Align Your Orbit: It's Not Just You

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.

We’ve spent so long in a state of hypervigilance, fear of socializing, and isolation that it’s hard to remember the toll all this takes on our spirit. If you’re feeling burnt out, tempted toward despair, hopeless, unsatisfied, and incapable of raising your energy, you are not alone. You’re in good company, and you’re likely already doing all the right things to lay groundwork for your future. Tell your inner critic to take a vacation; we’re in this for the long haul.

Spend this mercury retrograde looking for opportunities to listen and pull inward. Recover the practices and experiences that nourished you before the pandemic even began. Seek pleasure that doesn’t contribute to an obvious investment toward the future. Stare down your obsession with shortcuts. It’s time to hibernate into success.

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

Experiments for October

1.      Back to Basics – According to Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art, it is possible to trace a lot of Western ailments to a tendency toward incomplete exhales. Take some time to intentionally train a habit of fully emptying your lungs. For help with this practice, inhale for a count of three and exhale for a count of six during your meditations this month. Pull those stomach muscles in during the release and encourage yourself toward audible breath.

Challenge Mode: You know your body, mind, spirit, and emotions better than anyone else. If you feel like you’ve lost sight of healing practices, let your past self guide you in returning. Revisit old journal entries, photographs, and experiences to recover magic lost in the shuffle of time. Be your own ancestor and spirit guide.

2.      Restful Rest – A dear magician recently reminded me, when you don’t give yourself permission to rest, your rest is less restful. Taking that to heart, let’s discover how and when we give ourselves permission to rest. What do you need to get done to remove guilt from the equation? What rewards motivate you? Discover where you source pleasure for pleasure’s sake and not for any future outcome.

Challenge Mode: Rest is revolutionary. Joy is revolutionary. Disruption of norms is revolutionary. Remind yourself that you are first and foremost an animal. How do animals stretch? How do animals rest? How do animals dance? Let the creatures of the Earth be your teachers this month in your somatic experiments. 

3.      Identify Duplicated Labor – Our vampiric capitalistic society benefits from offloading labor onto the consumer. For instance, waste and plastic management becomes the consumer’s problem to fix. This encourages a movement away from tribal support structures toward an isolatory and overwhelming independence. Where can you lean on the communities you contribute to? How might you trade skills/services for mutual benefit?

Challenge Mode: Take advantage of the fact that our world is extremely interconnected to research people and organizations that align with your values. Instead of starting from scratch, ask how they can give you stepping stone toward your goals and purpose. Make connections and get inspired by other people doing the work. You aren’t in this alone.

4.      Get Spooky – The Festival of the Trickster (for all you Octavia Butler fans) is nearly upon us! Watch for opportunities to lean into weird, spooky, unearthly, and liminal spaces as they open for you this month. What’s going bump in the night? How are you celebrating this shift in energy?

Challenge Mode: This mercury retrograde is happening in Libra, meaning that your ability to balance and realign might become challenged. If you are facing a resurgence of your inner critic or other demons, turn around and face them. Get curious and ask them questions. What do they have to offer you as the retrograde ends and the veil lifts toward the end of the month? And, if they are persistent, know that sitting in and being present with the discomfort is enough right now.

Please tell us how these experiments are working for you!

If you like these experiments, 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 September’s Experiments

The offerings for September began with the overarching theme “You Don’t Need a Sword to Slay” and included playing with big magic, analyzing methods of communication, sourcing comfort in the realm of the literal, and finding ways to feel small.

I happened upon an excellent book by Maggie Nelson called The Argonauts, which is, at least so far, an autobiographical manifesto on the radical nature of queer joy. In the book, the author states, “I have come to understand revolutionary language as a kind of fetish… perhaps it’s the word radical that needs rethinking. But what could we angle ourselves toward instead, in addition? Openness? Is that good enough, strong enough?” It drove home for me the idea that bloodshed and attacks are not the answer. We need to create and redefine instead. Let’s imagine new worlds together.

My experiences with big magic this month primarily revolved around an energy work session I led for a friend of a friend. They were struggling with some attachment to narratives that were not serving them, and they pulled in online influences as well as potentially malignant human factors. In guiding this session, I prepared many alchemical treatments that I typically don’t get to explore with others. It was fascinating to have a chance to stretch my spiritual muscles while giving my friend the opportunity to be a more active participant in the curation of their overall narrative.

However, the biggest shifts for me this month have come from fully recognizing that everything—and I mean every little tiny thing—comes back around one way or another. While there have been some good harvests from energetic investments in the last month, there have also been several instances where circumstances that felt long in my past have come back to play a role now. Even small, seemingly insignificant decisions are showing up again at my doorstep. It’s quite a party in here lately.

In looking at the ways I position myself online and in my communication strategies, I found that shifting from text messages to emails when I’m seeking connection with another being has been very nourishing. The long format of emails gives me more space to play and get curious about what I want to know about the person. Having realized that, before technology, we all wrote a lot more letters, I thought emails were a great way to upgrade. That way, it’s easier to opt into curiosity and news rather than getting blindsided by a sudden text. I give myself more permission to treat emails as somewhat less urgent than text messages. Reserving texts for quick, logistical purposes has streamlined that communication strategy, and the emails successfully make me feel closer to my friends even when we are too busy to meet in person.

In thinking about boundaries, I still have a lot of walls up. I am very protective of my energy because I presently have so little of it. I suspect that this is a familiar sensation for you (thanks, pandemic). However, even if I am not as receptive to making new connections right now as I would like to be, I feel like I am working hard toward laying the groundwork for successful interactions in the future. I’ve become very interested in imagining the community I would like to live in and determining what the paths from here to there are. Expect a manifesto in the future. 😉

While my energy work session gave me a very practical way to shift between realms of belief, many of my idle thoughts have revolved around what I’m actually willing to believe for the sake of my own sanity. The world and society around me frequently feel like a big pile of shit intermixed with only occasional nourishment, and it’s difficult to stay optimistic inside that landscape. However, I recently heard a song, “Goddess Code” by Lizzy Jeff, that says, “believe the universe is always conspiring in your favor.” It’s a good reminder that it’s pointless to believe otherwise unless you want to believe you live in a Lovecraftian horror.

I have been able to source comfort and safety from the literal, but I’m hungry for what is other. I’m hungry for magic. I’m hungry for spirit. I’m ready to continue healing myself in the realms beyond this one. I suppose it’s a good thing that Halloween is this month.

My experiences of feeling small thankfully came to me this month, as I did not have the energy to seek them out specifically. The literary press I co-nourish held an outdoor release party, and watching one of the readers speak poem-spells under the canopy of trees in the company of a walking labyrinth suddenly made me feel like there was more magic around me than I even knew what to do with. It was an unexpected moment of clarity, guidance, and joy in community that I desperately needed.

And, finally, my experiences with “going deeper” this month have gone in several directions, but the most notable and present one right now is the exploration of a rarely recognized sub-identity with a sub-identity in another person’s system. These two characters were thrown together by forces outside their control, and while they never would have interacted and may have insisted on hating each other otherwise, there’s fertile soil ready for growth and evolution between them. It’s much needed novelty and excitement to play with.

Thanks for reading, hang in there, and enjoy these experiments! Happy Halloween!