Welcome! First time here? 🤗
Welcome to my website
Hi, I’m Raquel! 👋🏼👋🏼
I’m the founder of Sands & Semilla, small-batch cacao drinking blends and body care products shipped within Virginia, and when I’m not testing cacao products, I coach purpose-led professionals + budding entrepreneurs navigating the gap between the job that pays the bills and the income they’re building on their own terms.
If you’re in Virginia: I make Sands & Semilla, small-batch cacao — blends and a candle, made by hand, shipped within Virginia, and sold in person at farmers markets and pop-ups across Northern Virginia.
→ Shop & subscribe to Sands & Semilla
→ Where to find me: EatLoco MetPark Market Saturday, August 8 and EatLoco Reston on Sunday, August 9
If you’re anywhere else in the world — or if you’re building something of your own, wherever you are: this is also where I write and coach on income sovereignty — leaving, or reshaping, the corporate path, and building a life and income that’s actually yours.
→ Work with me — Clarity Guide sessions
→ Start with the self-guided workbook — Your Version of Enough
What I Actually Write/Podcast About
Everything here falls into four buckets:
The Culture — cacao’s real history, the wellness industry’s rebrand of it, and the ideas underneath the products I make.
The Consciousness — time, rhythm, identity, the internal work of building a life that fits.
The Creator — the actual mechanics of building something of your own — a business, an income stream, a body of work.
The Craft — the hands-on side: recipes, formulation, the specific choices behind what I make.
New here? Any post tagged with one of these is a fair entry point — pick whichever sounds most like what you’re curious about right now.
All the things
🧭 Work with me (Clarity Guide, anywhere)
Have a studio, café, or community space that might want to host a tasting?
📸 Instagram: @miriamraquelsands
📧 Email: theraquelsands@gmail.com
Thanks for being here!
— Raquel
Ready to dive in?
Read these first:
I believe:
Paths are Non-Linear
From one-job fragility → Built multiple income streams
From corporate control → Built autonomous work
From needing perfect plans → Learned to trust myself
I tried everything to feel “safe”:
✓ Better jobs (still got laid off)
✓ Perfect plans (still broke when reality shifted)
✓ Total control (still anxious, still exhausted)
Until I learned something that changed everything: Safety isn’t controlling the outcome (or everything to get it). It’s trusting yourself.
Pattern to Work
CHAOS (experienced instability)
↓
CONTROL (trauma response - try to eliminate uncertainty)
↓
ESSENTIALS (plan what you can actually control)
↓
SURRENDER (let go of rest)
↓
SELF-TRUST (real stability)
Principles that Help
Most career and biz planning focuses on KNOWN KNOWNS:
“I know I want to be a coach.”
“I know I need a website.”
“I know I need to charge $X.”
And tries to eliminate KNOWN UNKNOWNS:
“I’ll create a perfect plan for every scenario.”
“I’ll control all variables.”
“I’ll leave nothing to chance.”
The magic lives in UNKNOWN UNKNOWNS.
The opportunities you can’t see yet.
The paths that haven’t revealed themselves.
The connections that haven’t formed.
The skills you didn’t know were valuable.
When you try to CONTROL everything, you close yourself off to unknown unknowns. You’re so focused on your PLAN that you can’t see what’s ACTUALLY emerging.
When you plan essentials and SURRENDER the rest, you create SPACE for unknown unknowns. That’s where real possibility lives. Not in the perfect plan. But in the space you create by letting go.
Ready to dive in? Read these first:
🐝🐝🌱🌱
(original message from 12.4.2025)
Hi everyone — a quick follow-up to today’s A Day in the Life episode. I wanted to let you know that I’ve officially moved the rest of the Inside the Machine six-part series over to LinkedIn.
After experimenting there recently, it became obvious that a deep dive into corporate systems belongs in the very place those systems live!
(Full transparency: I’ve avoided LinkedIn for my business for a long time because I was using it to find gigs, consultancies, etc. I realized that I need to be in the belly of the beast 💪🏼and reach people who are in/might probably stay in and provide the knowledge and resources.)
If you want to keep following Inside the Machine, you can read the series and subscribe directly on LinkedIn (links below). And if you don’t have a LinkedIn yet but might need one for future paths or pivots, consider this a gentle nudge to create one 😊
Links to follow the Inside the Machine series on LinkedIn:
This shift (pun intended! since this is The Clarity Shift :)) also frees up Substack to stay what I want it to be: a more intimate, playful, spiritual, sensual space where we explore the inner landscape — identity, intuition, energy, design, self-assessment, home as a container, and what it actually means to make a living.
I’m also preparing new Substack-only series — one on feng shui + interior design as a career catalyst, another on self-assessment frameworks (astrology, MBTI, Human Design, and more), and a few things I’m still shaping behind the scenes.
As a quick housekeeping note: if you saw the outdated one-month service link in my last email, please disregard it. 🙏🏼
The best, most current place to see how to work with me is the Work With Me page here on Substack, where I offer my DIY Clarity Bundle and two active services. Thank you for being here — more is coming, and it will live right where it belongs!
Lots of love,
Raquel