Align Your Orbit: Recipes for Evolution in February 2021
Theme for February – The Romance of Specificity
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 designed to inspire intuition, so please adapt the offerings that follow to fit you. And above all, find delight in how you engage with them.
Especially in a pandemic world, life becomes repetitive when you’re zoomed out. You see the same faces, the same walls, the same foods, the same desk, the same streets. But when you take the time to zoom in, everything is in a state of flux. It is this specificity and nuance that invites you to fall in love with life again. Bring your expectations, your curiosities, and your gratitude to the most granular level, and there, you will rediscover wonder.
Reinvigorate your love affair with life this month with the little things—the way your own hair falls across your pillow in the morning, the carefree strides your cat takes across the room, the subtle echoes of sound throughout your living space—and trust that the ripples of these small noticings will culminate into alignment with the lust life has for itself.
Also! We are excited to offer themed playlists with our monthly offerings! Check out what we made for this month here.
Experiments for February
1. Radical Collaboration – It’s time to acknowledge how others give you a hand up. Use both words and actions to recognize and reinforce how someone inspires, motivates, enlivens, and understands you. Remember: be specific. Rather than simply saying thank you, go into details with examples and vulnerability. Ask yourself why a person is significant to you. Name it. Meditate on it. Summon more of that connection. Set a reminder so you send out regular acknowledgements all throughout the month.
Challenge Mode: While you’re leveling up acknowledgements, spend some time clarifying expectations of both yourself and others. What specifically quantifiable metrics convince you of your own accomplishments? When you are productive enough? When you are happy enough? How do those standards translate to others?
2. Drop Water in the Bucket – There’s no fighting the future. The future wins, and the present moment demands existence. As the world watches the stock market bow to the weight of collective action, remind yourself how heavy drops of water become when there are more than seven billion of them. Allow yourself to take small actions with groups aligned to the same cause and trust that the ripples, even if you do not see them, still happen underwater and underground. Throw your weight in with the masses and move mountains.
Challenge Mode: A helpful way to get perspective on questions of morality is to ask, would the world be a better place if everyone did this? At minimum, this scaling dramatizes the benefits and consequences to make the residue of an action easier to see. What moral philosophies do you hold that withstand this scrutiny? Which burn under the gaze of a thousand eyes?
3. Osmotic Permeability – Get curious about how much space you take up. Pay attention to fluctuations in conversational turn taking, physical space, energetic space, and body language. What strategies do you use to balance your potency with the potency of the others sharing space? When do you shrink back? When do you expand?
Challenge Mode: Dream realities feel especially present and palpable right now, and we encourage you to lean into acknowledging your dreams as equally valuable realities, even if they don’t abide by the same rules as “real life.” Notice specific messages, symbols, events, and people in your dreams. Is it possible to expand the space you take up in your dream landscapes?
4. Impossible Vows – Radical Dharma by Rev. Angel Kyodo Williams and others discusses the four great vows of Zen Buddhist practice, beginning with the first: sentient beings are numberless; I vow to save them all. While they are unachievable goals, impossible vows still provide intention and direction. We find that the nature of their unachievability actually relieves the pressure of accomplishment. What impossible vows have you made? What impossible vows will you make in the future? How does this alter your behavior now?
Challenge Mode: In an atmosphere where likeability translates to marketability, it is difficult to be a critic and philosopher, but that’s exactly the kind of thought labor we need right now. Call out even the smallest injustices, refuse to give up ground on your fundamental beliefs, and speak truth. Find comfort in knowing that few revolutionaries were loved in their own lifetimes.
Please tell us how these experiments are working for you! We would love to hear from you at r/highpriestesses.
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Andra’s Recap of January’s Experiments
The recipes for January included elevating your amateur, learning until you love it, diverging from consensus reality, progressing your regression, and embracing gradients.
I had a ton of fun with last month’s experiments, and I was really happy that they felt relevant the whole way through. In terms of focusing on where I enjoyed being an amateur and doing what I loved simply for the love of it, I did two things: admitting that I am an amateur in grief and learning to crochet with the needle in my left hand (I am right-handed). In allowing myself to be clumsy and stumble through things, I gave myself permission to level up at my own pace and have gotten better in both arenas faster as a result.
With regard to learning until I love it, I thought a lot about how marketing is one of my weak spots in almost all my endeavors. In reflection, I determined that most of that is because I’m really not sure how to do it well, and I have resolved to add books about organic marketing strategies to my queue of audiobooks (which I go through quickly on account of my crochet habit). I also spent a lot of time contemplating my job and whether it would be possible to garner more love for it, and I decided it was not possible because I am not philosophically aligned with what the company and my department are doing. However, I did notice that speaking up about a way my boss was not taking accountability for her mistakes did inspire me to be more productive myself, possibly because I had broken the silence.
I felt like I diverged greatly from my social group in my opinions of the capitol protests. While there was blatant white privilege and hypocrisy as well as coordinated efforts from members of congress to orchestrate it, I don’t think that the response to this action is a domestic war on terror or an increased military police presence. I want to protect the right to protest for everyone, and not just the people who protest on behalf of causes I agree with.
I spent a lot of time thinking about ways to upgrade my own shadow, and the most fruitful place where that came up for me was around patience. I noticed that I am very quick to demand that something be resolved because I experience an enormous amount of discomfort in my body when I know someone is upset with me. However, sometimes it is simply necessary to give the other person space to sort out their own feelings before returning to the conversation. Additionally, I played a ton with inversions because we just hung our yoga trapeze, and boy oh boy have I been loving it!
The theme of “embracing the gradient” centered around saying “yes, but…” rather than “no” and discovering what middle ground would make it possible to continue relating with a person or situation. For me, I had to find a gradient in my work life as the company I have been working for has been pushing me too hard for too long. As a result, I have determined that I can stay at this company if I am dedicating fewer hours to it, and my superiors are creating a part-time position so that I can stay employed. This will be a great adjustment for me as I set my sights on income-generating activities that are more in line with my personal philosophies post-pandemic.
I hope you enjoy our recipes and experiments! Dive deep!