ever will be.

My husband pushed further.

But what if someone else could just sell it better than you? What if they're genuinely more talented at business?

And this is where I had to name something I've been circling for a while.

Better at commodifying equals more deserving?

More gifted at extracting value equals closer to the source?

I don’t believe it works that way. A talented salesperson can sell anything. That is not a spiritual credential. That is not a relationship. That is not lineage.

And yet this is the logic that has always justified extraction — the idea that if you can profit from something more efficiently, you have earned some claim to it. We've seen where that leads.

Money is a disease.

I don't say that lightly as someone actively building a business.

I say it because I think it's true, and I think sitting with the contradiction is the only honest way to move forward.

When money becomes the measure of whether something should exist, whether a culture has value, whether a person deserves access — that is a pathology. Priceless things get priced. Sacred things get packaged. And the communities that held them sacred are left watching someone else collect the margin while being featured as a paragraph on the About page.

The question I keep returning to is not can I sell this? It's does this need to be sold?

Just because you love something, just because you see an opportunity, does not mean that commodification is the right next step. Sometimes the most radical thing you can do is resist that pull entirely.

I haven't fully resisted it.

I'm building Sands & Semilla — a small-batch cacao brand rooted in my Central American and West African ancestral heritage. I've made a choice to enter this market. And I carry that choice with weight, with accountability, with a commitment to being as close to the root as I can get.

Not because I'm certain I'm doing it right. But because I keep asking whether I am.

So where is the line?

I don't think there's a clean one.

Culture has always moved and mixed. But I think the line has something to do with power — who holds it, who benefits from it, and whether the people closest to the origin are in the room.

Some questions worth sitting with before you build a brand around someone else's sacred thing (or to ask yourself for your own culture/sacred things):

- Are the people who come from this tradition compensated proportionally — not just charitably?

- Are they visible as partners and decision-makers, not just as a sourcing story?

- Are you learning from them or learning about them?

- What would it mean to be a bridge rather than the destination?

- And honestly — does the world need you to do this, or does it need you to fund and amplify the people who already are?

People are undocumented because of what imperialism did to their countries.

People are refugees because of what capitalism extracted.

Families like mine are first-generation born inside the empire that destabilized the places their parents fled.

These aren't historical footnotes. This is still the water we're all swimming in.

My husband asked what if I can't sell it as well as someone else. And I thought — maybe that's not the point.

Maybe the point is that some things shouldn't be optimized. Maybe the most radical act isn't building the best brand.

It's being someone who asks whether it should be a brand at all. And then choosing, with full awareness, with grief and gratitude and accountability, to do it anyway — as carefully, and as close to the root, as you can get.

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I’m Miriam Raquel. And this is Come Home — a five minute practice for stepping back into yourself.

You don’t need anything special for this. If you have your cacao in front of you — beautiful. If you have a different drink — that works too. And if you don’t have anything at all right now — that’s fine. This practice works either way. We’re using the cacao as an anchor, but what we’re really doing is coming back to the body. Back to this moment. Back to you.

So wherever you are — in your kitchen, in your car, on your commute — just let yourself arrive here for a few minutes.

Start by finding your feet.

Feel them on the floor. Or the pedals. Or wherever they are right now. Just notice them. You’ve been carrying yourself around all day and your feet have been with you the whole time.

Take one breath in — —

And let it go.

If you have your cacao in front of you — or any warm drink — I want you to pick up the mug or the cup that speaks to you right now. Not the first one you grabbed. The one that feels right today. We make small choices all the time without noticing them. This one — let yourself notice it.

Hold it in both hands if you can.

Feel the warmth coming through.

If you’re still in the preparation — if your cacao is in front of you and you’re about to make it — let’s do that together slowly.

Take a breath before you scoop the powder. Just one breath. — —

When you scoop it into your mug — smell it before you add anything. Really smell it. Cacao has a particular depth before it becomes a drink. Something earthy. Something that feels older than today.

Now the water. Pour it slowly if you can. Watch what happens — how the powder moves, how the water changes color, how the two things begin to become one thing. — —

Stir it. Watch the liquid settle.

And here — just before you add anything else — ask yourself: do I need something sweet today? Or do I need to sit with the bitterness for a moment?

There’s no wrong answer. Your body usually knows. The honey can wait until you’ve listened.

Now — if your drink is ready — take one sip.

Not a gulp. One sip. — —

Let it coat your tongue. Let the warmth move down your throat. Feel it settle somewhere in your chest.

This — right here — is nourishment. Not just the compounds in the cacao, not just the warmth, but the act of giving yourself this moment. Of saying: I am worth five minutes of my own attention.

As you sit here — if something is coming up for you, something you’ve been carrying — let it. You don’t have to solve it. You don’t have to name it perfectly. If you have something to write in — a notebook, your phone — and something wants to come out, let it.

And if nothing comes — that’s also information. Sometimes the body just needs to rest inside a quiet moment without producing anything.

Before you finish — wherever your drink is, whatever you’re holding —

Take one more breath. — —

And offer yourself a moment of thank you. Not for being productive. Not for doing everything right. Just for being here. For giving yourself this.

You deserve the peace you’re creating right now.

Carry a little of it with you today.

— —

If you’re in NOVA, Northern Virginia, I’ll see you at market.

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Black pepper and turmeric are stirred in on rushed mornings. Honey on the slow ones. Banana cacao pancakes on Sundays when time felt like mine again. A warm cup held with two hands before the world needed anything from me.

I didn’t know then what I know now — that my body was remembering something my mind hadn’t been given language for yet.

For those who’ve just subscribed to this substack, for those who’ve been with me for some time, and for those just passing through, let me introduce myself in a way that doesn’t start with what I do (for others or for myself), just as I am:

My name is Miriam Raquel Sands. I am a Salvadoran American woman, first-generation, born into an immigrant family navigating a country that was built, in part, on the erasure of people who look like us. I am 50% Indigenous American and African. The other half of me is Iberian — the colonial lineage that crossed the Atlantic and changed everything it touched, including my ancestors.

My whole life has been in the United States. Some moments have been spent abroad, by choice or because of work, or family, but ultimately, I was born in an Imperialist-Capitalist- Consumer Country, unlike my entire family lineage before me.

I’m the first of my family born on this side of the border (literally and figuratively).

I’m the first person in my family who grew up with two languages: English and Spanish.

I’m the first in my family to have access, choice, and economy to go to Europe, Canada, and other parts of the world.

I’m the first to roller skate, longboard, and get out of a $100,000 car and student debt in under six years.

As well as

The ones who cultivated this plant ceremonially. The ones whose labor grew it under extraction. The ones who carried it across the ocean in ships.

When my DNA confirmed what my body already knew — that I am a genetic descendant of the Mesoamerican peoples who first domesticated cacao 5,000 years ago — something settled in me that had been restless for a long time.

This new business is new in form, not ancestry, not in embodiment.

This is a reclamation.

Sands & Semilla is the name of what I make — small-batch drinking cacao blends and handmade candles, made by hand in Fairfax County, Virginia. Two blends for now. Kakawa, the ancestral blend — four ingredients, the original preparation, bitter and warming, and true. Morning Shift, the coffee drinker’s blend — for the ones ready to trade the crash for something gentler.

Every jar is reusable. Every purchase comes with a seed. You bring the jar back in Northern Virginia (for now, next year I’ll be shipping online), and I fill it again, at market, by hand. 👋🏼

I sell at Eat Local Farmers Markets in Northern Virginia this season — Met Park on Saturdays. I’ll tell you where I’ll be every month right here, in your inbox, before I go.

But this Substack is more than market dates.

I plan to include topics such as:

The Plant (cacao) — the history, the etymology, the cultural and economic journey of cacao from the Amazon to your cup. I will tell you all of it. The beautiful parts and the violent parts and the parts that are still being reckoned with.

The Maker (me) — who I am, where I come from, what it means to build something rooted in your ancestry when you spent most of your life being asked to forget it. The first-generation unlearning. The healing. The slow, ongoing practice of ancestral veneration.

The Practice (embodiment) — how to drink this with intention. Journal prompts. Embodiment practices. Seasonal rituals. The quiet art of coming home to yourself, one slow cup at a time.

If you are here because you found me at a market — welcome. The jar you’re holding was made with care, and it carries a longer story than the label can hold. Now you know a little more about it.

If you are here because something in my story felt familiar — welcome. You are probably in the middle of something. Most people who find their way to this plant are.

If you are here because you just want to know how to make a good cup of cacao — welcome. I will tell you that too. It’s simpler than you think.

Where you can find me: Eat Loco MetPark Saturdays

Location: S Fern St, Arlington, VA 22202

Be sure to bring back your cacao tin jar for a $5 off discount on your next refill!

May

• Saturday, May 23rd, 9 am - 1 pm EST

June

• Saturday, June 6th, 9 am - 1 pm EST

July

• Saturday, July 18th, 9 am - 1 pm EST

• Saturday, July 25th, 9 am - 1 pm EST

August

• Saturday, August 8th, 9 am - 1 pm EST

Shop candles and stickers online → website

Join the refill waitlist → Google Form

It feels good to say that — to reopen this space in Aries season, in the spring of 2026, with the energy of beginnings and fire and forward motion. The Clarity Shift has always been the umbrella, the larger container that holds all the threads I explore: the Capacity Conversations, the A Day in the Life series, and whatever else wants to emerge. Those subseries live inside this bigger ecosystem, this wider field of curiosity and inquiry.

And now, as Season 3 opens, something new is growing alongside it — my cacao and ritual business, a project rooted in sovereignty, presence, and being in the now. I’m locally producing two cacao blends, candles, and a growing collection of designs — stickers, bookmarks, ritual tools — all meant to help us ground offline, return to our bodies, and create accessible, personal rituals that anchor us in the moment. It’s a business, yes, but it’s also a path, a passion, a practice. And it’s deeply connected to what we talk about in today’s episode.

Because today, I’m joined by — artist, spiritual director, builder, seeker, and someone whose presence feels like a deep exhale.

Anna Schmunk is an artist, spiritual director, dog lover, and human living in Nashville, TN. Anna hosts retreats and works as a spiritual director to help people with the difficult process of change. She writes about art, spirituality, identity, and belief in her newsletter Everything is Connected.

This conversation is the perfect way to open a new season: honest, meandering, reflective, spiritually curious, and rooted in the question of what it means to be human in a world that often asks us not to be.

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On Art, Work, and the Long Pause Between Them

Anna shares that she was an art major in college, and then… she stopped. Completely. For years.

Work became the creative outlet.
Work became the place where the energy went.
Work became the thing that filled the space where art used to live.

“I was working with a team to build things. So it did feel like enough — until it wasn’t.”

She ended up in product management almost by accident — a mentor handed her a book and said, “I think you’re a product manager.” And she was good at it. She built software for fifteen years. She climbed the ladder. She hit the milestones.

And then the enoughness stopped being enough.

She took an expressive art class. She left a corporate job. She had space for the first time in a long time. And in that space, something else emerged:

The call toward spiritual direction.

On Spiritual Direction (and Why It Feels Like a Secret)

I didn’t know spiritual direction was a thing — not in the way Anna describes it.

Not therapy.
Not coaching.
Not astrology.
Not problem-solving.
Not fixing.
Not doctrine.

But witnessing.
Noticing.
Savoring.
Holding space for the presence of the divine — however you define that — in someone’s actual lived experience.

“Spiritual directors ethically don’t have an agenda. We’re not here to keep you in a particular belief system. We’re here to help you notice how God is working in your life.”

It’s centuries old.
Rooted in monastic traditions.
Monks and nuns sitting with people in the 1300s and 1400s, helping them notice the movement of the divine.

Why don’t more people talk about this?

Why isn’t this offered as a normal part of being human?

Why is this not the default spiritual support instead of fear-based doctrine or productivity-based self-help?

I’ve done therapy.
I’ve done coaching.
I’ve done astrology.
I’ve done all the modalities.

But none of them offered what Anna describes:

A container for presence.
A container for being witnessed.
A container for noticing without needing to fix.

And that feels like medicine.

On Deconstructing Faith and Rebuilding Something Truer

Both Anna and I grew up in religious environments that were rigid, fear-based, and rule-oriented.

For Anna:

“We had very clear doctrinal statements. If you believe this, that’s good. If you don’t, you’re wrong.”

For me:

Southern Baptist, Cuban church, fear of God, nightmares, obedience, punishment, no mystery, no softness.

And yet — both of us found our way back to spirituality through curiosity, not doctrine.

Through mystery, not certainty.

Through love, not fear.

Anna says:

“I do believe God is love. And that our best interests are cared for. And that who you are matters.”

Everything else?
Open for questioning.
Open for unlearning.
Open for reimagining.

And that openness — that willingness to sit in the unknown — is what spiritual direction makes space for.

On Being Human in a World That Doesn’t Want You to Be

Anna said:

“So many of our work environments are openly hostile to humanity.”

And she’s right.

We put on emotional armor to go to work.
We suppress our grief, our intuition, our exhaustion.
We perform productivity.
We perform stability.
We perform being fine.

And then we come home depleted.

We try to fill the void with work, fitness, consumption, online noise, perfectionism, future-tripping, preemptive stress, or pre-grieving.

But the void is spiritual.

The void is presence.

The void is mystery.

The void is the lack of being witnessed — by ourselves, by others, by something greater.

And the antidote?

Not more doing.

But being.

“In the present moment is the only moment God is accessible.”

That line from Anna stayed with me.

Because it’s true.

You can’t access God in the future — that’s anxiety.
You can’t access God in the past — that’s rumination.
You can only access God — or presence, or spirit — now.

Which is exactly what my cacao and ritual work is trying to support:
A return to the now.
A return to the body.
A return to presence.

On Capitalism, Money, and Opting Out (As Much As Possible)

We also went deep into capitalism — how to navigate making money while trying not to be consumed by the system.

Anna is learning about capitalism’s origins, its violence, its extraction, and its dehumanization. And she’s trying to figure out how to:

• honor her time

• honor her values

• offer spiritual direction

• offer sliding scales

• redistribute income

• support mutual aid

• support small businesses

• avoid Amazon and Target

• spend less overall

• and still… live

It’s messy.
It’s imperfect.
It’s human.

And it’s the work so many of us are doing right now — trying to create something meaningful without feeding the machine that drains meaning from everything.

On Communication, Neurodivergence, and Letting People In

One of my favorite parts of the conversation was when Anna talked about being perceived as intimidating — especially by men — because she’s an internal processor.

She thinks before she speaks.
She has a resting “thinking face.”
She’s direct.
She’s introverted.
She’s likely on the spectrum.
She has ADHD.

And she’s learning to let people peek inside — when she chooses to.

Communication is its own spiritual practice.
Its own noticing.
Its own form of presence.

And it’s something we’re all learning in real time.

On the Question That Changed Everything

Anna shared that a spiritual director once asked her:

“How do you want to be in this situation?”

Not:
How do you fix it?
How do you optimize?
How do you win?
How do you climb?

But:

How do you be?

How do you inhabit your humanity?
How do you embody your values?
How do you show up in alignment with who you are becoming?

This question has shaped her life.

It’s shaping mine now too.

Where to Find Anna

If you want to learn more about her art, her spiritual direction work, her retreats, her workshops, or just follow her journey:

Website: https://www.annaschmunk.com
Newsletter:
Threads: https://www.threads.com/@annajoyschmunk
Spiritual Directors International: if you want to find a director near you

Closing Reflections + What’s Coming in Season 3

This conversation felt like a session in itself — a witnessing, a noticing, a savoring.

It reminded me that:

• We are allowed to be messy

• We are allowed to question

• We are allowed to slow down

• We are allowed to be human

• We are allowed to seek the divine outside of doctrine

• We are allowed to create without monetizing

• We are allowed to rest

• We are allowed to be present

• We are allowed to be witnessed

And as Season 3 unfolds, I’ll be sharing more about my cacao blends, my ritual tools, my sovereignty work, and the path that’s emerging in real time.

Welcome to Season 3.
Welcome to spring.
Welcome to the now.

Stay tuned for the first episodes exploring this new business, this new chapter, and this new way of being.

Hello, hello. Welcome back to A Day in the Life.

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If you’re new to this behind‑the‑scenes series, this is a vulnerable look behind the curtain—behind the door—of my life as I build a business in an overly (or maybe just deeply) saturated online market. Late‑stage capitalism. The global North. The United States. The East Coast. All of these layers folded into the long, slow work of aiming toward income sovereignty and sustainability as a woman of color, as someone who has navigated the corporate system for decades and created her own path, her own way out.

So welcome. 👋🏼👋🏼

I usually try to do this series twice a month. March 2026 has had other plans. Curveballs doesn’t even begin to cover it. There has been a lot happening—globally, politically, economically, culturally—and most likely that will continue. We’re all being affected, from different angles and at different intensities, but deeply nonetheless.

And maybe we don’t even fully realize how deep. How layered it all is. How much of it lives in our bodies before it ever reaches language.

One of the things I’ve been sitting with—one of the reasons I didn’t show up twice a month the way I normally do—is this truth about cycles. Everything moves in cycles. Everything is iterative. History repeats itself. Our bodies repeat themselves. Women move through menstrual cycles that never look quite the same month to month. Weeks shift, energy shifts, capacity shifts.

And yet we’re taught to believe in a linear path. A straight line out. That someday we will get out of whatever we’re stuck in—out of survival, out of a job, out of scarcity.

But life isn’t trying to get out of anything. Life is just trying to live.

I don’t say that to minimize what we’re going through. I say it to name something fundamental. We don’t live in bubbles; we live in layers. Cultural, religious, societal, and economic layers are all moving at once.

And I’ve been reckoning—personally and professionally—with the work I do helping people, especially spiritually minded and environmentally conscious people, mission‑driven people, purpose‑driven people.

The people I serve, myself included.

What keeps coming up in conversation, again and again, is safety and security. And it usually comes out as money. I need more money.

Friends, family, potential clients—so many conversations are marked by desperation, by treading water, by fear. Fear of AI taking jobs. Robots are taking jobs. Mortgages. Bills. Survival.

I’m not negating any of it. I live with those questions too.

Money is the expression, not the root. It’s that saying—more money, more problems. Even if we all had what we thought we needed, even if retirement was fully funded, houses paid off, debts erased… would the problem go away?

No.

Because money is a societal construct. Money is something that has been given power. If we return to something like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, what we actually need is much simpler: shelter, food, water, air, warmth, and community. We are social animals.

But because of systems built by people who wanted to hoard power and wealth—colonization, extraction, political control—money became the gatekeeper. I remember seeing an exhibit at the British Museum last year tracing the history of currency. Coins stamped with the faces of Caesars. The same symbolism persists today. Faces on money are not neutral. They represent power, legacy, and control.

Those who hoard wealth are the ones who truly benefit from the system. Debt keeps everyone else working. Consuming. Chasing the next thing—another upgrade, another device, another promise of security. All of it serves those at the top while the rest of us scramble without land, without leverage, without real or cultural real estate to lean on.

This became especially clear in a conversation I had with a potential client. She wanted to know my story—how I job‑hopped, pivoted across industries, repositioned myself, and paid off over $100,000 in combined student and car debt in under a decade after graduating.

But at the end of the conversation, it came down to the house. Keeping the house at any cost. Because losing it felt like failure.

We’re not failing because we bought into the system. We’re not failing because we sustain it. We vote. We work. We pay taxes. We commute. We budget. We cut streaming services. Each of us is a drop sustaining the ecosystem.

And the ones who own the apartment complexes, the monopolies, the conglomerates—the literal and figurative real estate—benefit.

I think we’ve been at the breaking point for a long time. Now we’re feeling the whiplash. The dismantling. The slow death of consumer capitalism.

As individuals, we’re being forced to ask: What am I really willing to decide for myself?

Because if we’re always solving for money, the hamster wheel never stops. Another option—maybe the only option—is minimizing our footprint. Reducing debt. Detaching, where possible, from systems that extract from us even while we sleep.

This is why I’ve been rethinking my business.

I’ve never believed the corporate system was a path to freedom. I’ve always tried to speak to people who already see it for what it is and want to repurpose it on their own terms. But unless we’re all going off‑grid completely—and even then, money still shows up—we’re still inside this economy.

(See more in my Q&A with 😍😍)

So yes, I’m still offering a 90‑minute clarity and strategy session. Sometimes that looks like resume design. Sometimes it looks like reframing your entire relationship to work. Because we still need to get paid.

But I’m taking a big step back from “repurposing the corporate ladder” as a central offering. The ladder has been broken for decades. We’re just now feeling it.

I’m still in business. Just not in the same way. I’m prioritizing play, experimentation, design, and writing. There’s another branch coming. I’ll share when it’s ready.

What isn’t going away is this series. Or the essays. Or the long conversations about capacity—mental, emotional, spiritual, economic, ecological—with Sarah on the podcast. I just spent time with her in Washington, from Spokane to Seattle, where we recorded an episode together in person. Those relationships—those connections—feel like the real light right now.

As capitalism continues to fracture, what remains are people. Community. The ways we hold each other as we’re all, in different ways, being remade.

Thank you for being here. For listening. For staying. 🌱🌱

If you want to support this work, you can work with me and/or share this newsletter. I’m grateful for it. Truly.

Please take care of yourself. Rest. Drink water. Get sunlight. Eat well. Cry. Yell. Hug yourself and the people you love. All of it is medicine.

Whatever is meant for you—whatever is coming from you—deserves gentleness as it grows.

I’ll talk to you in the next one.