Dragon 🐉 Letter #107: There is a moment when the body refuses to continue the old rhythm. That moment is where repair begins.
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.
Hola Beautiful Wildlings!
There are seasons in a life when the body speaks first. Before thought, before language, before the day even begins, there is a tension in the chest or a heaviness in the limbs or a quiet grief behind the eyes. The body tells the truth long before the calendar admits anything. When we override that message again and again, a rupture opens.
I was sitting editing this letter when a Black and White Warbler flew into the glass outside my window. The impact was sharp and sudden. I stepped outside and lifted her from the ground. Her beak was slightly open and her breath was fast. Her little body was all tremor and instinct. Frozen.
I placed her on my chair and watched her from inside. Over a few minutes her breath softened. Her wings steadied. She reoriented herself to the world. I went back out to check on her and snap these photos. She was so tiny. Then she was ready and flew back into the trees.
I keep thinking about how often we do the same thing. We hit an invisible boundary we never saw coming. We fall out of rhythm because something in the world is built against us. We try to move through a colonial architecture that was never designed with our bodies, our histories, or our cosmologies in mind. And then we go still because stillness is the only medicine available.
That stillness is where repair begins.
In my own life there was a long stretch when I kept expanding my responsibilities even as my energy shrank. I convinced myself I was being devoted and disciplined. I was “rising to the occasion.” Underneath those justifications lived something far older and deeper. It was the drive that forms under colonial time, the one that trains a body to run on extraction instead of rhythm. A drive that taught me to disregard my cycles, minimize my needs, and measure my worth through what I could carry. I didn’t understand this until my body slipped into yet another burnout cycle. My whole being told me to set the weight down and listen.
The rupture created by urgency reaches into every corner of a life. Work shifts from calling to burden. Creativity thins out. Relationships strain. Cycles of effort and collapse shorten. The nervous system shrinks its range until joy feels like something that belongs to someone else. These are not signs of personal inadequacy. They are symptoms of dominator culture that conditions busy disconnection and disembodiment as a way of being.
Bayo Akomolafe writes, “The times are urgent, let us slow down.” His words have lived in my body for years. The slowing is not a retreat. The slowing is a portal. It invites us to put down the logics that were never meant for us and return to our own rhythm. A rhythm that remembers land, lineage, and interdependence.
Colonial conditioning disrupts that relationship by teaching us to override our bodies, ignore the land beneath our feet, and carry more than any one person was ever meant to hold. Joanna Macy teaches that presence is the most radical form of participation in a collapsing world. Presence is not passive. Presence requires rhythm. Presence requires pacing. Presence requires a relationship with Time that is not based on extraction.
Gabor Maté reminds us that safety is the presence of connection. Connection reshapes the body. Connection rewrites what urgency has broken. Connection calls us back into the web of life where our belonging was never lost, only obscured.
My work did not begin with entrepreneurship. It began with my own decolonial unraveling when I had to rebuild my relationship with Time and the body from the roots.
For more than thirty years I have studied the conditions that pull people out of themselves and the practices that guide them home. Over the past decade I have coached hundreds of leaders, creatives, and culture-bearers through cycles of collapse and this slow reclamation of rhythm.
What this has shown me again and again is that rhythm is relational, not individual. Long before any of this became my work in the world, I was doing the personal decolonial work of unlearning urgency and restoring connection through ancestral practice, animist relationship, chronic-illness pacing, and somatic repair. My training in animist cosmologies, Flow science, and Indigenous Time Ecology shaped a body of work rooted in lived experience rather than theory.
These decades of lived study shaped the framework I teach. This is the ground I stand on, informing every rhythm we practice inside Wild Presence. It is not extracted from someone else’s lineage nor borrowed from a trend. It is the path I walked through collapse, re-matriation, and the deep apprenticeship to Time itself.
I share this because enrollment is now open for Wild Presence: Year of Rhythm. This Spiral is the result of years spent reclaiming my own rhythm after collapse. It carries the practices that helped me restore my capacity and deepen my belonging. It gathers the teachings that taught me to treat Time as kin and leadership as reciprocity.
This is a container where you learn to honor the truth of your energy and the intelligence of your cycles. It is a place where collapse becomes information. It is a place where the body is welcomed back into leadership.
If your body has been whispering for months that something needs to shift, please listen. This work is not about managing time or chasing productivity. It is about remembering your place within a living cosmos.
Your body is not a machine. Your purpose is not a burden. Your rhythm is not a flaw. There is wisdom in the way your breath moves. There is intelligence in the way your fatigue speaks.
I keep remembering that wee warbler settling into herself again. How she rested on my chair until her bearings returned. How she lifted back into the trees when her body knew she was ready. She did not rush or force. She trusted the slow re-entry. She trusted her rhythm.
May 2026 hold moments of stillness.
May this be the place where your breath steadies again.
May this be the season when your wings remember their pattern.
Enrollment is open.
If this feels like your next rhythm, I’m here.
Stay wild, love fiercely. Your presence is golden.
Maltiox! xo Ixchel
P.S. If your body has been whispering for months, this is your sign to listen. Wild Presence: Year of Rhythm enrollment is open. Your rhythm belongs here.
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.
