Align Your Orbit: Bare Witness
Align Your Orbit is a monthly series of philosophical and somatic experiments to guide you toward intentionality and impact in your daily life. These are games to inspire intuition, so please adapt the offerings to fit you and find delight in how you engage.
On the heels of a record-breaking heat wave here in the Pacific Northwest, we have been potently reminded that, though the grip of the pandemic is loosening, there is still so much more work to do. Even if we only consider our part of the world, we have had three major climate change events in the last year, and more are on the way.
As you live through humanity’s only chance to turn the tides, how do you bear witness? Where are your narratives naked facts and where do you romanticize? Watch how you form memories about this period, which will—undoubtedly—go down in the history books, and notice your strategies for unbiased observation.
Want to experience this month’s offerings as a Spotify playlist?
Experiments for July
1. Remember Who You’re Becoming – Rather than remember who you are or who you were, focus on what you are growing. Hold onto that when faced with obstacles. Know that, even when you revert to past patterns and behaviors, you set the trajectory for yourself and intend to get there. Watch for which doors spring open now as you transform and improve.
Challenge Mode: Pay attention to how you make memories. When you know you will want to remember something, how do you encourage your mind to capture the details? How do you hold the experience in your body? Notice which events, tasks, and sensations feel important enough to write down. Get curious about how much credence you lend to your own retelling and reality.
2. Gossip & Censor – While the extremes of these actions generate negative consequences, both are part of your daily experience. How do you own your perspective and narratives when you talk about a person who is not present? When do you resist the urge? Know that, when you speak about a third party, you are curating consensus reality. While you don’t want to enable missing stairs, you also don’t want to overstep your bounds. How do you navigate this balancing act?
Challenge Mode: When you receive intuitive messages—whether as sensations, voices, or textures—consider how you bring them further into reality. Which parts of divine messages are important to share with others? Make sure you don’t make anyone else responsible for your experience of the message; focus on the interpretation and why it matters to the situation at hand.
3. Find a Third – When faced with two bad options, take it upon yourself to find a third. Cancel a plan if necessary. Brainstorm alternatives with or without everyone involved. Duck under the waves before they crash. When you give up the need to do something for the sake of appearances, you gain more access to generative creativity.
Challenge Mode: In a crowded world, nighttime hours are friends. Find an excuse to do something at a time when no one else is present. Stay up late and get up early. Go on a moonlit hike. Visit the beach after hours. Spend time in the nude. Let the sun energize you enough such that you bring that energy forward into the evening.
4. Free & Control – As many places loosen mask mandates and other health safety protocols, watch for when your self-control and the self-control of those around you is exhausted. Choose how, when, why, and where you will enforce boundaries. By recognizing the energy it requires to hold them up, you will find where its most useful to let them down. Make wise decisions knowing that your immune system is unaccustomed to large groups of people, and don’t up-negotiate with yourself in the moment.
Challenge Mode: Especially as it relates to exercise, you may find two primal urges in your mind: one that begs you to conserve energy and one that begs to be empty. Which voice is louder for you and how do you balance those forces? Remind yourself that energy is abundant, but don’t forget to rest and recuperate.
Please tell us how these experiments are working for you! We would love to hear from you at r/highpriestesses or r/spacemermaids.
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Andra’s Recap of June’s Experiments
The recipes for June included embracing main character energy, finding the past before it finds you, analyzing patterns/tracking, approaching the “mezzo”sphere, and predicting the future.
As I continued my journal cataloguing (I still have about a decade of writing to go through) and also visited extended family this month, I got very close to older versions of myself. I found that I had little access to the more recent versions of myself in the presence of large groups of family, yet I was proud of and grateful for the patterns I have automated because, in a lot of ways, they were all I had access to. I had a lot of compassion and appreciation for the ways I make the best out of bad situations, know when to give others space to process, and prevent myself from reacting out of anger or spite.
Before I left on my long trip, I spent a lot of time getting comfortable with Trello (a task-management app), using it to organize my tasks into lists related to their relative urgency. Every day, I pull tasks into my “today” list and do what I can to get them done. It actually has become something of a game, and I like it so much that sometimes I massage my task lists when I’m bored. Between that and Habitica (another task management app that acts like an RPG), I feel solid with my habit trackers and to-do lists. Additionally, I had to break a lot of my daily habits when I went on this big family trip, which gave me time to reflect on why I do them and what value they have for me going forward. I definitely miss doing yoga 2-3 times a week!
During my trip, the two legs felt split into two categories: what is alive that still needs to die and what is dead that I can now salvage. Sorting through my dad’s possessions and putting him to rest in the St. Joe river was a humbling and raw experience full of love and magic, and that’s how I want all my endings to look. With regard to beginnings, I recognized the intense need to be honest about the reality of a relationship with someone rather than default to cultural norms or unrealistic expectations of what it should look like. Every time I avoided engaging in a relationship inauthentically, I was rewarded.
In terms of the “mezzo”sphere, I watched smaller groups emerge in the wake of larger family gatherings. I gave myself permission to break off from the group to be alone, to only engage with a small group, or to choose to do tasks that benefitted the event as a whole. Allowing myself to weave in and out of those dynamics gave me a lot of space and awareness of how others were shifting around me. Additionally, when my siblings and I were sorting through my late father’s possessions, I felt very comfortable delegating. I have difficulty trusting people to do what they say they will do, but I was pleasantly surprised when the memorial services, planned by one of my sisters, when off without a hitch. She did such an amazing job, and I know that many people who attended will remember that day for a long time to come.
When I thought about what would happen on this big family trip, I had minimal anxiety about the first leg in Utah and a lot of anxiety about the second leg in Idaho. However, I was blindsided by a few events I could not have anticipated in Utah such that I was humbled—I’m not always accurate in my predictions. And while the second half of the trip was difficult, I did a lot of work ahead of time to make sure that it went as smoothly as was possible.
My favorite exploration of the future this past month was a tarot draw I did with my best friend. We each drew cards for each of the following questions: what future are you safe from? what are you harvesting early? where should you look for hidden treasure? The reading resonated with me so much, and I clung to those answers any time I wasn’t sure if I was doing the right thing on my trip. Moral of the story: be brave and come up with your own questions and containers.
Please enjoy July’s experiments, and we’ll check in again next month!