Align Your Orbit: Love What You Love
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
Our forms of love are as varied and unique as we are, and every single one deserves celebration. Gush to your friends, pets, lovers, family, art projects, and music until you are empty, and trust that all that love will always return tenfold. Be brave and public in your affection. You don’t create a salve for unhappiness by hiding what is beautiful about your own life.
Shout from the mountains and rooftops about your love. Go wild with passion and vulnerability. Try or don’t try; the time will pass anyway.
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Experiments for February
1. express joy – We are all conditioned to mask our fullest reactions, but joy is contagious. Open up to happiness and beam out all that you feel as you feel it. Be effuse with elation. The world will always have ups and downs—trying to level them out will only put you at odds with your body.
Challenge Mode: Move your body. Free your emotions. Play until you feel it the next day. Get to know a city by walking across it. Relish the sensation of wearing yesterday in your muscles. Know that every day leaves you feeling stronger.
2. in new costumes – Upgrade your wardrobe. Cycle out at least one piece of clothing and bring something different in. Shop in your friends’ closets. Visit your favorite secondhand store. Make a habit of bringing new life into what has already lived once.
Challenge Mode: Your ability to adapt is a skill. What practices hone it? Invite novelty into the quotidian and watch how your attention shifts. Sit in meditation with your eyes closed to slits and pay attention to everything at once.
3. everyone is just – Take special care to give extra benefit of the doubt this month. Until proven otherwise, assume malicious intent is a figment of your imagination. Offer additional explanations and second chances. Be generous when instructing others.
Challenge Mode: There will always be people who are not aligned with your values. You can’t shut all of them out entirely. What boundaries do you need to feel safe entering into mixed spaces? You can’t change other operating systems, but you can upgrade your own.
4. naked underneath – Be honest about the time you put into your most inspired work. You’ve spent your life being good at group projects because you put in the most effort. But you’re maturing now and have curated groups of very capable people. Document the time you put in and don’t forget to delegate labor. Make sure everything is above board in the event someone needs to take your place.
Challenge Mode: You have more of your life ahead of you than you think. Don’t anticipate endings before they arrive. Allow spaciousness in your current identity and imagine multigenerational possibilities.
Andra’s Recap of January’s Experiments
The theme for last month was Sparkle and included experiments around indulging guilty pleasures, lengthening warm-ups, planning the future, and interacting with AI.
Because my partner is gearing up for a long period of sobriety due to planning a pregnancy, we have been having one last hurrah in our dance with mind-altering substances. I have so much gratitude for the ways that marijuana specifically has given me so much awareness of my body and mind, and I will certainly miss it. But, at the same time, I am excited about the list we have come up with of activities that elicit similar mental states. Overall, I’m looking forward to the break.
My partner and I also really love denial games, so we’ve been having a good time this past month with all the ways to make refraining fun.
Ash has been hosting a 30-minute morning moving practice on Wednesdays for a while now, and we’ve recently added Free Move time on Mondays and Fridays as well. This sanctioned time to do whatever my body needs has been so helpful in protecting myself from injuries at work and working on core strengthening. I'm finding that I really enjoy the sensation of my core muscles being sore!
This month also demanded a lot of clear the air conversations. I had to set a tough boundary around communicating with a particular person about the past. At some point, it’s necessary to stop rehashing what happened and move forward into what happened.
As I am about to get married, I had conversations with my partner about what marriage actually means to us and how we want to operate going forward. Those conversations birthed lovely rituals, and we both felt more centered afterward.
I definitely have big plans coming up between getting married and helping my partner conceive. I continue to look forward to being a parent and consistently find new ways to imagine enjoying the experience. I think it’s going to be really special. While the future feels uncertain, I don’t see any need to stop trying to live.
I have been coming to terms with the fact thatI love text messages and emails! They are the most efficient ways for me to communicate, and I have the most space there.
My sister also surprised me with paintings of AI selfies I had made, which felt very meta in light of the ongoing AI art conversation. I am glad she felt inspired, and I treasure her work.
I hope you enjoy February’s experiments!