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.
Do you know your Moon Phase?
To get your free natal Moon phase and description, use my Moon Phase calculator here.
Beautiful Wildling,
You and I, we have been tired for months. Maybe years. We have tried the protocols. The supplements. The morning routines. The sleep hygiene. The adaptogens our last coach recommended. We have tracked our cycles, our HRV, our steps, and our macros. We have been to the functional medicine doctor, the acupuncturist, the somatic practitioner, and the one who does the thing with the tuning forks. We have spent money we did not have on the hope that someone would hand us back the body we used to have at twenty-six.
None of it has worked the way they said it would.
(But thank goodness some of it does, or I wouldn’t be here now.)
We keep showing up anyway. We run the businesses. We answer the emails. We do the school pickup, the dog walk, or the caretaking for the parent who needs us now. We write the pitch. We take the call. We rearrange the calendar around the one hour of focus we can scrape together on a good afternoon. We have become experts at performing a version of ourselves that does not exist anymore, and the performance is more exhausting than the work.
We suspect something our practitioners have not said out loud. Our bodies are not broken. Our bodies are telling the truth. The decisions we have been making about our lives, our calendars, our yeses are decisions our bodies will no longer sign off on. The veto is physical. We are losing the argument with ourselves because our bodies are done arguing.
I want to tell you something the coaching industry does not want me to tell you.
I am a sick person who works.
I live on two cups of food a day. Avocados, eggs, and veggies, mostly. I have become a person who packs in calories per spoonful because my stomach will not move food the way stomachs are supposed to move food, and I refuse to waste away.
This condition has a name. Gastroparesis. It has debilitated me severely for the last two years. I have lost days I cannot afford to lose. I have learned to digest while standing. I have learned that a snack is a negotiation because the motility drugs I take are too expensive to have more than twice a day. Eating a restaurant meal while forgetting my motility pill means possibly not eating tomorrow at all.
I have autoimmune conditions. I have a nervous system condition. I have a spine that was broken and did not heal the way spines are supposed to heal. I do not name the rest of them here, not because I am ashamed, but because the coaching industry uses diagnoses as either credentials or disqualifications, and I refuse to hand my body over to either.
If I named them all, half of you would read me as more credible. The other half would quietly wonder if I have the capacity to take on clients. Both responses would be wrong. Both responses are the same, wearing different clothes. Both treat my body as a résumé.
I am not a résumé.
I am a fifty-four-year-old MesoAmerican nonbinary person who was told at sixteen that my body had decided to start attacking itself because of the trauma of my father’s violent end. I am the person who built a business inside that body anyway. I am the person who mentors founders through the thing inside them that will not come out, while managing my own condition, which some days means working six hours and some days means working forty minutes and some weeks means working from the couch with the dog on my feet because standing is the negotiation I lose that day.
I am also the person who made forty-two percent more this year than YTD last year. Who rematriated to new lands. Who is writing a book. Who is building a practice that does not require me to pretend.
You have been sold the lie that capacity is a straight line.
Colonial time wants our capacity to be a straight line. Colonial time wants our output to be predictable, our energy to be renewable on a schedule, our bodies to be a battery we plug in at night and discharge in the morning. Colonial time wants us standardized. Replaceable. Scalable. Colonial time wants our calendar to look the same in October as it did in April, regardless of what our bodies are doing, regardless of what our people need, regardless of what the moon is doing, regardless of grief, regardless of flare, regardless of the fact that we are biological beings embedded in seasons and relationships and lineage and weather.
Colonial time is killing us slowly.
Colonial time has already killed people like me. It would have killed me by forty. I am alive at fifty-four because I refused it. Not as a concept. Not as a brand. As survival. I stopped running my days on the clock that the productivity culture had handed me because my body would no longer tolerate it. The refusal was not political at first. It was physical. The politics came later, when I understood that the clock was not neutral, that the schedule was not natural, that the rhythm I had been forcing my body into was the rhythm of an empire that needed my exhaustion to function.
Your body knows this. Your body has been saying it. You have been calling it burnout, brain fog, perimenopause, laziness, ADHD, depression, anxiety, long COVID, adrenal fatigue, a rough patch, a hard season, a temporary thing. Some of those names are accurate. Some of them are covers for a larger refusal your body is trying to make on your behalf.
Your body is trying to tell you that the decision stack running your days was not built by you.
It was built by the thousand small agreements you made without knowing you were making them. The yes you said on a call before your body had time to speak. The email you answered at nine PM, because the phone was in your hand. The client you kept because letting them go felt harder than resenting them. The morning you skipped breakfast, because there was no time. The walk you canceled, because the work came first. The rest you postponed until after the launch, and then after the next launch, and then after the one after that.
Every one of those agreements is a line in a decision stack you did not consciously write. The stack is running your life. The stack is making your days. The stack is why you are tired in a way sleep does not touch.
You cannot willpower your way out of a decision stack you did not know existed.
You cannot optimize it. You cannot hack it. You cannot outrun it with a better calendar app. The stack is not on your calendar. The stack is underneath your calendar, deciding which things get on the calendar in the first place, which things you notice and which you let slide, what you call urgent and what you call optional, and whose needs come first and whose come last. The stack is the operating system. The calendar is just the screen.
The wellness industry wants to sell us a better screen.
I am not here to sell you a better screen.
Here is what I know because my body taught me.
You do not have a time problem. You have a decision problem because of your relationship with Time. The decisions are being made below the level of your consciousness, and they are running your days without your consent. The reason the protocols have not worked is that the protocols are aimed at the wrong level. You cannot fix the output of a broken operating system by redecorating the interface.
You have to get under the interface. You have to see the stack. You have to notice, with honesty that most people cannot stomach, how you actually spend the hours you say you do not have. You have to look at the agreements you made years ago and never renegotiated. You have to look at what your body has been asking for and what you have been refusing to give it. You have to look at the specific way your lineage taught you to measure worth by output, and you have to ask whether you are willing to keep paying that tax.
Sick people know this faster than well people.
I am going to say the thing the coaching industry will not say. Sick people are ahead of you. We have already lost the argument with colonial time. We have already had to build lives that do not assume a reliable body. We have already had to figure out how to work inside a capacity that does not cooperate. We are not behind. We are ahead. The future you are slowly moving toward, the one where you cannot push through anymore, the one where your body stops letting you override it… we are already there. And we have notes.
The notes do not look like the protocols. The notes do not look like the morning routine. The notes look like a decision stack rebuilt from underneath. The notes look like a relationship with Time that bends to a body instead of a body that bends to a calendar. The notes look like a business that does not require you to pretend either.
I built my practice for founders who suspect their bodies are telling them something they do not want to hear. I built it because nobody built it for me, and I needed it, and if I needed it, there are others like you. You do not have to be diagnosed. You do not have to be disabled like me. You do not have to have a name for what is happening to you yet. But you have to be willing to look at the decisions running your days and ask whether you signed off on any of them.
The thing inside you that will not come out is waiting for you to make different decisions.
The decisions are waiting for you to see the stack.
That is the whole of it.
I will not tell you that I have transcended my body. I don’t want to. It’s beyond wise and miraculous in what it has survived. And I will not tell you that I have healed. I will not tell you that my methodology is the thing that fixed me, because my body is not fixed and will not be fixed, and the selling of fixing is one of the lies I will not tell. I will tell you that I am here. I am working. I am building. I am writing this from a body that will not let me forget it is sovereign and mortal, with a limited number of days left, and I am grateful for the reminder, because the reason the work has the shape and ambition it has is that reminder.
You are allowed to be a person who is tired and who works.
You are allowed to be a person whose capacity fluctuates.
You are allowed to build a life, a business, and a body of work that do not require you to be someone you are not anymore.
Your body has been telling you. I am telling you too.
The stack is real. The decisions are yours. The time you think you do not have is hiding inside the agreements you have not renegotiated yet.
Start there.
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.
♾️ CONTINUUM, your custom plan →
🫧 Join the free 5-day Interrupting Time practice →
👩🏽🤝👩🏾 Ways to work with me…
🎙️ Book me for your Podcast, speaking event, or program…
🌒 Get your Moon Phase (free calculator) →
✍🏽 Meet OoSo Studio →
👩🏽🤝👩🏾 Ways to work with me…
🎙️ Book me for your Podcast, speaking event, or program…
Walk in beauty. Live your magic. Go wild.
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)
Thanks for reading! If you loved it, tell your friends to subscribe.
We may include other affiliate links in our content. Thank you for supporting our work.
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.
