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.
Beautiful Wildling,
There is a version of me that exists on the internet that I have not been in a while.
They move fast. They have systems. They have a framework with a name and a clean diagram and the kind of clarity that implies they solved this for themself before they sold it. They are confident about timelines. They do not mention their body unless it’s to note that they’re regulated.
I know when that version got locked in. It was before the spinal injury. Before my body decided it was done cooperating with the pace I had inherited and never questioned. I was in elected office (city council, the Golden Gate Bridge District, then Vice Mayor,). I was moving in the way that reads as competence and costs things you don’t notice until the bill arrives all at once.
The brand photographed that moment and stopped.
Here is what nobody explains about inner work: it does not automatically update your homepage.
You can transform your relationship to Time, to capacity, to what your body will and will not carry, and your sales page will still introduce you as the person you were before the transformation. Your bio will still use language from before the refusal. The offer names will still belong to a self that has been composted for two years, or in my case, a decade and a half.
You have to do both. The inner work, and then (separately and deliberately) the outer architecture.
And most of us never get to the second part because by the time we have done the inner work, we do not have the energy to also reverse-engineer a brand.
My body adapted long before my brand did.
The additional autoimmune diagnoses changed how I work. The spinal injury changed what a week can hold. The nervous system dysregulation changed what “available” meant. Each of those changed the work (what I offer, how I offer it, what I wholeheartedly promise).
The brand kept introducing me as someone with a different relationship to my body.
I spent a long time feeling like the gap was my fault. Like I was supposed to have updated everything already. Like a person who had figured this out would not wince when someone landed on my old bio and said, oh, I didn’t know you did that anymore.
(That, in this case, being something I had quietly stopped doing because my body made it impossible and I had not yet found the language to say so in public.)
Something I keep returning to: colonial, imperial time is archival. It fixes you to a record and demands you remain legible against it. The traditional brand operates this way. It says: here is who you were when you built this. Be recognizable as that version, or be unrecognizable.
Gloria Anzaldúa names the in-between place: Nepantla. The threshold. The space between who you were and who you are becoming. Not a crisis to move through. Not a phase to resolve. A cosmology. A way of being that holds contradiction, transformation, multiple worlds at once.
Nepantleras cannot be fixed to a single legible identity. That is not failure. That is the methodology.
Anzaldúa called them Nepantleras: someone whose home is the in-between. They don’t wait to arrive. They are already there.They do not pass through the threshold. The threshold is where they live. Where they work. What they know.Nepantleras are people who live in the in-between, who carry knowledge between worlds, who hold contradiction as a cosmology rather than a crisis to resolve. They are not people in transition. Nepantleras are people whose home is the threshold.
The traditional brand does not know what to do with Nepantla. It requires you to have already arrived. It needs to be stable, legible, and resolved. It was built for the person who finished crossing (not the one in the middle of it).
The kind of Time I am in relationship with does not function like this. Cyclical, Indigenous Time expects you to move. In a cosmology where nothing living stays fixed, a brand that photographs you at one moment and holds that shape indefinitely is not neutral. It is a specific kind of time politics.
The gap between who you have become and what your brand says is not a marketing failure. It is a cosmological mismatch. Your brand is demanding you be legible. You are living Nepantla.
Resmaa Menakem writes that the body is the site where knowing lives before language does. The body metabolizes experience first. It adapts, refuses, reroutes (long before we have words for what is changing in us).
The body enters Nepantla first. It is always in the threshold before the mind arrives. Before language arrives. Long before the brand has registered that a crossing is even underway.
The traditional brand does not have a body. It cannot feel a diagnosis or a dysregulation or the slow cellular renegotiation of what a week can actually hold. It cannot sense the refusal, the rerouting, the way a whole orientation to work shifts after the body has had enough of being asked to hold a pace it was never made for.
So it holds the shape of whoever you were. It holds it with a fidelity the body never had (because the body was never meant to be loyal to a fixed form).
The body was built for Nepantla. The traditional brand was built for arrival.
What I know now: the traditional brand does not update itself. And updating it is not just a copywriting problem.
It is a cosmological one.
The traditional brand that introduces who you used to be is pulling the wrong people toward you. The work lands. The client arrives. And there is a small, constant friction (because they found you through an older frequency, and the work you are actually doing now is operating somewhere else entirely).
That friction is not personal failure. It is physics. You moved. The signal did not.
I built Catch Your Brand Up to You in 14 Days, the Stellar Impression Sprint, because I needed it first.
In fourteen days, we read your personal cosmology against your current brand and name what has fractured. You receive a 6-Point Positioning Brief: the gap, stated plainly. The direction, yours to build from. A call to begin and a call to integrate.
$1,500. The details are here →
If you want to go further: there is a $500 upgrade during checkout. The Stellar World Code is a seven-element brand and voice architecture built from your own cosmology. The Brief names the fracture. The World Code gives you (or your copywriter) the material to close it.
This is not a rebrand. It is a frequency update. You have moved. This is how your signal catches up.
You are probably more interesting than the version of you on the internet, too.
The version of me on the internet is slowly catching up. I am doing it the same way I do everything now: not all at once, not on the old timeline, and with my body in the room for every decision.
I am a lot more interesting than the one who could push through.
Catch Your Brand Up to You in 14 Days here →
Stay wild, love fiercely. Your presence is golden.
With wild and rebellious love,
Maltiox! xo Ixchel
P.S. Maltiox pronounced mall-tee-osh means with gratitude in K’iche 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. 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.
