Align Your Orbit: Crystal Clear
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.
Warm temperatures bring hope on the wind. Our labors are already bearing fruit, and even climate change feels fixable now. We’ve done hard things and are ready for more. This bursting ache for life knows something new approaches. Lean into hunger and become your own superhero. The path before you is clear. Feel your muscles rejoice as you run toward destiny.
Want to experience this month’s offerings as a Spotify playlist?
Experiments for May
1. Be Transparent – Secrecy is often a waste of human energy. When we are transparent about finances, power structures, resources, and satisfaction, doors of opportunity open where there were only walls before. Find ways you subtly gaslight others and root the habit out. Don’t just say something is fine. Don’t make others do guesswork. Go undercover. Say exactly what’s on your mind.
Challenge Mode: Resist the urge to step into power vacuums. Understand that some things deserve to collapse under the weight of their own consequences. If you are the only reason a project someone else instigated is succeeding, let it fail.
2. Find Bedrock – This next period may challenge and shake you down to your essential foundations. What strength is left when the smoke clears? Repeat after us: we can do hard things. Don’t shy away from challenges. Forge forward with all the confidence of experience.
Challenge Mode: Let’s face it—object permanence is tough. It’s easy to lose track of all the wonders you’ve already manifested into reality. Dig into your past and draft a cross-genre list of accomplishments organized by year. Continually re-up your creative identity by always having a project to work on.
3. Seek Deep Rest – Find time to practice non-sleep deep rest. Lay down as flat as possible with whatever comforts you need but ditch the pillow, set a timer, and rest. Pay attention to where your mind takes you. Follow thoughts to their natural conclusions and exhale to let them go. Plot your trajectories and map your curiosities. What ideas spring from nothing?
Challenge Mode: Whenever you find yourself with a few moments alone, explore your facial muscles. Stretch and massage your jaw. Open your mouth wide. Plot the cardinal directions with only your eyes. Click here for more facial yoga exercises.
4. Decorate Time – We are a people who decorate time. Get curious about the patterns you’re weaving and ask yourself what they might look like in a year, a decade, five decades. You are someone’s ancestor—what will they find? Read for pleasure, make bad music, perform for your friends. What is the process of making memories?
Challenge Mode: Don’t be afraid to start new fires. When others come to warm themselves, teach them how to tend this magic. When the tending is successful, seek out new places that crave warmth. Create your own constellations of projects, creativity, and legacy. Allow yourself to pursue what calls you in any given moment.
Please tell us how these experiments are working for you!
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Andra’s Recap of April’s Experiments
The theme for April was “Shape Change,” which included experiments around speaking new languages, practicing recognition rather than prescription, feeding the ecosystem, and gestating.
This month was dense for me as many of my social and practical spheres collided and needed attention. I pulled all my recent knowledge together into new applications as I helped my girlfriend’s parents prepare to move across the country to live with us! This required learning and speaking the languages of reuse as it is spoken in the Midwest.
I feel like I am still learning how to be more hands-off such that I allow others to teach me new skills. I am frequently the person people look toward to get things done, and that means that I incidentally step into power vacuums often. I’m working on focusing more on observation in my interactions to leave more space for discovery.
In using friction as a way to veer away from prescriptive behaviors, I was proud of how I made space for my body during a book club and incidentally initiated time for the group to shake out and stretch together. It felt very much like “conversation in the room that only these people at this moment can have,” which is a quote from the book we are reading, Emergent Strategy.
As I set up my garden this year, I’m trying very hard to let nature to take its course while I am growing my plants. My seeds and starts are still very much in baby stages, but I’m paying attention to what wants to grow and what doesn’t want to be forced. But, more metaphorically, I’m leaning into the idea that I am also part of what nature consumes. There’s certainly been some peace in understanding that as my purpose, first and foremost. I am compost for new growth and life.
Regarding allowing ideas to gestate and resisting the urge to bloom too early, I continue to have some uncertainty around gender and what I want from that sphere of existence. While I have conviction in my desire to use they/them pronouns to signal my plurality and my desire to be free of gender roles, I have no idea how I want to present overall. I’m not ready to make decisions yet.
Additionally, I have had many conversations about possible futures with my place of work and with the yarn mill. I haven’t ruled anything out yet and continue to wait for the certainty I need to take another big step forward. I know that, ultimately, I may have to nail down a direction, but that time is not now.
I hope you enjoy this month’s experiments!