Human Design
A BASIC GUIDE
A Newcomer to Human Design? Visit this comprehensive presentation and explore the potential of this revolutionary system. Read on to discover how understanding your mechanical predisposition can transform your life by enhancing your individual way of making decisions.
Sections
Explore key topics in Human Design. Each section will guide you through the core concepts.
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What is
HUMAN DESIGN?
The Human Design System is a radically innovative body of knowledge about the human condition and the nature of being. Its main difference with other systems is that its fundamental premises are not psychological, neither philosophical nor metaphysical. On the contrary, they rest upon a physical structure that resembles the human form and out of which all the mechanical and cognitive laws emerge that are used by our genes to organize our physical experience of the world of form and consciously integrate with life at a holistic level.
The individual way in which this Bodygraph is imprinted at birth determines our unique way to embody human potential. Also, it conditions the perception that we have of ourselves. This, in relationship to life and to the people in our environment. The functionality of this human structure is entirely mechanical, and therefore free from any slant towards any kind of dogma; since the truth revealed by its configuration can only be accessed individually. This means it can never be the same for any two human beings.
Moreover, the language in which the information is delivered follows a logic that is easy to understand for anyone; because everything that it reveals is inherently human and is part of everybody’s daily lives. Instead of giving the rational mind something to believe in, it speaks directly to the potential awareness of each individual; offering a concrete map of the human characteristics that determine the tangible and observable nature of a person.
Where do I start?
Create your chart
Introducing your birth data into the software program will calculate the imprinting of your individual design.
The resulting Bodygraph reveals the four most fundamental formulas that you will have to pay attention to as you continuously experiment with them in your daily life: Your Definition, your Type, your source of Inner Authority and your Profile.
The plain understanding of these basic human mechanisms allows you to radically transform your way of identifying the source of Inner Authority that you trust when you have to make a decision for yourself.
The Human Design Chart
(Bodygraph)
The whole is always bigger than the sum of its parts, and as a synthesis that integrates many traditional sciences, what is revealed on the surface of any Human Design chart exceeds anybody’s expectations, no matter how unlimited their imagination is.
Also known as the ‘Rave Body Graph’, it is a biological structure that represents the way the human genes are organized in all members of our species, through the compelling preciseness of its mechanical circuit board. It is upon this circuit board that the unique blueprint of an individual can be analyzed, objectively described and empirically observed by anyone that has the expectable consistency in the understanding and application of very simple mechanical formulas.
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Based on two different calculations, every individual chart maps the natural imprinting that predisposes a person, both for ‘good’ and for ‘bad’, to have a unique experience in life as an incarnated human being. This predisposition is mapped out through a diversity of graphical elements - called centers, channels and gates - each with very specific mechanical and cognitive functions.The specific combination of these elements within the individual Rave Body Graph, and whether they are defined (colored) or undefined (white), provides astonishingly detailed insights into an individual's human characteristics, strengths, challenges and sense of purpose.
Unfortunately, our historical ignorance about this unique individual predisposition has forever taken humanity to chase after a generalized idea of what being human was supposed to be and look like, which despite the evident collective success of our species has always brought endless and unnecessary suffering to the lives of singular human individuals.It is the sole purpose of the Human Design System to correct the roots of this primordial misunderstanding that human beings have forever lived under.
Definition /
Openness
In Human Design, the most visually apparent aspect of an individual’s design is the graphical distinction between DEFINED and OPEN centres, represented by which of the 9 centres are coloured and which remain white on the surface of the Rave Body Graph. This binary - DEFINITION vs. LACK OF DEFINITION - forms the foundation for a mechanical analysis of individual human characteristics.
Activated gates in OPEN centres represent our personal potential and openness to the diversity of human forms, but their potential wisdom can only be unlocked when they connect in the aura with someone who completes the channel through a harmonic gate (the gate at the other end of the same channel). These active gates constantly seek for interaction with others, leading to potential attachments and co-dependent social protocols, which the rational mind tries to control. This dynamic is known in Human Design as the Not-Self, where compensatory strategies arise from perceived inadequacies.
DEFINITION, on the other hand, occurs when both gates of the same channel are activated, linking two centres in a very specific way, and creating a fixed and consistent frequency in the life force of the human individual. These DEFINED areas represent inherent traits that are independent of external influence, and therefore form a reliable source of inner authority that is a valuable alternative to the rational mind.
The balance between DEFINED and OPEN centres influences a person’s adaptability or resistance to others in social interactions. DEFINED centres provide inherent consistency, while OPEN centres scan and mirror the frequency that they ‘pick up’ from others, leading to variable perceptions that range from identification with what is not theirs to amplification and cathartic reactions. Understanding these patterns is key to recognizing the core aspects of an individual’s behaviour when they operate in accordance to their nature and the distorted perception of our inherent vulnerabilities as they are influenced by external conditioning.
Type of
Definition
A DEFINITION is created when the two harmonic gates that meet through the same channel are activated in someone’s individual imprinting. Every time this happens the whole channel gets colored in, and the two centers linked through that specific channel also get colored, as a graphical representation that this is a human characteristic that is meant to operate consistently throughout your entire life. Hence, these are the characteristics that, for ‘good’ and for ‘bad’, allow you to recognize and define the life force of who you are beyond circumstances.
However, given the huge diversity of imprinting amongst members of our species, the difference in the number of channels that are defined in a singular design can greatly vary from one individual to the next, and the specific way in which the different defined channels are aligned with each other within the same body graph also marks a great difference in the way in which they impact on the overall nature and corresponding psychology and mentality.
There are four different ‘Types of Definition’, two of which are so majoritarian that they spread over about 85% of human beings.
To learn more about how these Definitions influence your nature and interactions, check out our article on the Types of Definition.
What are
Types?
If you look into the level of detail revealed by the Human Design System, the imprinting of the Rave Body Graph's 9 centers and 36 channels reveals a vast diversity of human variations. However, this vast diversity can be simplified through a very simple formula called "TYPE," which helps individuals orchestrate and apply the overall mechanics of their design in daily life. Regardless of how open or defined a person’s centers are, all combinations can be categorized into four different types, each with its own distinct cognitive orientations and limitations.
Each type orchestrates the unique human characteristics of a singular individual in a different way, and none is superior to another. They all contribute to the overall efficiency of humanity. However, the Generator type, making up 70% of the population, establishes societal norms, which poses a natural challenge for the other three types, as they may struggle deeply in order to be able to conform to this sense of "normality."
These four types are not based on psychological or metaphysical principles but are deeply structural and organic. They influence human character in a way that transcends traditional gender differences, as the same human attributes can emerge equally in both men and women.
Energy and awareness
There are two 'Energy Types' (Manifestor and Generator) and two 'Non-energy Types' (Projector and Reflector). Energy Types make up nearly 80% of the population and are therefore considered to be "normal", because they naturally define themselves through the application of energy to action. Non-energy Types, about 20% of humankind, may feel rather "abnormal" as they don't naturally define themselves through consistent action, which requires a higher level of cognitive understanding if they want to be able to take advantage of their natural gifts.
Each of the four types has both light and shadow sides. If they rely on conditioned, rational decision-making, they become distorted by their own mentally homogenized fears. However, when they follow their true nature without mental interference, they can access their natural signature and fulfill their individual purpose with their clarity and self-empowering awareness.
The two non-energy types
The two Non-energy Types, Projector and Reflector, are defined not by action-driven energy, but by their natural ability to observe and measure cause and effect in the actions of others, representing the potential of human AWARENESS that can help us minimize efforts and sacrifices in order to achieve our material goals and develop our cognitive potential. Human awareness is complex and varies greatly between individuals, with forms of awareness that is rooted in the body, like instinct, taste, and intuition being more reliable for the spontaneous measuring of personal value than the rational mind can never be.
Non-energy Types embody the potential for differentiated awareness, while Energy Types represent the potential inherent in the display of personal power. In a world that is so dominated by power as ours, Non-energy Types often face psychological and material challenges, feeling "less normal" and even handicapped to face the material reality of life under ‘normal’ standards. Their primary challenge is overcoming the menta habit of having their attention focused on the perceived disadvantages to understand their true nature.
For Projectors, this deconditioning journey implies moving from bitterness and resentment towards recognition and a sense of success, whereas for Reflectors it implies moving from disappointment towards a natural sense of surprise. These transformations take time and require alignment with their unique design, as their experiences diverge significantly from homogenized societal norms.
The four TYPES
Manifestor
The Manifestor type is defined by two key mechanical traits: an OPEN Sacral Center and a DEFINED motor connected to the Throat Center. This design, present in only 10% of people, allows Manifestors to take independent action without seeking approval, making them unpredictable and often provoking fear and mistrust in others. This perceived independence can lead to resistance from those around them, triggering anger in Manifestors return, which they may keep inside and repress to avoid personal conflict.
Manifestors often feel isolated, hiding their true desires and passions out of fear of rejection or punishment. This pattern of repression usually begins in childhood, where they learned to conceal their true feelings from parents and authority figures. To overcome this internalized anger, Manifestors must confront their fear of rejection from others, and recognize and accept that not everyone will like or accept them - this is something natural in the diversity of life and does not mean that they should reject themselves because not everybody likes their impact on them.
When Manifestors free themselves from self-rejection, they can start living authentically, acting on their own personal needs and desires, and taking full responsibility for the consequences.
However, they must practice showing "Consideration" towards others, by becoming aware of how their actions impact on the lives of others. The key strategy for Manifestors is to "Inform before acting", which helps neutralize social resistance by acknowledging the effect their actions may have. By doing so, Manifestors can wield their personal power freely and live in harmony with themselves and those around them, ensuring they are never seen as intruders.
Generator
The Generator type is the easiest to identify on the surface of the Rave Body Graph due to its DEFINED Sacral Center (red square). This center's natural power is key, and if not used properly, it can cause increasing frustration and dissatisfaction as one grows older. Unlike Manifestors, who initiate action driven by an internal force, Generators need external stimuli to trigger a natural response from within. When Generators rely on their speculating minds for effective decision-making, they often become frustrated, feeling trapped in duties they've chosen but no longer enjoy once they are in it with both feet.
Generators are designed to be builders, and not slaves. To succeed in this, they must see their tasks through until completion, motivated by personal motivation rather than a homogenized sense of duty. Without this intrinsic motivation, many Generators fall into frustration and mediocrity, quitting what they have started and abandoning projects and relationships too soon. As children, Generators rely heavily on the input of their two parents, and if conditioned to follow household rules without nurturing stimulation, they grow up frustrated, passing their dissatisfaction with life on to future generations.
To break free from this frustration, Generators must ask themselves who they are acting for - if it's not for themselves, their actions will only fuel the continuity of their inner frustration. When they respond naturally to life, free from mental agendas, they experience deep satisfaction and a sense of personal fulfillment. Therefore, the guiding question for Generators in their deconditioning process should be: "Who am I for myself?" This mental focus helps them break their mental habits and to live authentically in the avoidance of unwanted personal compromises.
Projector
To be a Projector, one must have an OPEN Sacral Centre and no motor connected to the Throat Centre. This limits their natural ability to act consistently like Generators or Manifestors do in the display of their personal power. If Projectors ignore this limitation and take action based on homogenized mental agendas, they face challenges that they are not necessarily prepared to manage, leading to existential bitterness and personal resentments.
Projectors have a naturally deep potential for awareness, as 22 out of the 36 channels that constitute the Rave Body Graph are NOT directly related to action. Instead, each of these 22 channels offers a unique perspective on the quality of human life. Their greatest gift lies in their ability for RECOGNITION, especially recognizing value in the dedication of others. However, when this gift is not cultivated, Projectors may feel overshadowed by the homogenizing power of those around them.
Since power is rarely interested in awareness (unless it is in crisis), Projectors must wait to be invited before engaging with others and share their insights and awareness with anyone. Their focus should always be on the objective observation of others, not on mentally subjective self-analysis. By observing and recognizing how Generators and Manifestors use their energy, often with a great level of dysfunction, Projectors can be the perfect guides for them, but only if they have been previously invited to do so. This leads to the elimination of resistances in others and to the Projector's true and natural success, a sense of accomplishment that transcends material achievements.
Reflector
The Reflector type is extremely rare, making up only 1% of the population. Reflectors are unique because all 9 centres in their design are OPEN, giving them an inherent sense of invisibility and a deep detachment that predisposes them towards the development of personal wisdom. Unlike energy types, who see openness as problem that needs to be fixed, Reflectors perceive their openness as an opportunity, allowing them to gain wisdom from all human interactions that they have, particularly in recognizing the human condition at a collective level.
While Projectors develop wisdom through personal, one-on-one relationships, Reflectors gain insight from their connection to humanity as a whole. Reflectors must wait for a full lunar cycle before making major decisions, which helps them avoid being misled by their rational mind, which is often influenced by societal norms. This self-observation helps them see the limitations of their thinking and the conditioning they've absorbed from the groups that they ‘belong’ to.
Reflectors recognize how individuals are shaped by their families and societies, and their mental focus has to shift from “Who am I?” to “Who are they?” This understanding leads them to their signature theme of SURPRISE, as they uncover truths that transcend time and the everyday human experience. Reflectors embody outer authority, offering wisdom about life and the human condition to those that they meet.
What is
Strategy?
When one has lived a whole life identifying with one’s thinking, and using the rational mind for making ‘the right choices’, to offer a strategy sounds like one is offering the mind a more precise and effective way to carry on with its speculations about the future.
Oppositely, the concept of ‘Strategy’ in Human Design is designed to interrupt this identification with the rational mind and, in this, open up an inner space of self-observation where one is able to recognize how much of one’s regular thinking happens out of some mental habits that run on ‘automatic pilot’. These habits are actually fueled by a series of homogenized fears and anxiety over not being in control of one’s own existence. The normal ‘fears’ of normal people who put security above everything else.
Human Design is not for the weak of Spirit, as the daily application of the corresponding ‘Strategy’ tends to represent a challenge to the mental habits that one has developed in one’s early childhood, and by which one has been living for one’s entire adult life. This daily challenge to one’s own mental habits is what is known as a ‘deconditioning process’, which is truly like an inner battle that one fights against one’s own mental habits, in an attempt to beat the mind on its own ground; rationality.
It is only that as long as the ‘rationality’ stems out of a homogenized mental habit, the human mind can only lead to the distortion of what was meant to be natural. By going through the deconditioning process, one learns to make decisions from a place that is connected to the body, which frees the mind from its compelling homogenized fears, and eventually transforms it into an ally that fosters effective communication with others.
By suspending the identification with mental habits, the mind no longer has the power to continue to reproduce the same old conditioned patterns that have led one to a point of stagnation, which opens up every gateway for new kinds of people and experiences to show up in your personal horizon.
Following your Strategy helps you eliminate resistances and create a more flowing experience of yourself in interaction with the world around you, which will transform the kind of people and opportunities that you attract, and take you to enter into environments that empower the fulfilment of your individual life purpose. Your Strategy is based on which of the four types you are by Design:
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Generators & Manifesting Generators: Wait to respond
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Manifestors: Informing before acting
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Projectors: Wait for the invitation
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Reflectors: Wait for a complete cycle of the Moon
Following your Strategy and inner authority in your daily life helps you use your energy and awareness more effectively, interact correctly with external stimuli, and navigate life with greater ease and a sense of inner alignment.
What is
Authority?
Authority is a huge theme that is mostly misunderstood in the lives of human beings. In its etymological root it clearly refers to being the ‘author’ of one’s own existence, which is what naturally happens if we consider that our individual life is shaped by the decisions that we make for ourselves.
In the homogenized world, the source of authority is always external, as it is normally conditioned upon us, rationally or not, when we are children by the examples of our own two parents. By the time we are seven years old and discover to be able to think for ourselves, our rational mind has already taken over the capacity to choose whose authority it is going to respect/fear and whose authority it is ready to challenge.
The problem is that, in doing so, the mind will drive us to reproduce an improved version of the conditioned fears and homogenized dreams of our parents in our own individual lives, living our lives as disconnected as they were from what in Human Design is called ‘Inner Authority’.
Unlike decisions made by anxious mental choices - which are always under the threat of doubt and speculations - inner authority describes our individual capacity to make the most appropriate decisions for ourselves from a place that does not depend on our material circumstances, but on our own perception of individual purpose.
This sense of purpose can never come from the mind, but it is deeply anchored in the consistency of sensations and signals that emerge from the organic and holistic intelligence of our physical body, a place much deeper than our mere mental reasoning.
These signals can be rooted in individual intuition, in tribal instinctive awareness or in the spontaneous recognition of affinity with others through shared taste. They can also be based on the consistency of the emotional fluctuations that overtime bring your awareness back to the same place of departure; yourself. They can be rooted in just the existential power of your response to life, but never in mental speculations.
Because the mechanical consistency of these signals is rooted within your own individual nature, this makes inner authority a very reliable tool for navigating life, no matter how it presents itself to us.
What are
Profiles?
After ‘Type’, your ‘Profile’ is the most important formula that one needs to know about oneself, as it reveals the hidden relationship between an individual’s body consciousness and that of the personality, defining the nature that fuels the unconscious life of the brain and the role that provides a sense of purpose to the conscious personality.
To put it in simple terms, the ‘Profile’ is the cognitive framework through which a human being can consistently experience the permanent juxtaposition of their physical body with the metaphysical frequency of their personality. This is why, when one is not properly aligned with one’s own differentiated nature, the first place where we can recognize and feel it is in the distortion with which our individual ‘Profile’ makes us perceive ourselves in ways that we do not like or approve.
In Human Design, the sense of ‘correctness’ does not stem from the way other people see you from the outside, but from the consistency in the way in which one can observe oneself from within, as we are the only ones who can truly know when we are being loving and transparent in the representation and expression of our own individual truth, and when our mind is misrepresenting us by playing homogenized social games.
There is a total of twelve different human profiles. An individual’s Profile is derived from the position of the Sun and Earth in both columns of data at either side of the individual Rave chart.
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Personality Side: Describes the role through which the personality consciously resonates to life and the diversity of human nature. This role represents the potential for the fulfilment of individual purpose, when it is properly motivated, as much as it represents the limitation in perspective that is inherent to each and anyone of us humans.
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Design Side: Describes the unconscious nature of the way in which our physical body positions itself in its movement through space. This translates into a set code of unconscious gifts, needs and fixed behavior.
By understanding your ‘Profile’, you can better understand the way you are designed to evaluate the reactions of others in your personal relationships, and the correctness or not of the way in which you are navigating your life, helping you align to and stay true to your own authentic self.
