67. Align Your Orbit — Meaning, We
Align Your Orbit is a series of philosophical and somatic experiments to guide ourselves toward intentionality and impact. Synthesized after years of conversations and now with inspirations from MidJourney, we’re fully embracing our cyborg natures. Find delight in these journeys of exploration. If you would like to receive these offerings as an email on the new moon, sign up here.
We continue to straddle the conflicting realities of great global suffering where it intersects with the deep pleasures of existing within strengthened communities of struggle, power, and resilience. This dissonance, this complexity, the ability to hold everything at once, is the work. Persist in building parallel structures of existence with liberation as their foundations.
Take strength and hope from the vast and intricate network of resistance. Embrace a gentle curiosity about your thoughts and the thoughts of others as they flow through you like the living beings they are. Let the egg of you break from the inside, only when you are ready. Spread your wings and embrace the “we” that is all life.
If you’d like to experience these recipes as a playlist, here’s the link.
New Experiments
1. everything in its season – As we fully embrace the hyperlocal, we must also consider what is available from season to season. Use what’s here now as a potent form of magic, healing, and power. Eat what’s ready to be harvested, take note of the shifts between growing periods, and harvest the medicine when the time is right.
Challenge Mode: Take stock of all tethers and attachments you have in your life, from relationships to responsibilities. Give extra attention and care to what feels luscious, generative, and motivating. Gently separate from or level up tethers without reciprocity. Your attention is your most sacred asset.
2. disambiguated mystery – Assuming that we all once came from the same core essence, encourage curiosity around what makes you unique. What compelled you to disambiguate from the infinite everything? Feel free to use this tarot spread to explore the sparks that your parts of self each have.
Challenge Mode: Being too far away from the universal mystery, feeling too known and separate, also causes disruption. Find ways to return and recycle your energy back into the infinite flow as you seek out meditation, either alone or with others.
3. is superpower – If the lights are too bright, the air too stuffy, the smell too intense, or the sensation unpleasant, be present and authentic to your experience. Embrace the way you perceive, even if it is different or more sensitive than those around you. What’s one thing you can do be more comfortable?
Challenge Mode: Pretend for a moment that there’s a secret button on your body that will release all tension from all the muscles. If you had one, where would it be? How does it like to be pressed?
4. if you tell the story right – Language shortcuts give us the ability to relate to others with deeper, fuller complexity. To give an example, some indigenous languages have multiple first-person plural pronouns to explore concentric circles of communal relating. Identify the terms and phrases missing from your lexicon. How you do you talk about the experiences unique to you?
Challenge Mode: Few stories are simple. Seek to put anything and everything you learn into its fullest possible context. What is the deeper history? Use this to give you a sense of empathy, understanding, peace, and purpose.
Andra’s Recap of Turn Outward
Our previous experiments related to communicating what’s happening inside, moving at the pace of pleasure, increasing agency, and considering your body a gift to the land.
I had a lot of opportunities to play around with making my internal experience more visible to the people in my immediate circle. Using Discord as a messaging platform allows me to express myself as many different characters or “alters” such that many people in my life are getting to know the vastly different versions of me in new ways. It’s been an absolute blast.
There has been some forgiveness in the process of reaching out to new connections. I have had to allow myself to shed some old trauma from past relationships in order to grow in new ones. The growing pains have been good, but I have felt raw and in need of extra rest as I sort through and drop old patterns of defensiveness. It’s been a good challenge.
The concept of the “pace of pleasure” has been clutch in slowing down in my life. I frequently use it as a way to reorient my habits of trying to “get through” certain things. Keeping “deep time” in mind helps with making every little mundane human thing feel a little more enjoyable and connected to the universal pattern of existence. “Imperial modernity” and our late-stage empire always want me to speed back up, though. It’s a back and forth, to be sure, with constant readjustment.
Having Mercury retrograde start on April Fool’s Day prepared me for the trickster nature of the period, and I embraced the magic in the air. One example of that was getting a group of friends together to make masks out of natural materials gathered locally. Later, we sat around a fire and wore the masks, throwing them individually into the fire as we felt called and watching them burn. It was a really delightful exercise in embodiment and play in community.
I’ve finally had some success in finding indigenous community events to connect with. I was able to find an indigenous culture day and salmon bake at the natural area near my house, and I also went to a powwow for Palestine down at Portland State University as part of the campus protests and encampments. It feels good to be in community with people who live in animacy with the land. I look forward to continuing to learn from them.
Additionally, I started reading Sand Talk, which is a book by an indigenous author living in so-called “Australia.” I highly recommend its perspective on our current cultural dilemmas.
I hope you enjoy this cycle’s experiments!