You don’t need to be perfect. Just dwell in relationship with Time.
Hola! I’m 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.
The next Dragon Letters is gestating. Until then, we will be revisiting my work and offerings in a 5-email series called Reframes. Enjoy!
Beautiful Wildlings,
Maybe you’ve wanted to connect with your ancestors, to begin tending the stories, patterns, and grief you carry.
But a voice inside says:
What if I do it wrong? What if I offend someone? What if I’m appropriating something that’s not mine?
You’re not alone in that fear.
In fact, I believe it comes from a place of reverence, a desire not to cause harm, to be in right relationship. But when that fear calcifies into silence or self-erasure, it cuts us off from the very healing we’re craving.
We live in the aftermath of colonization and spiritual gatekeeping, where access to ritual was either stripped away or locked behind hierarchies of performance, power, and purity. In this terrain, many of us inherited confusion, hesitation, or even shame about whether we’re “allowed” to connect with our ancestors at all.
The perfectionism we learned, especially those of us raised under white spiritual systems or institutional religion, whispers that there’s one right way, one right language, one lineage pure enough to practice.
But that belief, that you have to know everything before you begin, didn’t come from your ancestors. It came from empire.
But that’s not how healing works.
True healing happens in connection. It happens in relationship, not performance. As the late Dr. Malidoma Somé said, “The focus here is not on ritual itself, but on opening up something in hearts and spirits that has been locked away so long that individuals can barely remember the source.”
You don’t need to know it all to begin. You need consent, integrity, and a space that honors both the power and the limits of where you are now.
Indigenous Time Ecology & the Spiral Path
Colonial spiritual systems conditioned us to fear mistakes more than disconnection.
We were taught that to be spiritual meant to be pure, correct, and composed. Not relational, emergent, or messy.
And that’s not how Time moves.
In Indigenous frameworks of Time, including the Mayan geo-cosmovision I carry, Time is not a line you race across. It’s a spiral, a living intelligence. It holds memory, emergence, and rhythm. It is both ancient and immediate. It is body, breath, and kin.
When you’re attuned to Time as a being, not a schedule, you can release performance and enter into sacred reciprocity. You begin to feel when the moment is ripe for ritual. When the altar is calling. When your ancestors are already near.
Like Resmaa Menakem teaches, “safety is not the absence of threat, but the presence of connection.”
And as Byung-Chul Han writes in The Disappearance of Rituals,
“We can define rituals as symbolic techniques of making oneself at home in the world. They transform being-in-the-world into a being-at-home [dwelling]. They turn the world into a reliable place. They are to time what a home is to space: they render time habitable….Symbolic perception is gradually being replaced by a serial perception that is incapable of producing the experience of duration. Serial perception, the constant registering of the new, does not linger. Rather, it rushes from one piece of information to the next, from one experience to the next, from one sensation to the next, without ever coming to closure…dwelling requires duration.”
This is the heart of Time Ecology:
Healing doesn’t require certainty.
It requires rhythm.
It requires presence.
And that begins with a willingness to show up — imperfect, in-process, and in relationship so we may dwell with Time.
Why I Can Hold This Work
I didn’t arrive at this work through clean lines or inherited ritual. Like many raised in diaspora, I began with fragments, stories half-told, traditions blurred by migration and assimilation, and a body that carried memories I didn’t yet know how to name.
I trained in Ancestral Lineage Healing with Dr. Daniel Foor, whose method centers consent, safety, and direct relationship with the wise and well dead. But my first initiations came long before: in the liminal places where I spoke with my twin long passed, midwifed my abuelita Bea’s death, where I lived undocumented in exile, where I navigated chronic illness and spiritual rupture.
I’ve carried rites across borders in my breath and my bones.
I’ve held ceremonies in public squares and created virtual altars in Signal threads.
I’ve rebuilt ritual from fragments and whispers, without a lineage map, only a pulse in my chest.
Like my mentor Dr. Amber McZeal teaches, when we reclaim the body as a sacred site of knowing, we begin to dismantle the colonial impulse to reach for power over, and root into power with.
This work is not about getting it right.
It’s about relational repair across Time, across breath, across ancestry.
I’m not here to be a gatekeeper.
I’m here to midwife your reconnection, slowly, safely, and with deep care.
You Don’t Have to Perform Your Way Into Belonging
When we release the grip of getting it right, something softer, and more real, begins to emerge.
You stop performing to belong. You begin to embody belonging.
You notice the subtle invitations: a sensation in the belly, a dream that lingers, a memory that arrives on the wind.
You remember that Flow doesn’t always look fast. Sometimes it looks like stillness. Sometimes it feels like grief. And sometimes it sounds like your great-grandmother’s voice arriving in a dream.
You begin to trust your pace, not empire’s.
This is what Wild Presence invites:
Not mastery, but movement.
Not perfection, but praxis.
Not doing more, but relating differently.
Wild Presence Collective: Where Practice Meets Rhythm
Wild Presence Collective is where the threads of ancestral reconnection, Flow states, somatic re-attunement, and Indigenous Time Ecology come together in a living, breathing spiral of practice.
It’s a four-month (renewable) collective devoted to the rhythm of remembering through ritual, coaching, and collective that reorients you back to your in-real-life collective.
And in alignment with Sacred Reciprocity, you’ll choose the tier that honors your capacity.
There’s no urgency here. No scarcity model.
Just sacred rhythm, real practice, and relationship.
👉 Join Wild Presence Collective →
Early Bird Bonuses end Friday. Doors close August 15th. Orientation begins August 20th. Sessions begin first week of September.
With devotion across Time,
Ixchel Lunar
Deep Time midwife | lineage tender | sacred rhythm keeper
P.S. For those who register by August 8th, you’ll receive a special Ritual Deepening Bonus Session, where we gather to activate your Ancestral Wayfinding Ritual Kit in real time, including your Ancestral Lineage Assessment, which is required for Ancestor work. Together, we’ll set the altar, create ritual protection, open the channels, and begin listening across Time.
And if you commit to the full season up front, I’ll co-create a custom Ancestral Flow Map just for you, your rhythm, your lineage, your next spiral of becoming. A living guide to your seasons, rituals, and right timing based on your geo-cosmovision (Astrology, Human Design, and Mayan Cholq’ij).
P.P.S. Maltiox pronounced mall-tee-osh means with gratitude in K’iche Mayan.
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Your Sanctuary to Cultivate Wild Presence for Thriving with a Planet in Transition
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. It’s an acknowledgment, a citation, of the origin of information in my process of understanding. (h/t Kelly Diels)
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Copyright © 2026, Cheyenne, WY, and Veracruz, Mexico, All rights reserved. Sharing your lineage of knowledge is decolonial. When iterating, please cite me. Not citing is epistemicide.
