Align Your Orbit: Main Character Energy

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.

With opportunities knocking and a fast-filling calendar, we’re staring down a month of excitement, anticipation, dread, overwhelm, and curiosity. What we once took for granted has suddenly become novel again as we step into the spotlight. We have spent over a year encouraging growth in ourselves and those in our immediate surroundings. As we begin to harvest the fruits of that labor, sensations of abundance, gratitude, and surprise are potent and palpable.

Live into your fullest potential, shine your brightest lights, and rejoice in what is emerging—this is the fuel for your jetpack this month. Own your power and mesmerize anyone paying attention. Be your own entertainment.

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

Experiments for June

1.      Find the Past Before It Finds You – Don’t think we forgot that June begins with a Mercury retrograde, but this time, give yourself a head start. Be unafraid of looking at the past even before it returns. Stare at previous versions of you and embrace them with love, compassion, forgiveness, and understanding. Let time surprise you with gifts of memories and shared experiences. Approach with open arms. To sink deeper into your fractal identities, read this.

Challenge Mode: As you rediscover and reconnect with old identities, you’ll find knots to detangle. You’ll find moments where you were pushed beyond your capacity. You will undo outdated attempts at gaslighting. Meet these tender places with somatic offerings, deep breaths, and self-love. Appreciate the ways you found soft places to fall.*

2.      Archive + Recover – The world is a year out of practice with routines, and it’s time to rebuild and reinforce. Analyze your patterns, habits, and tracking systems. How do you archive memories, photos, and to-do lists? Acknowledge the ways time is an ingredient in your experiments and decide how to document that. What do you want to remember?

Challenge Mode: As you approach your past and usher in the future, pay attention to your entrances and exits. Some part of you died back there; what did you learn in the process? How do you leave a situation? How do you begin? Practice having a reevaluation date for any new projects. When opportunity knocks on all doors, determine how desire, ease, relationships, and value alignment play roles in deciding how, when, and whether to accept.

3.      Approach the “Mezzo”sphere – Since binaries are boring, let’s talk about how to break through the micro/macro spectrum with the “mezzo” distinction. As a term discussed in social work, it encourages perspectives that look at the crossroads of individual and societal paradigms. Start seeing smaller spheres of community. Practice shopping local and get your produce from farmer’s markets. Ask yourself about intersections between your collective identities. When do your collaborations become more than the sum of their parts? Where’s the middle ground between doing it yourself and doing it at scale?

Challenge Mode: As a society, we’ve spent a lot of time talking about how to split benefits, and while that work is still ongoing, it’s time to talk about how to split risk. Determine the risks you take in your life and ask yourself if there are ways to split them among the groups that benefit. Additionally, identify the groups you are part of where you don’t assume risk. How can you invite fractional risk models?

4.      Predict the Future – Face forward and storytell your next steps. Talk openly about where you want to go. Guess at what will happen and get it wrong. Send emails to yourself in the future. How do you leave surprises for yourself and others to find?

Challenge Mode: We spend so much time working to change and transform what is, but when do you make space for just listening? Take some time to meditate on the sensations in your body, noticing what happens when you watch. Notice when you tense up or relax and give yourself space to not worry about the why. Bring curiosity and compassion to your physical and emotional experiences.

*from “Runaway” by AURORA

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 May’s Experiments

The recipes for May included decompressing, conceptual disambiguating, directing the paradox of muse and mania, and discovering mentors.

Much of the idea of decompression settled around the phrase “the pain point is not necessarily the pressure point.” In thinking about this, I thought a lot about root causes of discomfort in my body and took to noticing more fully where and when that occurred. In my personal relationships, I realized that sometimes what I need most of all is my own space and time to do self-care and rest. Giving myself time to recover from shifting relationship dynamics has been incredibly helpful. Additionally, I have been very afraid of the pandemic being over—the idea of meeting both friends and strangers again is very daunting. But, in looking closer at that, I realized that what I am really being protective of is my alone time, my craft time, and my existing family and partner relationships, so making time for them and putting those relationships more directly on my calendar has made it easier to flow forward.

This past month, I had the great privilege to take part in a psychedelic experience, and that’s the biggest place where I experienced disambiguation. I went into it hoping to find direction and guidance. I found it, but not in a form I expected. There was a lot of messaging toward looking at past versions of myself and learning from what I was an authority on back then. It has inspired me to go back and make a timeline of everything I wrote about in my journals. In disambiguating myself in terms of age, I have felt capable of reaching back (and sometimes forward) to seek advice from the versions of me closest to the problem.

I’ve had so much energy lately around building and setting up a yarn mill, and sometimes that frantic energy urges me to get up at 3 a.m. to start problem solving again. However, thinking about “what is muse and what is mania?” I was able to realize that this mill is a long-term project and that my energy around it isn’t going to fade any time soon. As such, I can get a few more hours of sleep. As I get more attached to this idea, it has become relevant to ask, “who are the people I want around me inside this massive endeavor?” and that has led to the formation of some unexpected and unique collaborations I could not do without. Prioritizing my values and seeking alignment with others has made it so much more possible to keep putting energy here.

Mentorship has been a big, big contemplation for me lately for many reasons, not least of which is because a group of friends and I recently launched a brainstorming and prototyping group with the intention of supporting each other through and giving feedback on our next big step in our lives. This process of determining how peer mentorship works in a group space is a fascinating learning process, but I am exceptionally grateful to be experimenting with others in similar positions as me. By centering creative questions and presenting both our successes and our stuck points, we have been able to generate and maintain momentum in surprising and exciting ways. As I am finding with starting my own business, true networking, where you are actually forming collaborative and nourishing partnerships with others in value alignment with you, moves mountains and shatters barriers.

I hope you enjoy this month’s experiments!