Align Your Orbit #84 - Ooze
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.
Even under surveillance, even under the pressure of systems that can no longer bear their own weight, the density of this moment expands to make us believe that rest is possible. Everything changes too quickly for plans to be relevant, so we rely on our ability to improv and pivot, and until then, we’ll stay right here in the viscous, nourishing liquids we’ve been cultivating all this time, thanks.
Link arms with whoever is around you, soak up the goodness when you can find it, and dig your heels in. You’re here to stay. You’re devoted and will keep showing up. You know who your people are and where you’re headed. Stay the course, even when progress is slow.
Experience these experiments as a playlist!
New Experiments
1. all you have is integrity – Turn a spotlight on how often you do what you say you will do. What does a snapshot of your personal integrity in this moment look like? Do you hold yourself to unreachable standards? Do you feel like your commitments slip from your fingers? Assess the accuracy of what you say and how it stands the test of time. Rather than chastise yourself (or others), invite curiosity about what barriers stand in the way.
Challenge Mode: When you make an agreement and something changes for the other person, give yourself permission to stand your ground. The goal of interpersonal interactions is not everyone’s happiness—it’s mirroring and growth. While allowing for some fluidity and change is healthy, you’ll fall out of integrity with yourself if you cave in more often than not. Trust the reason behind the structures you’ve created and stick to your boundaries.
2. collaborative transformation – We’ve practiced how to remove ourselves when we get emotional and how to settle our nervous systems when leaving is not an option, but how can we move emotional intensity through with another person in the moment? Invite others into your regulation process. Ask them to stomp their feet with you about something that gets on your nerves. Wrestle or throw a tantrum together. When you give the people with you the opportunity to play a role in moving through an acute moment, it’s much less likely to get stuck in you or others.
Challenge Mode: There will always be situations when we have less agency than we want, when we feel trapped outside our comfort zone. When you reach that inevitable moment, your continued resistance only makes the context more difficult. What does it look like to surrender to the process and find the joy in exactly where you are? This won’t be how it is forever.
3. present moment identity – You are not wholly representative of all humanity, your ethnicity, or even yourself across time—you are only representative of yourself in this moment. What opens when you temporarily give everyone and everything around you that same freedom from context? Allow what is in front of you to speak as an agent of the energy in this exact moment of spacetime.
Challenge Mode: For many of us playing the long game of building systems robust enough to weather collapse, harvest periods are rare. Resist the urge to move straight onto the next thing—soak in how it feels to have completed a project, to hear someone applaud your labor, or to resonate with the ripples you’re sending out in the world. This feeling won’t be here forever.
4. recovery orientation – We must build in periods of staggered rest on the path toward a more livable future. Give priority to inverted poses, stretches that rely on the force of gravity, and the desire to get cozy. Rest won’t make space for itself, and it’s calling your name.
Challenge Mode: A new demographic of people is mobilizing, angry at the crumbling governance systems. This new influx of energy makes it even more possible to withstand what is coming as you continue to build structures of resilience, community sustainability, and mutual aid. Invite in these new unlikely allies and their resources. Trust that the abundance will flow to exactly where you stand.
andra’s Recap of Sense the Slipstream
The experiments for the previous moon cycle included doing one thing on the way from here to there (challenge mode: every threshold is a portal to a new way of being), offering energy to all beings’ highest good (challenge mode: receive pain signals as opportunities for self-knowledge), seeing consequence as a way to restore right relationship (challenge mode: accept that you hold a piece of the world wound), and redirect energy (challenge mode: the land also wants your joy).
In terms of what has felt like it is calling my attention, I have been working more with my dreams. Specifically, I’ve been asking my dreams a question before I go to sleep and allowing whatever dream follows to be an answer. This practice has definitely helped me remember my dreams better, and it has given me fresh insights that have been helpful.
Otherwise, it is consistently in my practice to pick something up to travel with me, no matter how short the distance. It’s become thoroughly ingrained as a mode of being. It’s both efficient and keeps my vision on the lookout for what wants to move.
On a recent journey to the river, I enjoyed choosing mushrooms and seeds that felt like they wanted to come along. It’s a lovely way to practice presence and recognize that one of our gifts as humans is to move things that wouldn’t otherwise travel in such a way. I think about this every time I take a seed up a hill.
I see portals everywhere—in the curve of a branch reaching toward the ground, in an archway, in the arms of a stranger. I’ve enjoyed thinking about what it means to walk through them.
I’ve been in the practice of building in more confidence in my magic, and I appreciate thinking about “all beings’ highest good” as a backboard to prevent me from going too far in any one direction. When I brought a gift down to the river recently, I suddenly worried that it wasn’t enough, but then I opened up what I could of my memories and offered them to the river. In that moment, I realized that the way we live our lives is a gift, and it is always enough.
With regards to listening to pain signals, I have appreciated the practice of thinking about them as “trailheads” or the beginnings to journeys toward uncovering and healing a wounded inner child, which is a modality discussed in No Bad Parts by Richard Schwartz. I even find myself getting excited when someone tells me about some pain or some fear they are working with. It’s an effort not to ask them questions that would lead them down a trailhead path!
Thinking about moving from crisis to consequence has given me a lot of motivation to keep moving, keep loving, keep nurturing my relationship with the land. Even if everything crumbles underneath us, it’s worth playing a beautiful game. And, I understand now that a mature response to the state of the world is not to wallow in the destruction but to continue finding the next step forward. The mycelium network of resilience is only growing. Give it time, and it will be everywhere.
Thinking about the piece of the world wound I am tending, I appreciated the opportunity to be part of the Great Willamette River Cleanup, which took place on the same day across several major cities and picked up thousands of pounds of garbage by land and by kayak/canoe. I love opportunities to be in devotion with a group of people in service to the water and the land. It truly is where magic is possible, and it feels so good.
I don’t actually think I directly experienced harmful energy, but I did have an experience where a friend of mine had an outburst of anger, and I shut down. I couldn’t think in the moment of how to move through the intensity, especially because their anger was not directed at me. I felt like there wasn’t any way to help or support, and my nervous system found the acute anger difficult to sort through well. However, the person who got angry was able to encourage us both to stop working so we could take some time to tend to our friendship together. It was a beautiful experience to speak vulnerably about what each of us needed to move forward, and we both successfully turned the experience into one of transformation. I’m glad I stuck with it and committed to the process rather than running away.
In finding ways to give the land my joy, I went with another friend of mine on a hike from the headwaters of the creek that flows past my house all the way down to where it meets the Willamette River. The journey might have only taken two hours on traditional roads, but we were committed to the bushwhacking. There was a lot of joy in beholding the sections of the creek that don’t typically have an audience. Those moments of curiosity also feel like a gift.
Thanks for reading! I hope you enjoy the process of moving through this month’s experiments.