Align Your Orbit #94 - Choice Point

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.

Whether you feel it as a crossroads, a chokehold, or an opportunity for growth, we stand inside a moment of change. Every place you give energy asks for feedback, for truth, for witness, for honoring, for a commitment to renewal or a slow and patient dissolution. Do not miss this opportunity to simplify and consolidate.

Finish what is almost done, cut ties with dead ends, and hospice the dying with gentle, compassionate care. Every choice you make now will streamline your possible futures. Enter into your next phase with sleek, watertight grace.

Want to experience these experiments as a Tidal playlist?

1.       every moment an occasion – Pull out the dishes you use for company. Open the bottle of wine you’ve been saving. Bond with the herbal tinctures you made yourself. Practice the abundance mindset of using what might never come back to you and stop waiting for the perfect moment. It could never come, or it could be right now.

Challenge Mode: As we stare down ever trickier futures, the world asks us to minimize, to simplify, to downsize, to consolidate. Ask which objects feel like dead weight and move them on. Pass it forward, sell it off, liquidate, recycle. These possessions no longer define you.

2.       overlaps and gaps – Your projects are dancing with each other, their threads woven into the tapestry of your life. Some of them are complementary, their purposes and outcomes blooming in tandem. Others might be loose threads, difficult to track and relate back to the narrative. Map the threads you’re holding and see where it makes sense to guide them in a new direction.

Challenge Mode: There’s an underlying infrastructure holding your project management strategy, your connections to collaborators, and your storage mechanisms. Assess the platforms you use and identify their points of tension with the change you make in the world. Refuse to settle for less—the time you invest toward restructuring now will be worth it later.

3.       comfortable discomfort – Growth is uncomfortable as we change habits and patterns of familiarity, but not all discomfort is good for us. Identify where and why you tell yourself just be okay with it. When you look at discomfort directly, it may present you with opportunities that weren’t there before. Either way, something is asking you to listen.

Challenge Mode: It’s all too easy to look out at the distress in the world and numb out, shut down, ignore the catastrophe, but that doesn’t get us closer to a healed relationship with place. There is no saving the Western way of living, but we can give the gift of care back to causes we have a unique perspective on. There are infinite ways to do good. What’s yours?

4.       power off and back on again – You can’t often can’t stop the cortisol dump, the fight-or-flight response, the trigger, the meltdown, but you can reset your nervous system afterward. Splash cold water on your face, shake your whole body, go outside, take three deep breaths. You are an animal, both predator and prey. You know how to move through fear, anger, and disappointment. Invite the body to alchemize this experience.

Challenge Mode: If you’ve been in a resting mode that has translated into sedentary living, thank yourself for taking care of your immediate needs. And, simultaneously, maybe it’s time to listen to the voices calling you back to movement. Start with a sustainable practice—just three minutes a day—to remind you of the well of capacity that strength and stamina can return to you.

andra’s Recap of Sometimes It’s Like This

The experiments for the previous moon cycle included mess or maze (challenge mode: scream your unmet needs onto the page), reality failsafes (challenge mode: hold gaps in perception with tenderness), get tactile (challenge mode: acknowledge where your recollection is hazy), and don’t give a f*** (challenge mode: face the fear).

After practicing radical transparency for much of my life, I am the process of pulling inward and allowing some of my more tender places to retract. There are seasons for openness and seasons for playing cards closer to your chest. With so little capacity to spare and fatigue like whoa, I am nourishing my roots and taking a season off from full flower.

I have still enjoyed my writing practice a lot, and when I don’t have energy to fully get my needs met, that is a fantastic outlet. In a group writing session this month, I finally felt empty enough of my processing writing to write a very gay and brash poem instead, which seemed like a good sign.

In terms of preparing for possible fallout, I have been exploring how I would actually feel about a variety of worst-case scenarios. Most of the time, I have more serenity about that outcome than my anxiety would suggest. Staring off into that void actually helps me calm my nervous system and practice gratitude for what is presently here.

I don’t have any energy left for holding grudges or staying angry. There’s not enough time in the day. So, once I am reasonably confident that I have done my side of the work to adapt, improve, and accept feedback, I am moving on. I am committing to not taking others’ perception of me personal. It’s not something I can control anyway, and their discomfort is ultimately not my responsibility.

Getting back to the tactile experience took shape for me this cycle in handwriting my poems and doing contact improv out in the forest I am helping to restore. In this digital world, those physical moments are treasures and tragically rare. But, I’m here and determined to stay present.

For a variety of reasons, my memory is not what it used to be. That has meant I need to hold my recollections of how things happened with a loose hand. I have more compassion and benefit of the doubt to offer in that spaciousness anyway.

The tension between being uninhibited and feeling too vulnerable is a challenge to balance. For me in this moment, it looks like not trying to avoid or manage other people’s discomfort. I need to trust and even empower them to speak up when something is not working rather than spend all my energy going out of my way to avoid the mere possibility that they might become upset. I’m looking for opportunities to sit in the discomfort and practice the radical acceptance of setting my nervous system even in those moments.

That goes hand and hand with facing my fears directly. When there is friction with someone in my life, I’m determined not to shrink away but rather keep showing up in a way that might just force the issue. When we are obsessed with comfort, there is no room for change.

Thanks for reading, and enjoy this moon’s experiments!