Align Your Orbit: Flow of Force
Align Your Orbit is a monthly set of philosophical and somatic experiments to guide you toward intentionality and impact. Find delight in these timely experiments. If you would like to receive these offerings as a monthly email, sign up here.
Art co-created by Ash and MidJourney
With protests happening across France, Germany, and Israel, there’s institutional anger in the atmosphere. We are finding our voices and using them. Even as existential dread nips our heels and the sweet call of dissociation floats on the wind, we have spent many spiritual millennia nurturing the sacred weapons of boundary and message.
Practice regenerative activism. Seek groups that nourish you. Use collective rupture as an opportunity to root in deeper.
Want to experience this as a Spotify playlist?
Experiments for April
1. deep rests – Before sleep, practice yoga nidra or another deep rest protocol. Slide your awareness over yourself and release tension in each portion of your body before slipping into unconsciousness. Give yourself the best chance for full, abundant rest.
Challenge Mode: If you’re feeling hazier than usual in waking life, you’re not alone. Take this time to turn toward dream space. Make notes of sleeping predictions that become realities. Which symbols cross the threshold of waking and sleep?
2. transcend alternate realities – Every location—home, school, office, restaurant, concert hall—is a petri dish of pattern as it brushes against agency. And each person around you code-switches any time they shift in space. There are so many combinations of self and other. Honor the complexity that there are as many realities as there are points of view.
Challenge Mode: When you know you will only have a fleeting interaction with someone, refrain from trying to summarize your life story. Instead, give them a chapter. Lean into your eccentricities. Be someone even more authentic to yourself than your current idea of self.
3. hear the call – The only qualification you need is the call. Or at least, that’s where you start. Empty your mind through rest, meditation, dance, or another flow state and listen to what’s bubbling out of you. Follow the magic. Feel the electricity flow off your fingertips.
Challenge Mode: Your dissatisfaction with what used to soothe or sate you is an invitation to deepen. What opens when you reverse cause and effect? Get curious about the ways you seek comfort and don’t be afraid to question the value of your crutches. There’s only one way to walk again.
4. flock – When walking in a large group, human minds release serotonin if we practice good flocking behaviors. Give people ample space and adjust to nonverbal cues in real time to fly high. Meanwhile, people with headphones or checking their phones present obstacles for the flock to navigate around, creating challenge. When are you the rock in the river and when are you the water? It’s situational, and there’s no wrong answer.
Challenge Mode: Set up regular check-ins with at least two people close to you. Ask each other for advice, meta-communicate, and bask in what’s working. And if you’re feeling especially emboldened, take this practice to your institutions. Check in with authority figures—feedback should rarely be unidirectional.
Andra’s Recap of March’s Experiments
The theme for last month was What If Everything Goes Right? and included experiments around releasing metaphorical weight, marveling at change in every moment, exploring freedom of movement, and joining aligned groups.
I am very happy to report that I did a resort of my digital documents. I have two main folders now—“Creation” and “Community”—that encompass each of the spheres of my life. I also managed to release some old edits and academic essays from students that I really don’t have any reason to keep anymore, which freed up a lot of space. I still have a lot more work to do on photos and emails, but I’m making some headway.
Ironically, I am so burned out from holding my boundaries around overwork. It’s really tiresome to be “lazy,” go figure. Mostly this is related to my job right now, where we are certainly understaffed, but we should be getting a new person soon, so I’m hopeful that things will get better. In the meantime, I’m giving myself permission to dissociate into my audiobooks on the job.
After the first four weeks or so of being sober from marijuana and alcohol, the weird combination of feeling simultaneously over- and under-stimulated has lessened to some degree. But, that means that the sense of boredom has been creeping in. I’ve found that involving other senses into my experience makes it feel multidimensional in ways that substances used to, and that’s comforting. I’m certainly glad it’s all gotten easier, even if I still do have craving dreams.
There was an upgrade on that experiment that discussed attempting to fathom the unfathomable. My interaction with this prompt appeared primarily in my willingness to have candid and spontaneous conversations with friends and even coworkers about some visions from earlier in my life. It feels like I am fluidly incorporating those more mystical experiences into my personality and the rest of my life.
I’m still working on engaging my muscles. My biggest breakthrough with that this month is that my roommate and I have started playing around with learning some shuffle step dancing. It’s a lot of fun even if I feel like I have two left feet while I do it.
Regarding interpersonal anxiety, I had to be real about a situation happening in my household that required some careful extrication. In playing out as many possibilities as I could think of, I determined that few if any of the future paths in front of us led to sustainable outcomes. As such, we made the very difficult decision to ask one of many roommates to seek other housing arrangements. It will be a long process of getting them settled somewhere else, but I continue to be convinced that that’s the right choice for all involved.
I’ve been very invigorated by the activist groups I’ve been a part of. Most directly, I’m involved with an art affinity group of Extinction Rebellion in PDX and am also working up to being a full-fledged member of my nearby Neighborhood Emergency Team. It’s a work in progress, but I feel like I’m beginning to make an impact, and I am certainly inspired by the people I find myself in company with.
I did make it out to the Th!rd Act Day of Action. The art affinity group I support made signs for the action, and we showed up at 11:30 on March 21st to protest the way Wells Fargo and other banks fund fossil fuel companies. We were one of 102 actions that took place that day. For a group that formed less than a year ago, it was an impressive amount of organization. Here’s my favorite article written about the action.
I do, however, wish that the action would have lasted longer, as it was only about an hour before we packed it in. It seems like we can leverage all that human energy a little more effectively.
But, it was gorgeous, and we sang beautiful protest songs of truth and love. It was truly an inspiring moment, especially because it marked my mother-in-law’s first-ever protest!
Thank you for reading! I hope you enjoy the experiments for April!