Align Your Orbit #70 — What We Bring Back
Align Your Orbit is a series of philosophical and somatic experiments to guide ourselves toward intentionality and impact. Synthesized after years of conversations and now with inspirations from MidJourney, we’re fully embracing our cyborg natures. Find delight in these journeys of exploration. If you would like to receive these offerings as an email on the new moon, sign up here.
With multiple planets in retrograde, catalysts for growth abound. The path narrows, and thorns approach on all sides. Take the extra time to find pleasure in extricating yourself. There is abundant joy in every moment of healing. A secret spaciousness opens behind your eyes and in dreams. The phenomenal world is no match for you.
We know now that technology cannot save us. But magic might. Love might. Community rises to meet the challenge. Cast off the trappings of despair and step into the fringes, knowing exactly where you belong. Every being has unique access and perspective. Find yours, and bring it back into the infinite oneness. Liberation tastes sweet on your lips when you kiss the future.
If you’d like to experience these recipes as a playlist, here’s the link.
New Experiments
1. only you heal you – While others can provide you with new perspectives on what you deal with, healing comes from within. Honor the inherent knowledge of simply being and seek feedback, suggestions, and novel information. Remember to prepare enough space to hold this new perspective and allow time for the integration process.
Challenge Mode: When you find yourself in the position of healer, remember that you are not the one in control of the outcome. Make an offering. Touch another being like you want them to be free. Wait until the muscles around a hurt unclench before you hold a pain tenderly. Mark the edges of your sphere of influence.
2. so mind the gap – The middle difference between your ideal self and the self you are now marks the path, marks the journey. The room you have to grow is not a useful place for harsh judgment or self-criticism. Honor the frustration of your human nature and trust the process of becoming.
Challenge Mode: Each being has their own strategy for understanding and projecting onto reality. Allow the universe to be full of these delicious and divine contradictions. Speak only from your own perspective and do not implicitly demand that others meet you where you are. Find common ground with tenderness and care.
3. call in the entities – The beings invested in your wellness, growth, and success are without number. Ancestors—biological or not—keep tabs on your progress and come bearing gifts. Beings from your past and future attend you. Invite them into your meditation practice and offer them your yearnings like gifts.
Challenge Mode: Not all beings who surround you are fully healed. Get curious about what gentle holding you can provide to move through this suffering. Lama Rod Owens invites us to offer our experiences of the four sweet liberations—beauty, opulence, leisure, and pleasure—to our ancestors and other beings to help them with healing, as mentioned in his book The New Saints.
4. hold nothing back – If you have gifts, magic, knowing, or privilege in your body—use them. It does no one any good to sit on your hands. Know that this will be messy—you will make mistakes. This is part of your growth journey. Feel into the full well of your capacity for change, transformation, and creation. The time is again now.
Challenge Mode: Explore the outer reaches of experience in community. Hold meditation circles, lead each other through the mazes of your own psyches, breathe in time with someone else’s lungs. When you bring your realizations to your inner circle, they will be less likely to fade back into the consensus reality.
Andra’s Recap of Story Tells
The experiments last cycle included addressing friction in relationships, reclaiming autonomy, inviting anger, and honoring burnout.
It feels like I did little else but tend relationships this last moon cycle. While one collaborator exited a shared project without discussion, one partner crossed a boundary that took whole latter part of the month to repair. But, we did repair. I had to realize that there have been extremely few situations when a physical touch boundary was crossed—accidentally or otherwise—and we were able to recover successfully. We had to forge a new path. So much of that recovery relied on our ability to create rituals around apology in both directions.
I spent a lot of time this month thinking about invasive species as well and what the mechanisms of infinite growth are. In a deep spiritual practice, I was able to isolate some of those forces at play with love and kindness, allowing them to be reabsorbed into greater cosmic energy. It feels crucial that, as a curator species, we make space for life to be diverse and take action when something is crowding everything else out.
Reclaiming privacy has been a journey this month as I both explore when I need alone time from my partners and as I advocate for the unhoused community in my city. The gratitude I experienced from others when I set up a bathroom shelter downtown during our mutual aid distributions was immense. It makes me crave us all being closer to the land in all regards. While I am still figuring out my own needs around space and privacy, I feel grateful to have the modularity in my life that allows it.
Inviting anger into my spiritual practice has been a work in progress. It takes my therapist reminding me that my anger itself is not violence. Even telling someone that I am angry is not violence. What is violence is allowing my anger to come out in ways I cannot control because I have not tended to it properly. I remind myself that anger points toward a catalyst of growth and is, in fact, a gift from greater entities. This, too, must be honored. To do my part in this, I am taking steps to go for a walk when I’m angry and avoiding trying to repair too quickly. And, I remind myself that telling others when they have wronged me is a kindness, providing a moment of growth and potentially protecting others who might later experience the same wrong.
I’m still assessing what drains my energy and when I need to opt for rest. I find it especially difficult when I am scheduling events out weeks and sometimes months in advance. My ability to predict my energy is not infallible, and that means I need to offer myself some flexibility when the reality arrives. While I can give notice about when I need more space, there is always resistance from the greater world. Still, if don’t put myself and my own energy first, I cannot help to energize the greater movement in integrity.
That said, I feel I have done very well in minimizing the masking I do out in public. I aim to be my most authentic self in every second I spend in my skin.
Thanks for reading! We hope you find these experiments useful as you navigate this next moon cycle.