Dragon š Letter #106: We are the Nepantla generations, living in the pause between endings and beginnings. This letter traces how rhythm remembers us home.
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.
Hello Beautiful Wildlings!
Mercuryās retrograde joined Mars in Sagittarius this month, and the whole world slowed. It has pressed on my every nerve. The impulse to move. The pressure to produce. The ache of momentum interrupted.
The pause felt like a loss at first. Then it felt like fertile, new soil.
Retrograde seasons pull at the roots. They push on the container. The roots have outgrown the pot. They remind us that growth needs space before it needs speed. This isnāt failure. Itās repottingā¦ widening the vessel to hold what wants to live.
This slowing carries grief too. The news has been heavy with stories of abuse and power, of systems built to protect those who harm. As a survivor of child sexual assault and trafficking, this season has felt like walking through a storm of memory. Each headline opens a wound that never received collective tending.
The world is waking up to what many of us have lived in silence. I wrote this on Threads a few days ago, and it still feels true:
āHey my fellow survivors, itās ok if the internet is too much for you right now. Thereās a lot of people waking up to our lived reality. We donāt need to trauma dump. Give yourself space and Time to tell your story. Keep breathing. This is what justice feels like.
āWhatās fascinating about justice is that both the victims and perpetrators receive it. May it tend to our wounds and scars.ā
Justice is slow, and collective healing moved with it. Both move like Time itselfā¦ cyclical, relational, and rarely convenient.
This is where the work of deconditioning and decolonizing meets the body.
The Work Beneath the Cosmological Charts
Your Human Design provides a language for who you are and your energetics. Deconditioning and decolonizing teach you to live it.
Conditioning begins before language. It teaches which energies are safe and which bring punishment. It trains you to override instinct to belong. Each open or undefined center in your chart shows where this conditioning took hold and the places you learned to mirror dominator culture so that you could fit in.
When I used to override my bodyās no, I thought I was being strong. I thought discipline was safety. What I was doing was abandoning the only compass that never lied.
Deconditioning isnāt self-improvement. Itās a reunion. Every time you listen to your inner authority, your body reminds you that it is safe to lead.
Colonial Time and the Body
Conditioning is personal. Colonization made it systemic. It taught us to separate body from land, productivity from rest, worth from being. It trained generations to equate movement with meaning and stillness with laziness. It taught us to measure life by the clock instead of by the pulse of sunrise, tide, and breath.
Colonial Time is the architecture of domination. It is the rigid schedule imposed on spirit, the measurement of worth through speed and obedience. It organizes calendars and nervous systems alike. The same imperialism that once claimed ownership of bodies still influences our sense of urgency, the guilt we feel when resting, and the suspicion we hold toward slowness.
To decondition is to notice how that colonial time has taken root inside usā¦ the voice that says you must always be improving, that rest is unearned, that stillness is waste. To decolonize is to pull that root from the soil and compost it into something fertile. The two movements belong together. Deconditioning makes space for awareness. Decolonizing restores relationship.
Barbara Love calls this the work of Liberatory Consciousness ā awareness, analysis, action, and accountability or allyship. Awareness begins in the body, when you notice tension rising with every unchecked notification. Analysis asks: whose rhythm am I serving when I push past exhaustion? Action happens when you pause instead of performing, when you let the breath decide the pace. Accountability is about returning, again and again, to right relationship with the body, with the Earth, and with community.
This process doesnāt happen in isolation. It unfolds through collective deconditioning, somatic awareness, and ancestral rhythm. In community, we learn that slowing down is not self-indulgence but resistance. Somatic awareness teaches us to feel the operational cost of speed. Ancestral rhythm reminds us that Time was never linear. It moves in spirals, like migration routes, like healing.
Joanna Macy reminds us that healing isnāt linear. Itās widening circles. Each return to awareness deepens the work, rather than ending it. The spiral itself is the work. When we forget, we have the opportunity to begin again. When we burn out, the cycle calls us back to compost what no longer sustains life. This is the ecology of embodied becoming.
In this spiral, leadership changes form. Colonial leadership extracted authority from others. Decolonial leadership grows it through relationship and repair. It listens more than it directs. It measures success in how many beings thrive, not in how many tasks are completed. To lead from this place is to embody rhythm itselfā¦ responsive, porous, alive.
Robin Wall Kimmerer writes that reciprocity is the natural rhythm of the living world. We breathe out what the trees breathe in. They return the favor without needing our permission. This is what uncolonized Time feels like: mutual tending. When we breathe in sync with the Earth, Time stretches. Presence becomes the infinite Deep Now.
Colonial time disrupted that reciprocity. It told us to take without tending, to earn through depletion. It trained us to compete with the seasons instead of participating in them. To decolonize Time is to re-enter mutual exchange with the world around usā¦ to move from extraction to participation. This is a re-enchantment with the world.
In Indigenous-Time Ecology, this is the heart of the work: to befriend Time as a living companion rather than a resource to spend. The ancestors remind us that every breath, every choice, every heartbeat is a dialogue. When you honor that dialogue, your body begins to repattern its relationship with energy, power, and rest.
The nervous system learns safety in slowness. Creativity finds oxygen. The leader within becomes steady, relational, and alive.
When we move through collective deconditioning, somatic awareness, and ancestral rhythm, leadership changes texture. It stops striving for control and starts listening for coherence. It stops chasing outcomes and begins cultivating presence.
When we decolonize Time, we return to ecological rhythm. We stop measuring life by output and begin sensing it through relationship.
Ask yourself:
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What beliefs about productivity still guide me?
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Where did I learn to push through exhaustion?
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How would life feel if I trusted my rhythm over external timelines?
These questions are not mental exercises. They are invitations to feel how Time lives in the body, how rhythm is the medicine that heals what empire severed.
The Cycle of Deconditioning
Deconditioning unfolds in repeating cycles:
Awareness shows where conditioning holds control.
Pause interrupts the automatic.
Experimentation invites your embodied knowing to lead.
Integration builds new trust in the body.
Resmaa Menakem, who loves to remind us to pause, teaches that trauma unhealed in one body seeks safety in another. When we regulate together, we stop passing that inherited burden forward. This is why the collective matters. Isolation strengthens the old pattern. Regulation rewrites it.
And while this week of news was so difficult to witness, it was a collective exhale for many Survivors. For the first time in a handful of weeks, today I woke up without pain and tension in my body.
Wild Presence is built on collective rhythmā¦ a place where we learn to be witnessed in new patterns, held without judgment, and resourced by each otherās nervous systems.
In that exhale, awareness becomes capacity. The nervous system begins to remember its natural rhythm.
Decolonizing Through the Types
Each Human Design Type expresses a distinct ecological rhythm. Liberation hinges on honoring difference, not erasing it.
ź© Generators return to self-trust through satisfaction. The body knows when energy is alive.
ź© Manifesting Generators reclaim rhythm by honoring the pause before the leap. Curiosity guides them. Rest protects them.
ź© Projectors release the myth of proving. Recognition, not effort, is their soil of success.
ź© Manifestors find peace when they inform without shrinking. They start creative fires, but are not meant to tend them all.
ź© Reflectors live as mirrors of ecology itself. They move by lunar rhythm and environmental resonance, revealing the collectiveās truth.
When each Type moves by design, the field balances. Deconditioning through your Type restores participation in a living system.
Participation Instead of Extraction
Deconditioning restores choice. Decolonizing restores relationship. Together they return us to participationā¦ with body, with Time, with the living world.
This is the essence of Indigenous-Time Ecology. The seasons in your chart mirror the seasons in the soil. You are not separate from the cycles that move the Earth.
To live this way is to stop outsourcing your vitality to systems that demand extraction and instead step into Nepantla, the space between worlds where endings compost into beginnings.
We are the generation learning to live in this liminal threshold, to root in what is emerging while tending what is dissolving. Decolonization is not a destination but a passage into relationship. It is the long work of learning to live well in transition.
This is where leadership becomes lineage work. Each of us holds a fragment of the collective repair that will take many generations to tend.
Re/membering Time in Nepantla
We are the Nepantla generations. We were born in the threshold between worlds.
Colonization took more than five centuries to bring us to this edge, to carve disconnection into body, language, and land. It will take generations of care, creativity, and collective repair to re-root life in balance again. Our task is to tend the in-between.
Nepantla is the fertile middle ground, neither the old world nor the new, āa liminal space, a space where you are not this or that, but where you are changing.ā Gloria AnzaldĆŗa called Nepantla a bridge space, a borderland of transformation. In my work, it is the spiral path of Re/membering Time where urgency loosens its grip, the senses wake, and ancestral rhythm begins to breathe again.
āLiving between cultures results in āseeingā double, first from the perspective of one culture, then from the perspective of another. Seeing from two or more perspectives simultaneously renders those cultures transparent. Removed from that cultureās center, you glimpse the sea in which youāve been immersed but to which you were oblivious, no longer seeing the world the way you were enculturated to see it.āā Gloria E. AnzaldĆŗa
Colonial systems taught us to fear in-between states. They rewarded certainty and punished ambiguity. Yet all regeneration begins in the liminal. The sprout forms underground before it breaks the soil. The tide turns in the pause between waves. Nepantla is that pause.
This is the ground of my methodology, a spiral way of re-entering relationship through three interwoven movements: Emerge, Embody Flow, and Exhale.
Each is a doorway into a new relationship with Time, leadership, and belonging. Each meets you where you are and brings you home through repetition, not achievement.
Emerge
To Emerge is to feel the shape of urgency in your bones and learn to set it down. Here you begin to unlearn the grind of whiteness, the colonial demand to produce at all costs.
You release the story that your worth depends on exhaustion. You start moving by your senses, letting smell, touch, sound, and breath remind you where you are.
This is the first act of decolonial leadership, to lead from sensation instead of survival. As urgency dissolves, belonging starts to hum beneath the surface.
Presence becomes possible again.
Embody Flow
To Embody Flow is to orient to Spiral Time, where rhythm, not rule, becomes your compass. This is where you stop chasing Flow as a āpeak stateā and begin cultivating it as a daily practice of attunement.
Your rituals root into the lunar and seasonal cycles. You start trusting the pace of your body and the patience of the Earth. Rest is no longer a pause between tasks but part of the rhythm itself.
Here you begin to understand that leadership is not performance.
It is coherence, the ability to stay in rhythm with change. You learn to hold contradiction, to stay steady in uncertainty, and to treat liminality as sacred ground rather than wasted time.
Exhale
To Exhale is to move truth into the world from deep alignment.
You stop performing your value and start living it. You create from the ground of your own being, no longer rushing outcomes or measuring worth by visibility.
Expression becomes ecology. What flows through you nourishes more than it drains.
This is where leadership becomes relational repair. Each act of creation, each moment of rest, each breath in rhythm with Earth contributes to the long restoration of balance.
Your work, your lineage, and your presence ripple outward as part of the collective exhale of a world learning to breathe again.
Re/membering Time in Nepantla is a methodology and a movement of return, a map for how we might lead, heal, and create through generations of repair.
We are not building a new empire. We are composting the old and tending the soil of what will come after. The edge is not exile. It is the place where rhythm remembers us home.
The work of re/membering Time in Nepantla does not happen once. It happens again and again as we move through the spiral. Each time we return, the rhythm carries us deeper into presence as our perspective shifts and expands.
Wild Presence was born from this return. It is the living container for this spiral, the space where theory becomes rhythm and rhythm becomes relationship.
Invitation ā Year of Rhythm
Wild Presence: Year of Rhythm is where this practice continues.
Over the course of twelve months, we explore how your Cosmology (Human Design, Astrology, Cholqāij), Indigenous-Time Ecology, Everyday Animism, and Embodied Leadership weave together.
Youāll learn to make decisions through body intelligence, align work with lunar and seasonal cycles, and lead from resonance instead of reaction.
This is the foundation of Wild Presence and the Year of Rhythm. It is where we practice these teachings of Emergence, Embodied Flow, and Exhale together through collective deconditioning, somatic awareness, and ancestral rhythm. Together, we re-pattern how leadership feels in a decolonial bodyā¦ steady, relational, alive.
Weāll take you out of that small, tight pot and plant you in the fertile, wild Earth.
You are not here to keep pace with systems that drain you. You are here to move in rhythm with the living world.
If youāre ready to live your design in rhythm, join the waitlist for Wild Presence: Year of Rhythm here. Year 1 grounds you in the methodology and prepares you to bring these teachings into your own spaces. The facilitator certification process begins in Year 2.
May the next cycle bring steadier breath, deeper roots, and the patience to grow in your own Time.
Stay wild, love fiercely. Your presence is golden.
Maltiox! xo Ixchel
P.S. Wild Presence: Year of Rhythm opens later this month with three tiers of pricing. Join the waitlist here to be the first to know when enrollment begins.
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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Copyright Ā© 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.
