Align Your Orbit #79 - Depth of Visibility
Align Your Orbit is a series of philosophical and somatic experiments to guide intentionality and impact. 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.
As many of our deep fears creep into our reality, we must decide how bravely to face them. With every action, we balance slipping into the shadows of anonymity with lighting the flares of resistance. The surveillance, privatization, and scrutinization of so many aspects of our daily lives has become normalized to the point that it’s difficult to see the water we swim in, but that doesn’t mean we need to be complacent.
Radical actions could be anything. Planting a tree. Tending public, state-owned land. Learning the name of your neighbor. Grapple with your discomfort with being witnessed and name exactly what you are afraid of. Call the watchers out of the shadows. Refuse to play the simulation as you reveal a new reality. We’ve been building an alternative mode of living for years, decades, centuries. Let it shine through with obvious splendor. There is no time.
Experience these experiments as a playlist!
New Experiments
1. liberate yourself with “what if” – We don’t have any idea what the future holds, though, as a species, we love to guess. Still, we feel our possible futures collapsing faster than they re-emerge. With new stages of the meta-crisis looming, ask yourself plainly—are you living as though this could be your last year in this body? Allow the question to lead you to the satisfaction you need to release yourself from regret.
Challenge Mode: It’s easy to imagine fulfilling a series of hedonistic desires when we imagine our own impending end, but consider how your calculations change if you imagine that this is the last year for all of humanity. While that will likely not be the case, this thought experiment can lead you to actions that bolster biodiversity, empathy, and kindness to the more-than-human world. What are we prepared to leave as a legacy?
2. recruit strangers to the cause – Invite the neighbor you meet walking their dog to your next gathering. Beg tourists off the street to join your art installation. Summon witnesses to become participants. Everyone is looking for a way to get involved in the next iteration of our social evolution—give them a space to plug in.
Challenge Mode: There are likely people you have ostracized or specifically avoided inviting into your movement spaces, likely for good reason. What pathways for restorative justice are you creating to balance out those filtration practices? Lead by example and demonstrate alternative modes of being even to those who most threaten your momentum. This is how we change culture. This is how we change the narrative.
3. magnetize your energy – Every time you heal another part of yourself, you become more spiritually noticeable. Other human beings and even spiritual entities notice, even if not consciously. While this can be off-putting at first, embrace your new level of visibility. Enter into an ocean, having been raised in a pond. Greet the whales and sharks with awe and compassion. And when your blood is in the water, learn to bury yourself in the sand.
Challenge Mode: Each entity is another mirror for the way the universe is experiencing itself. This makes it infinitely possible to hold compassion even for beings that cause us lizard-brain terror. Expand your sense of self and hold the confidence that you can humbly offer health, empathy, and well-being to even the most traumatized of energies.
4. create resilience with redundancy – If you are the only one with a specific set of skills in your group spaces, you risk momentum crashing without you. Do everything you can to develop comfort in slipping in and out of any given role. Seek people with diverse skills and share them among the group. Counterbalance your outliers.
Challenge Mode: Begin creating a secure list of your accounts and passwords in an offline password manager vault. Draft up a will. Take whatever next step makes sense to plan for your ultimate demise. Any emergency preparation you take is a kindness to anyone who outlasts you. Embrace your mortality and develop smooth exit strategies.
Andra’s Recap of In and Out with the Tides
The experiments for this previous moon cycle included internal family systems strategies such as resensitizing your managers, hotwashing your firefighters, calling in your exiles, and summoning the self.
While I have identified as “plural” for more than a decade now, the Internal Family Systems (IFS) model has helped me integrate old memories and recover parts of self stuck in the past. These methodologies have dramatically increased my emotional and physical capacity even just in the past six weeks since I read No Bad Parts.
Not all the parts identified during my IFS meditations stick around as named entities. In fact, most of them don’t. Occasionally, an already-named part will show up during the meditations, especially as protectors.
I’ve also found that I have developed more empathy for others through this practice. I can see the ways that acting out is the direct result of unhealed parts, and I have confidence that most if not all psychological distress can be addressed with this tool set. As I have offered these meditations to others in my life, I have both reinforced my own understanding of the methodology and have also seen dramatic improvement in the lives of the people around me, especially in their capacity to relate to themselves. Many people experience this therapy model as more fun and productive than any other they have attempted.
Most days, I work through a trailhead, and I am all the better for it. I am finally feeling the emotions of and closing up my historical trauma memories.
Several people have asked me questions such as, “how do you do it all?” And while I must name that I have a lot of privilege to work from home, have subsided rent so I can work part time, and have a very supportive chosen family network, I also attribute my ability to juggle so many projects to the inner work I have done with my selves. When they each have a role that fulfills them and no longer need to self-sabotage to get my attention, I can move mountains.
Thanks for reading! I hope you enjoy this cycle’s experiments!