Align Your Orbit #93 - Sometimes It's Like This
Align Your Orbit is a series of philosophical and somatic experiments to guide intentionality and impact. Find delight in these journeys of exploration. If you would like to receive these offerings as an email on the new moon, sign up here.
Sometimes there’s nothing you can do. Sometimes it’s absolutely unfair. Sometimes it’s not your problem to solve. At the end of the day, all you can control is your attention. Allow something to shatter and pause before you pick up the pieces. Don’t do the repair alone.
After a lifetime cultivating a language of belief, you’ve gotten accustomed to people who understand the shorthand. But, as your circles grow wider, there are people who will fill your gaps with vowels you’ve never heard of. Make thoughtful decisions about how you lay your foundations of meaning-making. You know the limits of your time and attention—refuse to settle.
Want to experience these experiments as a Tidal playlist?
New Experiments
1. mess or maze – Your conviction is magnetic, so people look to you for answers even when all you want is collaborators. Decide when to show someone your messy works in progress and when to open the door to the masterpiece of your identity. Friendly suggestion: invite architects who will take inspiration rather than those content to wander forever inside another’s walls.
Challenge Mode: As a unique spark of the universe, you will rarely (if ever) be fully witnessed. When the loneliness of that truth is a feature and not a bug, listen for what it motivates. Your creativity is ready to catch the overflow. Scream your unmet needs onto the page. Create whole worlds where the impossible suddenly exists.
2. reality failsafes – It might be working now, but you’ve seen the shortfalls happen to someone else. Take this as a warning sign to have backup plans in place. Name what you need to move forward in unstable relationships. Ask about failure modes and get consent on an action plan. Let preparing for the fallout push the possibility further away.
Challenge Mode: When someone lives in the phantasm of a single version of a moment, their pain is real, but that doesn’t mean you have to opt into their narrative. Avoid litigating the past but don’t deny your own experience. Hold the gap in perception with tenderness, but don’t bother to build the bridge back alone. You don’t have the energy to resolve with anyone who won’t meet you in the messy middle.
3. get tactile – With so much of our experience now digitized, it’s easy to engage only the mind, but we’ve forgotten the subtle joys of the slide of playing cards across each other, the sultry scratch of pen on paper, the deep childhood satisfaction of turning the page on your own for the first time. Re-explore the physical and invite your body back into the activity.
Challenge Mode: Your memory of the past is constantly in the long process of slipping away from you. It’s working as intended when you constantly rewrite what happened—that’s natural in moments of growth and change. Honor the present by acknowledging where recollection is hazy. Hold your judgments and assumptions lightly knowing that your perception is limited, time is not linear, and you don’t actually want an unchangeable past.
4. don’t give a f*** – There’s the old adage, be yourself, but it innately requires that you cultivate more confidence than you have right now. Imagine what it looks like to be that kind of brave. What does the uninhibited version of you look like? When there is not space to be that version of you, name the barriers and start building trap doors.
Challenge Mode: There are fears you’ve carried for years, and even when you don’t speak them into being, they follow you everywhere. They show up in your relationships. They sneak out of your mouth as you speak about others. Sometimes the only way to budge the fear is to experience it directly. Acknowledge what currently lurks in the shadows and make the journey deeper in. Write the story. Listen to what this specter needs you to know.
andra’s Recap of Peepshow Aftercare
The experiments for the previous moon cycle included give your vocal cords a break (challenge mode: emojis), have the hard conversation (challenge mode: shake, laugh, chant, growl), flip a coin (challenge mode: demonstrate you have free will), and move like you’ve never moved before (challenge mode: widen the path to spontaneous healing).
In the ever-present attempt at moving slower in a culture that prioritizes urgency, speaking less and pausing before I try to explain or defend myself is forever a challenge. However, I felt very proud of myself for instituting a “time-out” signal in a family therapy session to give me a way to throw a yellow flag without leaving the session entirely. It helped us all pause, regroup, and get back on the same team.
I have been in the long practice of resensitizing my own body after chronic pain and trauma, and having come out with those skills on the other side, it is fascinating to explore that process with new partners. How do I gently coax the body to relax when they have never been touched this way before? How do I create the space for the next layer of guard to gently fall away? Even having been a professional cuddler, I find this so much harder with people in my personal life—there’s no script. It’s all improv and curiosity. Maybe I need to invite in more play to break the molds.
So much of my body wanted to call it quits after a major household conflict erupted during a very vulnerable moment of my life, but I’m still here, working through family therapy and doing the work. We’ve been having impossibly difficult conversations about conflicting experiences of reality and the difference between perception and spirituality, but I keep showing up and honoring the tenderness that creates. When you have multi-year relationships and want to keep growing roots, sometimes the only way out is through.
Having a little one around constantly reminds me of the proximity of terror and laughter. It’s such a tiny tone shift. When I shift out of the box and make faces, do something unexpected, or gasp at the smallest feat, I change the narrative. What is scary becomes a game. I look forward to the ways this practice and relationship continue to unfold.
When I am truly 50/50 about a decision, I leave it up to fate. I personally prefer my pendulum to give me information about my yes or no question: Does my most essential self want this for me? And there’s always opportunity for it to illuminate where I am in conflict with myself. It opens dialogues for how to go deeper. To be honest, it is some of the most powerful magic I practice, and I don’t ask the question unless I truly feel ready for the answer.
There might not be anything more energizing than taking the length of one song to move my body in completely random and non-performative ways. I stick out my tongue as far as it will go, bare my lion’s breath, flail my limbs, move the stuck energy. So often, I carry myself as though others are watching, and when there is no one but the ancestors in the room, I will move as I please and shake everything else off.
And then sometimes I do spontaneous acroyoga with another parent at a family picnic brunch! Shirking the conventions has its payoffs.
On the other side of the birth and having returned from parental leave, I am removing my coping mechanisms one by one by one. And some days I find that, even faced with the temptation, I genuinely don’t need them. I trust my processes and the ways I am supporting my body to find the paths forward, offering gratitude and non-judgment for the parts of me that still need support. But, knowing that I am beginning to heal enough to not need the crutches is an exciting light at the end of a long tunnel.
And, in case you were curious, I am still writing romance stories like mad! I can’t sit down and work on them enough, and they are always calling in the back of my mind. If you are curious about the stories I’ve been posting online, you can read them here.
Thanks for reading, and enjoy this moon’s experiments!