Align Your Orbit #80 - Mirage Magic
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 so many of our external systems continue to spin out of control, the destabilization threatens our morale and our motivation. But perhaps you have forgotten the lifetimes when you were only chaos. Tap into those primal parts of you to smile toothily in the face of danger and ride the waving mirage of malaise.
See through the illusions of others and erect your own to buy yourself time. Your hands hold all the power. It’s a lie that you cannot protect yourself—that’s what they want you to believe. Take accountability for your choices and your pain. You can’t change what happened, but you can complete the cycle and free yourself now.
Experience these experiments as a playlist!
New Experiments
1. obsess over your romance novel – When a desire to work incessantly on an art project, event, story, or location overtakes you, listen. What do these precious moments tell you about where your energy wants to flow? Even actions that seem frivolous or recreational create ripples in the world. Trust that your own commitment to healing gives texture to anything you do and create.
Challenge Mode: Reality is everything but orderly. As we try to fit our lives into neat boxes and calendars, we make tradeoffs, which can sometimes decrease our enjoyment of what we once loved. Make space in your scheduled existence to let the chaos in. Create spaces where you can temporary let go of one standard you hold for yourself. Set your burden down and flow.
2. facilitate radical transparency – As we continue to shift toward participatory, non-hierarchical forms of organizing, transparency becomes a necessity. Given the sheer number of conversations required to keep even a small organization running, that might seem daunting. Start small with organized channels for communication on your platforms and set clear expectations about which channels are priorities and for whom. Let everyone choose their level of involvement.
Challenge Mode: So much communication happens that we must opt out of threads that are not relevant to us. Take responsibility over your message notifications, channel invitations, and email threads—leave or mute communication threads and allow others to do the same. There is no need to anticipate others’ communication needs. Let them tell you when and where they hit overwhelm rather than removing them from communication preemptively.
3. let liminal spaces nourish you – In this era of rapid change, accelerated climate chaos, and economic instability, the thresholds to new existences and shifting perspectives are many. These middle spaces amplify dreaming, invite you into more presence, and energetically satiate you. Suck the marrow from these moments while offering your settled nervous system as a gift to the collective. Honor the grief of what you’re leaving behind. You’ll need these skills later.
Challenge Mode: With everything moving at too-fast miles per hour, it’s an effort to stop and take care of the body. If you can’t manage a routine, stretch as you pass through the next doorframe. Do a forward fold at the stove when you make lunch. Seek care and comfort in your body at every transition.
4. believe there is space for you – Nothing is as stationary in its existence as we have come to believe it is. And, in fact, belief itself remains powerful. In a time of shifting, incessant chaos, consensus reality cracks. Decide there is time, space, energy, and support for what you want, and it will show up for you. The “default world” is rarely more mutable than it is right now.
Challenge Mode: There is no one more capable than you at facilitating your healing. If something continues to hold you back, if you continue to have the same internal conflict, accept the catalyst and grow. Speak with your emotions like they are parts of you. Address your distractions like entities in need of your help. Ask your demons for a little bit of temporary space as you remember to breathe. At the end of the day, all the parts of you want you to succeed. Let them help you.
Andra’s Recap of Depth of Visibility
The experiments for this previous moon cycle included liberating yourself with “what if,” recruiting strangers, magnetizing energy, and creating resilience with redundancy.
The question of “what if this is humanity’s last year on earth?” has been wildly fruitful at putting my priorities in perspective. Both Ash and I felt that continuing to sit with this question would be an unfolding process throughout this year. For myself, it feels as though most of my life is in alignment, but I do find it difficult to, say, care about my relationship to sugar or prioritize long-term planning projects in light of this question.
As ever, I continue to seek more ease and nourishment in my organizing spaces, but it’s difficult when there genuinely is less-than-easeful work and documentation to do. But, one thing that reliably gives me life is going down to the creek I’ve been tending. I have many neighborhood land-tending events for that area, and I always get back so much more than I give when I put them together. Caring for biodiversity continues to be my top priority.
The land-tending events have been a perfect entry point for people wanting to get involved in their community. And, from there, I can introduce them to the entire cinematic universe of nested-scale organizing around land regeneration.
As such, I’ve invited all types of people to the land-tending events, from the neighborhood association president to radical mutual aid folks. Surprisingly, the events have all gone very well with very little conflict or difficulty. In fact, they continue to be profoundly valuable community experiences.
You’d think I would be comfortable with visibility after having run for city council last year, but it continues to surprise me. In every space I am in, my mentors want to move me into leadership. Instead, I’ve been encouraging us all to move toward non-hierarchical forms of governance such as sociocracy. This is both because I genuinely do want to see more organizations shift this direction and because I already feel overcommitted. I’d so much rather everyone develop the skills I have than create more situations where people rely on me to bring the skills.
In terms of offering care to even the most traumatized of energies, I have done a lot of work with Internal Family Systems (IFS), which allows me to have compassion for the parts of me that are acting up to get my attention. This practice makes it worlds easier to have compassion for the ways other people act out, and I can recognize stuck patterns with empathy. It continues to be one of the most useful skillsets I have ever encountered.
Slipping in and out of roles is almost always easier said than done. Turns out, people get attached, and I need to have firmer and more time-specific boundaries. I was, however, able to successfully opt out of going to a big conference happening in my network this month. There were so many people I knew going that I was able to trust I would get the information I needed without being present. And I placed my trust well!
In terms of emergency preparation, I’ll be planning for Portland’s citywide deployment exercise here soon as my neighborhood’s incident team leader! I know it will be good practice, but I’ll admit I’m very nervous about it.
Thanks for reading! I hope you enjoy this cycle’s experiments!