Feeling trapped in your relationship?
For a long time, I thought I was bad at relationships. Because I just couldn't find a satisfying way to stay in them without feeling like I had to become someone else to make them “work.”
I spent a lot of time wondering what was "wrong" with me, why I never feel whole or fulfilled in my romantic relationships or my professional relationships while everyone else seemed to magnetize relationships with ease. I blamed myself for not being able to find happiness under contract or through commitment to another, but when I met my Human Design it all made sense:
That's just not the way I'm built.
I still remember the wave of relief I felt, not just by instantly shedding the years of personal shame and self-flagellation, but also shedding decades of society's messaging that made me feel bad for not being "chosen" or finding "the one."
Human Design is such a powerful tool on so many levels, but at the purest level it helps you see what's "right" about you instead of what's "wrong."
It also helps you see all the places where you struggle with conditioning pressure and messages to be what you're not, and it gives you a personalized operating system to navigate through that confusion so that you can be the highest and best version of who you came here to be and what you came here to express.
If the need for more space in your relationships is something you can relate to (romantic, platonic, or professional), grab your chart and read on to see if you share any of these elements so that you can honor them within your existing relationships, or at least be aware of them as you enter new ones.
CHALLENGE #1: THE SQUARE PEG
Where your activations favor INDIVIDUALITY
The Individual circuit is comprised of 11 life force channels, or “super powers.” These are qualities that must be expressed in your life in order to experience lasting fulfillment.
Individual circuitry is about spontaneous inner knowing and empowering others by simply living your life in a way that honors and expresses your uniqueness. You might often feel like an outsider looking in, choosing to live at the outer edges of social circles rather than embracing the status quo.
Individuals are here to create without interference — for the sake of creation and self-expression. There's really no agenda, except exploring the unknown and feeling the satisfaction and thrill of spontaneous insight that has the potential to lead to great leaps in awareness, understanding, or innovation that serves the greater whole. They empower others by showing up in their unique expression.
If you have a lot of Individual activations you're really not built to fit in — and that's by design. This is the Diva, the soloist, the eccentric — and it's essential to push the boundaries of humanity beyond what we already know or assume to be true.
This quotation by George Bernard Shaw sums it up beautifully:
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
Individual circuitry in Human Design is, by nature, "unreasonable."
CHALLENGE #2: THE OXYGEN MASK
Where your activations favor SELF-EMPOWERMENT
The complex Integration channel is comprised of four “survival” channels. These are often bundled with the 11 channels of Individual empowerment above.
The complex channel of Integration is a subset of Individuality and it's not as much concerned with creative expression as it is safety, survival, and well-being. It's deeply primal, driven by a deep awareness of our physical vulnerability as a species.
If you have any of the four Integration channels, you're probably someone whose nature is to always be looking for the exits — literally and figuratively. You're also quick to say "I can do it myself."
The four Integration channels are the hardest to navigate in relationships, especially if you or your other is unaware of having it. People with these channels can seem extremely selfish and self-absorbed — uncaring, even. They don't want to be burdened by the needs of others, nor do they want to be a burden to others.
If you or your other needs a lot of space in your relationship, it's likely that you (or they) have at least one of the four channels of Integration.
Relationships where both parties have one of these "selfish" channels are much more compatible than those where only one member has Integration because there's a mutual need for space. Both parties understand and delight in the independence of the other because it gives them the space they need for themselves — nobody feels rejected or takes it personally.
In fact, my business partnership with Tara is a wonderful example of how this dynamic works. We've been working, growing, and thriving together for more than 12 years, but we spent the first three years in a non-committal dance of "trying each other out." We had each been burned by other business relationships in the past and were equally hesitant about getting too serious too fast.
It turns out that Tara and I both have Integration channels in our design. It's what allowed us to give each other the space we each needed until we felt called to up the ante in our commitment to each other and the work we were doing together. It wasn't until we had worked together for three years that we formalized our alliance, and I have never felt more free and supported simultaneously.
It's an overused trope about putting on your oxygen mask before helping others, but it's incredibly apt to describe the Integration channels. It might look selfish to claim your oxygen mask first, but it's a hard-wired response to protect yourself before protecting and supporting others. In fact, it's precisely due to this deeply primal nature that our species has survived as long as it has.
If you have Integration in your design, your need for space is not a nice-to-have — it's a must-have. You simply cannot be there for another unless you're there for yourself first.
CHALLENGE #3: THE BULLET TRAIN
Where your activations favor a FIXED DIRECTION
Your Profile “costume” is determined by the numbers to the right of the decimal point in your Sun and Earth activations. The Personality number in black is the first number, and the second number is the Design in red. This is a “4/1” profile, or “Opportunist/Investigator.”
"The 4/1 has one purpose in this life through its fixed fate — to be able to influence others with its foundation — they're not here to bend."
— Ra Uru Hu, the first student of Human Design
There are 12 profile combinations in Human Design which describe your "way" as you move through life. It's a costume that, when living in alignment, supports the expression and realization of your purpose. This is the more mystical side of Human Design that says we each incarnated in this life at a particular place and time for a particular assignment to help elevate and evolve humanity.
Some profiles are here to create karma, some are here to clean it up, and the 4/1 is a fixed path that bridges the two. "Fixed" doesn't mean a lack of agency — it means there is a path waiting for you, but it only reveals itself when you operate in alignment.
There was a time in my late 30's and early 40's where I had been on sabbatical more than I had been employed. After several years of entrepreneurial ventures and travel, I found that I had less and less in common with my peers.
My peer group had become a bunch of dead men: Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Albert Camus, Bohumil Hrabal, Aristotle, Epictetus, Socrates, Seneca, and others. I actually started feeling a little manic as I immersed myself in their words and worlds and recognized the only through-line to humanity that mattered was the through-line of love.
To bring myself back to this world, I made a point to go off the rails, to break myself so I could have more options to fit in and find a place in life that was "relatable."
I lowered my standards, I grew soft in my personal ethics, and I behaved in ways that still bring me shame and regret. I thought that by making myself less "rigid" in my ways, I wouldn't be so alone. And that's when I learned the very real difference between being alone and being lonely. Lonely is what I felt when I abandoned my "rigid" self for a version of me I didn't recognize or even want to be. It took another 5-7 years to find my way solidly back to me.
The trick for a 4/1 profile in Human Design is to realize that your best, most enduring relationships will be those where the other shares your direction in life (or at least makes ample room for it) — because your track is set, and no amount of internal bartering to deny it or sell yourself on taking up someone else's path is going to change that.
When it comes to relationships, Human Design is a powerful tool for navigating the quantum field of energy we cannot see — the energy of the sovereign self, the energy of the other, and the energy of what happens when these two energies meet.
When you honor your own hard-wired needs in a relationship, you also honor the other's. When you're no longer contorting yourself to fit a role or costume that wasn't made for you, they get to experience the full, unedited, authentic version of you. And when you show up accepting yourself and all the nuances and idiosyncracies that make you uniquely you, you create the space and grace for the other to also step into their own version of true.
Note: Every Human Design chart is more than the sum of its parts, and every element of a chart affects — and is affected by — every other element. Human Design is a deeply layered, complex system that integrates eastern and western traditions and wisdom. When I share discrete elements of a chart, I am simply sharing glimpses into the mechanics of Human Design (and the Gene Keys) to show others how they, too, can discern practical insights from their own charts into their uniqueness and the patterns of thought, behavior, conditioning, emotions, and psychology that keep them from achieving their highest potential or living their best life.
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