building an altar to almost anything will expand your surface area for experiencing synchronicities

📚 Resources and Links:* Sign up for the North Node waitlist here* Inquire about 1:1 work with Michelle here* Holisticism Resources 4 u:* Ruthless Clarity — an 8-week email course designed to help you achieve crystal-clear certainty about your goals, desires, and energy allocation* How to Begin: A Project Planning Class — a 90-m on-demand class that teaches you exactly how to sketch a effervescent project plan that’ll fill you with glee and inspiration and instantly banish procrastination and overwhelm, so your brilliant ideas can finally come to life.* The Subconscious Audit — an 11-day diagnostic framework that helps you identify what’s holding you back and making you *feel* blocked. Because you’re never actually blocked* The New Age Playbook for Spellbinding, Can’t-Stop-Reading Copy — a 35-page downloadable workbook to take your writing from blah to bingeableTo be blunt and unpoetic about it, a way to increase your surface area for synchronicities is to just start noticing things.In the Feldenkrais Method we talk a lot about habituation and differentiation. The whole point of a Feldenkrais class can be boiled down to this: I’m trying to bring your attention to your habitual way of being, moving, and thinking by introducing some type of novelty into your experience; the novelty helps you notice the things you’ve grown accustomed to which have been “invisibilized” in your life.By bringing your new awareness online, you give yourself options for responding to the world differently. You illuminate choices. You create doorways where there were once walls.And that’s the whole crux of synchronicity practice — we’re trying to create more opportunities for synchronicity to show itself.Archetype practice can do this, sure. But today I want to talk about an even more obvious option for inviting a different reality into being — altar work.What’s an altar? An altar is a place made sacred.The word sacred comes from the late Middle English sacre, which means to ‘consecrate.’ An object or place that’s been consecrated has been set apart from the average and the ordinary to accomplish something specific. We might also describe these objects or places as holy.A sacred space is a place where wonder can be glimpsed. - Joseph CampbellWhen we focus our attention on building and tending to altars we transform a space from regular-degular — mundane, if you want to get fancy about it — to holy and magical. An IKEA BILLY bookshelf becomes a hallowed shrine. The top of your ancient apartment refrigerator turns into a reminder of the omnipresence of our ancestors. The dashboard of your somehow-still-kicking Honda Civic becomes “a sacred place,” as my obsessed toddler has taken to saying. (Shoutout to the Moana writers for introducing that banger to our home, it’s familial canon now)The spaces we might take for granted because we’ve become habituated to thinking of them in a certain way are called into new light. We can see things differently … And if we begin to see one thing differently, maaaaaybe JUUUUUUSST MAYBE we can open up to the possibility of seeing many things differently.How you use your altar depends entirely on your cultural and spiritual beliefs and practices. But altar practice itself? Universelle. We find evidence of altars and shrines going waaaaaaay back to the Paleolithic era. Permanent sacred spaces tucked into narrow caves and carved into stone underhangs. ‘Mobile’ altars that could be taken on-the-go by migratory peoples. People have been doing this s**t forever.I think that altar creation is hardwired into our DNA, even if that’s not how we necessarily clock it these days. Is a thoughtfully designed tablescape for a dinner party not an altar to kinkeeping? Is an organized, dedicated crafting corner not a shrine to creativity? Is a well-tended back garden not a cathedral of nature?All I’m saying, really, is that making an altar doesn’t have to be this buttoned up ceremonial, Wicca-adjacent act full of vermillion red candles and money bowls and sc