Dragon 🐉 Letter #113: Your ancestors did not survive so you could rent your right to serve.
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,
This week, another renewal notice landed in my inbox. You know, the one that asks for four figures just to keep my work “valid,” and my body did what it always does when extraction shows up. It went tight and cold.
A pattern emerges whenever something meaningful begins to matter in the world. It starts with care, with people wanting to help, with the impulse to build containers for learning, healing, and ethical practice. Over time, it becomes a product. Eventually, it becomes a system that extracts more than it gives. Cory Doctorow calls this enshittification¹, the slow conversion of something useful into something that primarily exists to generate ongoing revenue for the institution that controls it.
Coaching certifications are now deep inside this cycle.
Many of these programs began with real intention. People wanted to share frameworks, lineages, medicine, and skills that could genuinely support people in crisis, transition, or creative becoming. They wanted to protect clients and practitioners alike. I know this because I’ve paid for those trainings. I learned things that still shape my work. I worked with teachers who cared. I am not pretending that what was offered had no value.
What I am here to name is what happened next.
The training stopped being the product. The credential became the product. Then the ongoing right to use the credential became the product. It is now common to pay several thousand dollars to become certified, and then be required to keep paying hundreds or thousands of dollars every year simply to remain allowed to call yourself what you have already been trained to be. These fees do not usually include ongoing supervision. They are not typically meaningful continuing education, nor are they community care. They are access tolls.
You are not paying to be supported. You are paying to avoid being erased.
Underneath this sits an economic truth that almost no one wants to say out loud. Most coaches do not make enough from coaching to justify ongoing licensing fees. Not in this economy. Not with the market as saturated as it is. Not when clients are stretched thin by inflation, debt, medical precarity, and collective burnout. Yet the renewal notices arrive as if everyone were running a high-margin practice rather than doing fragile, relational work in a collapsing world.
You are asked to invest heavily to become qualified. Then you are asked to keep investing just to remain legitimate. Meanwhile, you are largely on your own to navigate marketing, trauma, legal risk, ethical complexity, cultural harm, and the emotional labor of holding other people’s lives. What you are really renting is permission.
This is how extractive systems function. They do not need to threaten you outright. They simply make it feel too dangerous to step outside their walls. Your fear of losing standing, being questioned, or being seen as unprofessional becomes the enforcement mechanism.
What makes this especially painful in the coaching and healing worlds is the language these fields use. Liberation. Sovereignty. Nervous system safety. Collective care. Yet structurally, many of these systems behave like venture-funded platforms. Your ongoing payments matter more than how your work actually lives in the world.
What this model misses is how impactful work actually spreads. When people are trained in a method, a framework, or a lineage, the living question should be how that work moves through communities, touches real lives, and grows beyond the institution that birthed it.
Systems that keep raising the price of permission quietly limit that spread.
They shrink the field to only those who can afford to keep paying rather than those who are actively carrying the work into the world. Over time, the brand is protected, but the medicine gets locked away rather than rippling out into the world.
I want to name an example of a different approach because alternatives matter. Kendall Summerhawk, the creator of Sacred Money Archetypes², uses an ongoing license rather than an annual licensing fee. Once you are trained, you are not put on a treadmill where you must repurchase your right to practice every year.
While her work is not my path and not something I teach or promote (see P.P.S. below, a mention is not an endorsement), that structural choice is quietly radical. It removes the constant threat of being priced out of legitimacy. It acknowledges that the training itself was the transaction.
I also want to name a model who directly shaped my work. Kelly Diels’ Copywriting for Culturemakers certification. That program is no longer active, but its structure still matters. You trained once. You earned the credential. You were trusted to carry it forward. There was no annual toll to maintain your legitimacy. There was no threat of being quietly delisted if your income dipped. The relationship was based on learning and respect rather than rent.
That experience showed me what ethical certification can look like. You pay for education. You receive it. You integrate it. The lineage continues because people want to stay in relationship, not because their credit card is being held hostage.
When I compare that to systems that require perpetual licensing fees, the difference is unmistakable. One treats practitioners as people with evolving lives. The other treats them as recurring revenue streams.
There is a reason I am writing this now. My own work is in the middle of a quiet simplification. Some of the ways I have named and framed my offerings are changing. Not because the work is disappearing, but because I am stepping out of systems that require me to keep paying for permission to serve in the ways I already do.
What is emerging is cleaner and more direct. Fewer rented titles. More presence, lineage, and lived experience. You will feel it when it arrives.
Consider this a small flare in the night. Stay tuned for a kind of liberation that does not require an annual credit card to be valid.
I also want to say this clearly. When Wild Presence Year of Rhythm returns, those who choose to step into facilitation will not be put on a treadmill. That facilitation license was designed from the beginning to be ongoing. You train. You practice. You carry the work forward. There is no annual toll to keep your place. That was not an accident. It was a refusal to recreate the same extractive patterns I am naming here.
I am not ashamed that I can no longer afford some of the licensing fees attached to credentials I already earned. That is not a personal failure. It is a sign that the system is optimized for extraction rather than thriving.
If you feel dread when renewal emails arrive, the quiet panic of wondering whether you can afford to remain legitimate, or the pressure of being priced out of work you are genuinely called to do. There’s nothing wrong with you.
You are inside a system that forgot what it was meant to serve.
Some of what I am naming here does not live only in spreadsheets or contracts. It lives in the body. You can feel it in the way your chest tightens when an invoice arrives. In the way your breath shortens when your worth is put up for renewal. In the way your lineage knows the difference between being in right relationship and being rented.
My ancestors did not survive displacement, erasure, and extraction so that I could spend my life paying to be allowed to help people. The work I do comes from land, time, memory, and having walked through fire while staying in listening. That is a kind of credential no brand can issue, and no subscription can revoke.
Stay wild, love fiercely. Your presence is golden.
With wild and rebellious love,
Maltiox! xo Ixchel
P.S. If you want a place to land with this, Rhythm Reset and Queering Rhythm are open. These are spaces where you and I work with time, body, and presence without fixing or forcing. You are welcome there.
P.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.
