Align Your Orbit: Re-up

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.

Last month, we dove into the nuances of overt power structures. This month, let’s take that exploration deeper into the invisible or subtle dynamics that define and illuminate the water we swim in. Get curious about curation, moderation, and mediation as arenas of quiet power. Invite fluidity and grace into your relationship with yourself and others. As the veil thins, remind yourself you’re more than a ghost.

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

Experiments for October

1.      Memory Traction – Over time, memory fades, and this is healthy; a lack of change would indicate trauma. But that does mean you have a responsibility to re-up regularly on boundaries, agreements, and strategies with collaborators. Set a timer, make notes, and brainstorm systems for checking in and recommitting.

Challenge Mode: Do you know where your household would meet in the event of a fire? Take action on any emergency preparedness you intend on but haven’t gotten around to. Determine how you balance being stocked and taking risks.

2.      Habit Fallback Plan – Identify movement, practices, and traditions you need to feel alive and nourished. Make an ideal version of a daily routine given those needs. Then, create a version that takes 2-5 minutes. Flexibly explore both options and allow for varying levels of engagement.

Challenge Mode: Re-upping your personal commitments requires initiation energy, and recurring needs are often the easiest to ignore temporarily. How long can you go? Establish a timeline boundary to make sure you never go too long without something you need.

3.      Whole-body Engagement – Stretching or working out your whole body doesn’t need to take an hour. Add a sun salutation to your daily practice or get creative with the way you do planks! If you need more inspiration, click here.

Challenge Mode: Balance and grace demand invisible muscle and constant, conscious attention. Level up your flow and trust that your smooth transitions serve you in subtle, intangible ways. Stand out in a crowd based solely on how well you carry yourself.

4.      Reverse Engineer – Human minds love to tinker—what are you working on? Find something that inspires wonder in you and follow it all the way down an internet rabbit hole. Discover your new positive obsession.

Challenge Mode: To create something at scale, you must curate community around it. Pay attention to who shares your interests and where their passions take them. Ask others about what’s giving them life. Invite someone into your guiltiest pleasure.

Please tell us how these experiments are working for you!

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Andra’s Recap of September’s Experiments

The theme for last month was Power Juggle and included experiments around reaping rewards for positions of responsibility, identifying inner conflict, diversifying commitments, and utilizing dissatisfaction.

Overall, I feel like I had a crash course in how to balance complicated power structures as I navigated tenant-landlord interactions, living with someone I am now no longer partners with, and errant text messages from my supervisor all at the same time.

From the experiences, the biggest thing I recognized was that, even when someone apologized for verbally accosting me in a way they admitted was unfair, I still had hurt and frustration about the interaction that a simple apology did not soothe. What I really craved was vulnerable, authentic communication about what went wrong and an action plan about how to avoid similar in the future. While it is not always possible to achieve that, it feels like a worthy goal to strive for.

Additionally, I felt as though a lot of the antagonization I experienced came from people feeling threatened or envious, and I think a lot of that has to do with the unlivable nature of our capitalist dystopia. Realizing that made it easier for me to step back and make it less about me, which was necessary and appreciated.

While it was a complicated and necessarily nuanced thing to think about it, I found a lot of value in focusing on how to prioritize agency rather than abdicating roles where I had power, especially where that might create a toxic power vacuum.

Dommes gotta get their needs met, too. ;)

And, I had a lot of reassurance after reading a section of Emergent Strategy by Adrienne Marie Brown that I’m not the only one worried about becoming a “rockstar” leader intent on protecting themselves and their own reputation above their underlying mission. I’m looking forward to reading further in the book to learn about strategies to combat that without compromising momentum.

I’m not sure that I’ve come to any concrete conclusions about my inner conflicts, but I have reflected a lot on them and at minimum identified some. I have a lot of friction between my fear of being lazy and my need to rest, for instance, and it even shows up in how I speak and interact spontaneously. Additionally, I have come to the conclusion that, no matter what I’m doing or how much I enjoy it, some part of me will necessarily wish we were doing something else, so now I feel like I should look into how to navigate that well within my system.

Regarding my calendar and commitments, I did an excellent job of finding things I enjoyed making space for even after getting off work, where before I was usually too tired to even think of something to do. I accepted rides from friends that made it more possible to spend time together and still went to events even when I decided to take on extra shifts at work when someone went on vacation.

I had been getting sloppy about taking care of my magical items, but I had an opportunity to go through them all to make an altar for a very, very special occasion that happened just this past Wednesday, and it was very nourishing to remember all the stories these objects contain. Highly recommend that as a process. It’s a good thing to cull and re-up regularly.

I have admittedly felt some dissatisfaction with my body as of late, specifically I want to be able to do push-ups, I want my face to be thinner, and I need a haircut. Mostly, I’ve used this dissatisfaction to motivate actions and curiosities in ways that have felt good. I am doing fun dance planks now and adjusting toward less sugar.

My dissatisfaction also appeared in work settings, and I suggested some process improvements that went over very well and have streamlined the work.

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