Align Your Orbit: Recipes for Evolution

Theme for May – Follow the Flow

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.

Having lived through a collective trauma and disaster, we have the impression that more and more people are waking up to what needs to change. The flood of momentum toward progress, toward a decrease in suffering, toward a redefinition of success has broken free of its dam and is heading straight for you. How will you surf these tumultuous yet exhilarating waters?

Know that the places where you experience pain or resistance might find their origins further back or farther away than you first expect. Trace the path all the way back to where a difficulty began to fully understand possible therapies and solutions.

Want to experience this month’s offerings as a Spotify playlist? Click here.

Experiments for May

1.      Decompress – Before you can ride the waves of growth and expansion, you must first develop a relationship to your muscles and nervous system that allows energy to flow freely. Develop a movement practice or regular meditation that emphasizes calm reception and dispersion to live into the enormity you are. If you have a yoga trapeze or an inversion table, use it. Here are some easy decompression poses to add to your practice.

Challenge Mode: Spend some time this month noticing where you experience pain or discomfort, whether physical, emotional, intellectual, or spiritual. Know that the pain point is not necessarily the pressure point. Wrapping around and getting behind a problem is often an easier approach to hitting it head on. How can you follow the flow of pain toward its source? In discovering its source, how can you massage and address the needs of that area?

2.      Disambiguate – While labels quickly become limiting and problematic, sometimes it is necessary to name what’s happening before you can progress. In choosing a new name for a concept, you might find deeper, more meaningful ways to describe what you mean. For instance, instead of talking about gender dynamics, you might find it useful to consider directionality (giving or receiving, talking or listening, exteriority or interiority) to free yourself and others from gender constructs while still naming a phenomenon of flow that anyone could exhibit. How does acknowledging these tendencies transform the nature of group dynamics? How does it change the way you talk and think about what makes each of us unique?

Challenge Mode: Now that we’ve spent a year naming racial injustices, it’s time to put additional energy into naming and creating models of growth, healing, and development that make it possible to improve. As you continue to support movements of freedom and liberation, seek out information about BIPOC-owned businesses in your area. Seek mentors and friends from diverse communities. Identify and reduce white-body supremacy as it exists in ideals of urgency, productivity, perfectionism, and fear of open conflict.* Boost social media posts from people outside your social sphere. Live the revolution in your daily life.

3.      Direct the Paradox – When I wake up at 3 a.m. because I suddenly have a poem in my head or want to work on some yarn, I must ask myself: is this muse or mania? The paradox is that it’s always both, and I need to decide how to respond based on the context. As you discover paradoxes in your identity, determine contexts that shift you from one side of the spectrum to the other. Ask yourself if the urgency you are experiencing will last or if you genuinely need to act right away.

Challenge Mode: The paradoxical nature of love is that, to love others well, you need to love yourself first and foremost. If you nurture your own integrity, philosophies, and wellness most deeply, you will have more capacity for nurturing the same in others. What philosophies and values do you have that you love above and beyond other people? How is this a type of self-love?

4.      Discover Your Mentors – Being able to learn from your failures and mistakes starts with admitting you have them, and when they are difficult to see, sometimes you need someone you trust to point at where you have room for improvement. Who are the current mentors in your life? Who do you trust to give you counsel? Know that, as you seek out mentors, your peers can be excellent non-hierarchical resources for development. How can you create a value share that is nourishing to all parties?

Challenge Mode: Whether you always believe it or not, you are a wealth of information. You are an expert at your life experiences, and that’s valuable. The way you choose to identify—as queer, as polyamorous, as a woman in business, as a professional, as an artist—will mark you as a resource to those who could really use your support. Who do you mentor, and what is the value exchange in that relationship? What do you do to manage, dismantle, or acknowledge the power structure in that relationship?

*Information paraphrased from a post by @reparationsfund

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 April’s Experiments

The focuses for alignment in April included understanding that grief is a lifelong process, giving yourself permission to disengage, recalculating value, and befriending the unknown.

“Grief is a lifelong process” became something of a mantra for me this last month. In engaging with media about grief, I feel like I have a much greater understanding of what it means to carry the memories of the dead forward. It doesn’t exactly get easier; it just gets easier to deal with. I also appreciated giving myself a lot of space to grieve even when it was inconvenient. I’ve been doing my best to recognize the patterns and give myself extra buffers around interpersonal interactions that might stir things up. I know I will continue working on all this for a long time (and that I still have yet to process a lot of the grief about the pandemic itself), but I feel like I’m on the right road to developing the touchstones I need to keep walking.

The collective grief of the additional police shootings of Black individuals during the Derek Chauvin trial was certainly difficult this month. While I feel like there is more chance of culpability for officers in the future, the path to that future is long, hard, and painful.

While I thought that giving myself permission to disengage would mean dropping some of the major responsibilities I have, it was far more applicable to smaller interpersonal interactions. For instance, I focused on acknowledging when I wanted to move on from a conversation topic without feeling like I needed to come up with a reason on the spot. I also had a situation where I decided not to disengage from something causing me discomfort, and the ripple effects of not listening to my body in that moment have been substantial and dramatic, so I’m using that as a learning experience.

I spent a lot of time thinking about value, and I have come to the conclusion that value is such a multi-faceted concept that it’s always going to fluctuate and change based on the context. But, I appreciated considering every step of the process of creation and how each relates to the energetic exchange of money or other types of compensation. Most specifically, I’ve been thinking about the value of yarn and crocheted projects, attempting to determine what prices are fair and what I’m willing to pay for materials I trust. To check out some of what I’ve been working on, you can find me on Instagram as @closingloopscrochet or on my splash page here.

Befriending the unknown during a pandemic is difficult as magic feels in short supply, but the waking up of spring, and the magic of finding exactly what I need at the right time has been in full bloom for me this month. When I have a lot of passion and curiosity, the right steps to move forward seem to appear in front of me. For instance, I visited a sheep farm to make friends with the farmer who provides the wool I blend with the angora wool from my bunnies. She suggested I visit the Eugene Textile Center, which just happened to have both the perfect spinning chair and a swing picker for much, much less money than I was prepared to spend. I was thrilled. In fact, everything about making yarn and building a miniature yarn mill has been full to bursting with magic, and I know that means I’m heading in the right direction.

I also looked at one of my relationships with a new degree of awe, gratitude, and love. Knowing that we are so much in philosophical alignment and really getting perspective on how far we’ve come together in bridging the vocabularies of our beliefs continues to amaze me. I entered into this relationship after an enormous burst of compelling intuition, and I am so awed that the ripples of that experience continue to reach toward the farthest corners of my life.

Additionally, in returning to a book I wrote several years previous, I found new ways to connect with my own past and the story in ways I could not have anticipated. So, to sum up, I feel as though I have found and befriended the unknown even in what I thought I knew.

Thank you for reading, and I hope you enjoy this month’s experiments!