LIVING NEPANTLA · Private 1:1 mentorship
For creative founders and leaders scaling meaningful work:
Your work is growing. Why is your body paying for it?
You’re carrying work that was never yours to hold, at a pace set by systems that were never built for bodies. You can set that weight down and keep growing.
If you’re scaling something meaningful and feel the cost in your body, this is where urgency loosens its grip and growth no longer requires self-erasure.
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See what the year includes
It’s the best of seasons for your work, and the hardest on your body.
You’ve tried to manage the pace. And still, something feels strained.
People want your time, and the business you built earns well at the pace you’ve been keeping.
It looks like success (by most outside measures, it is), and it comes with the quiet dread before you open the laptop, the decision fatigue, the yes you give before your body can speak, and a stop time that keeps sliding later into the night.
Because you’re carrying work that was never yours to hold.
Where the strain comes from
Most business systems were not built for bodies.
They reward endurance over sustainability and treat human limits as inefficiencies to overcome.
Grind culture still wears a spiritual mask.
Urgency is framed as devotion, so exhaustion feels morally justified.
Time scarcity is structurally designed.
The pressure to move faster is a feature of extractive systems, built in long before you arrived.
Underneath all of it is the colonial clock: imperial supremacist systems that run on extraction, a colonial productivity culture that taught whole generations to treat a body’s limits as a character flaw, and internalized dominator culture, which keeps that lesson running inside us long after anyone says it out loud. We inherited that clock, and every one of us arrived after it was set.
I’ll be fair to the old pace: it works for a while. Capable people can override themselves for years (that’s exactly why it’s so hard to see), and the business keeps working the whole time. The open question, I think, is whether the way you’ve been moving will hold at a larger size without taking something you won’t get back.
No wonder the pace feels unbearable.
When urgency governs your role, growth starts costing your body, and no calendar fix can pay that back.
Urgency can’t be resolved with time management. It’s weight that was never yours to hold, and it has settled into your nervous system.
Every fix you’ve been offered treats urgency as a time management problem (a tighter schedule, a stronger mindset), so each one lives inside the same logic that caused the strain. They all ask how to fit everything in, and the question underneath goes unasked: whose is it to carry?
Look closely at what’s on your desk and you’ll find a mix: the work that is truly yours as a founder, scope that expanded without your consent, responsibility that drifted in because you were competent and the gap was there, and work that belongs to someone else entirely. A better calendar can’t sort that.
When the weight that isn’t yours comes off, capacity returns. Rhythm finally has somewhere to live, and your vision can grow without devouring you.
That’s the premise of Living Nepantla, and the Set-Down is how it works: the weight comes from the conditions, so we name what was never yours, and you put it down.
The in-between has a name
“Nepantla, which is a Nahuatl word for the space between two bodies of water, the space between two worlds… a space where you are not this or that but where you are changing.”
Gloria Anzaldúa (a Chicana tejana lesbian-feminist poet, in her own words) carried the Nahuatl word into our time and made it a home for everyone who lives between worlds. I first felt it as a child between two houses, one always running late and one where punctuality was protection. That’s when I began to hear the ancestors stirring.
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 polycrisis is what Nepantla looks like for a planet in transition: a threshold where old forms break down and something new hasn’t taken shape yet. It’s also where new things get born.
It took 500 years of genocidal imperialism to arrive here. It will take as many generations to undo, reimagine, and weave new worlds. You are one generation in that span, the Nepantla Generation, one of many, living in the between of what we are becoming.
So I center this liminal time we are in, in my work and my mentorship: Living Nepantla, the threshold as home. I’m in it with you (the Nepantla Generation includes me), and the weaving doesn’t have to cost you your body, or your future.
Meet your guide, Ixchel Lunar (they/them)
Ixchel in Montetik Forest. It was a whole vibe. Montetik is a community-owned ecological reserve and ecotourism park located on the southern outskirts of San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico. Spanning approximately 250 hectares of pine-oak forest, it serves as a critical watershed for the city and is managed by the El Aguaje Indigenous community. This is what landback is all about.
Ixchel Lunar is a somatic leadership mentor guiding creative founders through leadership recalibration grounded in decolonial and relational time. They support leaders to clarify responsibility, strengthen embodied authority, and express from aligned presence as their vision expands.
Their work is shaped by lived political rupture, migration, chronic illness pacing, and years of guiding high-capacity leaders and creative founders who refuse urgency as a governing force. Ixchel draws from Indigenous ecological timeways, nervous system regulation, cyclical leadership, and relational practice to help founders carry meaningful work without sacrificing themselves to it.
Ixchel was raised on the traditional, unceded and stolen lands of the Coast and Central Valley Miwok (colonized as Petaluma, California) and the Nisenan (colonized as Sacramento), and now lives and works in the highland forest of Coatepec, Veracruz, on Totonac, Nahua and Mexicah land.
Leslie Tagorda names Ixchel as a “decolonial cosmologist” in the Capricorn chapter of Astrology for Changemakers (Weiser, 2026), and Ixchel is AstroBrand® certified in Tagorda’s method.
“Their work with me was literally time magic.”
“
I want to get into flow more easily and use my time differently. I want to finish my book! That’s why I asked Ixchel to coach me. Their work with me was literally time magic. So much of what they asked me to put in place in my life, I would NEVER have thought to do on my own — and it’s genuinely working.
Ixchel is BRILLIANT. I learned so much from them. My sleep hygiene is massively improved, I changed the way I'm delivering programs that will make them more effective for both my clients and me, and I'm actually making progress on my book. I am writing without burning myself out.
KELLY DIELS, FEMINIST MARKETING CONSULTANT
”
Living Nepantla
A year of company in the in-between. Private 1:1 mentorship for creative founders scaling cultural brands, with me beside you every weekday while your work grows and you stay intact.
For Edgewalkers (people comfortable walking the liminal in-between of Nepantla), culturemakers, executives, entrepreneurs, leaders, writers, politicians, activists, BIPOC, decolonizers, anti-racists, neuro-emergents, 2Spirits, QueerAF, Trans, enbies, revolutionaries, feminists, and dreamers.
You belong if you’re part of the movement to create the post-hegemonic culture (liberating from the cis + heteronormative, imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy, h/t bell hooks + Laverne Cox).
You can have a life of leadership where…
- Growth stops overriding your body, so the next size of the business isn’t paid for out of your sleep and your health.
- Your decisions come clean (yes, no, not now) without the scramble in your body or the quiet resentment building underneath.
- You stop carrying it alone, even if you’re the strong one everyone else leans on.
- Your stop time is defined, so the day ends at a time you chose.
- Presence follows intention, so a launch no longer leaves you with a visibility hangover.
- Your scope matches your capacity, because the work that was never yours has been set down (and you can finally see how much room was under it).
Within the first 90 days, founders typically reclaim decision capacity, reduce over-functioning, and restructure their role to support sustainable growth. The rest of the year is for making that the way you lead.
Opens the application. I read every one personally.
Three movements, one spiral
Living Nepantla unfolds through three movements that reshape how you lead as your vision grows. It moves as a spiral: you return to each movement when it fits your season.
Ignite
Clarify your lane. Interrupt urgency.
Inherited urgency becomes visible here, and once you can see it, you can interrupt it. We name what’s truly yours to carry as a founder and what isn’t, and then we take the second list seriously. Even if you’ve cleared your calendar more than once already, this works differently, because the weight we’re moving was never on the calendar.
- Name your true founder-level lane.
- Define your stop time.
- Set down the weight that was never yours.
A refusal to go numb. A rising.
Embody
Stabilize capacity. Build grounded rhythm.
In Embody, rhythm becomes how your weeks run. Your body counts as information here, one sensing instrument inside a larger living system of land, season, lineage, and community. If your body has spent years as the thing you schedule around, this is where it becomes part of how you decide.
- Budget energy to your actual workload.
- Match your Presence Rhythm to real capacity.
- Map your planning to seasonal cycles.
The edge becomes home.
Signal
Express from aligned presence.
In Signal, leadership becomes coherent and expression stops costing your body. Your presence grows around what’s truly yours to carry. Visibility may have felt like a demand you meet at your body’s expense, and here it becomes something you choose.
- Restructure your presence commitments.
- Refine your message from lived authority.
- Integrate rest into outward leadership.
Expression becomes ecology.
You didn’t come here to grind yourself hollow.
You’re here to grow a body of work that rhythm can carry for years.
“They taught me how to let my body lead me to the answers that were right for me.”
“
Working with Ixchel, I found the deep clarity I needed to move forward. They taught me how to let my body lead me to the answers that were right for me.
Ixchel's guidance is a combination of practical and mystical, providing tools and insight. I highly recommend Ixchel to anyone looking to operate from their inner wisdom and bring a sacred vision into reality.
Charlice Hurst, Founder Decision Alchemy
”
What the year includes
Living Nepantla is a private twelve-month mentorship for creative founders scaling meaningful work. Over twelve months, we apply the three movements directly to your vision, your team dynamics, and your leadership patterns. This is deliberate, relational work: you won’t be rushed or crowded, and you’ll be met where you are.
We will reorient time, attention, and responsibility by clarifying lane and scope so your body of work can move forward without being devoured by urgency.
This is structured depth. And it is designed to expand if needed.
Flexible coaching
By voice or text, answered every weekday morning.
With a weekly call, your best thinking has to show up on a Tuesday at two. That’s 52 hours out of the 8,760 in a year (365 times 24; the math holds), and most of what matters happens in the rest: the start of sales season, the moment before you say yes to one more thing, the draft you can’t make yourself send, the walk where the idea finally lands. Flexible coaching lets you bring me into those moments. Message me any time, day or night, and I answer every weekday morning, Monday to Friday.
Nothing waits a week to turn into a story.
Unlimited calls
Whenever you want to think out loud with me.
When you want to hear my voice live, book a call. They’re unlimited, one at a time, so as soon as one is done you can book the next. If you do your best thinking out loud, you never have to ration it.
Live time to think, as often as you need it.
Audits
Your copy, website, and offers, back by Tuesday.
The lane you name in Ignite has to show up in what you publish, or the old pace comes right back in through the sales page. Send me your copy, website, or offer by Sunday and my notes come back by Tuesday.
Public work that matches the lane you chose.
Stellar Impression
As needed. Ask about adding it in our threshold conversation.
Some founders arrive with a body of work that has outgrown its brand. Stellar Impression, my brand mentorship, maps your brand from your cosmology (AstroBrand®, h/t Leslie Tagorda, plus Human Design) and ends with your Stellar World Map.
A brand that tells the same story your work does.
OoSo Studio
Included, for the technical side of your work.
Drop into co-working when you want company, bring tech questions to the standups, and give the project that keeps slipping a build day.
Momentum on the build you kept pushing to next month.
Somatic practices
From my audio collection, when your body needs more than a call.
Some weeks the insight is clear and the body hasn’t caught up with it yet. Those weeks, I send a somatic practice from my audio collection.
A practice your body can use that week.
Feedback on your weekly anumis
Your focused passions, with feedback every week.
Anumis are your focused passions for the week. You share yours and I send feedback, so you can see where your attention is going, week by week.
A second set of eyes on where your attention goes.
Transit analysis
Astrological or Human Design, on request.
When a decision has a timing question inside it (a launch date, a hard conversation), you can request astrological or Human Design transit analysis.
Cosmological context beside the practical one.
“I have often been stuck in some area at the beginning of a session, but never at the end!”
“
Ixchel is like a fine surgeon, always finding the exact place to direct their wisdom, so that I leave them more alive and empowered to create a life full of purpose and passion.
I have been a transformational coach and seminar leader for almost 40 years, Ixchel is one of the wisest people I have ever worked with. Their knowledge is both wide and deep. I have never had a call with them that didn’t open up something profound for me. I have often been stuck in some area at the beginning of a session, but never at the end!
Kathy Benson, Transformational Leadership Coach
”
Also included: OoSo Studio
Some of what a founder carries alone is technical: the site that needs fixing, the build you keep pushing to next month. Living Nepantla includes OoSo Studio (co-working, tech standups, and build days), so that side of the work has company too.
“SO FUN to see my work reflected back to me! Super grateful to feel some momentum.”
Who this is for
This private container is for you if:
- You are scaling meaningful work and feel the weight of carrying it
- Your leadership holds real responsibility: creative, relational, or organizational
- You are ready to reshape how responsibility moves through your life
- You want relational support, not a template
- You intend to keep building this vision for years to come
This is for founders with skin in the game who are ready to recalibrate before collapse forces the change.
Who this is not for
- It is not a done-for-you agency: I don't write your copy or run your launches.
- It is not therapy or trauma treatment.
- It is not for founders unwilling to change how they carry responsibility.
- It is not a standing weekly appointment.
If you care this much about your work and you’re tired of being the strong one who carries it alone, you’re who I built this for. Picture a morning a few months in. A message asks for your time, and before the old yes leaves your mouth, you lean back, look away from the screen, and take a breath. You’re checking your own timing now, and the work keeps growing without the weight that was never yours.
The year at a glance
Living Nepantla: twelve months of private 1:1 mentorship
- The three movements: Ignite, Embody, Signal
- Unlimited flexible coaching by voice or text, answered every weekday morning
- Unlimited calls, one at a time
- Audits of your copy, website, and offers (send by Sunday, notes back by Tuesday)
- Stellar Impression brand mentorship, as needed (ask about adding it in our threshold conversation)
- OoSo Studio: co-working, tech standups, and build days
- Somatic practices from my audio collection, when your body needs more than a call
- Feedback on your weekly anumis
- Astrological or Human Design transit analysis, on request
- After twelve months: month to month at the same rate, for as long as the work is alive
Living Nepantla is a five-figure investment over twelve months, built for founders scaling from $200K a year. We go through the numbers together on our first call.
Opens the application. I respond within five business days.
The 100% Focus Guarantee
(If you scrolled straight here looking for the refund policy: /sniffs/ I’m sad that you’re already thinking about this 🥺.)
Haha, with all jokes aside: Living Nepantla is LIVE with me. Because you’ll receive my proprietary curriculum and this is live coaching, there are no refunds. You are making a commitment. What I can guarantee is the part that’s fully mine to give:
“When you book Time with me, you get my 100% undivided attention and focus.”
That covers the voice note you send at eleven at night about a yes you’re not sure you should give (full attention the next weekday morning) and the call where you think out loud (all of me, for the whole call). I can make this promise every single time because it sits entirely in my lane.
And you never commit blind. If I invite you to a threshold conversation, nothing is confirmed until we’ve talked it through. If you’d rather feel the work first, a Rhythm Reset Session (a paid diagnostic session) leaves you with concrete insight and direction, whether or not we continue working together.
When to apply
I work with a small number of clients at a time, because that’s how I keep it cozy. When it’s full, new applications go to a waitlist, and I reach out in order as a place opens.
Waiting costs something you already know better than I do: another season of carrying what isn’t yours, at a pace you can feel in your body. If this is the season you’re ready to set it down, apply while there’s room.
Questions founders ask before they apply
Say it’s a Wednesday evening nine days before launch week and a collaborator asks you for one more thing. You send me a voice note before you answer, and on Thursday morning my reply is there: we look at whose lane that request belongs in. On Friday you book a call because things don’t feel quite right yet, and on Sunday you send me the sales page for an audit, with notes back by Tuesday. Other weeks are quieter, and the container is built for those too.
Plan for a few messages a week (more in sales season weeks and fewer in quiet ones), and 15 to 30 minutes on most days for small, adaptive practices that you tailor to your capacity. The work is designed for somatic honesty, so the curriculum moves at your rhythm.
Flexible coaching means you message me by voice or text any time, day or night, and I reply every weekday morning, Monday through Friday. It beats a weekly 60-minute Zoom call for a few reasons:
- We process situations in the moment (or by the next weekday morning) instead of catching up later, after the feeling has faded.
- I can help with decisions and insights as they come up.
- There’s no pressure to get through everything in one hour.
- When you want to hear my voice live, you still can: calls are unlimited, one at a time.
Yes. I keep my client list cozy and I answer every weekday morning. Some weeks you’ll message me every day and some weeks not at all (sales season weeks and teaching weeks are different animals). The container is built for both, so message me as often as it helps.
Everything is one-on-one: your messages, your calls, your audits. OoSo Studio comes with it, and its co-working and tech standups are rooms you drop into when they help.
Yes, as part of the mentorship. Audits cover your copy, website, and offers, Stellar Impression can map your brand, and your business comes up in nearly every conversation. What it isn't is a done-for-you agency: you get my eyes, my notes, and my thinking, and the work stays yours.
No. Living Nepantla is a somatic leadership mentorship. It works with capacity, responsibility, and relationship to Time. It may surface patterns connected to urgency or over-functioning, but it doesn’t replace therapy, medical care, or lineage-specific healing work. If deeper trauma material arises, appropriate clinical or cultural support is essential.
Living Nepantla is designed for creative founders and leaders carrying meaningful work that impacts others. The company can be any size, as long as you hold real responsibility for a body of work, a team, or a community. If you aren’t currently leading something that requires your sustained responsibility, this container may not be the right fit.
This mentorship engages decolonial reflection on Time, leadership, and power. Curiosity and willingness are enough to begin. If you’re unwilling to examine how urgency, privilege, or power shape your leadership, this may not be the right container. If you’re new to this lens, begin with my Decolonizing Time interviews and writings before applying.
Living Nepantla is a five-figure investment over twelve months, built for founders scaling from $200K a year. We go through the numbers together on our first call.
Yes. Stellar Impression, my brand mentorship, can join your Living Nepantla year when your brand needs it. We talk it through in the threshold conversation, along with the numbers.
Start with a Rhythm Reset Session. It’s a paid diagnostic session designed to clarify your founder-level lane, identify where urgency is shaping your leadership, and outline the most deliberate next step. You’ll leave with concrete insight and direction, whether or not we continue working together.
We continue month to month, at the same rate, for as long as the work is alive for you.
No. Because this is live coaching and you receive my proprietary curriculum, there are no refunds. What you get instead is my 100% Focus Guarantee: when you book Time with me, you get my 100% undivided attention and focus (h/t Mai-see Tsang).
The calendar was never the problem.
You can keep managing the pace. The project boards and time blocks will still be there, and some weeks they’ll even help. But urgency comes from weight that was never yours, and you get lighter when you set it down, with me beside you every weekday.
One of the questions on the application is the one this whole page has been circling:
What are you carrying right now that was never yours to hold?
If an answer came before you finished reading the question, that’s where we’d begin. The application is open. So am I.
Opens the application.
Not sure yet? Book a Rhythm Reset Session →
Let’s see if this is your season.
I read every application personally and respond within five business days. If it feels like a good fit, I’ll invite you to a threshold conversation, where we go through the numbers together before we confirm anything.
By submitting this application I agree nothing contained herein is to be construed as a vehicle to provide medical advice, diagnosis, opinion, or treatment, nor as a substitute for medical or professional care. Ixchel Lunar and Zumbido LLC are not liable or responsible for any advice, course of treatment or any other information or services you obtain through this site. Reliance on the information contained on this website is solely at your own risk.
You can have a life of leadership where…
Your scope matches your capacity
Your stop time is defined
Presence follows intention
Growth does not override your body
Your Sanctuary to Thrive in Wild Presence with a Planet in Transition
Stay wild, love fiercely. Your presence is golden.
The practice lives inside Time Weavers.
The daily ritual, a live circle every full moon, a seasonal circle each quarter, and five years of archives. $10 a month, or $111 for the year, on Substack.
Curious? Follow the journey on these platforms:
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