Align Your Orbit: In Process
Align Your Orbit is a monthly set of philosophical and somatic experiments to guide you toward intentionality and impact. Find delight in these timely experiments. If you would like to receive these offerings as a monthly email, sign up here.
We aren’t perfect, and the humans we all birth won’t be either. But, we owe it to whatever intelligence would evolve after humanity to try. Save the universe some evolutionary trauma and work back toward harmony with the natural world. No one said it wouldn’t be messy.
Nothing is waste. Everything is cyclical. Every being is food for something else. Let the plants be your teachers. Humble yourself in the presence of evolutionary ancestors.
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Experiments for July
1. say what you mean – Be direct in what you want. Resist the urge to sugarcoat or beat around the bush. Respect the time it takes to communicate and be concise. This is not the time to make whimsical promises you don’t intend to keep. Talk about the future like it’s already here.
Challenge Mode: There are times to go with the flow, and there are times to assert your desires in a situation. The longer the encounter, the more prudent it is to figure out what you want. When you speak your hopes and expectations into the air, you become an agent in your own future. Be brave and bold in curating your reality.
2. fully associate – Rather than dissociate, invite boredom. Our indoor spaces are stationary—they don’t breathe like the trees do. If you find your attention wandering, go outside. Pay attention to the myriad changes that occur when you are out of doors.
Challenge Mode: Imagine yourself in someone else’s experience. Experience love for a country halfway across the world. Make chalk drawings to invite protest and dissent with the status quo. Dissolve the boundary between participant and onlooker.
3. bring your body everywhere – Invite stretching, workouts, and health into every movement you make all day. Don’t let yourself sit still for more than twenty minutes at a time. Squat down and imagine offering your body’s water to the earth. We were never meant to be stationary creatures.
Challenge Mode: When you have nerve pain, healing is a process. You begin with shooting pain, then numbness, ache, fatigue, and finally renewed health. Take action to address discomforts you’ve been ignoring or putting off. Your physical existence should be pleasurable.
4. you are food – It’s easy to forget we are part of the food chain, an integral piece in the food web. We don’t only feed the microbes—we actively participate in nurturing pollinators, plants, and animals. How are you participating in the cycle of life? What does it mean for you to live into this purpose?
Challenge Mode: Robin Wall Kimmerer writes, all our flourishing is mutual. Surrender yourself to reciprocity. Find your gifts and offer them whenever you take something. Give thanks to a plant with another sacred plant. Dissolve the barriers between you and the natural world.
Andra’s Recap of June’s Experiments
The theme for last month was HERE WE ARE and included experiments around seeking pleasure in diverse activities, caring for your skin, scheduling time for whimsy, and cataloguing what you need to be comfortable.
I’ve recently come to the realization that I am panromantic. As with pansexuality, there are different flavors of panromanticism. I would describe mine as the experience of genuinely having love sensations for all people, as well as animals and plants. What changes for me is only the degree of love, but there is always a baseline of love. It’s terrifying to truly live like that, however, because I don’t want a relationship with all beings. But, at the same time, I don’t want to live with walls on all sides anymore. As with all things, this takes balance.
In terms of offering this love, I’ve had to be exceptionally clear up front with people about what I can and can’t provide long term, and the cultural scripts about love and relationships still sometimes supersede what I try to communicate to another person. I’ve had the most success in time-boxed, one-off situations where I adamantly refuse contact information. I hope I can find successful ways to navigate that as well, but it’s a process.
At the beginning of this month, a doctor told me I needed to have surgery to cut out a dermatological problem on my inner thigh. It would have excised about a two-by-two inch square of my leg. The doctor gave me some preventative care to reduce the risk of the problem happening again, and in doing that, the original problem also resolved itself such that I don’t need surgery anymore! I’m very happy and grateful.
In using gestures to communicate, I have been pleasantly surprised by how responsive other people are to physical movement. It’s hard to put into words exactly, but especially in situations when the ambient noise is a lot, gestures can make a world of difference. I want to lean more heavily on them overall.
I actually had a lot of time for whimsy this month in that we had a difficult roommate situation going on that discouraged being at home. As a result, my wife and I went out to new bars and coffee houses and found some new favorites. I have appreciated getting a more detailed view of the city I live in since the pandemic.
In going camping earlier this month, I did an excellent job of making packing up part of the fun. It felt leisurely and easeful in a way that packing in did not. I’ll keep working on that part.
Bare minimum comforts included freedom from mosquitos. I gave them an awful lot of my blood this last month. I couldn’t help but think that surely there’s a mutually beneficial relationship to have with mosquitos. Acupuncture is good for us, yes? If it weren’t for the venom and the random placement…
Engaging with strangers with kindness feels raw and a little dangerous for me in my newly discovered panromantic state, but I have overall become less afraid of other people, which has improved my experience of almost every interaction.
Thanks for reading! I hope you enjoy this month’s experiments!