Season 3 EP3: The 8,000‑Year Journey of Cacao: On Lineage, Loss, Return, and the Medicine That Survived Us

How Our Work Writes Our Story

Capacity Conversations | One Year Anniversary Episode Hosted by Raquel Sands & Sarah Liljegren [https://substack.com/profile/24801367-sarah-liljegren] | Season 2, 2026 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? 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 Sarah Liljegren [https://substack.com/profile/24801367-sarah-liljegren] — 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. That got into me early. Money was necessary. Money was not the point. 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? Capital W Work is about meaning. Lowercase w work is about money. We need both. But only one of them, I think, is the foundation. 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. We’re not suggesting you transcend your rent. 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 What strikes us most, looking back across both of our journeys, is this: the most valuable work we’ve ever done is the work of knowing ourselves. 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. Thanks for reading Sands & Semilla! This post is public so feel free to share it. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit raquelsands.substack.com [https://raquelsands.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Season 3 EP3: The 8,000‑Year Journey of Cacao: On Lineage, Loss, Return, and the Medicine That Survived Us

Hello, hello — and welcome back to this cacao series. I want to take you on this journey with me. 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. 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. Almost 8,000 years of relationship. 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. They called it kakawa — spelled *k‑a‑k‑a‑w‑a* — a word traced to the Mixe‑Zoquean language family. 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. They called it cacahuatl — cacao + atl, meaning water. 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. They brought diseases that collapsed 90% of the Indigenous population within a century. 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. I’m not here to commodify cacao. I’m here to be in a relationship with it. 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. 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. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit raquelsands.substack.com [https://raquelsands.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Ep 19 of A Day in the Life: Cacao, Ancestors, and the New Meaning of Income Sovereignty

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. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit raquelsands.substack.com [https://raquelsands.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Were We Betrayed? On Faith, Religion, and What It Costs to Think for Yourself

This episode was different. I flew in from Virginia to Washington. First time we’d ever been in the same room after almost a year of recording across two coasts. We sat in her living room, lavender lotion and Chapstick on the table, and we just went there. 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 don’t want to be sedated. 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 [https://open.substack.com/users/24801367-sarah-liljegren?utm_source=mentions] 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. Thanks for reading Sands & Semilla! This post is public so feel free to share it. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit raquelsands.substack.com [https://raquelsands.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Season 3 Ep 2: Coming Home

Welcome. 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. Thanks for reading Sands & Semilla! This post is public so feel free to share it. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit raquelsands.substack.com [https://raquelsands.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]