Dragon 🐉 Letter #114: Writing about Time as a lived relationship, with an invitation to a five-day embodied practice, Interrupting Time.
Hola! I’m Ixchel Lunar (sounds like ee-shell, 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,
Welcome. I’m Ixchel.
I write about decolonizing Time and Flow states, not productivity or optimization. Time and Flow as lived relationship with the body and the land.
I’m known for my writing and teaching on Indigenous timekeeping and for naming how capitalism and colonial power shape our relationship to time. I write about how dominant Western narratives flatten rhythm, erase land-based knowing, and reward speed at the cost of bodies, communities, and ecosystems. I am explicit about this. I am also explicit about landback and Indigenous stewardship as living, ongoing responsibilities rather than symbolic ideas.
I did not come to this work through theory. I came through collapse, exile, illness, and long stretches of listening when my body refused the pace I was taught to survive inside.
I left the United States in 2017 as the political climate hardened. I lived for nearly six years in the highland jungles of Nicaragua, recovering from autistic burnout and living close to the land where I learned more about rhythm from sloths and forest cycles than I ever learned from calendars or clocks.
I paid attention to the land, watching sloths move through the jungle canopy with a deliberate intentionality that made no apologies. I also learned what it means to live inside instability, surveillance, and real risk, while staying in relationship with the land and its people under pressure. I witnessed uprising and repression, community care and exhaustion. I stayed until 2022, when I rematriated to my ancestral land of Mexico.
Those years changed how I understand and relate with Time.
Video of a perezoso (sloth) visiting the allspice tree off our patio in Matagalpa, Nicaragua, December 20, 2020.
I come to this work through an arduous and distinctive life. I’m a Gen Xer, the eldest in a large, mixed-immigrant family, shaped early by responsibility, trauma, organizing, and social justice work. I’ve spent decades in relationship with planetary cycles, herbal practice, Western astrology, Mayan cosmovision, and Human Design, not as abstractions but as ways of listening to rhythm, seasonality, and capacity. These practices taught me how to notice when bodies are being asked to move against their nature.
Burnout taught me the rest.
I am mixed Indigenous, queer, neurodivergent, vision-impaired, and shaped by chronic illness and disability. My body has never moved well inside linear demand. I spent decades thinking that was a flaw.
We are not flawed or broken, the fascist systems are.
My work is woven from Indigenous ecological timeways, somatic reverie, and long experience living under colonial time pressure. I guide people to interrupt urgency, restore choice, and relate to Time through sensation and kinship rather than abstraction. You’ll find this work in my writing, audio practices, conversations, and guest appearances, as well as in longer containers where rhythm is practiced slowly, inside real life.
This guides everything I offer here.
Dragon Letters are where I write in depth. These letters move slowly. They carry story, history, observation, and practice. They are meant to be read like you would sit with a long conversation, not skimmed or mined for takeaways. If you are looking for quick tips, this space might feel strange. If you are hungry for contact, it may feel like home.
If you are new here, you are welcome to begin with a short embodied practice called Interrupting Time. It is a free five-day series of brief audio practices, each four to five minutes, to interrupt urgency and reconnect with your own timing, in real life. The work happens through sensation and contact rather than explanation.
If you are already subscribed to Substack and did not receive the Day 0 welcome email today, you are also welcome to join the series here:
Join the 5-day Interrupting Time practice →
Once you add yourself, the series begins with a simple orientation email and unfolds one day at a time.
Subscribing here means you will receive Dragon Letters a couple of times a month, along with occasional invitations to practice together more closely.
If you are reading this and your body softened even slightly, you are in the right place.
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.
🌒 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.
