Dragon š Letter #103: How Animism is helping me unlearn dogma, befriend food again, and listen to the body as kin
I used to think healing meant purity. Now I know it begins with presence. Every bite is a small act of remembering, a connection between my body, my ancestors, and the land that feeds us. This letter is about the hungry ghosts of dogma and the relational rhythm Iām learning to hear beneath them.
Hola! Iām Ixchel Lunar (they/them), an Indigenous-Time Ecologist, ancestral medicine guide, and rhythm witch for creative rebels, decolonial dreamers, and neuroqueer visionaries. This Substack is dedicated to weaving business, body, and belonging into something no empire can replicate. Still punk as fuck. Still cozy in the chaos.
Beautiful Wildlings!
In my Animism and Earth Reconnection class with Daniel Foor, I was surprised to be so broken open so quickly in the second week when we focused on the potentially charged topic of food. I thought my eating disorders were in the rearview mirror. But they appeared in ways I wasnāt even aware of until recently.
The Ideologies on My Plate
Having grown up in an ideologically split household, everything was up for grabs. Food carried ideology on both sides and created constant conflict between my parents and grandparents wishes and my bodyās desires.
My mom is vegetarian, with stories of how she came to love the cows raised at her parentsā orchard, who were then slaughtered and then to her horror, served to her as dinner. Her second husband was Buddhist and also vegetarian. So, we were a very pacifist, vegetarian household. The line drawn around animal products was at eggs. Dairy and honey were somehow deemed non-violent to them. But sugar (and therefore chocolate; carob is no substitute), eggs, meat and leather, except Birkenstocks of course, was not allowed in the house because the energy was ābad.ā
At my dad and grandparentās houses I basically ate anything I wanted. The problem with all of this was that I was undiagnosed celiac experiencing strange symptoms, mostly chronic bronchitis, ear infections, rashes, eczema, temperature dysregulation, and every time I visited my dadās house, constipation from sugar and meat exposure to a damaged GI microbiome.
Along with many ancestral foods (tamales, tacos, chile con carne y pollo, cacao), my dad loved sushi. So, luckily I wasnāt eating as much gluten. It was when I would visit my abuelita and I could get KFC and chicken noodle soup that the celiac issues erupted into flares. And while my grandpaās brother and his kids were celiac, no one ever thought or knew to think it could have been passed by him to me and my dadās kids.
Lessons in Dogma
In the 7th grade I was living at my dadās house, and it was decided that instead of going to the public school in the country, I would attend a small, private Baptist Christian school. The catholic school was also an option, but either it was too expensive or my dad was too traumatized to send me there (he and my mom had horror stories of going to Catholic School where they met). Also, I had been kicked out of catechism for asking too many questions about the Confirmation teachings, so they may have been avoiding a situation.
My abuelita helped me finish my Confirmation teachings outside of catechism before I was confirmed and received the laying on of hands for the Holy Spirit from conservative French Archbishop Lefebvre (himself a rule-breaker) who was giving traditional Holy Thursday Confirmations at a small Latino congregation in Californiaās Central Valley.
Side note: A staunch colonial, conservative traditionalist, Lefebvre opposed many of the modern practices established after Vatican II in the 60s-70s, including the shift away from Latin mass. Lefebvre was eventually excommunicated by Pope John Paul II for ordaining bishops as part of his conservative group without permission. After his death, Lefebvreās excommunication was lifted by Pope Benedict XVI.
My grandparents were part of the small Catholic society that opposed Vatican II, and helped organize a regular Sunday mass after our Spanish-speaking church, Our Lady of Guadelupe shifted their mass to Vatican II principles. Much of this opposition, especially for my Bircher (JBS) grandpa, was tied to the rise of Liberation theology in Central America, which he viewed as socialist. So they opted to send me to a Southern Baptist school to attempt to keep me in his colonial, racist religious tradition.
But as a mixed-race queer kid, I saw the hate ideology with my own eyes and felt deeply conflicted and precarious about my place in my conservative family. It was especially acute one summer Sunday when our congregation was disturbed by a Pride parade during mass. We went to the street to see what was happening. My grandpa was livid. The hateful things he said for weeks after stung.
This was familiar heat because it was known that my teenage twin cousins were gay. Or maybe I just knew and everyone else was in the dark or denial until they came out. Not sure. But I had grown up in the LGBTQIA+ community at my momās house, the vibes were loving, accepting, cinematicā¦ and this dogmatic Christian energy was the opposite.
So, here I am at this ultra conservative school for 7th grade, questioning everything, my families beliefs, my identity, and also very bored because these people had a view of reality that felt mind-bogglingly narrow. But I found allies in some progressive women teachers. One had me sit in on her 11th grade biology classes.
The Body as a Classroom
I was so fascinated to learn about the gastrointestinal tract in quite a bit of detail. So much science for a school that seemed to deny so much reality. I knew the GI tract mattered to me; I just wouldnāt know why for nearly three more decades.
In hindsight, this fascination with digestion wasnāt random. It was Animism whispering through the science, the gut as a sacred intelligence. I didnāt have the language for it then, but I was already sensing what I now know from somatic teachers like Resmaa Menakem and others: that the body keeps ancestral stories in its tissues. My rebellion wasnāt just against religion itself, but against the idea that Spirit could live only in the sky, never in the body. The Baptists wanted transcendence. My gut wanted presence.
Faith, Food, and Purity
My rebelious ethic of questioning wasnāt a fit for the Baptists. So I was moved to a smaller Christian school based on PACE learning where I could fly through my studies. I jumped 3 grades while I was there. But because I was a queer pre-teen with a penchant for punk and new wave, I was no longer a fit for these religious environments. It was then decided that I go back to public school.
In 9th grade I switched from the mostly white, rich country high school to the more diverse downtown high school by my momās house. I completed that year with a mix of 9th and 10th grade classes holding my attention. But in 10th grade my mom got divorced after a traumatic ending of her marriage and I dropped out a couple of months into the first semester from a mix of needing to support her and my brother and escapist drug exploration.
Through a series of crises I went to live with friends of the family in the Bay Area rather than get sent to boarding school. Then eventually moved back to my dadās house for a year, re-doing 10th grade, then testing out of high school and moving away. I landed back in the Bay Area and after my dadās murder, became connected with a Mill Valley high school student group called Creating our Future. Many of the activities were led by counterculture icons like Ram Dass, Wavy Gravy, John Robbins (Baskin-Robbins heir and author of Diet for a New America) and more.
A few of the students became life-long colleagues, including Sikh musician Snatum Kaur and Ocean Robbins, Johnās son. Being vegetarian was something that was part for the course, and eventually I became vegan when I became pregnant with my second child.
The undertones of this vegetarian and vegan lifestyle were purist and coupled with digestive problems from the undiagnosed celiac gluten and casein allergies, led to pretty major eating disorders as my desire to be pious and in right relationship with animals and my physical challenges were at odds because I wasnāt eating the ancestral foods as much as I needed to. Coupled with back-to-back pregnancies at 17 and 18, Gravesā disease, and what I would later learn was undiagnosed Pentad Super Syndrome, I was barely eating and had dropped to 90 pounds.
For the next eighteen-ish years I stayed pescatarian, still consuming gluten and dairy without realizing the damage they caused. Though every time I ate a bagel and cream cheese, Iād have to take a 20-minute nap.
Love as Nourishment
Food had become theological dogma. Every bite was a confession, every restriction a form of penance. It took me years to understand that my devotion to purity, whether in diet or doctrine, was another face of the same colonial conditioning that taught me to fear the body.
I regret having demanded that my kids be vegetarian or pescatarian. I wish they could have had the space to learn what felt good to their body, in the same way I gave them space to explore their own spirituality.
bell hooks wrote that love is āan action, not a feeling.ā I see now that feeding myself well is one of the most radical acts of love I can practice.
Eating as Relationship
As has been the practice of mine to accept or reject family traditions depending on their level of dogma, I was deeply connected to the energetics of food, but didnāt have a practice of appreciating my food because saying grace was attributed to the Christian religiosity I was in recovery from. Ancestral family meals were very meaningful, as well eating together as a family.
My kids both used to hum as they ate. I had taught them the importance of chewing food fully, masticating, making the little balls of food before swallowing, all things I had learned were really important practice for digestion, as well as for awareness and appreciation that came with the Animist and Buddhist practices. In that process of chewing, mealtime became a musical experience that I cherish.
But over the years living in seclusion, losing chewing surfaces from molars ravaged by celiac disease, eating by myself I began to experience eating as something to get through, rather than a socially nourishing experience. Traveling and eating out with my partner always brought out that appreciation of something new and delicious though.
Bringing awareness back to an area that still holds conflict is a new healing journey, one deeply needed after eighteen months of living with gastroparesis. Hopefully putting the focus back on appreciating my food, ābeing withā it, bringing awareness to its healing and nourishing properties will shift my relationship with my bodyās digestion.
The Alchemy of Presence
Animism teaches that relationship, not restriction, is the root of reverence. In that sense, the act of feeding myself, with attention, gratitude, and humility, becomes prayer. Daniel Foor reminds us that the ancestors donāt ask for purity, only reciprocity. The body is an ancestor too. It wants to be listened to, not disciplined into silence.
When I sit down to eat now, I breathe. I name the hands and elements that made this meal possible. I chew slowly, letting the food know itās welcome. This is not grace in the Christian senseā¦ itās kinship. A small act of rebellion against the systems that taught me to separate spirit from stomach.
The old purity stories are gone now. In their place, a rhythm. A slow conversation between hunger and satisfaction, between the wild appetite of the soul and the quiet wisdom of the gut. Somewhere in that rhythm, I meet the ancestors, and they hum back.
In the Sacred Cholqāij
In the sacred Cholqāij, each day carries its own medicine. 8 Batāz marks the renewal of the weaving of Time itself, the rebirth of the thread that connects the living, the ancestors, and the yet-to-be-born. It is a day for beginning new cycles, for ceremony, for remembering the creative forces that bind us to community and to life. The elders say Batāz is the day when the worldās first thread was pulled from the heart of the sky to the heart of the earth, so that story and spirit could stay connected.
8 Batāz ā Weaving the Living Thread
Today is 8 Batāz in the Cholqāij, the sacred count of days. Batāz is the thread that connects us to our ancestors and Time, the weaverās cord that ties beginnings to continuations. The number eight speaks to balance, reciprocity, and the harmony between the seen and unseen.
As I reflect on how food, body, and belief have shaped me, I see the pattern more clearly. The same thread that stitched purity into my childhood is the one Iām unspooling now, reweaving it into something honest and alive. 8 Batāz reminds me that every act of nourishment, every prayer said with the mouth full, is a strand in the fabric of belonging.
If your body longs to remember where it comes from, if hunger feels like more than appetite, I invite you to begin with an Ancestral Inheritance session. Together weāll listen for the hum beneath the hunger, the guidance of the well ones, and the rhythm that wants to be woven back into your life.
The ancestors do not ask for perfection. They ask for participation. To keep the thread moving. To remember that love, digestion, prayer, and grief are all forms of the same weaving.
Stay wild, love fiercely. Your presence is golden.
Maltiox! xo Ixchel
P.S. If your body hums as you read this, it may be your ancestors asking to be fed. Begin with a Gathering Intake Session to assess your four main lineages and meet an ancestral guide to begin working one lineage. This is where the weaving starts, where we listen for the well ones, and where repair becomes a lived relationship.
P.P.S. Maltiox pronounced mall-tee-osh means with gratitude in Kāiche Mayan.
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I was raised and bore children on the traditional, unceded, and stolen lands of the Coast and Central Valley Miwok (colonized as Petaluma, CA) and Nisenan (colonized as Sacramento and Fair Oaks, CA), past, present, and future. I also write, work, and live in the highland forest of the traditional, unceded and stolen lands of the Totonac, Nahua, and Mexicah, past, present, and future, in what is known as Coatepec, Veracruz, Mexico.
P.P.S. I do not live or consent to the colonial impositions regarding the construct of Time. I also practice honoring rhythms of work, play, and rest so that I can serve you with embodied presence and with loving care. This means I may take several days to respond to your requests and questions. (h/t Eva Glamaris)
P.P.S. A mention is not necessarily an endorsement of someone. Itās an acknowledgment, a citation, of the origin of information in my process of understanding. (h/t Kelly Diels)
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