#13 okay I'm going to talk about human design.

On integrating the clinical and the mystical.

Photo by José Martín Ramírez Carrasco on Unsplash

Dear friends,

As I fleetingly sometimes mention, I am really quite obsessed with something called human design. Human design is a birth-time-based individual profiling system, kind of similar to astrology. It uses the time of an individual’s birth to generate a profile that provides an incredibly detailed labyrinth of information about how that person is designed, specifically how their energy operates and functions at the level of their body, their relationships and their community at large. Human design integrates language from astrology, the chakra system and the I Ching.

What it also is, is a system that has come into the public knowledge after it was essentially channeled by its founder, Ra Uru Hu (formerly Alan Robert Kakower) during what he called an eight-day mystical experience with an intelligence he referred to as The Voice. This experience led him to write and publish the Rave I Ching, a reinterpretation of the ancient Chinese text and the foundation of the Human Design system.

Ethics though?

Mystical voices channeled by people who were probably on acid do not really fly as legitimate sources of information within the scientific reductionist home of my prima materia alma mater. As those of you working in regulated health professions would be more than aware, there can also be an atmosphere of danger around discussions of “esoteric” frameworks that lack the kind of empirical basis we have come to associate with legitimacy and safety in our work. Having said that, I believe there is space for a conversation to be had about not only the merits of such frameworks (like human design), but (dare I say) of the ways in which they might offer corrections or remedies in more dysfunctional areas of our dominant paradigms.

Our comprehension of the world around us is filled with holes, and even in the context of its history, psychoanalysis and psychology are both so young, and born of mere mortals with their own unresolved complexes that continue to tinge our inheritance from them. We are in far more danger when we stand confidently in the position that our “gold standard” research already shows us everything we need to know, than when we dare to wade into the shadows of that which calls us to it without yet revealing its logic or reason. Before I get into some of the specific things I want to share from my human design experiment, I wanted to speak to how it might weave ethically and usefully with clinical psychology and other regulated healing practices.

There is no normal person.

Many clinical frameworks work on an unacknowledged-but-implied basis that there exists a neutral, well person. The frequency with which I am asked by my patients “Is that normal?” attests to how this is also an infiltration into our broader cultural perspective on being a person. Human design offers an alternative ideology of wellbeing by providing an incredibly detailed and particular blueprint of each person. Every person has a fixed design, a particular vehicle that has been allocated to them for their trip through life. Rather than seeing the task of healing or self development as being about aspiring to become like the ideal person, we are instead in humble studentship learning how to drive the specific vehicle that is us. Each person’s design is lifelong, unchangeable, deeply idiosyncratic and unique.

Human design extends an invitation to consider the ways in which conventional wisdom may be unhelpful to the individual, because, to put it plainly, we’re all too weird for generic advice. For example:

• Manifesting generators (one of the five human design types) have energy that is project-oriented. They are said to be here to show us how many different things can be achieved by one person in a single lifetime. They are most satisfied working on something for 18 months to two years, before moving on to a new project. This runs counter to our cultural celebration of stick-to-it-ive-ness. MGs should not stick to it - they should quit and move onto the next thing.

• Folks with an indirect light determination are said to digest life better in the dark. They’re told to consume most of their food in low-light or in the evenings. They digest best at night, so do well to go to bed on a full stomach - such different advice to the popular wisdom that it’s healthier to finish eating early in the evening. In the most extreme form of this teaching, indirect light people are considered to be nocturnal and encouraged to work and live at night as much as possible.

• People with splenic authority have an immediate, instinctual sense of what is correct for them, or of the truth, in the moment something happens. They should go with their first instinct when making important decisions. But people with emotional authority are influenced by their emotional wave, and need time to feel into all aspects of this in order to know what it true for them. They are more likely to make good decisions if they sleep on it, and take time to go through their natural ebb and flow of positive and negative feelings before arriving at a conclusion.

I think that even for someone entirely disbelieving of the whole premise of a birth-time-generated chart, the introduction of the very notion of a fixed design is a useful one. It invites a creative type of thinking about one’s life, free from the enveloping cultural conditioning we receive about what health, wellness, success and even morality look like. It can function as an antidote to shame by offering a story that protects the individual as a sane, functional, albeit uniquely peculiar creature, rather than seeing them as a failure because they do not flourish in culturally endorsed forms of learning, relationship or environment.

As an aside, I think the need to escape such pressures has sponsored the incredible upswing in the number of people being assessed for ADHD and autism, and identifying themselves and their children as neurodivergent. The concept of neurodivergence might be less relevant in the absence of a delineated idea of the “neurotypical” person. There is certainly no “typical” human design. There’s also a whole conversation to be had about the source of these ideas of the well, good, “neurotypical” person - both in clinical theory and in the broader sense - as they often paint a picture of someone who would be an ideal citizen under an industrial, capitalist oligarchy - consistent, stable, functional, compliant and fundamentally lacking in creativity. There’s something to be said for the political role of frameworks that defend the individuality of each person in this way.

Strategy, authority and personal agency.

There is a second aspect to human design that I think has clinical relevance, and that is the idea of one’s strategy and authority. These parts of the chart are considered the most essential and fundamental - if you were to only receive one teaching on human design, you would be directed to strategy and authority. Strategy is the way in which each person is designed to operate in relationship, which is determined by type. For example, the strategy for a projector is to wait for invitations. Projectors are wonderful guides and teachers who impart important information to others, but if they share this wisdom without an invitation, they will not be successful. Authority is the way in which each person best makes decisions (i.e. the examples above about emotional and splenic authority).

I find that strategy and authority create a kind of ethics - an endorsement of the individual’s right and responsibility to retain agency over their life, their decisions, and their way of interfacing with offers like teaching and psychotherapy. Human design’s founder, Ra, used them in the same way - his instruction was always to apply strategy and authority even to the teachings themselves - if you have, to use an example from above, indirect light determination, that is to say you are nocturnal, but through the use of your strategy and authority you find yourself rejecting that idea, he would tell you to leave it alone, at least for the time being.

Strategy and authority also carve out the correct role for the teacher and the therapist - not as one handing down a dogma that must be strictly followed, but rather offering a variety of suggestions in the knowledge that they may be relevant or not. This creates a freedom in the student or the patient to engage with these inputs at their own pace and in their own way, but also creates freedom in the teacher or therapist to make such offers without a sticky sense of obligation to anticipate a certain outcome. The teacher/therapist and student/patient instead become a collaborative team, both responsible and respected for their part in finding the correct path through healing and learning.

Despite its eccentricities, I cannot deny the remarkable impact utilising human design has had on my sense of self, my relationships and my work. If I had suppressed my curiosity about it, or refused to share it with interested others, on the basis of some pre-determined criteria about the legitimacy of its foundations - that is, if I had used the criteria of scientific reductionism espoused by my profession as a means of deciding - I would have undoubtedly denied myself (and those around me) a great deal. I want to be part of an ongoing conversation about its merits (a conversation that is alive and well online and around the world), my own human design experiment, but also about how to find the right place in the world of clinical practice for what is strange and ephemeral, but still has the potential to be transformational and therapeutic.

Anyway, obviously go and look at your human design chart now. 😆 (I use www.mybodygraph.com and Genetic Matrix.)

In love, and the pursuit of a shared path to a greater truth,

Kate
(6/2 emotional manifestor; left angle cross of informing)