INTRO to OPEN CENTERS
In the end, it doesn’t matter how much you know about your design. None of that matters, unless you cultivate an awareness of your
openness, unless you can see and feel how it works in you. While so much of your wisdom potential lies these receptive places, you won’t have access to any of that wisdom unless you understand the potential of your open centers to sabotage your life, to keep telling you that you should be who you aren’t, and pulling you away from that very part on you that you can count on to bring you fulfillment.
If you leave this web site, or your Foundational Reading, with anything, I’d love it to be a deep curiosity towards your openness, a willingness, over time, to get to know each of your open centers, how they make you feel, how they speak, who in your early or present life they represent, and ultimately, how they get you to think that it’s safer, smarter, better to be someone that you’re not, as opposed to the lovely being that you are.
What I’m talking about is the power of conditioning, the power of what Human Design calls, the Not-Self.
If you’d like to hear more, click here for the expanded version of this Introduction to your Open Centers.
OPEN HEAD
You have an Open Head center. This means that you are always open to new insights and mental sparks coming from the people around you and intellectually stimulating environments. You are someone who loves to be filled up with inspiration. You have the potential to truly enjoy the pressure to know, without necessarily becoming overwhelmed or identified with this pressure, or knowledge for that matter.
The Head Center is the very pressure of consciousness itself. Whether you look at is as the place where the entire cosmos pours in, or the vast storage system we call the gray matter of the brain, the Head is always exerting pressure on the Ajna center, or our minds, making sure that our minds can’t stop thinking, thus, can’t stop evolving. Our Head center is all about inspiration.
The pressure of inspiration can be difficult. Because it’s always about something that hasn’t yet been grasped, it can bring up a lot of mental anxiety.
For more information about your Open Head Center, click here to hear the extended audio:
OPEN AJNA
You have both a symbolically and literally OPEN Mind. Unlike the Root, Sacral, Solar Plexus and Ego/Heart Centers, the mind is not a motor. It is not an energy center. This means that even though the mind can feel like an engine that won’t quit, in the end, it has no actual capacity to manifest anything by itself. Just take one look at your Bodygraph, and you’ll see that the mind has no direct access to a motor. It is, in fact, the only awareness center that is locked away from the body’s energy systems, separated by the Throat.
So as much as our mind may want to!, it is simply not equipped to make our decisions for us. It can certainly help us communicate. It can measure, witness, track, analyze and compute like nobody’s business. It’s a marvelous researcher. And even more than that, it carries the incredible potential to communicate the essence of our experience as human beings through words, stories, images, mathematical equations, etc. To do this, it must be able to look at life in so many ways, from so many angles. It can look back in time, forward towards the future, and swim around in a giant pool of life’s biggest philosophical and spiritual questions.
All minds have what Human Design calls, “OUTER AUTHORITY,” -- the capacity to be an authority for others. But no minds have inner authority.
For more information about your Open Ajna, click here to hear the extended audio:
OPEN THROAT
You have an Open Throat. The Throat is the center of manifestation in action, verbal communication and all metamorphoses. The Throat is not a motor; it’s more like a gear box -- a highly complex one at that. It has eleven gates, each translating into a different voice. Biologically, the Throat is where our Thyroid and the Para-thyroid glands sit. What this means is that all mutative, transformative processes must be initiated through the Throat.
So in a way you could say this is the center that brings change into our lives. Because The Throat governs so many biological processes, if we don’t live in alignment with our nature, this is the place where things first begin to break down.
The fact that your Throat Center is open means that how you speak, and what you talk about, can be greatly influenced by your environment. When you are on your own, you have the wonderful potential to feel deeply comfortable … just being silent. But as soon as you are with others, you can come under a great deal of physical pressure to speak. Even if you don’t talk, you’re still likely to be picking up all that isn’t being said in the room, and feeling a degree of pressure in your mind and Throat.
For more information about your Open Throat Center, click here to hear the extended audio:
OPEN G/IDENTITY CENTER
You have an open G- or Identity Center. What this essentially means is that you don’t have a fixed identity, or a consistent sense of direction in life. You can change, even dramatically, depending on who you are with and where you are. You are deeply sensitive to your environment. The good news is that you are actually designed to enjoy this aspect of yourself, to let go of the need to know exactly who you are and exactly where you’re going!
You are not here to play just one role in life, to experience just one kind of love, or to move in a single direction. You are here to play many roles, to experience every kind of love, and to move in all sorts of directions. And as you move through life experiencing it on so many levels, as you encounter people on the way, you are meant to take others in and reflect back to them the beauty of their own uniqueness. You have a true gift for engaging with, understanding and reflecting true diversity.
So, as strange as this may sound, I invite you to let go of the idea that you’ll ever fully know who you are, that you’ll ever be able to peg yourself down. You are everyone, and you are no one ….
For more information about your Open G-Center, click here to hear the extended audio:
HEART/EGO CENTER:
You have an open Heart, or an open Ego Center. The Heart Center is one of the body’s four motors. Though it looks small and simple (compared to some of the other centers), it’s actually extremely powerful and complex. In Human Design, the Heart Center is the home of willpower and the ego, the place where loyalty, courage and the ability to follow through on one’s commitments resides. The themes of the Heart revolve around a deeply communal dynamic of mutual support. This center makes it possible for us humans to live on the material plane -- ideally in harmony with each other. It allows us to engage in the creative act of bonding, of forging intimacies, or bringing children into the world and providing them with sustainable values and a meaningful education.
It is in and through the Ego/Heart Center that we experience our will to survive in this world as part of established communities. It’s the only center that is responsible for the creation of all societies and cultures.
So, you could say that the Human Design version of ‘Ego’ is quite different than what we normally think of in psychological and spiritual circles. Here, the Ego’s purpose is to help us hold our societies together, to make sure that we feed each other and support each other. It’s here to ensure the survival of our families and cultures through a grass roots system of bonding, reproducing, caring, protecting, educating, ritual-making, contract-honoring, goods buying and selling, etc.
People with defined egos (only about 35% of the population) are built for these arenas. They need to feel secure and involved in the maintenance of this grass roots system. Without even realizing it, they have the potential to exert and transmit a great deal of will power.
People with undefined egos, like you, make up the majority of people on the planet. Because your Heart Center is open, you can be quite vulnerable to the defined egos of the world. More than anyone, you just soak up (and then amplify) the constant pressure pumped out into the communal Ego field to perform, to keep your commitments, to prove yourself. To show how courageous, reliable and trustworthy you are.
For more information about your Open Heart/Ego Center, click here to hear the extended audio:
SACRAL CENTER
You have an Open Sacral.
In Human Design, an Open Sacral means that you don’t have consistent, reliable access to your own life force energy. This means that unlike Generators, your body isn’t always buzzing with energy. It’s not hungry to use itself up to a point of exhaustion. It doesn’t always speak to you with sounds that you can trust to be your truthful response to life, or decision-making authority. At least when you’re on your own, you can truly discharge and rest. You can unplug from the craziness of this world we live in and enjoy simply being, even spacing out.
And this is wonderful. You’re simply not meant to have the kind of staying power that a Generator has, to keep going and going until you exhaust yourself. It’s actually not healthy for you. You’re here to live a more energetically balanced life, where you have plenty of time to rest, and when you are making your contribution in the world, you do it in a way makes the most of the energy of the people around you. You are not here to use your own energy; you are here to understand energy and how it works, and to guide others in the most efficient use of their energy. In a way, on a mystical level, you could say you’re here to allow energy to move through you, to allow Spirit or the universe to do its work.
For more information about your Open Sacral Center, click here to hear the extended audio:
OPEN SOLAR PLEXUS/EMOTIONAL CENTER
You have an Open Solar Plexus. This means that you are an incredibly sensitive, empathetic person, who can really feel how others are feeling. Sometimes you can even sense what they’re feeling before they do, even though your mental analysis of their feelings might not always be accurate. You have the potential and ability to watch and surf the rising and falling waves of emotions, around and within you, soaking up the highs and lows, enjoying the pleasure, need, desires and passions others bring out in you, without identifying with or holding onto any of it. You can become someone who is deeply wise about emotions; you can be a true barometer of the emotional health of the people around you.
Statistically speaking, more people who are open emotionally (according to the Human Design definition) are taking up the couches of therapists, psychologists and psychiatrists than those with defined emotional systems. In a way, you could say that these people are continually going up and down on the emotional waves of the people around them, not just going along for the ride, but MAGNIFYING & INDENTIFYING with it. And then they’re making their decisions based on the feelings that move through them, whether those feelings actually belong to them or not.
As a deeply trained psychotherapist and a long-time client of therapy myself, I found it particularly challenging to understand the nature of the Solar Plexus, how it operates in me, and in others, and between us.
For more information about your Open Emotional Center, click here to hear the extended audio:
OPEN SPLENIC CENTER
You have an Open Spleen and a deeply sensitive immune system. In fact, you could say that your immune system operates like a sponge – soaking up the general level of health (or ill-health!) of everyone in your environment. The Spleen is the oldest awareness center we have in our bodies. It is your body consciousness, your primary, existential awareness. We share it with all other forms of life. Before we Homo Sapiens learned to rely on our strategic (extremely complicated) minds for our survival, it was wholly up to our Spleens to keep us safe and protected, to let us know in the moment whether we should fight or flee, whether a situation was safe, or not.
The intelligence of the Spleen is instantaneous, pre-verbal, instinctual, intuitive… and quiet. Despite its instinctual power, it is easily drowned out by mental chatter, and often completely overwhelmed by emotional material.
The fact that your Spleen is open points to a double potential; to be a place of victimization, or to be a place of great wisdom and sensitivity.
For more information about your Open Splenic Center, click here to hear the extended audio:
OPEN ROOT CENTER
You have an Open Root. The Root, in the Human Design system, represents the pressure rising up from our bodies to stay alive and evolve. Out of the Root Center comes a tremendous amount of fuel and energy, pushing their way up and out of us, getting things – getting us -- started.
Through your Open Root, you can take in a great deal of stress from your environment. When your Root center is ‘conditioned’ by or under the influence of other people, you can feel pressured. Chances are pretty high, in fact, that any time you are in the physical presence of a group, such as your family or your friends or professional community, you are taking in stress. This isn’t necessarily bad, of course. The pressure you feel at times can be extremely useful, especially when you’re living in alignment with your nature, when you’re making decisions that are right for you.
However, when you make decisions as a result of the pressures and stress you’re taking in from your environment, instead of following your unique Strategy and Authority, your Open Root becomes a very vulnerable place. It can make you move so fast and take on so much work that your health, your immune system can suffer. It can make it impossible for you to enter into new relationships or agreements correctly.
The irony is that when Open Root people work so hard to relieve themselves of the pressure they feel, they only end up with even more work to do.
For more information about your Open Root Center, click here to hear the extended audio:
SLEEP:
A final thing that you may or may not want to experiment with, but I thought I’d put it out there just in case… It’s about SLEEP.
According to Human design, although our Bodygraphs actually change when we go to sleep, (there’s actually something called a lunar chart!), we still remain open in those places that we’re open. This means that when we sleep very close to someone, and they are defined where we’re not, we are still taking in their energies. An aura is about an arms length all around the body, including above the head and below the feet. So this actually means that if you are sleeping close to a wall, and on the other side of that wall, in the apartment next store, someone is sleeping, you may actually be taking in their aura! Interesting, huh?
Because of this, some of us (especially those with open Sacral Centers… Projectors, Manifestors and Reflectors), can have trouble getting the kind of sleep we need to wake up refreshed, and feeling like ourselves.
For more information about SLEEP, click here to hear the extended audio:
LAST WORDS:
RESTORING THE MIND TO ITS PROPER PLACE:
Remember, genetics will always draw you to those who are different from you. Your open centers will lead the way. They will speak to you through your mind, convincing you to choose people and situations that will fill up your open centers. This can be wonderful, because there are few things better than positive conditioning. People who are different from us don’t only make great baby-making partners. They make great teachers and nurturers. They can nourish us in ways that bring out our true Self.
But if we’re not living our strategy, if we let our genes take over, if we don’t know or honor who we truly are (a marriage of body and soul/mind) we can’t benefit from difference. Our genes will do their thing. And they won’t be picky. They won’t be asking questions on our behalf, ‘Well, does this person who has a defined spleen, this person who I feel protected and safe whenever I’m with him, actually keep me protected and safe, in reality?” “Is he capable of respecting, loving me in the way I really want? Or is he more of a drug?” These are not questions that keep our genes awake all night. All our genes want is someone different. They’re not assessing the quality of difference.
Our minds may indeed be interested in these questions. In fact, they can get completely caught up in asking and trying to find answers to them, to the point of ignoring our bodies or trying to pretend that our bodies don’t exist. But chances are, if we’re relying on our minds to make our decisions for us, we’ll end up in trouble. We’ll only be getting half of the story, and that half will be very muddled up and confused. Or we’ll be getting two halves of the story, constantly vacillating between each other. “Well, there’s this... but there’s also that.”
If you’d like to hear more Last Words, click here for the extended audio: