In the sacred Mayan calendar, 13 Imox carries the energy of primordial waters, the subconscious, and the raw creative intelligence that exists before form. Imox is the nawal of the ocean, dreams, madness and genius, intuition, and the fertile chaos from which all life is born. The number 13 amplifies this energy to a spiritual peak, lifting unconscious material into awareness and inviting deep integration, release, and illumination.
13 Imox can feel vast, emotional, nonlinear, and overwhelming if resisted but profoundly creative and healing when allowed to flow. This is a day to listen beneath logic, trust the wisdom moving through your body and psyche, and allow the unknown to guide rather than frighten you. 13 Imox reminds us that true power does not come from control, but from learning how to swim in the waters of uncertainty with presence and humility.
Riding the Waves of 13 Imox
My work life started at age sixteen. I held a myriad of odd jobs as a high schooler, learning early how to move in the world. By my freshman year of college, I was ambitious with a capital A. In the spring of 1999, I landed an internship at a hip Austin ad agency and was quickly drawn to the creative side of the field, eventually becoming a copywriter.
At the same time, I was training to become a yoga teacher, and a deep cognitive dissonance began to take hold. I felt pulled between two disparate currents: marketing and advertising versus spirituality and truth. One revolved around persuasion, image, and desire; the other around presence, integrity, and liberation. Eventually, I chose the latter.
I found purpose in my next chosen field: elementary education. For about a decade, I was a classroom teacher—first in Austin, then in Guatemala. With time and perspective, a clear pattern has emerged: years ending in five have always been groundbreaking and deeply challenging for me.
In 1995, at age 14, I discovered my mother’s infidelity. I can pinpoint that moment as the end of my innocence—the straw that broke my childhood’s back. Something fundamental cracked open. In the years that followed, I shifted from a square, diligent A-student into a rebel, experimenting with drugs and boys, pushing edges, breaking rules, and living tumultuously for more than fifteen years.
In 2005, I experienced what was labeled a “manic episode”—a swirl of fluorescent colors, wacky brain chemistry, and over-the-top grandiosity. It culminated in the police taking me to Austin State Hospital, where I spent ten days medicated and tranquilized, brought back down to the earth plane. That episode—what I now understand as a kundalini awakening—changed everything. I bought a house in south Austin. I left marketing and advertising behind and reinvented myself as a bilingual schoolteacher. Life led me to a teaching job in Guatemala City in 2009 and to a total life revolution three years later in 2012, when I moved to Lake Atitlán, pregnant and partnered.
In 2015, I abruptly ended my teaching career in a dramatic flare-up of civil disobedience and protest against both my school and the traditional education system as a whole. I was fired, slapped with a restraining order, and became the subject of local gossip for a brief, intense moment. In the aftermath, my partner and I bought land and a rustic cabin in the woods across the lake in Pasajcap. I found myself working in an entirely new industry as a retreat coordinator at a beautiful lakefront center.
That, too, became a doorway. It led me to coordinating retreats, teaching yoga, interpreting Mayan fire ceremonies, and eventually offering personal Mayan day sign readings to guests. What once looked like chaos was quietly guiding me closer to my true path—my dharma.
And then there is this year. 2025. I went from celebrating twenty years of relative stability to checking myself into another mental ward, where I spent the first two weeks of June facing depression, anxiety, fear, doubt, shame, and insecurity. The shadow side of Imox’s otherworldly creativity and watery flow is, after all, madness.
I am still processing what I moved through this summer. But I know this much: I went to that deep, dark place in part to prove to myself that I could come back. That I could reconnect with my light by fully meeting my shadow rather than running from it.
In retrospect, each “year ending in five” was also a threshold—an ending that forced a new beginning. Every breakdown redirected my path, opened a door, and reshaped my relationship to work, purpose, and power. This is 13 Imox alive in my life: nonlinear, overwhelming, creative, destabilizing, and initiatory.
My inner masculine—the part of me responsible for action, work, and direction—has not been forged through control or mastery. It has been shaped through surrender, humility, and learning how to move with the waters rather than against them.
My power is not in mastering the waters.
It is in knowing how to ride the waves.
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