Align Your Orbit: Choose Your Mess
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.
The earth shakes beneath you, and change comes full of moisture on the wind. You remind yourself that existence becomes even harder when you go numb. The ideals you reach for begin to crest the horizon, and though the rest of the walk is long, the world is eager for this moment. Ask what you can do for the body and not what the body can do for you.
Practice saying, No, thank you. Our cosmic doombox is full.
Want to experience this month’s offerings as a Spotify playlist?
Experiments for June
1. Reinvest – The impulse to escape is natural. Build clear and explicit trapdoors into relationships and projects so you never have to use them. Starting over doesn’t decrease your challenges; it only changes the nature of them. Trust in the foundations you’ve built with the people you love and offer gratitude.
Challenge Mode: As you go deeper into relationship and commitment, stay vigilant to prevent boundary compromise. Don’t meet someone halfway if doing so makes you uneasy. Make declarations about your personal time and follow through on them.
2. Bulk Up – Be in the seemingly contradictory idea that fighting both fatigue and overuse requires movement. Keep variety in your exercise methods and get curious about stretching before you begin new tasks. Boldly take care of your body in full view of others. Incorporate traveling lunges into your routine. Find the edge of your push-up capacity.
Challenge Mode: You are allowed your exhaustion. Give yourself permission to take efficient shortcuts. Introduce slang to your conversations, invent concise gestures to communicate, collapse in a heap on a pile of comfy pillows.
3. Pick Your Poison – Everyone has a favorite way to unwind; spend some time this month bonding with yours. Embrace the magic of this energy transfer and leave guilt out of the equation for once. Allow others their vices and don’t expect them to match yours.
Challenge Mode: There are times when addressing conflict head-on saves time and energy. Assess your discomfort with confrontation and create containers where it is safe to fight. Give everyone time to air their frustrations, yourself included.
4. Cry with Majesty – Close your eyes. Imagine hiking in the small hours of the morning to crest the mountain peak at exactly the moment the sun comes over horizon. Allow awe to wash over you and watch which body parts are most affected. Seek these profound experiences in media, nature, and creative endeavors this month.
Challenge Mode: Let your most intimate spaces double as public ones. Imagine your bedroom suddenly becomes a concert hall. Hold a talent show in your living room. You don’t need a full-size venue to generate excitement.
Please tell us how these experiments are working for you!
If you like this, please consider donating to our Patreon. If you would like to receive these offerings in your email inbox, sign up here.
Andra’s Recap of May’s Experiments
The theme for May was Crystal Clear and included being transparent, finding bedrock, seeking deep rest, and decorating time.
While I find a tremendous amount of power in vulnerability and transparency, I was reminded how much the world does not reward that in the short term. After going into detail about the ways an organization I was part of seemed to be drifting away from its mission statement, I faced backlash. Still, I made sure that I was setting boundaries and staying in my own integrity as I navigate these spheres of existence.
My bedrock is strong. In a recent psychedelic experience, an entity told me, this is your new lowest point. Celebrate that. While I do, in fact, feel like I have been shaken down to my foundations this month, I feel confident that these issues are surmountable. And, they are so much easier to deal with than what I was facing this time last year.
Additionally, this seemed like a good time to pull up the rotting floor in the bunny barn, so we worked with a contractor to get that done, and now the bunnies have a new floor and even a window to let in natural light, which is making everyone happier.
I’m still working on my list of accomplishments. Writing it all down feels like a daunting task.
I found, when I did make time for meditation this month, it was deeply, deeply profound and brought me a substantial peace I didn’t know I needed. I have been practicing meditations in which I am mostly supine but allowed for stretching when it felt like my body wanted it, and that was very productive. I’ve also added a section in my gratitude journal to thank any time I made to do a restful activity, and I hope that this will help me integrate rest and remind me that I do a lot to take care of my body.
Facial yoga was also an important source of rest for me this month, even if I did feel embarrassed whenever someone caught me doing it. It releases muscles I never realized needed relaxation and has prompted more self-massage, which has really improved my overall well-being.
In terms of decorating time, I want to start by saying that this was the first month since I got covid in February that I feel ease with remembering things. It was really severe there for a while, so I am appreciating the ways in which making memories is easier now. I also have been getting increasingly interested in making clothing (I’m nearly finished with my burlesque outfit) as a way to curate memories. While this has always been a practice in my crochet work, it feels all the more relevant now.
And, we talked last month about starting new fires. Where that showed up most for me was in tending to the yarn mill, doing interviews for an additional apprentice, and purchasing a large mill machine. The trip down to look at the machine felt so aligned and beautiful, and I’m thrilled to be taking another crazy step on this journey.
I hope you enjoy playing with this month’s experiments!