Align Your Orbit: Play in the Ashes
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.
It’s Sagittarius season with yet another eclipse on the horizon, and we’re all coming to terms with just how quickly 2021 has sped by. It’s been a year of patience, hope, ache, change, and reorientation. There has hardly been time to process the massive global shifts that occurred in 2020. And yet, 2022 approaches.
Take this next month to honor what has been lost, rediscover what you have access to, and play with what arises. Accept emotions as they come and trust that they are part of the path toward greater understanding and awareness. This, too, will end and lead to yet another beginning.
Want to experience this month’s offerings as a Spotify playlist?
A big thank you to those who participated in this month’s group discussion to write these recipes. They wouldn’t be as robust without you. <3
Experiments for December
1. Acknowledge Ancestor Energy – When the veil thinned during the Samhain season, it’s possible it didn’t bother to thicken back up. If you, like us, have been experiencing intense ancestor energy, lean into the sensation of being watched. What do you do with only the ancestors around? How do they consent to these interactions? What happens when you say their names aloud?
Challenge Mode: Ancestors aren’t only those in the distant past; they might be versions of self from the near past or even the future. Perhaps a person who hasn’t yet emerged in your life is whispering. Understand that even ancestors are complex and sometimes flawed beings. How does acknowledging this dispel the hierarchy? What reminds you that your inspirations, idols, and ghosts are also human?
2. Use What’s Available – While the holiday season is often highly associated with heavy consumption, we invite you to explore what it means to use, reuse, and repurpose only that which you already have. Honor your own insatiability for change within the constraints of what’s already in the room. If you need to purchase something, find a used version where possible. Send experiences instead of gifts. Reimagine your space and how you live within it.
Challenge Mode: When you make use of what’s available, you are experimenting. Every experiment needs permission to fail. If you find that something you tried didn’t work as planned, give yourself permission to back out. Forgive yourself for your inability to accurately predict outcomes. And if there seems to be no way out of a bad mood, ask for reassurance.
3. Reorient Gratitude – According to information from the Huberman Lab podcast, you can upgrade gratitude practices when you think about ways people have been grateful to you. In our experience, this boosts sensations of self-worth while emphasizing connections with other beings. Or, if nothing comes to mind, you can get similar benefit from imagining narratives in which one being helped another. How does this shift how you experience gratitude?
Challenge Mode: What are ways in which you feel gratitude toward yourself? Consider what you have now that your younger self would have given anything for. Reflect on how far you’ve come and offer gratitude for all the tools, practices, wishes, and dreams that got you here. Experience amazement and awe that you have come so far.
4. Rewire Outlets – Eclipse portals and the holiday season often reinvite vices you thought you had overcome. Ask yourself, what am I seeking from this? What alternative would sate that desire? If you want to slow down and rest, focus on balance if a full stop is difficult. Invite a practice of alternate nostril breathing. Set a timer for five minutes where you don’t do anything.
Challenge Mode: While rest and slowness are crucial and revolutionary, sometimes what we want most is a form of productivity. We mistakenly believe that what gives us pleasure can’t possibly encourage growth. We worry about how our self-soothing looks to others. How can you declassify what is work and what is play?
Please tell us how these experiments are working for you!
If you like these experiments, please consider donating to our Patreon. If you would like to receive these offerings in your email inbox, sign up here.
Andra’s Recap of November’s Experiments
Last month’s theme was “Recalibrating…,” which included experiments around choosing your friction, focus on affecting the immediate, curation of variety, and risking extremes.
Having recently taken on a part-time job wherein I am lifting and carrying 50+ pounds regularly and standing on my feet all day, I definitely have come up against some physical friction around what my body can do. However, this is a capacity I really, really want to grow, and I am keeping in touch with my intuitive awareness of self such that I trust when I reach a breaking point. I have been focusing on stretching after work and making sure that I’m getting enough calories to support the activity. It’s only a matter of time before it feels normal.
It’s been an effort to pull in my focus from trying to save the world in every possible way toward making small changes that are in my immediate control and vicinity. However, taking this new job at SCRAP (School and Community Reuse Action Program) has made that much more possible. Every day, I process donations for the store, which typically include secondhand craft supplies, and every day I feel like I am making a major difference in my immediate community. Couple that with the fact that I adopted my neighborhood block and decided to sign up for Ridwell, and I finally feel like I am playing enough of a role in the restructuring of sustainable living such that, in my off time, I can genuinely relax.
Ash and I spent a lot of brainpower rearranging our Space Mermaids events, whether that meant changing the day that they happen, switching the time, or even merging events. Additionally, I was finally able to get a recurring date night with my partner on the calendar, which feels really good. We’ve had two now, and both have been exceptionally nourishing experiences that allow us to prioritize each other rather than the activity at hand. Furthermore, Ash and I played a lot with creative constraints in our artistic practices. Working at SCRAP has given a plethora of opportunities to explore how to make art out of found objects, and we’ve also played with more strict writing prompts lately. Good stuff has been coming out of the practice, to be sure. One of my favorites things that Ash said they learned from this exploration was that “supposed to” is a terrible constraint.
Most of my experience with risking extremes came from playing the video game, Subnautica, in which I repeatedly needed to push past fear thresholds to keep playing the game. In more of a real-life sense, I have also been exploring what I am comfortable with in terms of gender explorations and social interactions. I am using they/them pronouns at work now, and it feels good. The memories I have taken a hard look at in the last month (in the form of old family videos) have done a lot to remind me that my gender was non-traditional from the beginning, and I am finally at a point in my life where I can honor that.
Thanks for coming along with us on this incredible journey. We hope you enjoy this month’s experiments!