When aspiration feels dangerous.
Last week I was triggered.
By aspiration.
Tara and I are planning our first immersive Human Design retreat for the Fall. We're partnering with Nell, a coaching-client-turned-collaborator, and one of the first major decisions is choosing a venue.
I live in the beautiful Hudson Valley, a 2-hour drive from NY, and there is no shortage of fabulous options to host an intimate, life-changing gathering for those who crave outer expansion through inner alignment.
Our little team is mighty.
Between the three of us we have three different energy types, three different inner authorities, all three angles (Right, Left, and Juxtaposition), all energy centers defined, 19 of the 36 life force channels (between natal + electromagnetics), all the major circuits (Individual, Collective, Tribal), and all the minor circuits (except Tribal-Defense).
In other words, our collective composite covers a wide range of capabilities, sensibilities, and operating requirements:
Nell is a 6/2 Emotional Manifestor — she's here to initiate and impact others, her voice is her power, and she is a gifted powerhouse when it comes to planning, producing, and executing meaningful, memorable experiences when following her wave.
Tara is a 4/6 Splenic Projector – she's here to guide the energy of others through deep, intuitive insight, and her power is an acute perception that's deep, penetrating, and alert to talent and right timing.
I'm a 4/1 Sacral Manifesting Generator – I'm here to build and my energy and stamina is my power — when I'm responding to life in the moment, I'm unstoppable, which bodes quite well (in theory) for my Incarnation Cross of Ambition.
Human Design is a powerful tool, especially for small, high-impact teams where everyone is invited, empowered, and supported to operate in alignment with their unique blueprint.
So when Nell brought the short list and budgets for possible venues and she and Tara were energetically "all-in" on a truly exquisite property that had the price to match, my whole body started shutting down and pushing back.
This was my Sacral response, it was all panic and fear, it was confusing, and it was layered.
The first layer was the price – we would have to charge a hefty sum for our inaugural event, and be on the hook for a hefty deposit. While we've done some 3-hour workshops, this was taking the experience design and promise of transformation to a whole new level. We've done this sort of thing for clients in the past, we've just never done it for ourselves.
The second layer was the pressure from my undefined Solar Plexus to please my co-creators — they were thrilled and did not perceive the fee structure as a hurdle the way I did, and I really didn't want to be the wet blanket in the mix.
This, my friend, is where Human Design blueprints kick in to help navigate the energetic divide.
Nell and Tara both have the Channel of Surrender (44-26), a Design of a Transmitter that's all about deal-making. In fact, Tara and I have nicknamed it "The Power Broker" for its raw essence. My Incarnation Cross is Ambition and my Sun Gate (70% of my personality) is Drive. In theory, I should be all over this, right?, secure in the knowledge that my two Power Broker collaborators who instinctively know this will work have flashing green lights.
But I can't.
Because the third layer was a whole web of feelings that I couldn't name or place. They were tangled up in past memory and I just knew I couldn't make a decision until all that gunk was no longer in the way.
Now, in Human Design, all you really need to know — and practice — in order to live in alignment with the promise of your blueprint is your Strategy and Authority. But when you're armed with the nuances of your underlying architecture, you can get pretty surgical about your deconditioning. Your triggers always guide you to a time in your life when you were making decisions out of alignment — at least that has been my experience.
Instead of running away or hiding from the discomfort, the greatest gift you can give yourself is to run toward it, name it, and sit with it until it reveals the wound that needs healing.
In my case, it took several days for the true source memory to surface.
At first I thought it was related to other wounds where my aligned aspiration was met with resistance from people close to me who felt threatened by my desire to expand and grow. But the feelings from those experiences — the wounding — didn't quite match in tone, so I held out a little longer, trusting my unconscious to bring me what I needed to heal.
It did not disappoint.
It was the mid-1990's. I was in my late 20's/early 30's, a few years out of business school, working for myself. ISO 9000 was big then, especially for software companies, and it was a fit with my fusion of pattern recognition, systems thinking, and visual processing.
My first two years were scrappy and solo as I operated in alignment with my Sacral — each new project or investment in a contractor or office space was met with a quiet, self-assured "uh-huh." (Sacral speak for "all systems go.")
When I signed a $400K contract my third year, something in me shifted and I stopped making decisions with my Sacral and started making decisions with my mind.
Suddenly, I was embarrassed about my tiny, one-room office space on the corner of Broadway and Sansome in San Francisco where the windows would rattle and the exposed brick would quake when the buses drove by and you could hear the sirens of every fire truck as if they were right there in the room with you.
I thought about what "success" must look like to others and signed a lease for "respectable" office space on Chestnut Street on the Embarcadero below Coit Tower. That office space also needed furniture to look legit, so I had to lease tables, desks, chairs, and a coffee table for the workspace and lounge area.
Oh, and hey, guess what? That $400K wasn't going to be realized without talent, and the clock was ticking. The temporary subcontractors I had relied on part-time were moving on to new opportunities so I needed to hire people fast. Needless to say, my hiring did not go well.
Nine months into the project I was exhausted and miserable and embarrassed and the only way out was to take my losses on the office lease and furniture and shut the whole thing down. I still feel the churning “ick” again in my belly just thinking about that very lost, very dark era.
That whole year can be summed up as being “too far out over my skis" — it was a disaster waiting to happen and it took everything in me to keep that from happening.
This was the tangled web of feelings that surfaced for me when faced with an aspirational budget for the aspirational experience we're in the early stages of creating.
Having revisited those memories after recognizing that visceral "un-unh!" in this new moment (Sacral speak for "hell, no — do not pass go!"), I can now hold that prior experience with generosity and grace for the person I was at that time and the enormous conditioning pressure she felt in her open Ego to prove herself to others:
“See? I'm a successful entrepreneur!”
“See? I signed a big client and a big project!”
“See? I have an office! In a prime location!”
"See? I'm legit! I have employees!"
The beauty of working with a team that is committed to living their Human Design is the deep awareness, trust, and respect we have, not just for our own designs, but for each other's designs as well — especially for our Inner Authorities when it comes to decision-making and commitments.
While Tara and Nell were ready to send out invitations, figuratively speaking, I was running for the hills and had to say as much. Even though I didn't know the reasons why, all I knew was that my Sacral was not on board.
In Human Design, we are not our minds. And, in fact, our minds can lead us down some really disastrous alleys and thoroughfares because the mind is caught up in masking perceived weaknesses. It is a terrible, lying, unreliable, self-destructive navigator for your most important decisions.
I apologized to Tara and Nell for not being able to meet their enthusiasm, but I didn't need to. They respected my Sacral. They didn't deny my feelings or try to talk me out of them. They didn't try to rationalize why it wasn't as risky as I perceived. They didn't take it personally (a benefit of their defined Egos). Nell went even further to assure me that the visceral "no's" are just as valuable as the visceral "yes's," and as a writer and photographer I get that — emotional clarity comes through emotional contrast.
It took me a few days to really understand all the layers and nuances of this past experience I was healing and how it was helping me to learn and grow in this new experience, and it's really quite simple:
I don't want the venue to do the heavy lifting for the experience we're creating. We're creating an immersive, intimate, transformative Human Design experience that will mark a turning point in our clients' lives — who they were before vs. who they are after. The venue should support the details and engineering of the experience — not the other way around.
We may still choose the venue that caused all my internal commotion and turmoil, and if we do it's because the experience needs it — and no other space will do.
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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