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The Clarity Shift Podcast

The Clarity Shift Podcast

Written by: Miriam Raquel Sands | Clarity + Cacao
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About this listen

 Unedited conversations about sovereignty — at work, in the body, and in life. Raquel Sands explores career transitions, income design, cacao and ancestral plant medicine, first-generation identity, ritual, and what it means to build without extraction. Raw, unscripted, and made for the ones who are still figuring it out.

raquelsands.substack.comMiriam Raquel Sands Hygiene & Healthy Living Social Sciences
Episodes
  • Season 3 Ep 2: Coming Home

    Season 3 Ep 2: Coming Home
    Apr 16 2026

    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
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    4 mins
  • Season 3 of The Clarity Shift podcast: Reopening in Aries Season with Artist + Spiritual Director Anna Schmunk

    Season 3 of The Clarity Shift podcast: Reopening in Aries Season with Artist + Spiritual Director Anna Schmunk
    Apr 10 2026

    The Clarity Shift is a spacious, unedited, stream‑of‑consciousness podcast exploring what it means to be human in a world that often asks us not to be. Hosted by Raquel Sands, this show sits at the intersection of spirituality, creativity, work sovereignty, embodiment, and the quiet moments of noticing that change everything.

    Inside this larger container live two subseries — The Capacity Conversations and A Day in the Life — each offering their own lens on presence, identity, and the inner workings of a life in motion.

    Season 3 opens in Aries season, spring 2026, alongside Raquel’s new cacao and ritual business: locally crafted cacao blends, candles, and grounding tools designed to bring us back into the now. This season features conversations with artists, seekers, builders, and spiritual practitioners like Anna Schmunk, inviting us into deeper awareness, gentler rhythms, and more honest ways of being.

    If you’re craving presence, nuance, and the kind of conversations that feel like sitting on the floor with a friend — welcome. You’re in the right place.



    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
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    1 hr and 8 mins
  • Ep 18: A Day in the Life

    Ep 18: A Day in the Life
    Apr 1 2026
    A Day in the Life (March): Cycles, Money, and the Quiet Re‑ReckoningHello, hello. Welcome back to A Day in the Life.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.To say it’s hard is an understatement. To say there is a path forward is also an understatement.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.But what I’ve been filtering, sifting, and sitting with is this: we’re not actually trying to solve for money. 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 ...
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    39 mins
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