A Sneak Peek at My New Book....The Instruction Manual for Your Life

Here's  a sneak peek out of my new book.  (Please ignore the references to the other sections in the book.  They are being finished up as we speak...Yippeeeee!)  If you are new to Human Design, may I gently suggest that you get your free Human Design chart first, watch my free slide show and read the mini-report, The Parts of the Chart, that comes with your free chart.  Then come back and read this chapter.  It's pretty empowering stuff....

(p.s.  Here is the beginning design of the new cover.  We're not done yet, but it's a great start I think!)

Human Design and Conditioning 

If we are designed to be abundant, happy and loving, then why are so many of us struggling, suffering and feeling like we’re blocked or stuck in our ability to create a great life?

Most of the people I’ve worked with for over thirteen years as a Life Coach have been struggling in some way to make life work. All of my clients are very educated, enlightened and amazingly self-aware people, yet they feel stuck and trapped in old behaviors that keep them from creating what they really want to create in their lives.

The self-help industry has served many people by helping them identify their blocks and limiting beliefs. And while there is a tremendous amount of benefit to be had from self-awareness, many people still struggle with doing what they think they know they need to do to be successful. Self-awareness is certainly the portal to transformation.

But, self-awareness is only a doorway. Once you walk through that door, you have to know what to do next, otherwise you might just discover that you’ve added a whole other set of negative beliefs about yourself and your inability to “just do it” and make success happen for you.

Some of you may have sought therapy or coaching to help you work through some of your “problems” with loving yourself, hurtful or limiting behavior patterns or feeling comfortable expressing your authentic feelings. Some of you may feel like you’re broken or blocked on such a deep level that there is no hope for you.

What if you’re not broken? And nothing about you needs to be fixed? What if all you need is just a little bit more information about the unique way you operate and learn a new way to interpret the world and the energy around you?

You’re about to wake up to the amazing possibilities that are out here for you.

In order to understand why you get stuck in your creative process and sometimes feel broken, you have to start with learning some new vocabulary words and integrating some basic beliefs that will help you unravel the mystery of why you might be doing everything right and still not getting the results you’re hoping for.

The first vocabulary word you’re going to learn is “De-Conditioning.” In traditional Human Design, it is taught that once you see your Human Design chart, you begin a seven-year process of un-doing all the beliefs and actions in your life that aren’t really true to who you really are. This process is called De-Conditioning. (It takes seven years because that’s the length of time necessary to replace all of the cells in your body, with a few exceptions.)

But De-Conditioning isn’t just this magic process where you look at a piece of paper and ((poof)) seven years later, you’re deeply aligned with your authentic self and living an abundant life. It’s a conscious process that involves awareness, study and some time to recognize patterns.

De-Conditioning is the process of mastering your unique energy blueprint and learning how to choose your response to life rather than reacting to the energies that are constantly bombarding you. When you understand who you are, your unique strategy for processing energy and how to use that energy to make decisions and get what you want out of life, you become De-Conditioned. (Not to mention happy and abundant….)

Before you begin the process of being De-Conditioned, you have to first understand how you became Conditioned. You become Conditioned any time you step into the energy field of another person. Conditioning is the process of experiencing someone else’s energy and combining it with your own energy.

When we are around others, we take their energy into our open energy Centers. You can never escape conditioning. It’s the real music of the dance we all do together in relationships. Even when you live out the truest, highest expression of who you are, you will always experience other people’s energies.

Conditioning can be conscious or unconscious. Unconscious conditioning happens when you don’t understand the true nature of who you are and your unique energy configuration. When you are unconsciously conditioned, you can act in ways that don’t always serve you. You might even adopt limiting beliefs that are rooted in a fundamental misunderstanding of how you process the energies of the world.

When you are being unconsciously conditioned, you often mistake the energy of someone else as your own. And you act on it or react to it. This kind of lack of conscious awareness is exhausting because at a certain point, our own energy field struggles to hold on to and sustain an energy that is not naturally ours. Many people don’t realized that their “burn out” or exhaustion in life often stems from the energetic force necessary to manage energy that isn’t really their own.

Conscious conditioning comes when you are aware of how you process the energy of the world around you. When you get more experienced at understanding your Human Design, you will discover that you have more options than you ever believed about how you react to the world and the people in your life.

You begin to be unconsciously conditioned in your open Centers before you are even born. This is congruent with what the emerging science of epigentics tells us. Our beliefs and our energies are influenced by those around us as early as three months prior to birth, which coincides with the “birthday” of your Unconscious Personality in your chart.

Conditioning continues to come from your family of origin and the people who you were around consistently in your early life. This is the conditioning that often results in predictable behavior patterns and even influences your choices and attractions later on in life.

We are deeply influenced by the energies of our caregivers. Remember that where you are open in where you take in energy from the world and people around you and you amplify it. If your parents are defined in Centers that you have open, you are consistently exposed to those energies in an amplified way for your entire childhood.

This long-term exposure makes it easy to confuse the difference between your definition in your chart and your openness and the energy which is naturally yours versus the energy of your caregivers. When you experience the same energy amplified for your whole childhood, it makes sense that you think you have energies that you do not have consistently.

Here’s how it works.

When you look at your Human Design chart you will see that your chart is colored in certain places and white in others. Remember that what is colored in is “defined” in the chart, meaning this is your consistent energy, in essence the “truth” of who you are.

Where you have white in the chart is called “open” or sometimes you may see it referred to as “undefined”. Whatever is open in your chart is where you take energy and information in from the world around you. Because you are always around different people and energies, this openness is experienced or Conditioned in many different ways.

Not only that, remember that where you have openness you will experience these varying energies in an amplified way. You don’t simply take the energy in from around, you take it in and feel it even more. The openness in your chart is where you have the potential to become wise about others and the world around you because you “sense” these energies very deeply.

Openness in the chart can feel somewhat vulnerable. In our openness we sense and experience in intense ways. We also sense and experience in inconsistent ways. These energies can change for us depending on who we are with and where we are.

There are predictable behavior patterns that people adopt in response to the openness in their charts. A good Human Design Specialist can take one look at your chart and, with a quick glance, tell you the behavior patterns that may be keeping you “stuck” in your life.

You develop these predictable behavior patterns based on your long-term exposure to your families of origin. Your parents, your siblings and anyone you may have grown up with, consistently influenced your energy field with their energy field and you probably developed certain consistent responses to this powerful field of influence.

For example, let’s say you have an open Identity Center. 

The Identity Center is the energy center responsible for love and life direction in the chart. People who have this center open have the potential to be very wise about love and life direction. When this center is open you experience love and other people’s identities and direction very deeply. Ultimately people with an open G are designed to know others well and to experience many possibilities for the direction of their life.

But, when you don’t understand how this energy works, if you have this center open, you may have a tendency to question your lovability. You also may struggle to find the “right” direction in your own life. It’s easy to classify these patterns as dysfunctional and, certainly, they can be painful if you don’t understand them. With awareness, you can learn to use your openness as a valuable tool to help you become wise about what love truly is, about your unique identity and what makes you oh-so-lovable. You can also become very savvy about choosing the life direction that is right for you.

Understanding openness and how it works keeps you from being a “victim” of the energy surrounding you and gives you control over your life experience.

As you begin to live your Human Design Strategy and you gain a deeper awareness of your own personal energy, it begins to get easier and easier to break free from old energetic behavior patterns that you may have adopted over a lifetime and embrace your inherent wisdom. Sometimes the “broken” patterns you have simply disappear when you understand their root energetic cause and their origin.

Your openness ultimately becomes part of the gifts you bring to the world.

Let’s look at anther concrete example. Let’s say you have a child with an open Emotional Solar Plexus who is raised by parents who both have a defined Emotional Solar Plexus. The child is constantly experiencing emotional energy from her parents in an amplified way. 

 
Of course, a child doesn’t have as much impulse control when it comes to expressing herself. So, as she is taking in all this emotional energy from her family, she is manifesting the emotional energy of her family in her actions and behaviors. Her family believes she is a dramatic and emotional person and she has the reputation of being somewhat of a “drama queen.”

Let’s say that the parents in this family develop some challenges in their marriage and the emotional tensions runs high. This little girl is going to take all of that emotional energy in, amplify it and express it. She could easily become the emotional “canary” in her family.

Sometimes kids with an open Solar Plexus in a family with defined emotional energy will learn to be very “nice” and develop a lot of “pleasing” behaviors as a way of trying to control the emotional energy in the house. Remember, openness means you amplify your environment and feeling intense emotional energy, happy or sad, can be uncomfortable for the sensitive open Solar Plexus.

All of this foundational exposure to emotional energy translates to the possibility of a lifetime pattern for this girl. She may grow up into a woman who avoids conflict, defines her self-worth by how “nice” she is and never speaks her truth out of fear of experiencing someone’s emotional response. She may work hard to keep everyone in her life happy until she can’t sustain that illusion any more.

In later sections in this workbook, we will discuss the specific energetic behaviors of open and defined Centers and how they may be influencing your life. This will give you vital insight into your personal chart and your unique energy configuration. Each section contains affirmations and writing assignments that can help you grow in you awareness of your own conditioned patterns.

Once you become aware of your inherent energy, the energy of others and your conditioned patterns of response, you can begin to choose to respond to these energies in a new and empowered way. This is the crux of what it means to become De-Conditioned and it is a very conscious and active process.

As I stated before, the De-conditioning process will take some time. But you will begin to see improvement in your life immediately. Most importantly, you will see that many of your old patterns aren’t a result of you being “flawed” in some way, but merely artifacts of old energy patterns. This new perspective is dramatically empowering!

Energy Themes in the Chart

The Human Design chart is very much like the human genome. We all have all of the DNA that makes us human but each of us expresses our genes in our own unique way, with our own unique genetic combination.

We all have all the parts of the Human Design chart. It is a blueprint or the energetic map for being a human being. But, we each express aspects of the chart in our own unique way and with our own unique combination of energies. You can’t ever escape the full experience and expression of being human. But your energy will influence your interpretation of the human experience.

You can never “not have” certain human energies, nor can you shield yourself from them. We all experience the full range of being human, some of it in fixed, consistent ways, some of it in inconsistent and varying ways. Understanding your unique design can help you become a master of your energy

Centers, Profiles, Gates and Type represent different kinds of energy themes. There are nine Centers, twelve Profiles, sixty-four Gates and five Types. Also each Gate has six possible ways of being expressed. (There are actually even more factors that are part of a chart, but these are, by far, the most influential and relevant parts of the chart.) Each one of us is a magnificently unique combination of all of these energy themes.

The energies in the chart are thematic, meaning that when you have a certain energy in your chart, it will be a theme for you and your life in some way.

For example, let’s look at the Channel 59-6, the Channel of Reproduction and Mating. 

The Channel of Reproduction and Mating carries a theme of fertility. People who have this energy consistently can either be very fertile or struggle with fertility issues. Either way, if you have this energy in your chart, it will probably be a theme in your life. 

The energies in the chart are more of a continuum. For example, the Gate 25, called the Gate of the Love of the Spirit, can be expressed as either love or hate. But, none of us expresses only pure love or pure hatred all the time. The human experience of love and hate is more of a continuum of possible expressions. 

At the same time, when we are consciously experiencing life, we have the power to deliberately choose our response to life. In other words, you have the power to consciously express the highest possible expression of the themes in the chart. Understanding who you are and how your chart works, will give you the power to choose your response to life and the people around you.

Of course, when we are unconsciously experiencing life and we are reacting to the energies around us, we don’t often realize that we have a choice over how we experience the world. Knowing your Human Design teaches you how to never be a victim of other people’s energy again.

While there are many different subtleties and nuances to all the energy themes in the chart, in order to make the chart practical and easy to understand, I have related these complex themes to eight key personality traits that are the root energies for creating a delicious, successful life.

These eight key personality traits contribute to the full expression of your personal success, whatever that may entail for you. These eight traits, called Resiliency Keys, are influenced by your open and defined Centers in your chart and your unique energy blueprint. When you are fully expressing the highest energies in your chart, you will experience the positive manifestation of the Resiliency Keys.

The more fully you express the Resiliency Keys, the greater the satisfaction, success and joy in your life.

The eight Resiliency Keys are:

· Lovability

· Self-Worth

· Authenticity

· Courage

· Decisiveness

· Emotional Wisdom

· Self-Trust

· Knowing How to Leverage Your Energy

Think about this. If you feel lovable, have high self-esteem, express yourself authentically, have the courage to do what is right for you, know how to make good decisions for yourself, understand your emotional energy and how to interpret it, trust yourself and know how to use your energy in a sustainable way, you will have a pretty darn good life!

Of course, the opposite is also true.

When you understand your conditioned energetic and behavioral patterns, you can begin to slowly de-condition yourself and begin to lead a life that is a more pure reflection of the unique, magnificent human you truly are.

When you begin to discern the different energies that are flowing through you, become aware of your old energy patterns and your conditioned behaviors, you will start to develop new empowered ways of responding to the world. You will no longer perceive yourself to be powerless over the influences of other people’s energies and you will, over time, develop a new appreciation for the broad range of possible expressions of the human experience.

It’s kind of like this. When an elephant is first trained in the circus, its leg is chained and the chain is staked into the ground, limiting the elephant’s ability to move about freely. Over time, the elephant gets used to being chained and stops pulling and resisting the chain. When this happens, the elephant’s handlers stop staking the chain and the elephant no longer tries to escape, even though it could easily move about freely.

The energies of our conditioning are kind of like the chain that binds the elephant. Without awareness, we think our actions are hopelessly limited and we are stuck in perceived bondage to the energies of others.

When you learn about how your open Centers influence your experience of the world and you learn a new way to interpret the energy you take in and amplify, you begin to realize that the metaphorical chain around your leg, isn’t real and you can truly be free to be yourself in every way.

There is nothing keeping you from expressing your unique magnificence and perfect abundance except old energy patterns.  Section 2 of this book will help you learn to break these old energy patterns.

( I hope you liked it!  More soon!)

P.S. If you want to dive into the De-Conditioning process, check out my new class, De-Conditioning by Design

http://www.humandesignforeveryone.com/deconditioning_by_design.html