✶ A QUICKSTART GUIDE TO THE CONSTELLATION SYSTEM

so, containers.

what the hell do i mean by containers?

well, i’ve realised the concept of Containers is so much bigger than i’d thought of it my whole life. when i thought of containers, i thought of drawer dividers holding socks (a container for socks), or a grocery list in my reminders app (a container for actions i need to take at the supermarket), my bullet journal (a container for my thoughts and tasks). those are all what i’d now call SPATIAL containers. containers for things which have a physical or digital LOCATION in space.

don’t get me wrong, love a spatial container.

but what i was missing was TEMPORAL containers. containers for TIME, for actions, activities, processes which don’t have a location but a DURATION.

let me try and illustrate what i mean.

when i worked shifts as a barista, my life was still pretty chaotic, but i did have at least ONE temporal container - my shifts.

a shift meant: be at work at these hours, do job. the rest of my life, all the things i wanted to accomplish (write a book) or needed to do (my fucking laundry) swirled in the ephemerous vortex between those contained shifts.

i was still stressed a lot, but at the very least i had one boundary, one divider that could guide me. i knew when i was at work, i was at work, i was making coffee, serving customers, making money. when i wasn’t at work, everything else was on the table. i muddled by like that.

but eventually, when i started working for myself part time, and then eventually full time, i didn’t have shifts anymore. suddenly i had NO containers, not even tenuous ones. things fell apart.

no one was watching. no one was clocking me in or out. if i didn’t get things done, consequences would pile up. eventually… but not immediately.

and my brain is not great at doing things if there are no immediate consequences to… not doing them.

it was ALL up to me now to figure out:

WHAT should i be doing??

WHEN should i be doing it???

and HOW do i (get myself to) do it??

it felt a lot like this 👇

so…

what should i do?

when should i do it?

and how do i get myself to do it?

pretty much every day since, i’ve done my best to answer these questions for myself.

many days my answer has been “i don’t know, okay!??!!? i don’t know!!!”

but the thing about asking yourself the same questions every day, is that you can’t help but start to get better at answering them. i’ve chipped away at my answers over time - trying to lean into the better ones and trim away the less helpful.

this is what the Constellation System is.

it’s my current answer to these questions, having grown and evolved from asking them of myself every day, every week, every month for more than four years.

at its heart, the Constellation System is a set of organisational containers - both spatial AND temporal.

it’s absolutely not the only system for organising your life. Getting Things Done, the Bullet Journal Method, there are countless systems out there.

i don’t pretend that mine is The Best. it’s just the best one for me and my chaotic brain. if you find it helpful too, incredible! amazing! but i’m not out here to convert you.

so, here’s a high-level overview. the Constellation System, at its simplest, is composed of three sets of containers, three interconnected systems.

• the Garden

• the Almanac

• the Ritual

each system answers one of these existential questions.

firstly, THE GARDEN answers the WHAT SHOULD I BE DOING?? question.

it does so by corralling everything we are doing, need to do, or want to do (or have to store) into one of six magickal spheres of life: the domains.

each domain is like a different area of your life’s garden, and they reflect our basic human needs. we need to find a balance between tending to all these parts of the garden.

the six domains, and my personal latin names for them, are…

the second system is THE ALMANAC, which deals with the WHEN SHOULD I DO IT? question.

there are things we need to take care of at specific times, but there are many more things we want to do in life which don’t come with their own set time. calendars and schedules are full of identical, arbitrary units of time - which don’t give us much help deciding “when should i do this? how do i fit it all in? how do i prioritise and find a place to start?”

conversely, the Almanac charts the different cycles and seasons our life’s garden goes through over time, giving us a natural rhythm to follow when tending it. it shows us when to plant, when to nourish and maintain, and when to weed things out. it gives a guide for when to do things - essentially another vector for decision-making beyond “what’s the highest priority?” helping us to place our tasks and actions in time, not just space.

and finally the third system, THE RITUAL, deals with the HOW DO I (GET MYSELF TO) DO IT? question.

by giving ourselves gardening tools, in the form of rituals and routines, we can show up to tend the garden little by little every day, know exactly how to do things when we show up, and see it grow and flourish over time. the Ritual gives us repeatable patterns we can use to care for our different domains, so we don’t have to reinvent the wheel and waste precious mental energy figuring out the How every time we do a task.

as i work on creating the Constellation Deck, and codifying the system in the Guidebook, i’ll be sharing a lot more about how these systems work together in detail with my patrons.

ALSO - if you do resonate with the system, and you want to be updated when there’s new Constellation System content (the deck, the book, whatever else), the best thing you can do is sign up to my newsletter. especially since i’m not on social media these days!

but for now, i want to give you a quickstart, if you’re curious about trying the Constellation System yourself. these are a few simple ways you can start to implement it.

1. learn the six domains

any system that tries to divide the huge complexity of life into a mere six domains will need those domains to be, to some extent, both porous and universal. the domains are based on fundamental human needs: sustenance, shelter, resources, health, social connections, meaning.

you’ll notice that my domains have latin names - this is what works for me.

it makes the system feel less clinical, more holistic, more magickal. when i dedicate a day to paid work or financial admin, i’m not just checking off boring, necessary tasks, i’m engaging with the vital and magickal sphere of Divitiae.

the latin names also give it a bigger porousness, and feel more expansive.

i could call the domain Money, or Finances, or Paid Work, or Resource Security - but all of these mean something slightly different, smaller, more specific.

by naming it Divitiae, i have one umbrella word which encompasses ALL these different aspects of the domain. that is incredibly valuable, as it allows me to limit my domains to six, which feels manageable.

you need not use the same names for your domains as me. if another naming system makes more sense, by all means use it. just be careful to ensure it is as expansive as you need it to be - if you have to create a new domain to cover another area, your domain name is probably not expansive enough.

here’s a VERY brief overview of what each domain contains.

(for ease and aesthetics, i always list the domains in this same order so that the colours create a rainbow - this is not an order of importance.)

꩜ genero

• creativity, hobbies, labours of love, passion projects, meaning

﹩divitiae

• paid work, money, financial management, resources

⌂ domum

• home, environment, physical space, household and domestic work

⏀corporalis

• body, physical health, nourishment, movement, style and expression

⚭ socialis

• relationships, connectedness, people, family, community, beyond the self

✦ spiritus

• mind, mental health, spirituality, learning, study

2. start using the sigils

when i distilled the six domains and gave them names, i also decided on a corresponding colour and sigil for each. this might seem like a purely aesthetic addition, but i’ve found it to be INCREDIBLY useful.

when i chose the sigils for each domain, i was careful to choose something that

1. was quick and easy to draw on paper, simple enough that it is easily readable when drawn alongside handwritten text in the space of a single line

2. had a corresponding special character that was digitally accessible. i wanted a clean, black-only sigil look - so i copy and paste the characters when i need them.

(i could have used emojis, which would have been slightly quicker to select from the emoji keyboard, but emojis are harder to draw / replicate on paper, and i wanted to be able to use one symbol across digital and analogue.)

how to use the sigils

when making a to-do list for the day or week, consider which domain this task or activity falls into, and add the corresponding domain sigil alongside it.

this does a couple of things. it starts getting you to consider how each action you take relates to your life in the big picture, essentially what area of your life it is tending. it attaches more meaning to it, which can help with motivation (at least it does for me).

it also starts to give you an idea of how you are spending your time across the different domains. do you spend 99% of every day focused on paid work? or taking care of children or dependents? or working on creative projects? are you happy with that proportion? is your body, home or mental health being neglected in comparison? are there any small ways you can incorporate basic maintenance for those domains into your days, weeks or months?

these are obviously huge questions to answer, and you won’t figure out answers immediately, and implementing changes can be complicated - but working with the domains in this way is a good way to start to bring attention to these questions and get them percolating.

3. incorporate the domains into a digital calendar

the domains make organising and colour coding a digital calendar really simple. here’s how i use the system in my calendar.

i have a main calendar for each domain, with the appropriate colour. i add both recurring and one-off appointments relating to that domain.

for “reference calendars” - which i want to be able to check every so often, but would clutter up my main calendar too much - i create a new calendar and match the colour to the correct domain. i have calendars for the two boxing clubs i go to, with recurring events for all their class times, so i can quickly check when the next class is. those are in corporalis-red, but in their own calendars so i can toggle them on and off without affecting other corporalis events.

i have the opening hours for my office / coworking space in divitiae-green, and my wheel of the year in spiritus-purple.

i also have a dedicated gold-coloured “weekly almanac” calendar, which i use to assign days of the week to different domains when i plan my week. this is usually how i decide which tasks and projects i’ll engage with each day. (obviously this may not be relevant if you’re not self-employed or largely in charge of your own schedule like me).

if you want to incorporate the domains into your own calendar, feel free to copy my sigils and colour hex codes!

꩜ genero | blue | #15ACA7

﹩divitiae | green | #0A7771

⌂ domum | yellow | #AD8204

⏀corporalis | red | #A72936

⚭ socialis | pink | #F469A5

✦ spiritus | purple | #A84ACF

PS. remember, this is just a teeny taster of the system!

if you want more, be sure to join my newsletter & become a patron ✦