Align Your Orbit: Guiding Stars
Recipes for Evolution in March 2021
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 that follow to fit you and find delight in how you engage.
The impending warm weather has us ecstatic for the increasing opportunities to meet with friends outside, especially as the end of the pandemic inches ever closer. Daffodils and crocuses are brightening up the walks we’re taking and reminding us that it’s time to reflect on how we pivot around our guiding principles and purposes. What is your current trajectory on your way to your calling? How did you set your course toward the stars?
This month, we invite you to excavate your experiences and belief structures around morality, identify the magic you employ in your journey toward wholeness, explore your relationship to ease and stillness, and project into the possibilities you want to bring into reality.
**Want to experience this month’s offering as a Spotify playlist? Check this out!**
Experiments for March
1. Tiers of Purpose – When you ask yourself—what is the purpose of life?—you might find it difficult to distill your life into one theme or calling. But, maybe it’s all right to be vague at that uppermost level, especially if you allow yourself to have more than one purpose. If your highest calling is, say, love your people, how might your secondary or tertiary purposes get more specific?
Challenge Mode: In considering how purpose and morality intersect, we have determined that good actions don’t automatically cancel out bad ones. If there is not a direct or symbolic relationship between actions, they may as well operate on different planes of existence. Take time to think about how you understand morality and how this impacts your purpose. How does undergoing this process encourage or motivate improvement?
2. Circles of Magic – Given that we all have unique experiences, genetics, and philosophies, you may have more of an affinity for some magic over others. What types of magic are you most comfortable and familiar with? What magic do you want to learn next? We have identified the following circles of magic for ourselves to get you started: optimism, ritual, agency, probability, somatics, alchemy, stillness, channeling, projection, and performance. What categories would you add to that list?
Challenge Mode: Some circles of magic are more compatible than others. How does acknowledging that you and a loved one operate from different perspectives help you find alignment? Sometimes, we like to say “we serve the same god” to indicate alignment in purpose. How do you know when someone is successfully allied with you in your magic and purpose?
3. Ease in Play and Pleasure – In Pleasure Activism, Adrienne Maree Brown says, “We seem to still be on the ascending portion of that long arc toward justice. But we can sustain the struggle if we find all the ease available to us, the place where we can flow together, coast together, and rest.” As we acknowledge that the next few years are only going to bring more unprecedented weather events as we simultaneously continue our battle against the harms of profit-driven corporate models, we also need to find what eases this pressure. How will you rejuvenate yourself along the long road of your purpose? What sorts of people increase your ability to regenerate energy?
Challenge Mode: This month, we have had several reasons to reflect on what indicates health and wellness in our bodies. One such indicator is range of motion. If we have full range of motion after a minor injury, we have much less cause for worry. How can you explore range of motion and other evidence of wellness in your own body? Acknowledge both small adjustments that have a big impact on your somatic practice as well as more incremental change.
4. Prototypes – While identifying your purpose is often the first step on the journey to achieving it, you will need to prototype a few of the many ways you could get there. Take some time this month to brainstorm in a meditative state and limit the amount of judgment you put on your initial ideas. Open yourself up to non-obvious or otherwise surprising solutions. What would it look like to increase or decrease the scale of your objectives? Try something. Try everything. There is no perfect solution.
Challenge Mode: We often take for granted the ways our mind differentiates between the real and unreal. To analyze those assumptions, we invite you to ask yourself: what proof identifies something as either reality or dream? To get you started, we use both the exquisite soreness of our muscles and gravity as anchor points for which is the consensus reality. What are your anchor points?
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 February’s Experiments
The focuses for alignment in February included radical collaboration, dropping water in the bucket, osmotic permeability as it relates to group energy, and impossible vows.
At the beginning of the month, I decided to set a daily task on Habitica (one of those “gamify your life” apps) to acknowledge someone in my life at least every other day. This practice started out easy as I have many, many people in my life who deserve recognition. Doing this opened up opportunities and invitations I would not have received otherwise, which was a lovely surprise. It also proved to be a good way to stay in touch with people I don’t spend a lot of time with. I did, however, need to grapple with the ways I was afraid of complimenting behavior in people when I was also having some disagreement with them. I didn’t want to send mixed messages, but I lamented the inability to trust that we could hold the nuance of both the good and the bad at once.
In terms of quantifiable metrics for success, I discovered a path forward in my life that would make me feel like I had done enough good in the world through my career. It was the first time I found something that felt like “enough” in that regard, and though I may not take that trajectory, it was exciting to know that such a thing was possible.
Regarding throwing my weight in with the masses, I definitely played the GME stock game with a “donation,” and I have been immensely pleased at the way that battle is still raging. Otherwise, I spent a lot of time contemplating areas in activism or production that are untapped niches. That helped me understand where I could have the most impact given my skillset. The challenge mode for this focus asked “would the world be a better place if everyone did this?” and led to some very juicy conversations about what morality is and how we navigate it. This largely informed the “good” and “bad” discussions that appear in this month’s experiments.
Evaluating my osmotic permeability mostly took place in terms of my relationship with my girlfriend. We spend a ton of time together, and though we are both polyamorous, we have found great love, sensuality, and satisfaction with each other such that we have found a sustainable rhythm for being each other’s main source of relationship sustenance. In playing with how to align our bodies and energies more intentionally, I have been able to feel even more connected to her and additionally take up more space energetically as we are going to sleep so my access to dreamspace feels wider and more diverse.
One of my “impossible vows” is a sincere and complete refusal to accept a work environment that cares more about profit than either employees or the supply chain ethics. Because of the ways I was calling out these problems at my job and because I asked for more flexibility around which hours I worked, I lost my job. I knew this was a possibility, but it was more important for me to be in alignment with my values than warp myself to succeed at a job I didn’t enjoy. I’m not sure what’s next for me at present, but I keep telling myself that I am good at figuring that out. There’s a lot of interesting things cooking. Ultimately, I am proud of the way I used my privilege to take risks and stand up for others in ways I could afford.
Onward and upward! Enjoy this month’s experiments!