Align Your Orbit: Recipes for Evolution

Theme for April – See Past the Horizon*

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.

In the rush of excitement coming from the combination of vaccines and warmer weather, we’re all feeling the collective push toward movement, reopening, and acquainting ourselves with the post-pandemic world. As you begin the process of reemergence, know that you set the pace.** Know that grief will flood into your awareness in ways you cannot anticipate or put on the calendar. You have survived a worldwide pandemic, but there are many people, animals, and ideas that did not. None of us are the same as we once were.

Recognize how much resilience you cultivated to survive this. Tap into the depth of the well you built to sustain yourself. Be surprised at what you have, but recognize that you are still functioning under overwhelm. Your capacity has dramatically increased, but you are still maxed out. Return to agreements with curiosity and renegotiation, and leave extra space for the slow process of grief as the dawning realization of what actually happened this past year comes fully into awareness.

*Theme paraphrased from a poem by Ash Good; the full line is “I wish for you those friends—the ones who say ‘I am so glad we have reconnected in this lifetime.’ The ones who keep going past the horizon and return despite all odds.”

**Concept paraphrased from a discussion with a friend about Radical Dharma

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

Experiments for April

1.      Grief Is a Lifelong Process – Though grief may become easier to coexist alongside, it is one of the slowest processes we go through, and you will carry the grief you experience now your entire life. Nothing will make you completely forget someone or something lost. You contain within you enough of a memory to recreate them, and this is how you ferry the souls of the dead. Know that large griefs don’t cancel out smaller ones; they are cumulative and easily compound on each other.

Given that you will spend more and more time grieving as you age, how can you source strength, love, gratitude, pleasure, and magic from grief? How do you relate to your allies on the other side?

Challenge Mode: Grief is a community experience. There’s a reason we gather to honor the dead; the cumulation of each of our memories of a person, animal, or idea temporarily recreate and recenter their being in our presence and awareness. As we reexplore healthy ways to engage with others, how will you rely on your community? How will you hold space for others in their grief when it does not directly affect you?

2.      Permission to Disengage – As Kazia Urbaniak says, we are “[people] of the pivot.” We have the capacity to recognize which survival mechanisms no longer serve us while honoring the ways they were previously necessary. As you reengage with the reopening world, wield the sword of boundary setting and honor the sacred nature of your time, energy, and thought. Choose your own pace and refuse the rush. Write a list of everything you do (work, play, relationships) and sit with the gravity of it all in one place. Drop what’s not working with integrity and grace. Communicate with those involved as soon as possible.

Challenge Mode: Recognizing when you are at capacity is not always easy, especially when you actively want to do everything on your checklist. Start with the sensations in the body. When do you feel tightness in your chest, inability to take a full breath, or panic for little or no reason? Notice these as check engine lights for your life. How can you make what you are doing more efficient to increase your capacity? If you are stuck and just need to source comfort, remember how securely the ground holds you. Spend some time with your floor practice this month as you explore somatically. 

3.      Recalculate Value – It’s easy to look at a $5 price tag and dismiss all the processes, people, and historical knowledge required to make an object. Spend some time meditating on something you purchase and rely on. Think about how many hands, eyes, ears, and thoughts had to exist for this object to arrive here to you. Accounting for all the short- and long-term costs associated with the object, what price would be honest and transparent about actual value?

Challenge Mode: Though it is difficult to make a difference in economic strategies as an individual consumer, your dollars count. Iron out where your priorities are and why you would boycott a business or product. This may require creating a hierarchy of harm according to your belief structure. Remember that the moment you start making a profit off a product or service, you are culpable, to some degree, for the ways those practices cause harm. Shift your perspectives away from transactions and toward relationships.

4.      Befriend the Unknown – We’ve spent much of last year needing to simplify for the sake of understanding and survival, but nothing is simple. How can you re-invite mystery into your daily existence? Listen to new music, leave love notes for strangers, attempt to describe your spirituality. As Carl Jung said, “if our religion is based on salvation, our chief emotions will be fear and trembling. If our religion is based on wonder, our chief emotion will be gratitude.”

Challenge Mode: Speak with the metaphysical. Set up a shrine and whisper to it. Write letters to the dead or the missing. Address your journal entries to people who don’t exist. Tell the bees the news.*** Make space for the unexpected when it arrives.

Please tell us how these experiments are working for you! We would love to hear from you at r/highpriestesses or r/spacemermaids.

If you like these experiments, please consider donating to our Patreon.

***Idea borrowed from The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood

Andra’s Recap of March’s Experiments

The focuses for alignment in March included identifying tiers of purpose, relating to circles of magic, finding ease in play and pleasure, and prototyping.

In considering my own tiers of purpose, I identified that the work I do through Space Mermaids/High Priestesses feels like the most valuable and connected in terms of providing a place for people to create community. In making space for this belonging, I feel like we are beginning to find better cultures to exist inside of than white-body supremacy. However, that doesn’t take up all my time. I also spend a lot of time taking care of my bunnies and have been considering starting up a mini yarn mill. Providing ethical ways to engage with animals and making those transactional relationships healthy also feels like a calling. Encouraging myself to pursue both projects at once has been incredibly fulfilling, though the overwhelm of having such large endeavors on the horizon has me evaluating which relationships and ways of being I may need stop to make more room in my life. It’s wonderful but so, so full.

This month, as I needed to say goodbye to my cat, Lotus, after discovering that she likely had liver cancer and would not eat as a result, I really tapped into the nature of grief magic. At 27, I have been rather privileged to have little experience with death, but rolling through both the death of my father this past December and now the death of my most beloved cat and magical friend, I am beginning to understand exactly how much time we spend in our lives grieving, and that only increases as we age. In seeking some way to experience ease and pleasure in that practice, I have been appreciating the ways it really feels like Lotus is an ally in another realm, consistently sending magic and luck from afar. I have never had a reason to feel so connected to the other side. And, starting now, I am taking my role in ferrying the memories of dead more seriously. This, too, is magic.

In looking back through my gratitude journal and having the great pleasure to have a friend come to stay at my home for spring break, I recognized that what I am most grateful for in my life are memorable and notable experiences. I care about the things that happen. I care about the time spent, especially when spent with others. In my gratitude journal, I try to distill the sparkle of the memory—the moment that allows me to recreate everything else—and that has drastically increased the pleasure in looking at the journal in retrospect. In terms of pleasure and ease in the body, I have been gentle with myself about where my range of motion is limited, specifically when I try to stretch my legs out on the ground. The wide-legged poses in yoga are really difficult for me! But, I understand that the important piece is the dedication to practice rather than the result or outcome.

It feels like I spent most of my time this month prototyping. Despite the absurdity of the idea of starting a yarn mill, I can’t go more than a few days without considering again how it would all work. I have gained an immense appreciation for how much work, relationship-building, and knowledge goes into industry, especially one that I thought would be simple! Turns out it’s far more complicated and nuanced than I ever would have understood. This practice of prototyping feels like it closes the gap between what is fantasy and what is reality, and I am excitedly anxious for the moment when the idea will land fully in one arena or the other.

Additionally, I want to offer a special thanks to all the lovely friends who contributed their suggestions and thoughts to this month’s recipes. It’s always lovely to engage this way in community.

Thanks for reading, and I hope you enjoy this month’s experiments!