Align Your Orbit: Shape Change
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.
The beginning of spring has brought with it a number of contradictions. The trees are flowering, but there’s still a war on. Our personal projects are coming to fruition, yet the pandemic still lurks in the background. We make exciting plans for the future amidst yet more social unrest and uncertainty.
It’s tempting to calculate the net benefit of all this transformation, but doing so paints the world mediocre at best. Eschew the law of averages and live in all realities at once. See the beautiful both inside and separate from the ugly. Practice holding quantum fluctuations within you as you match and reflect the multiplicity of this world with your own inner plurality.
Want to experience this month’s offerings as a Spotify playlist?
*Shape Change is a concept pulled from Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower.
Experiments for April
1. Speak New Languages – Whether you’re learning new vocabulary or wandering through a new creative passion, every opportunity to cross into new genres of being brings new perspective to anything and everything to enter your awareness. Seek out the outermost edges of your love languages (read about the love languages of dance!), explore your linguistic history, or work toward mastery of a new skill set.
Challenge Mode: The best way to learn a new language is to immerse yourself. Get curious about the cross-genre languages the people around you already speak. What skill sets do they have to offer? Allow casual observation to be your primary instructor.
2. Practice Recognition, Not Prescription – Rather than force what doesn’t want to happen, embrace friction and find creative ways toward your goals. If exercise bores you, go for a walk and take pictures of everything in bloom. Dance to find which muscles need extra attention. Invite friends to plank with you and set a timer for a minute. Initiate giggle fits. Develop core strength organically.
Challenge Mode: Evaluate how your household handles chores and other shared responsibilities. Try a system where you offer recognition for what gets done rather than assigning specific tasks. Write a list of what needs and invite everyone else to add to the system collaboratively. Invite group participation and minimize delegation.
3. Feed the Ecosystem – As the saying goes, if something is not eating your plants, then your garden is not part of the ecosystem. Humans expend a lot of effort trying to be separate from nature, but we forget that our purpose, too, is to feed the life cycle. Lean into the idea that even your highly intelligent body will eventually become food. Bring lightness and understanding to this as your divine purpose. How does it make you rethink your relationship to what you build your body with?
Challenge Mode: As you garden and prepare the ground both literally and metaphorically, think about endings as well as beginnings. Look for ways that your actions now will proliferate existing cycles rather than interrupt them. Go with the grain and let water flow down the path of least resistance.
4. Gestate – Though the plant growth hormones in the air invite rapid transformation, not everything is ready just yet. Allow contradictory sets of possibilities to continue living within you until one of them asks to be born. Mourn doors to dead ends but open opportunities at both ends of the hallway.
Challenge Mode: Give yourself time and space to live in the both and of your own identity experience. Get curious about all modes of being within. Explore every corner of your gender curation. Express yourself both alone and with others. Don’t limit your options; follow your omnifarious cravings.
Please tell us how these experiments are working for you!
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Andra’s Recap of March’s Experiments
The theme for March was Make Way for Sacred, which included experiments around adapting to the conflict in the air, implementing failsafes, defining worship, and embodying music.
In making more space for two new people in the household I help curate this last month, I feel like adaptation was definitely in the air. The skills I’ve developed over the years and my confidence in my own intuition have certainly helped set this up for success, and the transition has been minimally tumultuous.
I have also been pleasantly surprised that, even though there is so much wrong with this world, I have been discovering so much personal joy lately. I am living that contradiction in the best ways I know how.
Much of my desire to create failsafes had to do with trying to deal with the fact that, since contracting covid a couple months ago, my short-term memory has been frustratingly fleeting. This has meant leaning more on writing things down and being honest as quickly as possible with someone affected by a slip of my mind. Rather than make excuses for myself, I take preemptive steps to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
Additionally, I am back in a very immediate hinge-partner role in my life, which has previously caused turmoil for me, but I am working toward healing from the trauma of the previous relationships and having regular conversations with both people involved such that the patterns I fell into the previous time won’t recur. It’s been challenging but also fulfilling and full of excitement. I’m stretching muscles that have been dormant for much of the pandemic, and it feels good.
Regarding worship, one thing I noticed this month as new people have come to live in my home is that I am unabashedly speaking my truth, especially around ways I treat the land, the plants, and the objects around me as sacred. I have not at all felt embarrassed to talk about the way I prayed to the plum tree before we decided to cut it down, for instance. It really helped to have a new perspective and to notice that I am walking in my own spirituality regardless of who is around me or my concerns about what they might think of me.
Because I am working on a burlesque act, it’s been practically impossible to listen to any music without thinking of how someone might dance to it. It’s been so enjoyable to have a new perspective to tune in from, and I imagine that this lens will only continue to color my experience. I find myself eager to watch videos of other people dancing to get ideas for my own act such that media consumption has completely changed for me. It’s a delightful way to experience consistent joy in my life. I’ve even been practicing a few of my moves at the bus stop.
Dreamspace has been especially vivid for me this past month, jam-packed with symbolism I haven’t quite unraveled yet. I’m not sure that I’ve exactly made friends with the landscape yet, but I imagine it will continue to be an ongoing process. What I did recognize, though, is that, when a relative of mine suggested that the frequency of my father’s appearances in my dreams indicated unfinished business with him, I was able to politely reject that narrative; it didn’t feel true. All the dreams in which he appeared were unequivocally good dreams, and I would miss him if he left them altogether.
I hope you enjoy this month’s experiments!