Align Your Orbit: Forces in Our Control
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.
The clean-cut clarity of this season illuminates the path, and suddenly, you know the way forward. It emerges, and you walk. We have created manmade problems, which means, they are solvable. We can solve them. But that doesn’t mean it’ll be easy.
Buckle down; strap in. This one’s gonna hurt. But, life finds a way—and there’s no end in sight.
Want to experience this as a Spotify playlist?
Experiments for December
1. Anchor – Trust yourself—your past self to have made good decisions, your future self to handle change. Use your safeword and plan aftercare ahead of time. Never be far from a soft blanket and pillow.
Challenge Mode: Whether you’re living here for a couple months or for a few years, you’re here to stay. Ask questions about your neighborhood emergency response team. Foster resilience in yourself by strengthening the bonds that hold your communities together.
2. Boundary – A boundary is an invisible line, but it is a line nonetheless. Stay in your power as you set a boundary by determining the consequence for ignoring it. If you touch me, I will leave.
Challenge Mode: Let everyone face their own consequences. You don’t have to cover for everyone else’s mistakes, especially when you are the victim. Healing requires community; don’t try to hold up the whole world alone.
3. Hunger – Natalya Kolosowsky from Shadow Tender talks about hunger as the natural emotional counterpoint for gratitude, and both are part of a healthy cycle. Be honest about what you crave in the world even as you relish abundance.
Challenge Mode: Use magic objects, colors, phrases, and gestures to rewrite your reality. To encourage resilience. To put up an effortless boundary. To remind yourself of exactly who you are and why you came here.
4. Bandwidth – There is so much going on in the world, and it’s taking up much more emotional, physical, and social bandwidth than ever before. Recognize the need to rest more than usual. Give yourself buffer. Take the space you want, even before you need it. Any action is worth your time.
Challenge Mode: If you have rested and are ready to bring your voice, body, and skills to the fight, join a group such as Extinction Rebellion or Raging Grannies. Speak out against broken record record-breaking, as the Bureau of Linguistical Reality calls it. Make climate change casual conversation.
Please tell us how these experiments are working for you!
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Andra’s Recap of November’s Experiments
The theme for last month was Remix and included themes around the power of many, wider thresholds, body as machine, and raise the alarm (on climate change).
Here’s what I came away with from last month’s experiments:
I did it, but like, voting felt inconsequential. The political process is too slow for the kind of change we need to make to shift climate crises. These shifts require a concerted effort in every country at once.
I’m simply not playing at that scale yet.
Instead, I’m focusing my energy on the local organizations I support. Creative reuse, hobby farms, personal relationships—and it’s been fulfilling. This feels like enough. But there are still nightmares out there. There’s more to be done.
Each of us are doing a piece of it, together.
In the meantime, it’s critical to rest. To recharge. To play the long game. Run long-distance. We have to stop sprinting.
Discomfort is a common experience of right now, and that sucks. It’s the background narrative of every conversation. I’m tired, we seem to say collectively. But it’s worth it. Life is worth it. Let’s stretch the muscles of our godhood and get them moving again.
I have no attainable vows. There is no such guaranteed thing. Constant change is a companion on this journey with no end.
And I’m here for it.