At the beginning of this project, I put out a call for contributors to write about a particular gate that feels personally meaningful to them. I’m so happy to present to you the first guest post for this week’s Gate 23 by my dear friend Meg Koenig, who writes over at Salty Muse. Meg is a self-development strategist and certified hypnotherapist who uses play as a portal to deeper self-discovery and authentic living. She’s based in Bozeman, Montana, and the 23 is her grounding Personality Earth gate.

If you’d like to be part of this project and write about one of the 64 Gates, I’d love to share your experience and insights! Please DM me for more details.

Thanks so much for being a part of the Mandala 64 Walk, Meg!

Gate 2 Reflections

One thing before we dive in to Meg’s experience with Gate 23, as per usual: let’s take a short moment to reflect. How did Gate 2: Receptivity appear in your life over the past few days? It finally felt warm enough to plant some of my seedlings outdoors that I’ve been growing inside, and getting my hands dirty felt really good- and really perfect for the season of double Earth.

The Gates that ring in the solstices, equinoxes and cross quarter days do feel collectively important, kind of like reset points for the season ahead. With Gate 2, we’ve moved from the frequency of thunder to the energy of Earth, and I’m definitely feeling the shift in my body. A little more permission to rest, and to bloom. How about you?

Thanks to everyone who came to Superbloom, my Beltane ritual on May 5 as well, right in the midst of Gate 2’s receptive potency. It was a beautiful time spent singing, toning, creating, and learning together. The next somatic-creative ritual for the Wheel of the Year will be for the Summer Solstice- stay tuned!

Today is also the last day to get in on the early bird price for my upcoming course Your Heart is a Compass. It’s an embodied deep dive into the 8 Seasons of the Wheel, the 8 Gates of the G Center, and the 8 stages of Inanna’s descent into the Underworld. It’s gonna be fun….

Early Bird: Your Heart is a Compass

Now, onto the Gate of the week!

The Distillation of the Moment

Meg Koenig on Gate 23

I love this gate.

What strikes me most is that it is wisdom that deepens through me. I feel how in my life it moves in a spiral — reworking its magic in layers, through different lenses, through newly found wisdom as it comes online in each present moment.

It has been a joy to have guidance actively encouraging me to make things more simple and easeful — for myself first, and then for others. I have to understand something before I can synthesize it most of the time, and then other times things just arise through me that I cannot explain. I grew up in a very direct, no-fluff home and this has made all the difference in my actual strength in living into this gate.

I allow things to move through me. I recently learned the Latin phrase lectio divina — which I receive as allowing sacred words to wash over you. When this gate is activated, words move through me for myself and others in the same way. If someone is open and ready to shift, they just come through without trying. It is the same with writing.

My great test in life is timing. I am here to learn how to wait for the right moment to speak. The longer I hold back, the more powerful my influence becomes. Timing is so imperative for me because it gives my mental processes time for distillation. If I speak before I am ready, I will not be fully heard, even if I think I have been. I recognize right timing because I receive praise and recognition when it lands.

I lived this viscerally in the corporate world. Any time I spoke from a need to be seen or acknowledged, it backfired — I would be met with silence, overlooked, as if I hadn’t spoken at all. It was bizarre and disorienting. But when I learned to wait, to let a meeting move around me until someone turned and asked for my thoughts — that is when I was truly heard. Moving from ego, nothing landed. Waiting in patience, everything did. Wildly humbling. Wildly powerful. And in hindsight, absolutely hilarious.

The shadow is genuinely entertaining to me. The shadow is complexity. I know I am out of alignment when things feel complex, or when I find myself telling a complicated story about a situation.

What I find most interesting is complexity as a form of protection — because it looks like intelligence. It looks like thoroughness, like rigor, like care. Nobody calls you out for it because from the outside it resembles mastery. But underneath it is a very old fear: what if I say the simple thing and it’s not enough — then I am not enough.

This has become one of my favorite filters. If something feels simple and easeful, it is for me. If it does not, it is not meant for me right now.

I move through this evolution of the gate naturally — starting with complexity, moving into the gift of simplicity, and sometimes arriving, or helping another arrive, at the siddhi of epiphany. It is a constant dance. I find it a lovely challenge to start at a knot and work to free it.

I do let my trickster side play here. When I get annoyed I will toss something into a conversation to deepen the complexity and then quietly walk away, laughing. It is naughty. But it also helps me detach when I find myself too involved in something that is simply not mine to carry. It helps me laugh, relinquish my serious nature, and come back into lightness and play — back into the trickster I love being. The shadow becomes a boundary tool — if something feels too dense and I know I am not resourced, I will leave it alone until I am. Occasionally I am a messy, reactive human and I spill the beans before I am ready. And hey — this is life. This is real human beingness.

I first encountered Human Design about seven years ago, but found the Gene Keys shortly after and they resonated immediately. The free profile alone has been a lifeline I return to again and again. I have explored more advanced teachings with Richard and others, but the simple foundational guidance has been the most profound for me. A life raft, if I am honest.

23 in the Gene Keys and I’Ching

The Gene Keys name it beautifully: the shadow of complexity, the gift of simplicity, the siddhi of epiphany.

Reinforcing simplicity is liberating at its core — in all dimensions. This gate is part of what has led me back, again and again, to inner child work — tending to the wounds there rather than looking outside for answers. The science behind bilateral movement and EMDR is compelling in this same arena. The body finding its way back to simplicity through rhythm and repetition. Simple, practical, backed by science, and deeply healing.

I also love the I Ching hexagram language around this gate — Splitting Apart.

The image is a mountain sitting on the earth, but the earth beneath is dissolving. The lines fall away one by one from the bottom until only the top line remains — the one true thing, the elevated wisdom that was always there, waiting. Everything else quietly gives way beneath it.

On the surface it sounds ominous. But the deeper teaching is anything but.

The splitting apart is not destruction. It is the removal of everything that cannot hold. The inessential falls away. What remains is only what is true.

This is the same alchemy as Gate 23 in the Gene Keys — complexity collapsing into quintessence. The hexagram is the visual of that process. Everything that isn’t load-bearing dissolves. What remains is enough.

The 43-23 Channel: Meg’s Conscious Sun & Earth

Gate 23 is defined for me, fully connected to Gate 43, forming a complete channel. I am literally built to be a channel, which has been a wild ride over the last eight years experimenting and playing with Human Design, the Gene Keys, and astrology.

It is my Personality Earth — my conscious grounding force. And it carries the 5th line, which is its own beautiful paradox: learning to transmit without attachment to how it lands. The Heretic. The projection screen. Seen as everything, known as nothing.

Essentially I have to be OK living in paradox at all times. Fully responsible for nothing. Fully accountable for everything. And somehow, that is the most liberating thing I have ever been handed.

Starting my Substack last year was one of the clearest expressions of this gate I have lived.

In my hypnotherapy and coaching sessions and group work it shows up constantly. I am always tracking patterns — conscious and unconscious — and I trust my knowing. When I write for fun, as a form of play, I follow consciousness rabbit holes as they present themselves and trust whatever arises. You will either love it or hate it — or maybe both — and I have made peace with that. Whatever it evokes in you is part of your journey. That is the 5 line doing its thing.

In those spaces this gate feels like lightness. Like freedom. An effervescence in the body — bubbly, uncontained, a little fizzy. It moves through me before my mind has a chance to organize it into something proper. When I can catch it I like to bathe in it, relish it, recirculate it back through my system. An energy bath. Taking it in as the gift it is and letting it fully land in me before it moves on.

It is also worth naming: this is not where I make my living, and that matters. Having other ways of being in the world gives me the freedom to play here without grasping. The transmission stays clean because nothing is riding on it. No attachment to how it lands. Just the fizz, and then the letting go.

A Somatic & Creative Practice for Gate 23

When the sun transits Gate 23, try the Distillation Game — a three-minute practice for simplicity and embodiment.

Begin by bringing something to mind that feels knotted. A situation, a relationship, a decision, an emotion. Don’t analyze it. Just let it sit in your awareness like an object on a table.

Then begin drawing figure 8’s — eyes tracing the shape in the air, pencil or pen or paint brush moving in the infinity symbol on the page, a hand moving out in front of your body, hips swaying, or feet walking the pattern on the floor. Allow the movement be loose and unhurried and let the complexity of the thing breathe inside it. Don’t try to solve anything. Just move your body.

Allow the figure 8 hold it. After a minute, slow the movement down and ask your body one question:

what is the simplest true thing here? Don’t reach for an answer with your mind.

Let the movement draw it up.

Then come to stillness.

Place one hand on your heart and one on your belly and breathe in whatever word or phrase or feeling arose.

Let it land. That is your quintessence. And if you want to close the loop — write it down. Note the way it made your body feel, notice if there were smells, or sensations on your skin, or if you saw something in your mind or in the present moment, did you hear anything, awareness of anything that would be considered a 6th, 7th or 8th sense.

One sentence or one word. The simplest true thing. That is Gate 23 doing its work through you.

All about Meg:

Meg Koenig is a self-development strategist and certified hypnotherapist who uses play as a portal to deeper self-discovery and authentic living. Based in Bozeman, Montana, she works at the intersection of the body, mythology, and the nervous system — guiding people back to the simplest, truest version of themselves. Her framework, the Seven Gateways to Self-Realization, forms the backbone of her brand Salty Muse, where her tagline says it all: life is a beautiful game, let’s figure out how to play your version. I am a 200-hour registered yoga teacher, a devoted student of the Gene Keys, Human Design, and Astrology, and a lifelong investigator of what it means to live closer to yourself and closer to the land.

@ saltymuse on Instagram.

Website: saltymuse.com/

Have a gorgeous week ahead, everyone- the sun is in 23 and the earth is in 43 for the next 5.5 days, so the channel is alive for us all.

This channel is known as the “genius to freak” channel, so enjoy that ajna-to-throat connection and let your freak flag flyyy!

See you in 5 days for the sun in Gate 8: Contribution

PS. If you’d like to have a physical, IRL way to deepen your learnings of Human Design, the I’Ching & the Gene Keys- and how they fit into the Zodiac Wheel and the Bodygraph, you can order a copy of my Mandala 64 deck! I have a few decks left in hand and not sure when the next preorder will be, so get yours while it’s hot! <3

Mandala 64 is a learning and oracle deck I created last year, with one card for each gate, plus 14 cards for each of the planets and luminaries that transit through the gates.

My favorite practice is to pull the card for the current gate and place it on your altar for the week. Let it sit in your field. It’s one of the most embodied ways I know to learn the gates - not through study but through slow, repeated encounter.

Order Your Deck Here!

Participating in the Mandala 64 Walk is free. Paid subscribers get access to live rituals at each of the 8 G-Center gates through the year, plus extra goodies along the way.

The Scorpio moon showed up true to form with full underworldly intensity, evidenced by the wild events of almost everyone I talked to in that window. I went to a kid’s birthday party and the host’s father was in the hospital, calling her to say that he thought the staff there was AI. Another friend showed up whose dog had been attacked by a coyote. Meanwhile, I was having psychological ptsd from a respiratory bug that reminded me of my big-T trauma housefire near-death-experience 15 years ago. The weather was balmy, but where was the flowery ointment of Beltane to soothe all that ailed?

The Scorpio moon was doing the thing it’s supposed to do- excavate the depths, helping us purge the remains of the stuff that we truly don’t need as we enter late spring and prepare for summer. Sometimes, at the end of an illness, you cough and cough with no results except for irritation. So sometimes (like my doctor told me after the smoke inhalation from the housefire) you have to sprint until you throw up. That’s the only way to get residual smoke or any kind of clinging-on gunk out of your lungs. No gentle breathing, no taking it slow…. you have to run til you puke and get it all out with force. That is the only remedy. And in my sphere, that was the Scorpio full moon’s MO felt like over the past week.

On May 1, the moon was in the gate of Alertness- the splenic energy of fear and uncertainty and distrust. Across the sky, the sun was in the Gate of Rationalization - 3rd eye energy of thinking about something and trying to figure it out so hard that you end up giving yourself a migraine. Those are the shadow frequency of those gates, but that’s felt like the overall vibe in my world over the past few days. Sure, on May 1st there were lots of reels of flowers blooming and Maypole dances and bonfires circulating on social media, and lots of press about Beltane and the full moon being on the same day. But the energy felt heavy, far from the resplendent and magnetic blossoming and receiving that Beltane is supposed to brign in. I spent May 1st and the psychic hangover that followed feeling like something in me was still turning over, still processing, and definitely not ready to bloom. The calendar said celebrate and my body was like… not yet.

After years of intentionally walking the wheel and living the spiral of time, I’ve learned to trust that.

On May 1st the Sun still hadn’t reached 15 degrees Taurus, which is the true midway point between Equinox and Solstice. The sun was still in Gate 24, the final hexagram with the lower trigram of Thunder before the shift happens to lower trigram Earth in true Beltane’s gate 2: The Receptive. Thunder season has been running since the Spring Equinox, and Thunder is upward movement, sprouting energy, the first push through the hard soil. It’s not soft, open, or magnetic. It’s not receptive. Thunder is effortful and directional and electric. And on May 1st, the collective was still inside it, completing something important, even as the calendar flipped to May.

The full moon in Scorpio was a final excavation, not a celebration opening a new season. Sometimes you truly do have to finish something before a new something can arrive.

But then yesterday, the day when the sun actually reached 15 degrees Taurus, on the true cross- quarter day of Beltane, the energy palpably shifted.

The Sun had moved into Gate 2: Receptivity, and the lower trigram of Earth opened and revealed itself. And (despite still having an inclination to provide some disclaimer here about confirmation bias or something) I truly felt the shift, deep in my body. Yesterday, after a week of excavating the depths in my body and trying to figure it all out in my mind, I no longer felt stuck in the loop of needing to figure out what Gate 24 was trying to show me. I felt something inside me open, like a timelapse flower unfurling it’s petals with a hypnotic pulsing sensuality. It’s wasn’t the feeling of a full dramatic door swinging open, but a contraction and expansion that makes true receptivity feel safe, protected, and nourished.

I felt it in my heart and in my gut- May 5 was Beltane. Not May 1st. The turn of the earth and the living, breathing energies that it percolated into my perception said so.

This is one of the reasons I’ve come to love tracking time through astrology and Human Design alongside the wheel of the year. The Celtic holy days were never meant to be fixed calendar dates. They were tracked by thresholds, by what the land and light were actually doing. Beltane traditionally falls when the Sun reaches 15° Taurus, an astronomical alignment in the dance of mother earth and father sun. Not the first of May on a Gregorian calendar that was designed around commerce and administration.

Our ancestors’ bodies were in conversation with the changing light. They could feel the difference between the upward thunder-push of early spring and the open, blossoming, pollinating energy of late spring. And although the light and warmth and plant activity varies depending on where exactly you live, I believe that the geometry of the solstices, equinoxes, and cross quarter days deliver something energetically distinct, regardless of your location. Thunder season and Earth season are two distinct energies, with two distinct invitations.

When we attune to the actual pulse of the seasons rather than the date on our phones, something in us relaxes. We stop fighting our own timing, and we stop wondering why we don’t feel festive when we’re supposed to, or why grief arrives in the middle of what the calendar says should be a time of abundance. The earth has her own schedule. And our bodies, given the chance, will sync with it.

The G Center in Human Design - the center of identity and direction- is the heart-energy center that holds all eight gates that the sun passes through during the Sabbats of the Wheel of the Year. Every solstice, equinox, and cross-quarter day activates one of the G center gates. When I learned this about the bodygraph, it hit me in a deeper place than my mind. It made so much sense to me in my heart, in my sternum- a deep realization that the wheel isn’t just a seasonal calendar of my ancestors. It’s a map of the heart, moving through eight faces of love and direction across the solar year. Each holy day is a moment to tune in with the pulse of our hearts at the same time as the collective is tuning in with celebrations of the pulse of the earth

Gate 2 is the Beltane gate. Known as Receptivity, or Direction of the Self. In the Gene Keys, its gift is orientation, trusting our hearts about which way to face as we move into the light half of the year. Its shadow is dislocation- a feeling of being unmoored, out of place, out of season.

On May 1st, I was dislocated, and all the Beltane content made me feel even more that way. But it’s because we were in the wrong gate, trying to fit a thunder shaped block into a flower shaped hole.

By the time the sun actually crossed into Gate 2, I knew exactly where I was headed, with less urgency and more heart-open awareness of the moment.

I held my Beltane Ritual for paid subscribers last night, on May 5th, but I’ll be honest: I had been feeling like I should have done it on May 1st. Everyone knows May 1st is Mayday, it’s on the calendars, and it felt like the obvious choice. But something in me said wait when I planned the date, and I’m so glad I did. On May 1st, the energy hadn’t shifted yet.

Last night, in the ritual, I felt the difference, and it reminded me of the palpable relief my ancestors must have felt when the day came to celebrate the season of light after months of darkness. The holiday can’t come a moment too soon, but you can’t rush a new season, either. Last night the small group of us landed somewhere together, and I don’t think that would have happened four days ago.

This is a great example of what seasonal attunement actually feels like. It’s subtle, and it can take years of practicing living the spiral to notice, but it’s a lived, felt difference in the body and in the larger field.

It goes without saying that most of us were never taught to track time this way. We inherited a calendar built for industry, not for the body. And so we spend a lot of our lives slightly out of phase, pushing when it’s time to receive or resting when something in us is ready to move. So many moments go by with a disorienting wonderment about why we just feel off when we’re doing everything right.

Taken together, the Wheel of the Year and the Human Design G Center gates offer something profoundly different, profoundly simple, and, in my humble opinion, so worth tapping into as the overculture’s alien-ballroom-world gets more and more unhinged.

Each of the eight thresholds of the year corresponds to one of the eight gates in the heart center, and somatically feeling into this is not a luxury- it feels pragmatic in these times. The pulse of each of our hearts connects with the pulse of the earth. It’s that simple. And when you learn to attune to those thresholds in your own body, and see it reflected back to you in the seasonal celebrations of people from across the globe, you stop fighting your own timing and relax into the aliveness of the moment. You stop shoulding yourself and start to recognize where you are in the cycle, knowing what quality of energy is at your disposal and what the season has available for your growth & happiness.

If this feels resonant, I’d love to have you in Your Heart Is a Compass - a five-week live journey through all eight thresholds of the Wheel and the Heart, beginning May 19th, Tuesdays at 6pm MST. We’ll learn the systems and the words, but more importantly we’ll discover that feeling of connection in our bodies.

Early bird pricing closes this Friday, so don’t wait too long.

Learn more and register here.

All my love as the Earthy season unfurls <3

I have followed the path of other people’s certainty more times than I want to admit.

The reason it felt easy to do that was that I always had a name for it that sounded to me like a virtue. Adaptable. Flexible. Open-minded. I left school and followed an ex-partner to another country for a year to be on his timeline. I quit a job I really liked because someone I loved thought it was the right time. And somewhere in the middle of all of that following, I gave myself a lot of credit for being someone who could flow with things, who wasn’t rigid. Who was open, flex, and compassionate. Someone who didn’t need to control the direction.

What I was less willing to see was that in each of those pivotal life moments, I did know what direction I wanted to take. I knew not after I made the decision in a remorseful state, but right when I was agreeing to the choices. My heart had its own read on things the whole time, but it was quieter than the certainty coming at me from the outside, and I hadn’t yet learned to trust that quiet wisdom over a loud voice.

For years, through my 20s and early 30s, the stillness in me kept getting overridden by the momentum of someone else’s vision, and I kept calling that growth. I kept calling that love.

It took me a long time to understand that what I was doing was a kind of disappearing. What finally interrupted it wasn't a breakthrough moment or a conscious decision or the years of therapy where I talked in circles and told myself what I thought the therapist wanted to hear (haha). It was attuning to the seasons, and paying attention to what each season was asking of me.

The framework I have been building over the past several years, which I’m currently calling The Heart Is a Compass, has been giving me language for my patterns in a way that I find truly useful. It isn’t a way of understanding myself better in the abstract (like some chart readings can feel), but as a way of knowing what a particular season can help me learn about myself and my relationship with the world, right now.

We are currently in the window of time celebrating Beltane, the exact halfway threshold between the sprouting season and the gestating one. From Beltane to the Summer Solstice we are in the season of Earth, of full yin, the elemental signature of deep receptivity. It’s when the world (in the Northern Hemisphere, at least) tends to be in its most lush, receptive, and open state. In the life cycle of the year this is the moment of the blossom, the flower that has stopped pushing through the dark and is opening up into the light, twisting it’s stem to orient toward the sun.

The throat chakra governs this season, and the gate that opens at its threshold in Human Design is Gate 2: the Direction of the Self. The gift of this gate is orientation- the season of late spring reminding us that it’s a powerful time of year to come home to ourselves. The shadow of this collective moment is dislocation, which shows up as a feeling of not knowing which way to face, of being unmoored from your own center.

In the myth of Inanna’s descent, which I’ve been deeply initiated into this year, this cross quarter day of Beltane corresponds with the underworld gate where the goddess surrenders her lapis lazuli necklace, the beads at her throat. This necklace is a symbol for the pleasantries and niceties, the beautiful crafted speech that protects her before she has said anything real, anything from her heart’s desire.

She gives the necklace up at the gate and goes one level deeper into the underworld. What she finds without it, I believe, is the difference between saying what people want to hear and speaking from a place that can actually receive an honest response. The necklace is charming. The necklace is likeable. The necklace is also a filter between her voice and the world, and she has to take it off to find out what an unfiltered response feels like.

I think about all the times I adorned my voice with pleasantries or things that other people wanted to hear while my heart was saying something entirely different, and how long I called that being kind. One thing that keeps coming up this year in conversation is that there is a huge difference between being nice and truly, deeply being kind.

Chironic Activations

It’s within this season of blossoming that I find myself observing the collective wound of dislocation, along with the collective gift of orientation. This is the time of year when many people are launching beautiful, heartfelt offerings, blossoming into the public world with their own brand of genius that’s been incubating since last Halloween. It’s also the time of year when I witness people feeling like they’re on a treadmill and can never catch up- which turns into the embodied sense that they don’t even know if they’re running in the right direction.

The Scorpio full moon hit me pretty hard over the past few days, and I’m feeling all of this inside me. I’ve come down with a bronchial infection that is giving me some ptsd, as it’s harkenening me back to the endless coughing and shortness of breath that I felt after getting stuck in an asbestos-filled housefire in my late 20s. Scorpio is in my 4th house of home and security, so this lung thing hitting me out of the blue and it’s connected memories feel pretty on point. I also found it pretty funny that I lost my voice immediately after I published a podcast episode about the full moon, Beltane, and finding your voice. Touche, universe.

There are some other transits, too, that are hitting my chart in an even more profound way, that are giving me some clues to the wounds around connecting my heart to my voice.

My Chiron is in Gemini in Gate 20, the Gate of the Now. The big shocking sky-daddy Uranus just entered Uranus after 7 years in Taurus, and is lightint up this gate first. Uranus will be hanging out there for about a year, bringing electrical attention to a wound around being present with myself and speaking my truth.

The Gene Keys shadow of Gate 20 is superficiality and the gift is self-assurance. I have lived in that shadow in ways that are specific and recognizable to me now in a way they weren’t before. The ways I smooth things over, make myself easy, keep things light when something heavier and truer wants to come through.

This gate and this Chironic wound live in my 11th house, alongside my North Node, in the house of groups and community and belonging, and the particular ache of it is that I have always been good one on one or in small circles while hungering for the larger belonging the 11th house represents. People in my life have at times told me they wanted more from me, that I wasn’t going deep enough or showing enough of myself. I heard it and didn’t know what to do with that, because from the inside it really didn’t feel like withholding at all. I was asking questions, staying curious, being nice. It felt like offering what I had. But I think what they were sensing was the sparkly blue necklace on my throat, before I even knew I was safe enough to take it off.

My Midheaven, the place of public perception and career, falls in Thunder season, between the Spring Equinox and Beltane, In my Heart Compass framework, that season is associated with Innana’s surrender of the measuring rod, the tool for assessing progress and judging whether something is good enough or developed enough. In Mesopotamian art the measuring rod is depicted a little like a compass and square, a tool of precision. It’s the measuring mind that grabs hold of new growth and demands an answer before it has even found its direction .

My career, my visible work in the world, sits in the season that asks me to put that tool down and let what is sprouting grow without subjecting it to constant assessment. Chiron in the sky right now is conjunct my Midheaven in Aries, in the gate of Innovation, opening the wound right where this work is. And Uranus cracking open Gate 20, my natal Chiron gate, is simultaneously breaking through what has been softly managed by my measuring rod- and now that it is falling away, I can see how much my self judgement (of imposter syndrome, the shadow of this gate) prevented me from seeing the gift that shines from within it: making order out of chaos, facilitating the birth of new creations, and embracing the necessity of change to spark innovation.

From Wounded Soul to Alchemist

Over the course of the past few months, I have been meeting each week with thirteen people who have given themselves the audacity to call themselves magicians, trading readings and divinations in a container that asks us to show up as what we actually are. Chiron’s myth is that his wound never fully heals, but in the witnessing of it something becomes available to pass on to others. I am finding that to be true in ways that are still surprising to me.

What I appreciate most about this Heart Is a Compass framework that came to me in a dream earlier this year, especially in seasons like this one when the personal and the cosmological are piled on top of each other, is that it gives me something to orient by without pulling me all the way into self-analysis. Knowing that we are collectively at the threshold between the thunder season and the earth season, the 3rd eye and the throat. And that personally I am feeling activated to release the measuring rod and the necklace, gives me a place to put the experience that is larger than the experience itself. It returns me to my heart when my self perception threatens to become its own kind of strict and definite measuring rod.

What I keep learning, every time I come back around to these thresholds, is that passing through a gate once doesn’t mean you don’t pass through it again. The spiral always returns. Beltane comes every year, and Inanna descends more than once in a life. But each time around, you meet the same threshold with different eyes, different wounds, and different capacities. And what you surrendered before you will need to surrender again - but the next time it’s more willingly, with more honest grief and more accepting grace mixed together.

This time crossing into the blossoming season I am more aware of my own tendency to hide inside pleasantness than I have been before, and also more aware of the self-assurance that is quietly growing underneath it. It is still a wound. It still carries the specific ache of the 11th house, with a hunger for deeper belonging that never quite resolves. But I am learning to let my throat carry something honest and stay present for what comes back, so the wound doesn’t fester, it communicates.

People have called me both deep and fun my whole life, sometimes with a note of surprise in their voice, as if they expected to have to choose betwen the two. I remember the precursor to Facebook, Friendster, had a wall where people wrote testimonials about you (rather than notes to you). I was a freshman in college, and new classmates I had just met filled my wall with both of these words. I thought it was… weird. (I mean, the whole concept of having a personal testimonial wall was weird, and the reviews on my personhood felt stranger still)

But looking back, I do see I have walked that tightrope for a long time. I’m well versed with the depths of philosophical interconnections, and also always down to go out and laugh and bounce around on the dance floor. But this compass framework is pointing me toward something more integrated now, more toward self-assurance and presence, innovation and innocence. More toward a voice that is actually mine and not just the version of mine that is easiest to receive- through lightness or depth.

Inanna doesn’t narrate the underworld from the surface, from the world of the sky gods, although she does return there to bask in the sun eventually. For now, she speaks from the depths while she is still in them, because that is how the testimony really means something.

As for me, I am still in the descent. In the process of shedding “shoulds” and proving myself to the patriarchial overculture. In the process of seeing the parts of me that are revealed in this shedding as both/and -the complex, shadow and light beings that they are. I am learning not to fight it or rush it, but to meet it, and to witness it honestly.

This framework is the compass I am using as I walk down, and it’s a reminder that everything — even descent— has its own seasons.

I am not sitting in the static darkness waiting for the return of the light. I am letting my eyes adjust to see the beautiful nuances of color underground.

If you’re in your own descent, I’d love to share some tools that I’ve been working with to navigate more clearly in the darkness.

Your Heart is a Compass starts May 19th. It’s a place to locate your moment in the descent and shed the garments of the sky gods. To witness the dance of your shadow, and reveal a glimmer of love within the darkness that might lighten heart, just a little bit. There’s an option to add on a custom reading about your specific chart’s wisdom within this compass, too.

Sign Up Here

And if you’d like to see what my facilitation style is like before committing, I’m hosting a Beltane Ritual the evening of Tuesday, May 5th from 5-7 MST. We’ll be exploring the blossoming potential of the current moment with breath, sound, and art-making. Come honor the wheel of the year and the gorgeous flowers within your heart. (It’s free for paid subscribers with code EMBODY.)

Superbloom: A Beltane Ritual

Thanks for being here <3

Alison

And one more quick note before we drop into the energy of the days ahead: Although Beltane was commonly celebrated on May 1 in Ireland and around the world, Gate 2 is where astronomical Beltane lives, the exact midway point between the equinox and the solstice. This is a G/Heart Center gate, which means it’s one of the eight holy thresholds of the Pagan Wheel of the Year. I’ll be holding a live Beltane ritual on Tuesday, May 5 called SuperBloom: A Beltane Ritual- paid subscribers can use the code EMBODY for a free ticket, and everyone is welcome! Come learn about the history and the myth of the Green Man and the May Queen, and integrate the yin and yang within your body with a breath & vocalization practice.

If you’ve been feeling the pull of my 5-Week offering, Your Heart is a Compass, the sun in Gate 2 is a good time to listen to it! It begins May 19, and early bird pricing is live until May 5.

Early Bird: Your Heart is a Compass

Let’s get into Gate 2:

There is an essential knowing in your body that lives below the level of thought. You have probably felt a quiet internal pull toward something you can’t quite explain,or a sense of which direction is yours even when you have no receipts to prove it. This is the energy of Gate 2, the Direction of the Self. This gate embodies the deep, still quality of Earth that holds us and tells us which way to go.

In the I Ching this is Hexagram 2, Kūn, the Receptive. It’s composed of six broken yin lines, Earth over Earth. It’s the only hexagram in the sequence of 64 that’s made entirely of receptive energy. Gate 24 before it was Thunder beneath Earth, a charge stirring and returning, Gate 2 is the Earth itself, completely undivided and receptive in its yielding. The I Ching describes it through the image of the mare- a horse that is not passive, but devoted, strong in her steadiness, finding her direction by following what is true in her body.

The shadow of Gate 2 is Dislocation, and it is a unique kind of pain. It’s the feeling of being cut off from your own inner compass, not knowing which way you should go or where you belong. When this gate is in its shadow frequency, there is a grasping quality, an anxious scanning of the outer world for signals about where to go and who to be.

The gift is Orientation, which is less about finding your direction and more about trusting that the direction is already in you. And the siddhi is Unity, which is the recognition that the self and its direction are not two separate things. You are not moving toward your life. You are it, unfolding. Blossoming like a May flower. This gate is where true Beltane occurs each year for good reason: it is the fullness of spring turning toward itself, all that inner gathering now showing its resplendant face.

Beltane & The Turn of the Trigram

Gate 2 is not just any gate. It is one of the eight G-Center gates in the Human Design bodygraph that map to the Celtic holy days. 2 marks Beltane, the cross-quarter day at the midpoint between the Spring Equinox and the Summer Solstice. If you have been following the Mandala 64 Walk since the equinox, you have been living in the season of Thunder, the lower trigram Zhèn that has been running beneath every gate since Gate 25 in Aries. Thunder is electrical and initiating, the yang charge that breaks through the surface of things and sets them into motion. It is the season of the green shoot, the spark, the first impulse.

With Gate 2, the lower trigram shifts. Thunder gives way to Earth, Kūn, and it stays here through the next 8 gates, all the way to the Summer Solstice. This is one of the great seasonal pivots of the year, and Beltane is its threshold. You can feel the difference in your body if you pay attention: where the weeks since the equinox have carried a quality of urgency and forward thrust, in early May the energy softens. The world is not pushing up through the ground anymore. It has arrived, and is opening up. The blossoms are blooming, the canopy is filling in, the birds are twitterpating, and the earth beneath it all is flourishing with what has grown.

Beltane in the old tradition is the fire festival of union and flowering, the moment when the masculine and feminine principles of the year find each other and the world becomes, briefly, complete. The doubling of Kūn in Gate 2’s hexagram deeply represents that feeling. This is receptivity at its most radiant, when the earth is fully green and fully open and fully fertile, receiving the sun from a place of abundance. The compass has been found, and now the body can settle into the direction it already knows just by being.

Gate 2 in the Body

Gate 2 lives in the G Center, the diamond-shaped center at the heart of the bodygraph, located physically around the sternum and heart space. This is the center of identity, direction, and love. It is the seat of the magnetic monopole in Ra Uru Hu’s framework, the force that holds your design together and draws your life toward you. Where other centers process energy or generate pressure, the G Center orients. It is less like an engine and more like a compass.

This means the G Center is not somewhere you push from. People with Gate 2 defined may find that when they try to consciously navigate or force a direction, something goes flat. The quality of this gate’s knowing is receptive, exactly like the hexagram it comes from. It arrives in stillness. It is body-based and below the mind. The physical correlate is the liver, the organ that filters and orients in Traditional Chinese Medicine, associated with the wood element and the impulse of spring. Gate 2 is a spring gate on a deep level, with the body knowing which way is light before the mind has caught up.

The shadow expression, Dislocation, often shows up as a kind of chronic restlessness or lostness, the feeling of being in the wrong place or belonging to no particular direction. This is often the G Center’s signal that it is being overridden by mental navigation, by trying to figure out where to go rather than letting the compass do its work. The correction for Gate 2 is less about finding the right path and more about returning to the body, quieting the scanning, and waiting for the pull.

Season, Channel & Polarity

Season: The lower and upper trigrams of Gate 2 are both Kūn, pure Earth. This is the only hexagram in the sequence made of a single trigram doubled, and it falls at Beltane, the cross-quarter midpoint between the Spring Equinox and the Summer Solstice. Early Taurus holds this gate, and the doubling of Earth feels appropriate to the season: the ground has fully softened, the green is everywhere, and the body knows spring is real now without having to argue for it. This is receptive power at its most confident. The earth does not strain to hold what grows in it.

Channel: Gate 2 reaches down to Gate 14 in the Sacral Center, forming the 2–14 Channel of the Beat. Gate 14 is the Gate of Power Skills, the Sacral’s capacity to pour life force into what it loves, to find abundance through doing what is true. Together these gates form a rhythm: the direction from above, the energy from below, the compass and the engine. Without Gate 2’s orientation, Gate 14’s considerable drive can pour into just about anything and exhaust itself. Without Gate 14’s sacral fuel, Gate 2’s quiet knowing may stay internal forever, never fully embodied in the world. The channel is sometimes called the Heartbeat because it describes the most fundamental life rhythm: the self knowing its direction and the body moving toward it.

Polarity: Gate 1, the Creative, sits directly across the wheel in early Scorpio. Gate 1 is the yang gate of the G Center, the mutative spark of self-expression, the pulse of creative force that needs to come out without necessarily knowing why. Gate 2 receives and orients; Gate 1 generates and expresses. These two poles of the G Center need each other in the wheel: Gate 2’s deep yin knowing provides the ground that Gate 1’s creative fire moves through. And Gate 1’s willingness to express, to be seen, to manifest outward, gives Gate 2’s direction somewhere to actually go.

A Somatic Practice for Gate 2

Bring your attention to the center of your chest, the sternum, the heart space. Let your hands rest there if that feels right. Without trying to solve anything or find anything, just notice what is present. Is there a sense of openness or contraction? Of settling or scanning? There is no correct answer, only the information your body is carrying right now.

Take a slow breath and let your weight drop into the back of your body on the exhale, as if the earth beneath you has a little more gravity than usual. This is the physical quality of Kūn: letting yourself be held by what is below you rather than holding yourself up. Stay here for a few breaths. If a sense of direction arises, something as simple as a pull toward a person or a place or an action, don’t rush toward it. Just notice that the compass moved.

Creativity Prompts

Pull out your favorite notebook and any art supplies you like and give yourself 15 uninterrupted minutes with one of these:

Write about a time you followed a direction you couldn’t fully explain and it turned out to be right. What did that knowing feel like in your body before you acted on it? And where in your life right now is something pulling you that you haven’t yet named or trusted?

Draw or paint the image of Earth over Earth, two open fields stacked, a landscape of pure receptivity. Let it be literal or let it become something personal. What does your own deepest direction look like if it had a shape or a color?

With your Mandala 64 deck, pull the Gate 2 card and sit with both sides. Where are you living in the shadow of Dislocation right now, and where is the Gift of Orientation already moving in you?

Blessed true Beltane week <3

See you in 5 days for the sun in Gate 23: Splitting Apart.

Participating in the Mandala 64 Walk is free. Paid subscribers get access to live rituals at each of the 8 G-Center gates through the year, including this one, plus extra goodies along the way.

The second video I stopped for was about a new 3D map of the universe, which was made by over 900 researchers worldwide over the course of 5 years. Using a high-tech instrument in Arizona with 5000 fiber-optic eyes, they were able to see a whopping 47 million galaxies and quazars and 20 million stars, thus creating the most high resolution map of the universe ever made. Through this project, they hope to learn more about dark energy, the stuff that makes up 70% of the universe. (My guess: it’s probably like fascia is to the body).

The third post I clicked through was by my teacher and friend Britten La Rue in a musing about Matriarchy. She writes:

“Your self-trust is the disobedience that is already ending the patriarchy. The self-trust that you will not abandon yourself, ever.
-
One by one is how it will go. The matriarchy won’t have a single leader. It won’t have a singular hero. It is all of us.”

What struck me deeply, as we approach this Full Moon in Scorpio, is that all of these posts were about the exact same thing. There is a fundamental truth that underlies them, which feels so on-point for this Uranus in Gemini * Pluto in Aquarius era we’re just now in the beginning of.

That truth is:

The next “big thing” is a whole bunch of small things.

The next big thing is a network of interconnected small things.

Interstitia and galaxies and matriarchy, hooray! But how does that relate to the full moon in Scorpio?

Glad you asked.

TL;DR: Because Scorpio rules the compost, the season when cellular boundaries between life forms begin to break down and merge with eachother, where what once was singular becomes intimate with the plural.

The full moon on Friday, May 1st, is in Gate 44, the gate of Alertness in the Human Design Mandala. This is the gate that the sun transits through at Halloween, the cross-quarter day of Samhain, the time of the thinning of the veil. This gate is all about recognizing that we are not alone in the universe- we are part of a deeply rich web of relations.

Gate 44 lives in the Spleen center in the Human Design bodygraph, and is one of the many splenic gates of Scorpio season. The Spleen is one of the oldest centers, the most primal awareness we carry, the animal part of us that knows the truth wayyy before the mind does. The spleen is immune intelligence, great at pattern recognition, where your body reads the vibe instantly, without a single word being exchanged.

And across the sky from Gate 44, the sun is in Gate 24, Rationalization. This gate sits in the Ajna, a frequency of the mind doing loops to make coherent what you body already sensed. Gate 24 is one of the many throat center gates of Taurus season, evoking a blossoming into your true voice. Gate 24 is the place where the flower opens to the bee and says: here I am, in all my glory.

These two gates, from Taurus to Scorpio, form an axis of instinct and reason. The spleen knows something before the words are there, and the mind does its work to translate that knowing into something understandable.

The full moon in gate 44 is the Halloween gate, a splenic energy that sees through walls, that knows that the universe is more than what we can see and touch in the tangible realm. The Gene Keys calls the shadow of Gate 44 Interference, and I think that word is worth sitting with. The invisible spirits that are moving through the veil at Halloween, the ones we might tend to avoid or ward off, along with the ancestral patterns we’re always trying to not repeat - these are not actually interference, if we don’t look at them that way.

If we look at the Gift frequency of this gate, Teamwork, we can see that they are a fundamental interstitial, galactic infrastructure- a connective tissue that holds us together, that creates it’s own electrical charge. The spirits that emerge at this full moon are made up of the accumulated cellular memory of everyone in your web of relations who had to survive something in order for you to be here. Your grandmother’s particular way of going quiet when she felt afraid, or the way your great-grandfather knew before anyone said a word that the harvest was going to be lean. Instead of seeing these as curses, we can see them as messages from our spirit team. Dispatches from the deep root system that you- your beautiful, radiant self- are the flowering tip of.

Coming to Meet is the I’Ching name for hexagram 44, and I see the meeting it describes not as an encounter between two strangers on a road- but between you and the whole interstitial web of life that has been reaching toward this very moment from below the soil. This full moon in Scorpio, pay reverence to the mycelium. This full moon in Scorpio, give gratitude to the compost. To the ones who sang to the bonfire before you. To the more-than-human realm that speaks constantly in pattern, in the language of seasonality. Gate 44 is the gate that knows how to read all of what’s beneath the surface- the roots, the relational web. It is a primordial alertness in the service of recognizing that we are not alone in this, and we never were.

Full moons are mirrors. That is always true. But this one in particular is asking: what root system is trying to communicate with the spring blossom that is you right now? And are you considering it interference, or letting it come through as part of your team?

A moon of speaking from your roots

I’ve been practicing this a lot myself lately. In the Magician’s Table, a container I’m part of that I’ve spoken of here before, we share readings with a partner and then vocalize six or seven minutes of feedback and love and appreciation to our reader. No notes, just speaking from the heart, from the gut, from the spleen. And I’ll tell you, for someone whose authority in human design is G Center, meaning I make sense of things by hearing myself talk, this has been an edging practice. My voice cracks a little in the places where I still don’t believe myself, and I go faster through the things I’m not sure I have the right to say.

Taurus rules the throat in medical astrology. This whole season is a season of speaking, letting your voice move through your body the way a blossoming flower lets the sap move up through its stalk when the warmth returns to the earth, allowing whatever wants to move through move. This podcast episode, if you choose to listen (in the player above or by searching for Living the Spiral anywhere you find podcasts), is a practice in sap moving up through my stalk. I normally have notes to follow, but this one was an exercise in free speech :)

If you haven’t tried this, I recommend giving yourself a voice note today. Say something out loud that you’ve been thinking to yourself. You don’t have to post it anywhere or make it beautiful. The full moon in Scorpio is asking you to go under the surface of yourself and bring something back up to the bright sunshine, where Taurus season’s Mayday is asking you to speak it into the world as a blossom.

A Mayday/Beltane Invitation

Beltane is one of the fire festivals in the Wheel of the Year. Historically in the Celtic and Gaelic world, at this time of year all hearth fires were extinguished in the home and then re-lit from a central communal bonfire. That practice feels so nourishing …. the idea that you would let go of the fire you’ve been tending privately so that it could be renewed from something shared.

With Gate 44 holding this full moon, take a moment to remember that we are at this crossroads, the Taurus-Scorpio axis. Between deep intimacy with what is alive and blooming and a deep intimacy with everything that has gone into the compost to become the soil.

I’m weaving all of this into a course that’s been living in me since January, when I was sick and my world was filled with so much dreaming. It is called Your Heart Is a Compass, and it follows the eight gates of the G Center through the eight holy days of the Wheel of the Year, woven with the story of Inanna’s descent to the underworld. It’s on Tuesday evenings Five weeks, starting May 19th on Zoom. Early bird pricing at $222 is open through May 6th.

I know the thread count here is high. The Pagan calendar, Human Design, Sumerian myth. But when I look at the compass I painted in January, when I hold all of these threads together, I see that same interstitial, fascial, matriarchal web, and know they are not tangled. They are woven.

This course brings together different lineages of the same knowing: that your heart is the most reliable compass you have, that the earth’s seasonal pulse is always there to orient you when you’ve lost the thread, and that we have to descend deep into the soil in order to grow the most colorful blossom.

If you want a taste of what the course will be like before you commit, come to my Blossoming into Beltane ritual on Tuesday, May 5th from 5 to 7pm Mountain. It is a two-hour Zoom ritual, and it is free for paid subscribers/Embody the Revolution members with code EMBODY (hey, if you’ve read this far and you’re not a paid subscriber, I invite you to use the code for a free ticket too!)

Register here:

Blossoming into Beltane

Happy full Scorpio moon, y’all. It’s time to go deep, pay reverence to the deep fascial web of the cosmos, and rise up to speak your most flowery truth.

Questions about the course or the ritual or anything else?

Write me at alison@hearthandspiral.com.

Welcome to the new world.

Uranus moved into Gemini just a couple days ago on April 25th after 7 years in Taurus, the last of the outer planets that has changed signs over the past year. If you have been feeling a strange electricity in your body, or a sense that your cells are reorganizing underneath the surface, you are not imagining it. This is a big shift into a new reality… and it is just getting started.

I wanted to mark this pivotal moment by talking to someone who knows this eccentric and liberating energy from the inside out.

My guest on today’s show, Christa Hamilton of Practical Astros, has Uranus in her first house, and she has spent her whole life feeling electrical insights move through her in ways that have sometimes been hard to explain. She came back to astrology in a serious way during her Uranus opposition, which is a mid-life transit that tends to shake you out of whatever comfortable rut you have settled into, and hands you the next version of your authentic self (whether you feel ready for it or not).

I have been sitting with this Uranus transit personally because it is initiating my Uranus opposition, and landing right in my 11th house, where I also have Chiron and my North Node waiting to be shaken up a bit. Uranus just spent 7 years moving through my 10th house, through becoming a mother and rebuilding my entire sense of what my work is and who I am in it, and now it moves into my house of community. Uranus in the 11th house is all about liberating your collaborative visions and seeing what becomes possible when you stop trying to do it alone, and that is just the feeling that catalyzed the series I am launching today.

Living the Spiral: Magicians is a new series where I’m having conversations with practitioners who have gone through an initiatory fire - and come out the other side with powerful magic to share with the collective.

Over the past couple of months, both Christa and I have been deep inside a space called The Magician’s Table. It’s a container started by Britten LaRue, where 13 self-identified magicians come together each week to trade readings and share glimmering feedback with each other in order to hone their skills, try out new voices, and engage in the realm of real magic.

Identifying as a magician is pretty bold. When I decided to join the table (and, in doing so, to call myself a magician), the feeling of real magic hasn’t left my side. Since I’ve had the audacity to label myself a magic being, so many other magical beings have been coming out of the woodwork to meet me in that space. So as Uranus enters my 11th house of hopes, dreams, and collaborations, I’m excited to bring some vivid conversations with magical baddies to the Living the Spiral community.

This Uranian conversation with the truly brilliant Christa Hamilton is a wonderful place to begin.

Chatting with Christa was so insightful and so fun, and I’m so incredibly grateful for all the wisdom she imparted on me as we leave the sign of her Uranus opposition and she passes the torch to me (And all of you 1983-1990 babies, it’s coming for you too…!)

Christa and I talk about what it feels like to be a Uranian native, look back together at seven years of Uranus in Taurus and what that era brought to us, and we talk about how to meet the next seven to eight years with grace. Uranian electricity moves really fast in an air sign like Gemini, so we need a good toolbelt going into this hot-wired terrain.

Christa’s advice for the next 8 years landed in my body when she said it and I have been thinking about it ever since: protect your psychic bandwidth, reduce the noise, and practice your intuition like a muscle. What is coming through this transit is going to be extraordinary and new. And you won’t be able to receive it if you are already burnt out on too much information. Listen in for all the tea on Uranus in Gemini and beyond.

🎧 Listen to the episode in the Substack player above, or find it wherever you listen to podcasts!

Work with Christa:

Christa Hamilton is a lifelong student of esoteric subjects and an active practitioner of divination. Astrology is the central core of her practice, and she weaves in tarot, plant medicine, animal symbolism, and dreaming as she works. She is a graduate of the Nightlight Astrology School, a founding member of the Asteri Sofia Kairos collective, a contributing writer and lecturer for the Astrologer’s Co-Op, and a volunteer for OPA. She focuses primarily on one-on-one client readings and also creates art, writes, makes videos, and collaborates with other practitioners to make astrology genuinely accessible to anyone who wants it.

Check out all of Christa’s Practical Astros offerings!

🌀 Find her at practicalastros.com

📖 Follow her Decan Walk on Substack

📱 Follow her on Instagram and YouTube

Work with me:

Speaking of learning to trust your own signal in an era of Uranian disruption:

I opened enrollment this week for a course I have been building for a long time. It is called Your Heart Is a Compass, and it starts May 19th.

It is built around one idea: the heart is not just a center of feeling or a pump moving blood through the body. The heart is a navigation system. And when you learn to read it, you stop needing external permission to know where you are going. You stop attuning to everyone else’s frequency. You start coming home to your own hearth.

Over the course of five Tuesday evenings from mid May to mid June, we will learn about the heart through the Human Design system, the wheel of the year, somatic practices, and the G center gates, the gates that govern love, direction, and self. We’ll see through the lens of the ancient story of Inanna’s descent to release burdens of the sky-gods and descend into our heart’s deeper truth. This course is the most complete thing I have ever made, and I am so excited to be in the room with the people who say yes to it.

The early bird is $222 through May 1st. After that it goes to $333 through May 18th when enrollment closes.

If finding the compass in your heart feels resonant, especially right now as Uranus is rewiring everything and the old ways of finding direction are failing, I would love to have you there.

📬 Learn more and sign up for Your Heart Is a Compass - Early bird pricing in effect until this Friday, May 1.

Your Heart is a Compass

You can also book a personal reading or explore more of what I offer at hearthandspiral.com, and follow along at @hearthandspiral on Instagram.

A little housekeeping:

I have been creating at high volume lately and wanted to make sure you know what is living here on this Substack so you can choose what feels right for you.

There are now three separate content streams here on Living the Spiral:

• New and Full Moon Forecasts - biweekly podcasts covering the astrology and Human Design energies of each lunation, so you know what is moving in the collective sky and the best ways to work with it.

• The Mandala 64 Walk- a journey through all 64 gates of the Human Design mandala, published each time the sun moves into a new gate. A beautiful way to learn the gates in real time as we feel them together.

• Living the Spiral: Magicians - conversations with practitioners who are transforming the world through their unique magic. This series is brand new and I am excited about where it is going.

If you would like to stop receiving emails from any one of these streams but still stay subscribed to the others, you can manage your notification settings here:

https://www.livingthespiral.com/account

All three are free to access. If you want to go deeper and support the work, paid subscriptions are open and I am so grateful for everyone who has said yes to that.

If this podcast has ever helped you find your way back to yourself, the best thing you can do is follow the show wherever you are listening, leave a five star review, or share this episode with someone who is feeling the Uranian electricity of this moment. It truly makes a difference in getting these conversations to the people who need them. <3

How are you doing? Let’s take a moment to reflect on the last week in the Mandala 64 Walk. How did Gate 27: The Gate of Caring show up for you over the past 5 days? Deep thoughts about nourishment, a feeling of sacral warmth, a question of who you are feeding and whether you’re pouring from an empty cup…. I was lucky enough to spend a few of the Gate of Caring days immersed in water- a hot spring and a pool- and that felt truly nourishing to me. How about you?

Drop a note in the comments or the chat.

And before we dive into the energy of the next 5.5 days, I wanted to take a moment to plug my upcoming course, Your Heart is a Compass- it’s an embodied, creative course that is a synthesis of human design, the Wheel of the Year, and your body’s energy centers, all told through the story of Inanna’s Descent. If any of that makes you say hmmmm, click the button below to learn more!

Your Heart is a Compass

Now… onto the gate of Rationalization

Gate 24: The Story

You know those times when your mind will not let something go? You have probably had a certain thought that keeps returning to your brain again and again, like a ghost with unfinished business. You think you have resolved it and then, in the bath or on a walk or in the thin space before sleep, it comes around again, a little different this time, asking to be looked at from a new angle. This is the energy of Gate 24. It is the mind’s natural returning, the way a stream washes over the same stone over and over until the stone is finally smooth.

In Human Design this is the Gate of Rationalization, and in the I’Ching it is Hexagram 24, Fu, or Returning. The image of the trigrams is Thunder beneath Earth. This is the first stirring of yang returning after its long withdrawal, one bright line moving back up through five yin lines. We meet it in early Taurus season, in the body of the earth, where the returning is warm, finding its way back to a pondering from winter because the ground is now finally soft enough to dig into it.

The shadow of Gate 24 is Addiction. The addictive quality here is the mental loop itself, the mind’s compulsion to return to the same grooves of thought again and again. People with this gate defined might find that the unfamiliar silence feels more uncomfortable than the familiar noise, so they keep returning to the same thoughts. The gift of Invention is what becomes available to us when the loop opens: the mind turns the idea over one more time and instead of finding what it already knew, it finds something it has never seen before. That is the quantum leap, the moment when genuine novelty arrives through the process of faithful returning. It brings up a quote that I love “Addiction thinks in circles, Invention thinks in Spirals”. And the siddhi, Silence, is the recognition that awareness was always larger than the thoughts moving through it, and it takes quietude to reveal the greatest answers.

This gate sits in the Codon Ring of Life and Death alongside Gates 3, 42, and 27, the sequence we have been walking through since the equinox. The ordering, the growth, the nourishing, and now the returning: a complete circle of how something comes into being, grows, sustains itself, and then circles back to its own source to be renewed.

Gate 24 in the Body

Gate 24 lives in the Ajna Center, the awareness center located physically in the head, associated with the pituitary and pineal glands and the prefrontal cortex. This is the center of mental processing, conceptualization, and analysis. It sits between the Head Center above it, which generates the pressure of questions and inspiration, and the Throat below it, which expresses outward into the world. The Ajna is where raw inspiration gets processed into something that can be thought, held, turned over, worked with. It is the mind’s intuitive workshop.

As an awareness center, the Ajna carries a fear frequency in its shadow expression. Gate 24’s fear is the fear of not knowing and being unable to resolve the question. That fear is what drives the addictive looping: the mind cannot bear the silence between the question and the answer, so it keeps generating more thought to fill it. People with Gate 24 defined in their charts will know this particular discomfort well, the sense that if they just think about it a little more, the answer will finally arrive.

What this gate actually requires is the opposite: the willingness to stop, set the thought down, and let the Ajna rest. The Ajna is not a motor center, which means it does not have the energy to force resolution. The insight comes in the space between the thinking, the way a word you cannot remember suddenly surfaces the moment you stop reaching for it. It’s got ‘a watched pot never boils” energy. During this transit, notice when your mind is looping and exhausting itself. Looping has a quality of tightness with a slight anxious hum. But returning, the real kind, has a quality of genuine curiosity, openness to finding something new and jumping out of the grooves of comfort, making the circle into a spiral.

Want to follow all these transits easily, in your personal calendar?

Plan your life in sync with the transits with my Living the Spiral Calendar:

I just launched a digital calendar of all the astrology transits and human design gates that the sun passes through on the Mandala 64 Walk. If you spend time in a Google or Apple calendar (or something of that sort), this calendar layer can integrate with your schedule, events, and day-to-day flow. It’s super helpful to look at the transits at a glance and see whats coming! I also have a Lunar Transit calendar, great for Reflectors or people who are building a deep relationship with the moon!

Get a Transit Calendar

Season, Channel & Polarity

Season: The lower trigram of Gate 24 is Zhèn, Thunder, the electrical initiating current that has been running through every gate since the spring equinox. The upper trigram is Kūn, Earth, which is pure receptivity, the ground itself. Thunder beneath Earth is the image of potential that is present but not yet fully surfaced: the charge is there, the movement is there, but the earth above holds it in a patient, unhurried container. Early Taurus is certainly evoked in this image, like the body of spring holding so much that is still gathering itself before it comes fully forward.

Channel: Gate 24 reaches upward to Gate 61 in the Head Center, forming the 24-61 Channel of Awareness. Gate 61 is the Gate of Mystery, the pressure of the unknown, the big questions that have no immediate rational answer. A Capricorn gate, it always reminds me of the sea-goat reaching the top of the mountain after climbing for days, recognizing that the mountain it summited is only one of many in the range, reaching outward to the horizon. The sea goat looks up toward the stars and the galaxies above, and after so much ambition and labor to get to the top, they realize that they’re part of a much larger great mystery.

Gate 61 generates true inspiration, the knock from the inside, and gate 24 receives that knock and begins the long patient work of breaking it into smaller parts that the mind can rationalize. Without Gate 61’s pressure, Gate 24 can loop without traction, returning to pieces of the puzzle without the full wonder of mystery at its center. Without Gate 24’s patient rationalization, Gate 61’s inspiration remains in the realm of pure inner knowing, unable to become communicable to others. Together they move from the unknown to a way of understanding.

Polarity: Gate 44, the Gate of Alertness or “Coming to Meet”, sits directly across the wheel in early Scorpio, in the Spleen Center. Gate 44 is the gate of instinctive cellular memory, the body’s immediate felt recognition of a pattern. Gate 24 moves through the slow patient work of mental returning, and it’s opposite gate Gate 44 knows instantly, splenicly and below the mental realm. These polar gates need each other across the wheel: without the body’s instinctive pattern recognition, the mind’s returning has nothing to check itself against. Without the mind’s capacity to rationalize and renew, the body’s pattern memory can become its own kind of trap, repeating the past because the past is what it knows.

A Somatic Practice for Gate 24

Bring your awareness to the space just behind your forehead and between your eyes, the physical location of the Ajna Center. Don’t push into it, just rest your attention there lightly, the way you might place a hand on something without gripping. Notice what is moving there right now: the quality of your thinking and whether it feels tight or open, looping or curious.

Now take a breath in and on the exhale, let the thought you are carrying just loosen a little. Just relaxing the grip slightly, the way you might unclench a hand that has been holding something for a long time without realizing it. Stay in that looseness for a few breaths. The thought may return, and that is fine. Let it return naturally, from the other side of a pause, and see if it arrives just a little bit changed.

Creativity Prompts

Pull out your favorite notebook, your paints, your crayons, your play-doh, whatever calls to you, and give yourself 15 uninterrupted minutes with one of these:

Write about a thought or question you have been living with for a long time, something you have returned to again and again without fully resolving. Without trying to answer it, write about what it feels like to carry it. What does the loop actually sound like from the inside? And then, consider: what might it mean to set it down, just for a moment, and trust that the answer will arrive on its own terms?

Draw, paint, or sculpt the image of Thunder beneath Earth: something powerful moving in the depths below a quiet surface. Let it be literal or let it become something personal. What is stirring in you beneath the stillness you are trying to hold?

With your Mandala 64 deck, pull the Gate 24 card and sit with both sides. Notice which frequency you are living in this week - shadow or gift- around a particular thought or question you keep returning to. Move from there.

See you in 5 days for the sun in Gate 2: Direction of The Self, aka Receptivity!

Speaking of which- that’s the Gate where Beltane occurs, the midway point or cross-quarter day between the Spring Equinox and the Summer Solstice.

I hope you’ll join me for my seasonal ritual on May 5: Blooming into Beltane

Paid subscribers: use code EMBODY for a free ticket.

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Don’t know what gates you have defined? Book a Human Design reading with me to find out how these energies align with your own!

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But there is a story that happens before the descent that many retellings skip past.

Gilgamesh’s Refusal of Innana and the Bull of Heaven

Inanna wanted Gilgamesh. He was the most celebrated warrior king in the world, the one the gods had blessed beyond all others, and she went to him and offered herself. She was the goddess of love, and she offered love to him.

Gilgamesh went heard Inanna’s longings, and he was offered several favors by the powerful and influential queen of heaven. As he traveled he communed with his mother, Ninsun, and told the goddess about Inanna’s proposal.

“Do not let her gifts enter the house,” Ninsun advised. “Her tender touch would weaken your warrior’s arm.” Ninsun knew that the goddess of war would not help her son’s warrior nature if she was sleeping with him.

So he refused Inanna, but not gently. He scorned her in the most public and savage way available to him. He listed her previous lovers one by one, named what had become of each of them, and used her entire erotic history as evidence of her unworthiness. He called her a broken door. A fire that goes out. A shoe that pinches. He took the thing that made her Inanna - her desire, her erotic power, her capacity to love fully and move on - and he turned it into a weapon against her.

What could I offer
the queen of love in return, who lacks nothing at all?
Balm for the body? The food and drink of the gods?
I have nothing to give to her who lacks nothing at all.
You are the door through which the cold gets in.
You are the fire that goes out. You are the pitch
that sticks to the hands of the one who carries the bucket.
You are the house that falls down. You are the shoe
that pinches the foot of the wearer. The ill-made wall
that buckles when time has gone by. The leaky
water skin soaking the water skin carrier.
—Tablet VI, the Epic of Gilgamesh

As the Age of Taurus began to give way to the Age of Aries, he slut shamed the goddess of love in front of his court. And the world of the epic treated it as wit.

She wanted love from the most powerful man alive and got her own nature thrown back at her as an insult. When I reread this story, I’m filled with modern-day rage. That is what the system still does to women who want things openly. It takes the wanting itself and makes it the proof of their damage.

Of course she raged. She went to her father Anu and demanded the Bull of Heaven, threatened to break down the gates of the underworld if he refused, and sent Gugalanna - the great Bull of Heaven, her sister’s husband, the sacred force of the Taurean age that she resided over - down to Uruk. The great bull, earth god also known as the “Canal inspector of An, the sky god” threatened the city with drought and famine, sucking fertile water out of it’s canals- but Gilgamesh and his companion Enkidu killed the bull. Enkidu threw the bull’s hindquarter in Inanna’s face. She went up on the walls of Uruk and screamed her grief and her fury into the sky.

And then Gugalanna, the Taurean Bull of Heaven, was dead. And her sister Ereshkigal, down in the underworld, had lost her husband. The age of Taurus was over. The wound the system inflicted on Inanna became the wound that ended an entire astrological age.

This is what the patriarchy does with devastating efficiency. It shames a goddess for her erotic wholeness, watches her reach for power to compensate, and then calls the consequences her fault. Inanna played a part in what happened, of course. She was high on her own power. But the system handed her a role that had to be played and didn’t follow through when the rubber met the road.

The descent is where she stops playing by the sky-god’s rules.

Here is what makes all of this so much more than a myth about a descent. Inanna is Venus. She is the planet Venus before the Greeks called her Aphrodite. She is not just named after the planet; her mythos, particularly her descent into the underworld, represents the astronomical cycle of Venus.

The Sumerians tracked that bright wandering star with extraordinary precision and mapped her entire cycle onto the goddess. They tracked her appearances as the morning star and the evening star, and the dark periods in between when she vanishes from the sky altogether. The story of her descent is that disappearance. The three days Inanna spends on the hook, in her naked truth in the underworld, are the three days Venus goes invisible at inferior conjunction, passing between the earth and the sun, dying before she rises again on the other side.

Inanna is not the soft and harmonicVenus we inherited from later cultures. She is the goddess of love AND war, of desire AND sovereignty, of the erotic AND the political. Armies prayed to her before battle. Lovers prayed to her in the night. She outsmarted the great trickster god Enki and took the divine powers for herself. Her desire was enormous and her capacity for love was enormous and her rage when that love was weaponized against her was enormous. The Sumerians held all of that as one thing, one goddess, one planet moving through the whole sky. The split came later, and the circle came first.

Inanna was worshipped and empowered during the Age of Taurus - and Taurus is Venus’s own sign. Her home. The age that was ending with the death of the Bull of Heaven belonged to her. It was made of her energy, and it carried her signature, which is fertile, sensual, embodied, and of the earth. The wound the new patriarchial system gave her by rejecting her and killing the Bull of Heaven ended her age- and she knew that she couldn’t continue to live in the Heavens alone anymore.

She had to go underground.

What She Takes Off at the Gates

The poem begins famously with the lines:

From the Great Above she opened her ear to the Great Below

From the Great Above the goddess opened her ear to the Great Below

From the Great Above Inanna opened her ear to the Great Below

-Wolkstein and Kramer

Inanna doesn’t go down to the underworld empty-handed. At the peak of her glorious reign as Queen Goddess of Love, she goes dressed in everything she has. A crown of authority, lapis lazuli necklaces, a golden breastplate, the shiny ring, a measuring rod, a royal robe. She has seven adornments, representing her heavenly power, and she crosses through seven gates. At each gate she is required to remove one layer.

These adornments are the me, the divine powers. They came to her through Enki, the grandfather god, who gave them to her and later regretted it. They were formalized through her marriage to Dumuzi, the shepherd king, the ram god, one who symbolized the Age of Aries rising. In her descent, Innana is dressed in the gifts of a system that gave her power on its own terms and expected her to stay inside those terms. And she is dressed in the armor she built when the system shamed her for wanting something the system couldn’t hold.

She takes it all off. Gate by gate, piece by piece - the power she was given and the power she grabbed to compensate for what was taken. She is also, in the sky, releasing her own era. The evening star going dark. Venus disappearing into the underworld of the solar glare, shedding her visibility and her brightness and her queenship in the night sky.

This journey was far from the Persephone-Hades telling of the goddess being stolen to the depths by the dark lord. Instead, it is a laying down of ego, of pride, of heavenly pursuits. Inanna cannot get to her sister carrying all of the baggage. She cannot meet what is true wearing the costume of the woman the system made.

By the time she reaches the bottom she is fully naked and bowed low. And then she dies. And then she is hung on a hook.

The Sister Who Was Sent Away

Ereshkigal is the queen of the underworld, and in my read, she is the part of the great goddess that got sent underground when the above-world order got organized and administered. At some point in the deep past, the story says, she was abducted to the underworld and made to rule there. The surface world carried on without her.

Though depicted as a monster, she is not a villain. She is the exiled half of the whole goddess. She is everything that doesn’t fit the arrangement, everything too dark or too wild or too grieving to be the consort of the shepherd king. She has been down there a long time. And Inanna, for all her power, has never gone to visit her.

Now Ereshkigal’s husband is dead, and Inanna is responsible for his death. Inanna called the Great Bull from the sky out of pride, and he was killed. It is this that calls her down under. Perhaps the system shamed her into a corner she couldn’t get out of any other way, but either way, the Great Bull is gone. And Ereshkigal is in labor with grief, alone in the dark with the body of the bull of heaven, and Inanna finally goes.

She is going to her shadow, the invisible part of herself she exiled by becoming fully identified with the queen above, the acceptable face of the goddess, the one who fit the arrangement. And she is going carrying the full weight of what happened, even if the myth doesn’t name it directly. The reunion at the center of the descent wasn’t the real death. The death was Ereshkigal knowing that Inanna still wore the trappings, the costumes, of that world that would no longer accept the erotic and the deep. That face of death was the last thing that had to go. And it took three days.

The Ones Who Could Reach Her

Knowing that most beings who go to the underworld never return from the darkness, Inanna strategized about her re-ascencion with her close advisor, the warrior heroine Ninshubar. Ninshubar came with word of Inanna’s trapping down below, and when the gods above refuse to help her, Enki sends two beings to the underworld to bring Inanna back. They are called Kalaturru and Kurgarra in some translations. They are created specifically for this mission, made from the dirt under Enki’s fingernail, and they are neither male nor female.

This is not incidental. Every other being in the myth is locked into a role within the gendered order. The gods won’t go down. The husbands won’t go down. The servants are helpless. The only ones who can reach Ereshkigal, Queen of the Underworld, are the ones who exist outside the system entirely. They go to her in her mourning and her labors of pain for her dead husband, and they simply witness it. They mirror her moaning back to her. They offer no rescue, no advice, and no fixing. They just meet her in the dark. And she is so moved by that that she releases Inanna.

The first author in history wrote: the ones outside the system are the ones who can move freely through it.

The Husband Who Didn’t Mourn

When Inanna comes back up she finds the shepherd king Dumuzi sitting on the throne in her good clothes, not mourning her at all.

She was only down there three days, and he was already wearing the crown.

In the sky, this is Venus rising as the morning star. She has crossed through the dark and come out on the other side, visible again, but in a different part of the sky, preceding the sun instead of following it. She is changed, no longer the evening star who lit the dusk of the Taurian age. She is the morning star rising into something new, and she comes up to find the ram king enthroned.

The myth is quiet about this but it is not subtle. The shepherd king was ready, he had been waiting for the moment. The descent was, among other things, an opportunity, and he took it.

So Inanna sends him down in her place, a promise she must keep to her sister. He becomes the one who goes to the underworld- the sacrificial lamb, the dying and rising shepherd king who will later echo through so many other myths and religions. She sends him down because he is the one who should have mourned and didn’t.

But it doesn’t entirely hold. His sister Geshtinanna, enmeshed in his power, loves him so completely that she offers to take half his time in the underworld. And the myth allows it. Dumuzi gets six months above ground, in the green season, on the throne. Geshtinanna takes six months in the dark.

She does the harder work. She goes willingly into the place her brother could not bear. She is the true sacrificial lamb, offered up to maintain the ram’s power. The age of Aries rises and another woman holds the underworld so it can.

The Men Who Made the Slaying Sacred

On the other side of the ancient world, another mystery religion was also holding the death of the bull at its center.

Mithras was a Roman mystery cult, practiced in underground temples by soldiers and merchants, and its central image was the tauroctony: Mithras kneeling over a great bull, driving a knife into its neck, his face turned away as if he cannot bear to watch. Scholars like David Ulansey have argued that this image is astronomical. The bull is Taurus. Mithras is the force that ends the age. The slaying is the transition from one great era to the next.

It’s the same astronomical event. Notice the planetary layer underneath it. Inanna is Venus. Her astrological age, the age of Taurus, is Venus’s sign. Mithras comes out of the world of Mars, the soldier’s god, and Aries the ram, the warrior, the next age, is Mars’s sign.

The transition from Taurus to Aries was a transition from Venus to Mars. And part of what that transition required was making Venus manageable. The whole Inanna, the one who loved and waged war and descended and returned and held all of it in one body, had to be divided up. Aphrodite gets the bedroom. Athena gets the battlefield. Artemis gets the wild. The Inanna who was all of those things at once becomes a committee of acceptable femininity, each piece containable on its own, none of them the whole.

The Mithraic cult is, among other things, the mystery religion of that transition celebrating itself.

Where Inanna’s tradition mourned the bull, descended into grief, went to her sister in the dark, and came back changed, the Mithraic tradition made the killing the sacred act. The death of the old age became a triumph. A warrior mystery.

Mithras slays and stands over what he has slain, and his cult spread through every Roman garrison in the known world.

These are two stories about meeting the end of an actual, astronomical age. One goes downward and inward, and one drives the knife, killing the bull and fragmenting the goddess so she can never quite find her way back to herself.

It’s Time for Venus to Rise

We are now at another time of great cycles turning.

The names for what precisely is ending and what is beginning are debated and probably beside the point. What is not debatable is the feeling, the felt sense that something enormous is shifting. Old structures are cracking, and the roles that everyone was assigned are being questioned in ways that feel both necessary and terrifying. That the above-world order is showing its seams once again.

And the same split is visible now that was visible then. There is a Mithraic energy moving through the world right now, with the impulse to conquer the transition and to other the enemy. An impulse to make the slaying of the old age a glorious act, to take the throne while the goddess is underground. We are no longer in the Age of Aries, but with Neptune and Saturn in that sign we are feeling the Mars energy. The arrow energy, the straight line energy that knows where it is going and will cut through whatever stands between here and there.

And there is Inanna’s way, which asks something harder. Inanna asks us to go down into what is being lost as we move through the cycles, to strip off the adornments of the arrangements that are showing their dark shadows- even the ones that felt like power, comfort, or glory. It’s time to find the exiled sister, the exlied parts of ourselves that we hid underground, and be there with them in their grief. It’s time to be moved by the ones who exist outside the system, to whom none of this ‘end of the world’ narrative is anything new. It’s time to come back up through all seven gates carrying what you really know because you really took the time to go down into the depths.

The Venus that is rising now is not the soft one we think we know. She is the whole one. Love AND war. Descent AND return. The morning star AND the evening star. She is the circle, the glyph with the world held inside the round, not the arrow shooting out into conquest. She holds the cycle, the whole wheel, the return built into every departure.

That is what integration looks like: the fragmented goddess finding her way back to herself. The parts that were divided up and made manageable to the powers that be slowly recollecting into one.

She is coming back. The compass doesn’t point away from the dark.

An Invitation to Tune Your Own Compass

I built a course around this myth and how we can work with her to release the adornments of ego and find our true orientation, our internal compass.

It’s called Heart is a Compass, and it maps the eight gates of the Heart/G Center in Human Design to the eight holy days of the Wheel of the Year, with Inanna’s descent woven through as the living myth underneath it all.

We meet live for five Tuesdays beginning May 19, and so I’m excited to be bringing it to you.

If this post tugged at something in you, you can find out more about the course and register here. <3

Your Heart Is a Compass

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Welcome to another installment of the Mandala 64 Walk.

How did the sun in Gate 3: Ordering show up for you over the past 5 days, starting with that raucous Aries New Moon and staying there through the Mars/Saturn conjunction in Aries? I’m curious what the chaotic beginning-of-things energy might have stirred up. Drop a note in the comments or the chat!

This week we get a teeeny bit of relief, as the sun has entered Taurus, the sensual, Venus-ruled sign of the bull. 5 planets are still in Aries, though, so the fire tide is high, and the sun is squaring off with Pluto soon… SO the sun in the Gate of Caring might be just the balm we need to get through it.

Want to follow all these transits easily, in your personal calendar?

Plan your life in sync with the transits with my Living the Spiral Calendar:

I just launched a digital calendar of all the astrology transits and human design gates that the sun passes through on the Mandala 64 Walk. If you spend time in a Google or Apple calendar (or something of that sort), this calendar layer can integrate with your schedule, events, and day-to-day flow. It’s super helpful to look at the transits at a glance and see whats coming! I also have a Lunar Transit calendar, great for Reflectors or people who are building a deep relationship with the moon!

Get a Transit Calendar

Also: I’m putting out a Call for Guest Writers: If you’re interested in writing a guest post for one of the 64 gates, I’d love to hear your perspective and co-promote you and your work! <3

Shoot me a DM and let me know which gate you’re interested in- I’d love to hear from you!

Gate 27: Caring

Something in your somatic awareness shifts a bit this week. The sun crossed out of Aries and into Taurus on Sunday, and with it we step out of the territory of initiation, shock, ordering, and chaos-as-void, and into a different kind of lived experience. Taurus is the body that knows how to inhabit itself. It knows what it needs to feel held. It knows how to eat well and rest well and tend to what is living around it, slowly, with full presence.

Gate 27, the first full gate of the sign of the bull, holds the essence of that intelligence. In Human Design it is called the Gate of Caring, and its territory is nourishment in the most physical and instinctual sense. This gate represents is the mammalian, sacral, animal knowing of what a living thing needs to survive and thrive, like the person who arrives with food before you knew you were hungry.

The Gene Keys title for this energy is “Food of the Gods,” and Rudd places it in the Codon Ring of Life and Death, alongside Gates 3, 42, and 24 -the last gates we have been walking through this Aries season. That sequence now makes a kind of sense: disorder (3), growth (42), rationalization (24), and now nourishment (27). Life begins in difficulty, matures through growth, comes to terms with it’s own existence, and sustains itself through care.

The shadow of Gate 27 is Selfishness, and it moves in two directions at once. One is hoarding, protecting your own resources at the expense of the whole, and the other, just as common, is the self-abandonment that looks like giving: pouring from an empty cup, giving past your genuine capacity, and building resentment that has nowhere to go. Both of these shadowy frequencies are based in the same fear: that there is not enough to go around.

The gift of 27, Altruism, is when you feel your connection to the whole clearly enough that giving becomes natural, the way a tree gives out oxygen and the way the sun shines. The siddhi of Selflessness is the shore just beyond that, a complete dissolution of giver and receiver into one force of light. As Rudd writes, “to give is to receive”, and at the highest frequency of this gate, that is simply true all the way down.

Gate 27 in the Body

Gate 27 lives in the Sacral Center, that deep generative hum in the lower abdomen we visited with Aries Gates 42 (Growth) and 3 (Ordering). But where Gate 3 carries the mutative pulse of new beginnings and Gate 42 carries the energy of growth via completing cycles, Gate 27 is the Sacral’s nourishing function. The life force here is oriented toward feeding, sustaining, protecting what is alive and growing.

The Sacral is not an awareness center, which means this function does not operate through thought or deliberation. It knows through sensation who or what needs tending, and it moves toward that thing. The trouble in the shadow frequency is that the Sacral’s generative force can override the body’s own signals, feeding others past the point of depletion, unable to register the body’s own hunger beneath all that giving.

People with an undefined Sacral will feel this field amplified during the transit. There can be a pull toward caretaking others, a heightened sensitivity to need in the people around you. The invitation is to notice the pull without immediately acting on it. The Sacral’s response is felt, not thought. You can trust what the body knows without following every impulse. Let yourself be nourished first, even just a little, before you reach outward.

Season, Channel & Polarity

Season: This week sits at the threshold of two seasonal frequencies. The lower trigram of Gate 27 is still Zhèn, Thunder, the electrical frequency that has been running through every gate since the spring equinox. And the upper trigram shifts to Gèn, Mountain, which brings stillness and containment. Thunder beneath a mountain is an image of tremendous force held in a stable container. The I Ching places us at the moment when the charge of spring is beginning to be absorbed into solid ground.

Channel: Gate 27 reaches toward Gate 50 in the Splenic Center, forming the 27-50 Channel of Preservation. Gate 50 is the Gate of Values, the instinctive knowing of what is worth sustaining, what a community needs to survive long-term, and what must be protected. Gate 27 provides the fuel and the drive to nourish. Gate 50 provides the discernment about where that nourishment belongs. Without Gate 50’s splenic intelligence, the caring energy of Gate 27 can flow indiscriminately, unable to sense where it will genuinely help and where it will quietly enable dependence. Together they form the whole channel: the warmth of care aligned with the wisdom of limits.

Polarity: Gate 28, the Gate of the Game Player, sits directly across the wheel in early Scorpio. Gate 28 carries the willingness to take on struggle, to fight for something that matters, to risk everything in service of a life that feels worth living. Where Gate 27 is about preservation and sustenance, Gate 28 is about the purposeful encounter with risk and death and the question of what makes it all meaningful. The polarity holds both: without nourishment, there is no capacity for the game. Without the game, nourishment has no direction.

A Somatic Practice for Gate 27

Come into your body and feel where you are holding tension right now. Not dramatically, just the ordinary ambient tension of a day, like a pull across the shoulders, a subtle tightening in your chest or belly. And now, before you do anything for anyone else, find one small way to offer your own body something it needs. Something immediate and physical, like a glass of water, both hands placed warm against your lower belly for a minute, or a few breaths that extend all the way down into your sacral space.

Gate 27 lives in the Sacral and it is one of the few gates that asks you to start with yourself before moving outward. The body genuinely cannot give what it does not have. Feel what it is like to tend to your own body as if it were something precious and living like a child, because it is. Notice any resistance to that. That resistance is the shadow. Just notice it, feel it, and breathe into the place in your lower belly where your life force lives, and that in itself is giving yourself the care you need!

Creativity Prompts

Pull out your favorite notebook, your paints, your colored pencils, whatever calls to you, and give yourself 15 uninterrupted minutes with one of these:

Write about someone who nourished you without agenda, whose care for you was clean and real. What did it feel like in your body to receive that? And then, honestly: what is your relationship to receiving care? Where do you let it in and where do you deflect it?

Draw or paint what nourishment looks like as an image or a scene. It might be a garden, a table, a body of water, a pair of hands. Let your hand follow the feeling rather than the concept.

With your Mandala 64 deck, pull the Gate 27 card and sit with both sides. Notice which pole you tend to live in around nourishment: withholding or over-giving. Let the card show you what the centered version of this energy looks and feels like in your body.

See you in 5.5 days for the next gate of Taurus season, the Gate of Rationalization (Gate 24).

If you have any thoughts about how the Gate of Caring is showing up in your world, or if you have this gate defined in your chart, let me know in the comments!

(Don’t know what gates you have defined? Book a Human Design reading with me to find out how these energies align with your own!)

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And if you know someone who is curious about human design, please share this post! Thanks for coming along with me as we walk the 64 gates of the Mandala.

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Thanks for your patience with this one- I know you were waiting on the edge of your seats wondering “When is the Gate of Growth article going to drop?!” and it never did… and here we are in Gate 3 territory, rung in by Friday’s new moon in Aries in this gate of chaos > innovation.

I just got back from a whirlwind trip to Miami, where I was a speaker at the A Human Design Experience Conference. I thought I’d have more down time to put together a post for my Mandala 64 Walk, but I was nonstop vibing the whole 4 days and didn’t want to miss a minute of the connections, learning, and fun.

I’ll be sharing more about the experience soon- but for now, onto the gate of Ordering!

The sun moved out of the Gate of Shock (51) and into the Gate of Grown on April 11th. It moved through Growth (42) until Thursday April 16th, when it sashaed into the Gate of Ordering (3) and met the moon and Chiron there.

The moon has now moved on to Taurus and beyond, but there are still 6 planetary bodies in Aries- Sun, Neptune, Saturn, Mars, Mercury, and Chiron, so all that talk you’ve been hearing about both new beginnings and temper tantrums continue to be in effect this week.

A reminder for the week ahead: slow is smooth, and smooth is fast.

Want to follow all these transits easily, in your personal calendar?

Plan your life in sync with the transits with my Living the Spiral Calendar:

I just launched a digital calendar of all the astrology transits and human design gates that the sun passes through on the Mandala 64 Walk. If you spend time in a Google or Apple calendar (or something of that sort), this calendar layer can integrate with your schedule, events, and day-to-day flow. It’s super helpful to look at the transits at a glance and see whats coming! I also have a Lunar Transit calendar, great for Reflectors or people who are building a deep relationship with the moon!

Get a Transit Calendar

Gate 3: The Story

The old character for this hexagram shows a sprout pressing up through the crust of the earth. It’s the first tender push of the sprout, the part that happens underground and in the dark, before anything is visible from above.

Gate 3 is that moment. It lives in the Sacral center, and it can have a quality that is easy to mistake for confusion or chaotic aimlessness. But you are not behind. You are in the earliest stage of something that does not yet have a form. The Sacral is churning with creative life force, and Gate 3 asks it to hold that charge without discharging prematurely into just any available shape. The gate’s name is Ordering, but the order comes later. What comes first is always the mess.

In the Gene Keys, the shadow here is Chaos, and what Rudd means by chaos is not random noise but rather the fear of change itself, the fear that if we stop managing and controlling the shape of things, something terrible will emerge. The word chaos comes from the ancient Greek khaos, meaning emptiness, vast void, or chasm, related to the verbs kháskō and khaínō, meaning “to gape” or “be wide open.” The Proto-Indo-European root is cognate with Old English geanian, “to gape,” which is also where we get the word yawn. So when we think of Gate 3’s chaos, it isn’t disorder. It’s the open mouth before the first word, the gape before creation. In Hesiod’s Theogony, chaos is the primeval emptiness of the universe before things came into being, from which Darkness and Night were born, and eventually Light and Day.

The “chaos = mess” meaning is a later imposition. The original is much closer to Gate 3’s actual energy: the pregnant void, the wide-open space before form arrives.

The gift, Innovation, arrives when you stop needing to know what the new thing will look like and start following the pulse of what wants to become. The siddhi of Innocence is the other shore: a state where life is simply delightful again, where the not-yet-formed is not a mess or problem but a real invitation to begin again.

This gate follows Gate 51 (Shock) and Gate 42 (Growth) in our Aries walk. We have been jolted awake, invited to mature and complete, and now we are back at the beginning, which is exactly where a new cycle begins. The seed has been planted. The push through the hard ground is underway.

Gate 3 in the Body

Gate 3 lives in the Sacral Center, the body’s primary motor, located in the lower abdomen roughly between the navel and the pubic bone. This is the visceral, generative hum of life force itself: the energy that fuels sustained work, reproduction, sexuality, and response.

Where the Heart/Will Center we visited with Gates 21 and 51 is about willpower and ego, the Sacral is pure animal aliveness. It does not think. It responds. It knows what it wants through sensation and movement, through the body’s yes or no, mmhmm and mmm nnmm , and Gate 3’s energy within it has an on-off mutative quality, a pulse that moves and then goes still, moves and then goes still. Trying to force this energy into a steady stream is exactly what creates the shadow experience of chaos and confusion.

The Sacral Center with an open or undefined configuration is especially porous to the field of this transit. If your Sacral is undefined, you have been taking in and amplifying this churning, generative, mutative energy over the past several days. The invitation is to feel it without becoming it, to notice what the pulse is pointing toward without needing to act before the timing is right.

Season, Channel & Polarity

Season: We are still in Thunder season, that deep electrical Aries drumbeat that has been running through every gate since the spring equinox. Gate 3’s lower trigram is Zhèn, Thunder, which has been the consistent environmental frequency of this season. But now the upper trigram shifts: where Gate 51 (Shock) was Thunder over Thunder, Gate 3 is Water over Thunder. The I Ching places us in a thunderstorm where the lightning has already struck and the rain is beginning to fall. The electricity is still present in the ground, but now something is being absorbed, nourished, moved through. Water over Thunder is not a gentler energy but a more complex one. The initiating force is now covered by depth, by the unknown, by what moves below the surface. It also evokes an image of a blade of grass growing through frozen water, icy ground, to make its way to the surface with rumbling motion and innovation.

Channel: Gate 3 reaches toward Gate 60 in the Root Center, forming the 3-60 Channel of Mutation. Gate 60 is the Gate of Acceptance, and it holds the wisdom of limitation, the understanding that structure is not the enemy of creativity but its lovely container. Gate 3 is the mutative spark and Gate 60 is what gives it timing and form. Without Gate 60’s grounding, Gate 3 can feel like pure flux, all pressure and no channel for it to move through. When the two meet, something genuinely new becomes possible. This is a format channel, meaning it shapes the flow of energy throughout the entire system.

Polarity: Gate 50, the Gate of Values (the Cauldron), sits directly across the wheel in late Libra. Gate 50 is the family soup bowl that holds ancestral values, integrity, the long-term nourishment of what we have built. Gate 3 is the wild mutative seed of new inventions, and across the sky Gate 50 is the vessel that knows what is worth tending and what needs to be released. The polarity holds both the eruption of the new and the wisdom of what to do with it once it has arrived.

A Somatic Practice for Gate 3

Bring your attention to your lower belly, the broad soft space below your navel. Place both hands there if that feels good, one layered over the other. The Sacral Center lives in this territory, and Gate 3’s energy here is often experienced as a low, churning vitality that doesn’t quite know where to go yet.

Take a few breaths down into this space. You are not trying to activate anything or resolve anything. You are simply making contact with whatever is alive here right now in this moment. There may be restlessness or a sense of something swirling, unfinished. There may be a kind of underground hum. Let it be whatever it is.

With each exhale, feel your lower belly soften slightly. With each inhale, let the breath move all the way down. Notice if there is any held breath near the pelvic floor, any subtle bracing in the hips. Gate 3 holds the beginning of things, and beginnings can feel uncomfortable in the body. You don’t need to resolve that discomfort. You just need to breathe into the place where the sprout is pressing through.

Creativity Prompts

Pull out your favorite notebook, your paints, your colored pencils, whatever calls to you, and give yourself 15 uninterrupted minutes with one of these:

Write about something you are in the very beginning of, something that doesn’t have a shape yet. Don’t describe what you hope it will become. Describe only the sensation of being in the not-knowing. What does it feel like in your body to be at the very start of something?

Draw or paint a seed underground, in the dark, before it has broken through the surface. What is around it? What is the quality of that dark earth? What is the first movement of the push upward?

With your Mandala 64 deck, pull the Gate 3 card and sit with both sides. Notice which frequency is most present in your life right now: the shadow of chaos, or the gift of innovation and play? . Let your actions move from there.

Gate 42: A Look Back to last week

The sun was in Gate 42, the Gate of Growth, from April 11 through April 16, and I was still in Miami for most of it, so this one is coming to you in retrospect. How did you grow last week?

Gate 42 is the sacral gate of completion and the end of cycles. In the Gene Keys it moves from the shadow of Expectation through the gift of Detachment to the siddhi of Celebration. Richard Rudd writes about what happens when we hold an expectation without being attached to the outcome, and how detachment is not coldness but a real trust in the ebb and flow of what comes. The siddhi of Celebration is the moment when the observer and the observed collapse into one, when life is simply funny and full and complete all at once.

Gate 42 lives in the Sacral Center as well, and it forms the Channel of Maturation with Gate 53 in the Root Center. Together they carry the full picture: 53 is about starting, 42 is about finishing. The hexagram is Wind over Thunder, and the I Ching knows it as Increase. It’s the sense that when a cycle completes with full presence and willingness, something new always grows from it.

Looking back at that week, last Saturday to Thursday: where were you finishing something? Where were you releasing an expectation? And what are you carrying forward from that ending into the voidlike beginning that Gate 3 now asks you to work with?

We’ve now reached the end of Aries season, and the next gate the sun enters will be the first full Taurus season gate: It’s Gate 27, the Gate of Caring. Sounds like something we truly need right now…. stay tuned.

Also, I’m putting out a Call for Guest Writers: If you’re interested in writing a guest post for one of the 64 gates, I’d love to hear your perspective and co-promote you and your work! <3

Shoot me a DM and let me know which gate you’re interested in- I’d love to hear from you!

The new moon is exact on April 17th at 5:51 a.m. MDT, and it falls in Gate 3, the Gate of Ordering. This is the energy that the I’Ching calls Difficulty at the Beginning. The image is a blade of grass pushing through frozen ground, a single spark in a dark void of night. It does not know what it will become- a tree, a raging fire. But it presses toward light because that is the only thing it knows how to do.

Chiron, the wounded healer, is sitting right there along with the Sun and Moon, which means this new moon is dropping it’s seeds directly into old Aries wounds. This moon could activate the places where beginning new has felt unsafe or where your instinct has been silenced. The last time we had a new moon conjunct Chiron in Aries was April 8, 2024, for the Great American Solar Eclipse. I recently looked back to an article I wrote for Astrologer’s co-op about that eclipse, and was reminded how potent it was. That eclipse was in the Gate of Shock, and it truly broke something open.

Now, this new moon conjunct Chiron is asking what you want to plant in the fertile soil of the ground that broke open 2 years ago.

The dwarf planet Eris is also tightly conjunct the Moon at this new moon, and although I don’t always work with asteroids in my reports, she is definitely worth mentioning. Eris is the celestial body associated with the goddess of discord, the one famously left off the guest list of Peleus and Thetis’ wedding (the future parents of Achilles) because she was thought to be a troublemaker. In myth, her excluded presence from event eventually unraveled an entire civilization.

Astrologically, Eris is not necessarily a chaos-maker but rather a truth-revealer- and she’s here with Chiron, the sun, and the moon in the Gate whose shadow is known as Chaos. Eris is a force that disrupts false harmony by bringing to the surface what was already there but not being spoken about. She has been in Aries since 1925 and she moves so slowly that her presence here is generational. Conjunct the Moon at this new moon in the final degrees of Aries, Eris is asking what you have been swallowing to keep the peace. She wants to reveal what has been excluded from your own story, and what uncomfortable truth is ready to stop waiting at the door.

The Sun, Moon, Chiron, and Eris are all gathered in Gate 3, Difficulty at the Beginning, with the shadow of Chaos, the gift of Innovation, and the siddhi of Innocence. Instead of conjuring a mess that can’t be cleaned up, I like to think of Chaos here as original creative state, the condition of your inner child before they learned to color inside the lines. This new moon is the moment in the void before the form arrives, when everything is still possible and nothing is fixed and the raw material is alive in your hands.

The other planets in Aries

At the time of the new moon, Neptune and Mercury are meeting in Aries Gate 25, known in the I’Ching as Wu Wang: Innocence, or Heaven over Thunder. This is the gate of love without agenda, evoking a heart that has released its constriction, allowing the mind and body to move through genuine openness rather than tight strategy. A heart center gate in the bodygraph, Mercury and Neptune here are giving us an assignment to release the tension in our hearts through our breath, our laughter, and our communication. Just enough to let a little light in. (Thanks, Leonard Cohen).

Also on this new moon, Mars and Saturn are exactly conjunct in Aries Gate 17, known as Following, the gate of opinions and far-sightedness. This is some tense energy- two of the malefic planets are piled on top of each other. In gate 17, they are asking us to release our deeply defended opinions in favor of a more omnicient, longer view. Zoom out from your third eye, and un-furrow your brow.

All three of these gates (along with all the gates in Aries) have Thunder as their lower trigram. Thunder, the trigram that takes us from the Spring Equinox to Beltane in the Human Design Mandala, is the shaking that makes way for what is new.

Tune in, turn on….

This episode opens with a three-minute coherent breathing practice to help you arrive before we go deep into the gates and planets. Then we walk through each gate with its I’Ching image and Gene Keys shadow, gift, and siddhi. I also revisit the 2024 eclipse and why this new moon is a direct continuation of that thread.

Listen to the episode in the Substack player above, or anywhere you find podcasts.

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This new moon, remember: Your Heart is a Compass

If this new moon is stirring something deep for you - if you can feel something inside you that is trying to sprout out into a new way of being, or if you’re seeking a more aligned direction in your decision making process- I want to tell you about my new offering Your Heart Is a Compass.

This is a five-week live course starting on May 19th, built around the 8 gates of the Heart/G Center in Human Design, the 8 holy days of the Wheel of the Year, the descent and return of Inanna, and the question of what it really means to let your heart lead.

We will work with the Heart Chakra (Known as the G-Center in Human Design) as a navigational system, as something you can feel in your body moment to moment and follow in your life season to season.

Each Tuesday from May 19-June 16 is a live session with me, with time for embodied practice and real conversation. Each week also comes with a guided meditation to ground and center in between meet ups.

In these times of great insecurity and propaganda, some of our old maps are failing us. There has never been a better time to find a compass that can help you orient, one based on the ancient wisdoms of your body and the earth…. with a little help from the goddess. I hope you join me for this creative, somatic, educational opportunity to tune our compasses together.

Early bird pricing (only $222) is open until May 1st. If something in today’s episode is pulling at you, this course is the longer work of it. I’d truly love to see you there.

YOUR HEART IS A COMPASS — EARLY BIRD LINK

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And if you’re not ready to jump into a full course but want to support my work and get a taster, my paid subscription tier, Embody the Revolution, is only $8/month and includes bonus articles & podcasts as well as live seasonal rituals on Zoom to ring in the equinoxes, solstices, and cross-quarter days.

The next ritual celebration will be held on May 5th in honor of Beltane and Mayday.

Don’t be a stranger…

You can follow the spiral in a few places. On Instagram I’m hearthandspiral, where I post transit reflections, gate walks, and the occasional voice note from my garden.

This Substack, Living the Spiral, is where my longer work lives. And if you want to go deeper, hearthandspiral.com has readings, courses, and my Mandala 64 learning & oracle deck. Come say hello wherever feels right.

Thanks for coming along for the ride.

This week, the sun is moving into the Gate of Shock, right as the lineup of all the planets in Aries move into formation … hold onto your butts.

A quick plug for something that might be useful:

Plan your life in sync with the transits with my Living the Spiral Calendar:

I just launched a digital calendar of all the astrology transits and human design gates that the sun passes through on the Mandala 64 Walk. If you spend time in a Google or Apple calendar (or something of that sort), this calendar layer can integrate with your schedule, events, and day-to-day flow. It’s super helpful to look at the transits at a glance and see whats coming! I also have a Lunar Transit calendar, great for Reflectors or people who are building a deep relationship with the moon!

Get a Transit Calendar

Gate 51: The Story

Thunder repeated: the image of Shock.
Thus in fear and trembling
The superior man sets his life in order
And examines himself.

The Sun just spent several days in the energy of the hunter, where we were focused on tracking resources, scanning the horizon, taking aim, and biting through- taking decisive action on something. Now the ground shifts and shakes, quite literally. Gate 51 arrives the way thunder and lightning does, with the whole sky splitting open at once and your body responding before your mind has caught up. Get ready.

This is the gate the I’Ching calls the Arousing. It’s trigrams are Zhèn doubled, Thunder over Thunder. The archetype of this energy is the shaman, the initiator. This is a person who goes somewhere others haven’t gone and comes back changed in ways that are challenging to put into worlds. We often think of shock only in terms of unpleasant events, but we must remember that we can also be shocked awake, by the release of tension that comes with an unexpected success.

People who have Gate 51 defined in their charts often have lives that read this way: a series of before-and-after moments, of being cracked open by experiences that had no business being as significant as they turned out to be. They carry those stories in their bodies and when they tell stories of them, something in the listener shifts too, initiating them through what feels like an electrical current.

The shadow of this gate in the Gene Keys is agitation. In its more withdrawn form it goes quiet, unable to channel the shock, irritated with the energy and unable to trust that the disruption might be moving somewhere useful. In its more reactive form it provokes and pokes. It might even manufacture the lightning strike energy because the nervous system has come to expect jolts and struggles to tolerate the stillness between them. The underlying fear is the same in both: that the next shock won’t be survivable. That vigilance lives in the body as a kind of perpetual startle, a wired readiness that never fully discharges.

The gift is initiative, a word commonly associated with the sign of Aries that this gate is in. As we evolve along the frequency of shock, we accept that conditions will never be perfect and decide to take the reigns anyway, like a horse or a ram riding into a cosmic storm. The siddhi of Gate 51 is awakening. This is what happens when the ground falls out from under you or you get lit up by a bolt of lightning, and you realize you are still here- and more alive than ever before. The shock itself is the teaching, with the bolt of lightning and the rumble of thunder being the illuminating force.

Gate 51 in the Body

Gate 51 lives in the Heart/Will/Ego Center, which is the same center we just experienced with Gate 21. The Heart Center governs willpower and is one of the only motor centers with a direct connection to the Throat.

Physically it corresponds to the heart muscle, the stomach, the thymus gland, and the small intestine. It is the center of immune recognition, the body’s capacity to know what belongs and what doesn’t, what is self and what is other. That function is worth sitting with in the context of shock: a shock is precisely the arrival of something that breaks the boundary between the familiar and the foreign, between the world you knew and the one you are now standing in.

Where Gate 21 engaged the jaw and the gut as the site of willpower and control, Gate 51 tends to live a little higher, in the chest, in the space behind the sternum where the thymus sits. The thymus trains the immune system in early life to recognize self from non-self. It is the body’s initiation chamber. Under conditions of chronic shock or prolonged hypervigilance, that whole system can become dysregulated. The Heart Center as a whole can develop patterns of striving past genuine will into performance, or collapsing into withdrawal.

People with an undefined Heart Center will feel this transit’s field especially strongly over the coming days. There can be an amplified urge to prove something, to take dramatic action, to match the jolt of the transit with one of your own. The invitation with an open Heart Center is to notice the electricity without discharging it. The shock belongs to the field.

Season, Channel & Polarity

Season: The lower trigram through this stretch of Aries has been Zhèn, Thunder, and Gate 51 doubles it: Thunder over Thunder. This is the most concentrated expression of Thunder season in the whole wheel. Two thunders stacked on eachother feel omnidirectional, arriving from above and below simultaneously. The upper and lower trigrams are identical, which in the I Ching points to an intensification of the initiating, cracking-open quality of this energy. Whatever this gate wakes up in you, it tends to wake it up fully.

Channel of Initiation: Gate 51 reaches across to Gate 25, the Spirit of the Self, in the G Center, forming the Channel of Initiation. Gate 25 carries unconditional love, the innocent open-hearted presence that holds steady through anything. Gate 51 is the shock and Gate 25 is the love that survives it. Without the grounding of Gate 25, the Gate of Shock can move wildly without direction, initiating for the sake of initiating, disrupting without knowing where it is headed. Gate 25 provides the compass, the orientation toward spirit that the thunder is always seeking. Together this channel initiates people into their hearts, which is among the most disorienting and necessary things that can happen to a person.

Polarity: Gate 57, the Gate of Intuitive Clarity, sits directly across the wheel from Gate 51. Gate 57 lives in the Splenic Center, the oldest awareness center in the body, and it operates in the now. Gate 51 moves like thunder and Gate 57 listens like a body in stillness, registering safety or danger through sensation rather than through thought or action. Where Gate 51 jolts you awake, Gate 57 tells you what to do with the information once you are standing. The polarity holds both the bolt and the listening that follows.

A Somatic Practice for Gate 51

Bring your awareness to your sternum, the long flat bone down the center of your chest. Place one hand there and feel it. The thymus gland sits just behind the upper part of it, and this is where Gate 51’s initiation energy lands in the body. Feel the temperature of your hand against your chest. Notice whether there is any holding here, any bracing, or any subtle constriction across the ribs. This is often where shock lives long after the shock itself has passed: a low-grade armor in the ribcage or a slight pulling inward of the chest that becomes constant enough to stop registering it consciously.

Take a few easy breaths into this space. You are making contact, nothing more. With each exhale, let your sternum soften very slightly, as if it could move back toward your spine on a slow wave. Notice if any part of you resists that. The resistance is information. Gate 51 is asking you to feel how much resilience is already woven into this place, underneath every shock to your system that came before this moment. Stay with your hand on your chest for a few minutes and feel what it is like to be present here, breathing into and loosening the intercostal muscles between your ribs..

Creativity Prompts

Pull out your favorite notebook, your paints, your colored pencils, whatever calls to you, and give yourself 15 uninterrupted minutes with one of these:

Write about a shock that changed you. Skip the story of what happened and go straight to the moment right after, when everything was different and you didn’t yet know what different meant. Where were you in your body? What did the world look like through that new perception? What did the shock initiate you into?

Draw or paint the split second after lightning, that instant when everything is illuminated and the thunder hasn’t even rumbled yet. What do you see in that sudden brightness? What was always there that you couldn’t see until the light hit it?

With your Mandala 64 deck, pull the Gate 51 card and sit with both sides. Notice which frequency lives in you right now around something unexpected in your life: agitation or initiative? Let the card tell you what the shock is trying to wake up.

Also, I’m putting out a Call for Guest Writers: If you’re interested in writing a guest post for one of the 64 gates, I’d love to hear your perspective and co-promote you and your work! <3

Shoot me a DM and let me know which gate you’re interested in- I’d love to hear from you!

Welcome to another lunar episode of Living the Spiral, in honor of the first full moon out of eclipse season. As we dive into the mystical energy of this Libra lunation on April 1st (or 2nd depending on your time zone) at 10:11 p.m. EDT, we’re not just observing another predictable celestial event. Instead, we’re at the cusp of an extraordinary cosmic alignment.

This moon serves as a gateway to what I call the “month of fire,” which is accentuated by a unique convergence of 7 celestial bodies in the cardinal fire sign of Aries. The harmonious balance of the relational Libra moon with all this independent, initiatory Aries energy brings in a vibe of deep reflection, and sets the stage for profound transformation and growth as we prepare to move through the catalytic month ahead.

The full moon in Libra perfects on April 1st or 2nd depending on where you are in the world, and it falls in Gate 48 in the Human Design body graph. Gate 48 is known as the Gate of Depth or The Well/. The hexagram from the I’Ching is exactly that image: a well with a rope and a bucket, deep mineral water that holds the memory of the earth and all of the beings that came before us.

Gate 48 lives in the Spleen center, the seat of primal knowing in the body, and its Gene Keys progression moves from the shadow of inadequacy through the gift of resourcefulness into the siddhi of wisdom.

Across the sky from that moon, the sun is sitting in Gate 21, Biting Through, in the Ego or Will center. This is the energy of the hunter with the bow already raised (read more about this gate in the latest Mandala 64 Walk post:

With the sun in gate 21, we’re in a conscious period of controlling our environments. Taking action, with no hesitation, no checking twice, no dropping the bucket down and waiting for it to come back up. Just aim the arrow and release it.

And along with the sun, pretty much every other planet in the sky is also stacking up in Aries: Mars enters Aries on April 9th, then Mercury, then the moon coming around to join for the Aries new moon on April 17th, bringing us to seven celestial bodies in Aries at once. The Sun, the Moon, Mercury, Mars, Venus, Saturn, and Neptune. All of them (and Pluto and Uranus too) are in direct motion, with no retrogrades happening until May 6th. In the year of the fire horse, this means we’re finally speeding up to a gallop and running toward the horizon.

This episode is really about the conversation between the well and the fire, which is also the conversation between depth and decisiveness, between what you already know in your bones and what the sky is asking you to do with it.

Gate 48’s shadow shows up as a particular flavor of imposter syndrome where the wisdom is there at the bottom of the well, and the bucket is just sitting at the top with the rope coiled in your lap. You keep deciding it is not quite time yet, with insecurity that you’re not enough keeping you from going deep. That there is something you still need before you can pull the water up, dip your arrow in, and shoot it into the world.

This full moon is a beautiful quiet mirror before the stellium of planets in Aries really builds up the energy. This lunation is truly a powerful moment to go down into your well, to the wisdom and resources of your ancestors and the roots of the earth. Spend some time in the depths, and let what you discover down there become your fuel for the fire in the cosmos that lies ahead of us.

I also talk through the celestial bodies and points that make aspects to this full moon: Black Moon Lilith in Sagittarius making a sextile to the moon, which brings a wild and untamed quality to that depth, an invitation to let the unpolished and unrefined parts of your knowing in alongside the ancestral and cultivated wisdom.

And Jupiter in Cancer squares both the sun and the moon in a T-square, asking which well you are pulling resources from and whether the roots you are drawing on are the ones nourishing you right now, or just the familiar ones.

There is also a short somatic practice toward the end of the episode for Gate 48, bringing your right hand to your left side, to the spleen, and breathing into that space to feel into what you know in your body. This splenic knowing is not what you have studied or what you can teach, but what you inherently know from having lived inside a body for this many years, and inside a web of ancestral relations for this many generations.

This full moon is the last quiet moment before April fully fires up, so take advantage of rituals that connect you to your inner knowing, your past, and your guides.

And if you want to walk the gates in real time as the stellium builds, the Mandala 64 Walk on Substack is doing exactly that, one gate post at a time as the sun moves through them. This offering, along with all my podcasts, are free for everyone, with live seasonal rituals and the transit calendar for paid subscribers.

Go listen to the Libra full moon, tend your well… and get ready to run toward the future. May this full moon illuminate your path ahead with clarity and courage, and may your inner resources be the fuel for your fire.

Listen to the episode in the Substack player above, on Youtube, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

And if you wouldn’t mind leaving a rating or review, I’d most appreciate it! Your engagement helps me reach more people, and makes my heart shine <3

xo

Alison

Let’s get deeper:

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I put together an Astrology & Human Design Digital Transit Calendar covering all the planetary transits and aspects AND the human design solar transits of the 2026-2027 astrological year.

Using a digital Astro-HD Calendar has become one of my favorite tools for living consciously with the cycles of time. Every major planetary transit and aspects that shapes the feeling of each season is included. And woven through all of it, I’ve included the full cycle of Human Design solar gate transits. Each one is annotated with: the Gene Keys gift, shadow and siddhi; the I’Ching hexagram, elements and name; and a few journaling prompts/reflection questions to help you feel into the energy of the gate in a deeper way.

If you’re following the Mandala 64 Walk here on Substack, this calendar is a natural companion. You can see at a glance on your cal which gate the Sun is moving through each week, track the rhythm of the year as it spirals through all 64 gates, and follow along with each post in real time.

It’s also a beautiful way to look up the birthdays of people you love and find which solar gate they were born under! This can be a beautiful way to understand the people in your life a little more deeply.

And practically speaking, it’s a genuinely useful planning tool. Major retrogrades, significant conjunctions, eclipse seasons, etc, are all mapped through Spring 2027 so you can move through the year with some sense of what’s coming.

Calendars are gifts to all paid subscribers

A paid membership to Living the Spiral is $8 a month and includes the full digital calendar, the complete Mandala 64 Walk gate posts, and live ritual gatherings on Zoom for the 8 holy days of the Wheel.

Our next gathering will be for Beltane on May 1st, one of the most potent thresholds into the blossoming of the year. I would love to have you there!

If you’d prefer not to sign up for a subscription but still want a calendar, you’re in luck!

I created 2 different calendars this year. Both are Google Calendars you subscribe to, which means it lives alongside your existing calendar and updates automatically. No downloading or manual entry needed. They can be viewed in your Google, Apple, or Outlook calendars.

1. Living the Spiral: Astro-HD Transit Calendar

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2. Reflected by the Moon: Human Design Lunar Calendar

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And, if you’d like something tangible to hold IRL alongside your calendar, the Mandala 64 deck is a beautiful companion for this work. It has one card for each gate with a shadow and gift side, something to pull when the Sun moves into a new gate and you want to feel it in your hands before you read about it.

Use code ARIES20 for 20% off of decks at hearthandspiral.com.

Paid subscribers: your Living the Spiral Calendar link and instructions to install it are below! <3

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Call for Guest Writers: If you’re interested in writing a guest post for one of the 64 gates, I’d love to hear your perspective and co-promote you and your work! <3

Shoot me a DM and let me know which gate you’re interested in- I’d love to hear from you!

Sun in Gate 21: March 31-April 4

Gate 21: The Story

When the Sun moves into Gate 21, the energy moves from the head back down to the heart. The questioning 3rd eye of Gate 17 has been busy sorting through opinions, building its cases, and wanting to know what the world is all about. Now, for the next several days, we enter a different collective vibe. The hunter/huntress doesn’t wonder what everyone else is thinking- after collecting opinions from others and distilling them into witness, they now know enough to read the terrain and make their own moves.

This is the gate of someone who takes charge- a classic Aries stereotype, if I’ve ever heard one. The desire to be in charge is less a selfish hunger for dominance, and more centered on the understanding that resources don’t manage themselves. The tribe won’t eat if no one tracks the game.

Gate 21 brings the innate willpower to make decisions about material reality: money, territory, food, and other physical conditions of survival. The I’Ching calls this gate Biting Through, represented by the hexatrams Fire over Thunder. The image is of something clenched between the teeth, and the jaw coming down hard enough to chomp thorugh it fully with decisive action. Like in a hunt, this taking control is the only way things get done.

The shadow of this gate is the grip that tightens past usefulness. The clenched jaw, the incessant scanning of the horizon even after your meat is on the fire. Control that began as competence can curdle into fear. This is the fear that if you relax your hold, everything will fall apart. The belief that you are the only one who can see clearly, and the world requires your vigilance to hold its shape. That grip lives in the body as a kind of chronic bracing, an ever-readiness that never quite resolves into rest.

The gift of 21 is authority in its truest sense: the earned kind that emerges when someone consistently shows up for the health of the whole. When the shadow of control transends into the gift of authority, that paranoid grip becomes true stewardship for the tribe. In this gift frequency, the hunter moves through the landscape with respect for what she takes, and also knows when it’s time to stop hunting.

The siddhi of this gate is valor. This word is not so common in today’s world, but it means the sustained willingness to be accountable. This is deep accountability to the resources you carry and the people who depend on your skills. Valor is surrendering to the frightening fact that real authority means letting go of the illusion of control altogether and taking action anyway.

Gate 21 in the Body

Gate 21 lives in the Heart Center, also called the Will Center or Ego Center. In the bodygraph this is one of the smallest centers, with only four gates. The Heart/Will/Ego is one of the only motor centers that directly connects to the Throat center. Physically, the Heart Center corresponds to the heart pump-muscle itself, as well as the stomach, the thymus gland, and the small intestine. It governs the immune system’s ability to recognize what belongs and what doesn’t, which is related to the ego’s function of maintaining a coherent self in the world.

The Heart Center is a motor center, but it operates on a different rhythm than the Sacral or the Solar Plexus. It is not a continuous generator of energy. It runs in cycles: on, then genuinely off. When someone with a defined Heart Center pushes past their natural rest, they can tend toward heart issues, immune dysfunction, or digestive problems. The stomach in particular carries gate 21’s emblem in the jaw, the bite, and the capacity to process what comes in and extract what is useful. When this center is forced to perform beyond its natural will, the body notices, and it’s not always pretty.

People with undefined Heart Centers (which is the majority of people) are highly susceptible to the amplified willpower in the field during this transit. There is a collective pull to prove our worth, to make promises, and to commit with force. This gate’s transit can bring an impulse to act from the ego’s desire for validation instead of from genuine authority.

The invitation this week is to notice where you are biting hard into something that doesn’t actually need your teeth.

Season, Channel & Polarity

Season: We are in the Thunder season, with the lower trigram of 21 being Zhèn, thunder. This is the same initiating energy that opened up spring, cracking the ground open, and moving before it knows which way is correct. Thunder is activating, disrupting, and awakening. The lower trigram has been consistent since Gate 25 at the equinox. The upper trigram of 21 is Li, Fire. This evokes the image of clarity and illumination coming down over the initiating force below, like a lightning bolt. In this image, things are illuminated first and acted upon second, in rapid succession. The Fire trigram in Aries carries a no-nonsense quality, a willingness to burn through confusion and just decide.

Channel: Gate 21 in the Heart/Will completes the Channel of Money with Gate 45, the Gatherer, in the Throat Center. Gate 45, a gemini gate, is the voice of royal abundance - the queen, the sovereign. 45 is the energy of one who communicates about resources and gathers the community together to decide what will be shared. Gate 21 is the one who goes and gets it. Neither gate works well alone. The Hunter without the Gatherer accumulates without knowing how to distribute their gains, and the Gatherer without the Hunter has nothing to distribute. Together, the channel links willpower to expression, and material mastery to the spoken word used to gather people into community.

Polarity: Gate 48, the Well, sits directly across the mandala wheel from 21. Gate 21 acts, asserts, and scans the horizon, and Gate 48 descends deep into the depths. The Well is the gate of depth, a Libra gate that has intuitive knowing and deep desire to know. This gate is the bottomless resource that is always there but never feels like enough, in contrast to the quick-action of the hunter. Gate 21 needs Gate 48’s reminder that authority is grounded in depth and connection, not just decisiveness. Gate 48 needs Gate 21’s willingness to act even without going deep. The polarity holds both the one who understands deeply and the one who moves quickly.

A Somatic Practice for Gate 21

Bring your awareness to your stomach. Feel your upper belly, just below your solar plexus where your ribs begin to flare apart. This is where the Heart/Will Center lands in the bodygraph: the stomach, the small intestine, and the thymus tucked behind the upper sternum. Press your fingertips lightly into that soft hollow at the base of your ribcage and feel what is there. Tension? Emptiness? A kind of low-grade readiness? This is often where willpower lives as a physical sensation, like the clench of your gut that arrives before a hard conversation, or holding your breath before something you don’t really feel like doing. The ego/will center is the place that knows whether you actually have the energy to do the thing you're about to say yes to.

Now bring your jaw into awareness. Is it soft and relaxed? Or slightly clenched? Are your teeth resting apart or pressed together? Gate 21 lives as much in the jaw as in the core. Gate 21 is all about the capacity to bite through, the tension of making a decision. Very gently, let your molars separate. Let your tongue drop away from the roof of your mouth. Notice what releases in your chest when your jaw softens. Notice if the grip around your stomach shifts at all. By doing this you are practicing the difference between appropriate force and chronic holding. Staying here for a few minutes and softening the jaw is a way of letting your Heart/Will Center tell you what it actually has the energy to bite into right now.

Creativity Prompts

Pull out your favorite notebook, your paints, your colored pencils, whatever calls to you, and give yourself 15 uninterrupted minutes with one of these:

Write about a time you held on to control of something past the point where it was helping. This could be a project, a relationship, or a job. What were you afraid would happen if you let go? What did you actually gain by gripping so hard? Write about the moment the grip released and how it felt in your body.

Draw or paint a huntress or hunter scanning the landscape just before she moves with decisive action. Lean into the energy of stillness, tracking, full presence. I think of my dog waiting with her tail straight out for the longest time, still, pointing, before chasing a squirrel. Draw or paint what that authoritative alertness feels like.

With your Mandala 64 deck, pull the Gate 21 card and sit with both sides. Notice which frequency you are living in this week around a particular topic or situation in your life- control or authority?

Have a beautifully valorous week, everyone!

Alison

PS> Thanks for sharing this project with a human-design-curious friend !

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This episode has been a long time coming. It’s the one where I finally lay out the whole architecture… all the systems I work with on Living the Spiral, how they’re related, and most importantly, why I think they matter more than ever right now.

If you’ve been in my world for a while and nodded along when I mention the Fuxi sequence or the 64 gates of Human Design without quite seeing how it all fits together, this episode is for you. And if you’re brand new here, welcome! This is a good place to begin.

The through line is this: all of these systems are, at their root, technologies for locating yourself inside a living pattern. They remind us that we’re not separate from what’s moving around us, that the seasons are not happening to us. I found that when that relationship between my body and the season and ancestral time actually landed in my lived experiences rather than just my mind, something deep shifted. My sense of belonging came alive. And at the heart of it, that’s what this whole project is about.

🎧 Listen to the episode in the player above, on Youtube, or anywhere you find podcasts 🎧

Episode Overview:

The Oldest Question

We start at the beginning, with the impulse that every human culture across recorded history has shared - which is the need to locate themselves inside a larger story. Every culture across spacetime has created systems to address “Where am I in the cycle? What is my relationship with the land telling me? What do the shifting stars and planets say about the quality of this moment??

This impulse long predates writing. What I find remarkable is that across wildly different cultures with no contact between them, people arrived at remarkably similar answers: the sky is a clock, the seasons carry teachings, patterns repeat, and inside the repetition there is meaning. That’s the deep root of every system we cover in this episode.

The I Ching: The Origin Story

We go into the history and mythology of the I’Ching, starting with Fuxi, the mythological sage-emperor who received the eight trigrams (the ba gua) by observing nature. He witnessed the marks on the back of a tortoise shell, reflecting the behavior of water, the shape of wood, and the way things grow and die and grow again. Fuxi saw that reality is made of two forces in relationship, yin and yang, and that stacked in threes they produce eight fundamental qualities of energy: thunder, water, mountain, earth, wind, fire, lake, and heaven.

From there we get to King Wen, who (while imprisoned around 1000 BCE) took Fuxi’s eight trigrams and stacked them into pairs to create the 64 hexagrams - six lines, each broken or unbroken, 64 possible combinations. His son the Duke of Zhou wrote the commentaries for each of the individual lines, and Confucius added his own layers later. The I’Ching we have today is a palimpsest- thousands of years of wisdom in conversation with itself, all built on those same 64 patterns.

I also talk about why I have some frustration with how Human Design sometimes presents itself as if it arrived from nowhere, when so much of it comes directly from these ancient systems that deserve their own reverence and credit.

The Fuxi sequence and binary code

This is the section I’ve been wanting to talk about for a long time, and it genuinely blew my mind when I first found it.

The sequence that Human Design uses on the mandala -the Fuxi sequence, also called the Earlier Heaven sequence - is a mathematically precise ordering of the 64 hexagrams that was actually formalized not by Fuxi himself but by an 11th century Song dynasty philosopher named Shao Yong around 1060 CE. Shao Yong arranged the hexagrams starting from all broken lines and moving systematically toward all solid lines, with each hexagram differing from the next by the minimum possible change.

The result is a perfect binary sequence. If you assign yin the value zero and yang the value one and read the lines from the bottom up, the Fuxi sequence counts in binary from 0 to 63 without missing a single step. Shao Yong drew this as a square diagram, with eight hexagrams across, and eight down, where the top line alternates yin and yang every hexagram, the next line every two, then every four, every eight, every sixteen, every thirty-two. This is exactly how binary counting works.

Six centuries later, the German mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who had been independently developing binary arithmetic since 1666, received a woodcut of this diagram from a Jesuit missionary named Joachim Bouvet who was living in Beijing at the Forbidden City. Within a week of seeing it, Leibniz sent his paper on binary arithmetic to the Paris Academy for publication, titling it with direct reference to the ancient Chinese figures of Fuxi. He wrote that the hexagrams corresponded perfectly to binary numbers and that the ancient Chinese were far more mathematically sophisticated than anyone in Europe had assumed.

There’s a wrinkle worth knowing: the Chinese never actually interpreted the hexagrams mathematically. That structure was always latent in the form, but Leibniz was the first to read it that way. And he was working from Shao Yong’s later rearrangement, not Fuxi’s original work, something Bouvet also didn’t mention. But what Leibniz saw was real, and profound. The binary system he developed with it eventually became the foundation of Boolean logic, then electrical circuits, then the transistor, then the chip, then everything you’re using to hear or read this.

📌 [Add image: Fuxi/Nüwa serpent image — Han dynasty silk painting] 📌 [Add image: Shao Yong’s Fuxi square diagram — the 8x8 binary grid]

The Zodiac: The Origin Story

The roots of Western astrology are Babylonian, going back to ancient Mesopotamia around 2000 BCE or earlier. The Babylonians were extraordinary astronomers who tracked planetary movements from clay tablets across generations and noticed that the sky was a clock, that the positions of the sun, moon, and planets marked the seasons, the floods, and the harvests. The 12-sign zodiac solidified around the 5th century BCE in Babylon when they divided the ecliptic into 12 equal sections named for nearby constellations, tracking the quality of light through the seasons.

When Alexander the Great conquered Persia and Egypt in the 4th century BCE, Babylonian astrology collided with Egyptian astronomy and then with Greek philosophy. The Stoics and Platonists gave astrology its philosophical backbone, the idea that the cosmos is a living, intelligent whole and that the movement of celestial bodies reflects and participates in events on Earth. The hermetic tradition’s “as above, so below, as within so without” comes from this period.

I also touch on the precession of the equinoxes here (the reason the tropical zodiac signs no longer align with their original constellations) and why that doesn’t undermine tropical astrology, which was always a season-based system rooted in our relationship with the Earth rather than the stars themselves.

What moves me most is that these two traditions, the I’Ching in China and the zodiac in the ancient Near East, were developing at roughly the same time, with no contact. And they were doing similar things: reading the patterns of energy as it moves through time across the scope of a year, a lifetime, and beyond. People across the globe finding meaning in the turning, and locating themselves inside something larger.

The European Wheel of the Year

The eight holy days of the wheel of the year (the solstices, equinoxes, and four cross-quarter days between them) are the third tradition I work with. The modern Pagan Wheel of the Year was codified in the 1950s by neo-pagans and neo-Wiccans, but it draws from much older Celtic and various European pagan traditions, some of which may predate even the I’Ching and the zodiac.

These were the fire festivals and seasonal celebrations of agrarian communities in northern Europe. They were ceremonies about the return of the sun, about when to plant and when to harvest, when to go inward and when to put yourself out in the world. They are fundamentally human ceremonies rooted in the body and the land.

The beautiful thing is that the Wheel of the Year and the zodiac confirm each other perfectly. The four cross-quarter days all fall in the fixed signs: Samhain in Scorpio, Imbolc in Aquarius, Beltane in Taurus, Lughnasadh in Leo. The solstices and equinoxes happen at the cusps between the mutable and cardinal signs. The zodiac is already a wheel of the year, based on these astronomical observations. These traditions aren’t competing by any means, they’re translating the same pattern into different languages.

How Human Design and the Gene Keys plug in

In the late 1980s a man named Ra Uru Hu received what he described as a mystical transmission and developed Human Design, a synthesis that took the 64 hexagrams of the I Ching and mapped them directly onto the zodiac wheel, as well as onto the chakra centers of the body. The mandala arranges all 64 gates in the Fuxi sequence around the full 360 degrees of the Zodiac.

The Sun transits all 64 gates through the course of a year, spending about five to six days in each one. Your Human Design birth chart is a snapshot of where the Sun, Moon, and every planet were in those gates at the moment you were born, plus a second chart from 88 days before your birth (the end of the second trimester, when all organs are formed). Those two snapshots of the planets superimposed onto eachother create your bodygraph, with defined centers showing where you have consistent reliable energy and open centers showing where you’re most responsive to the environment.

The Gene Keys, developed by Richard Rudd who was a student of Ra’s, takes the same 64 hexagrams into a more contemplative and poetic territory. Where Human Design describes the mechanical structure, the Gene Keys asks you to move through each gate at three levels: the Shadow (the contracted, fear-based expression), the Gift (what emerges when you work with the shadow rather than against it), and the Siddhi (the fully flowering, transcendent potential of that frequency). I love the poetry of it, and feel that it’s a beautiful complement to the more structural and mechanical language of Human Design.

And the Wheel of the Year loops back in here beautifully, too: the eight Pagan holy days on the wheel of the year correspond exactly to the eight gates of the G Center, the center of identity and direction at the heart of the bodygraph. At every solstice, equinox, and cross-quarter day, the Sun is transiting a G Center gate. The wheel of the year is written into the mandala, and the land, body, and sky are in conversation through these 64 gates across time.

Why Cyclical Living Fosters Belonging

I spent the past few years tracking the sun’s progression through the Zodiac and also through the Gates of the Mandala. And when you know the Sun is in a particular gate and you’re feeling that energy in your life, it is truly profound. The collective nature of this ancient archetypical symbolism means you’re not broken or behind, but you can tell that you’re inside a specific quality of collective energy. The more I attune to this, the deeper sense of belonging I feel. It’s the feeling of being inside a larger pattern that includes me.

And when you know your own gates that are activated in your chart, you start to understand why certain seasons feel like coming home and others feel like unknown territory. It can give you empathy and compassion for why certain people light you up and others grind your gears. It’s attunement to a larger resonance field, because the Sun is transiting the same gate for every person on Earth at the same time, but lighting their charts up in very different waays. That shared invisible weather, and these systems that are making it visible to many, has made me feel more belonging, and more compassion, for myself and everyone around me.

A Counter-Eschatology

At the end of the episode I spend some time with an essay by JM at Starnightdwell that I’ve been thinkin about a lot since I read it. The essay is about eschatology (the study of endings, of last things), and how we are currently living inside a cultural and political moment that is being actively shaped by people who believe in a very specific kind of end times. A time when Armageddon isn’t a metaphor but an actual policy goal.

In their essay, JM points out that astrology is by its nature based on cyclical models of time. And an understanding of the cyclical nature of time makes for a very different kind of eschatology. When endings are also beginnings, you can’t have an end time in the way that many people pulling from the prophecy of the Abrahamic religions are leaning into right now. They argue that the attunement to cyclical time changes the ethical weight of everything- if you believe the land comes back and the story continues in a cycle, you make different choices than if it were all to end. You have to live differently.

In the episode, I also talk about JM’s critique that astrology as it’s currently practiced has largely been captured by an individualized, late-stage capitalist frame -all about my chart, my type, my shadow work- and how that can become another way of feeding the ego while the world contracts around us. The antidote lies in remembering that these were always collective technologies, from the start. The zodiac originated with stories about how the quality of the season shows up for everyone. The I’Ching was always a map of how energy moves through universal situations, not just through individuals. The Wheel of the Year was always communal, celebrating pivotal moments in the year when whole villages moved through the thresholds together.

When we track the Sun through the gates, mark the cross-quarters, and do this work in community, we are practicing a counter-eschatology, a reclaiming of the world away from the doomers and end-timers. We are rehearsing a different relationship to endings, living inside the spiral instead of waiting for it to end.

Tools and Resources I Mention in the Episode

For the I Ching: I use an app simply called Yijing — it has five different translations you can switch between including Nigel Richmond’s Language of the Lines, Brian Arnold’s modern English interpretation, Carol K. Anthony’s Oracle of the Cosmic Way, and Gregory Richter’s transcription from Chinese. You can cast coins or shake your phone to cast, or just read straight through.

For Human Design: My favorite structural resource is the Neutrino app. It’s really easy to use and has a wealth of information about your chart, your centers, your gates, and all the substructures of the system.

For the Gene Keys: The Gene Keys book by Richard Rudd is the source. There’s also an audiobook read by a very serious and eloquent British woman that I enjoy. You can also sign up on the Gene Keys website to receive a limited-time audio transmission (called “The Pulse”) from Richard Rudd each time the Sun transits into a new gate.

The Living the Spiral HD Astrology Calendar: A Google, Apple, or Outlook compatible calendar that tracks all the solar gate transits and major astrological events through the year. Available to paid subscribers of this substack at livingthespiral.com, or you can buy one at hearthandspiral.com.

Come Walk the Mandala with Me!

The Mandala 64 Walk is my ongoing series here on Substack, where I’m writing one post per gate as the Sun transits through the year. Each post will include the I’Ching hexagram, the Gene Key shadow/gift/siddhi, a somatic practice, and a creativity prompt to align with the energies of the week. Free to follow along!

Paid subscribers to Living the Spiral will get tickets to my live rituals that I’m hosting at each of the eight G Center gates/Holy Days, plus a digital calendar of Astro-HD transits.

We started with Gate 25 at the Spring Equinox and we’re moving through Aries season now. Come join at livingthespiral.com.

If you want to go deeper into your own design and explore how your chart is activated inside these larger cycles, my books are open for readings at hearthandspiral.com! I offer astrology, human design, and combination readings for both your natal charts and transits of the current moment.

The next episode will be about the astrology and human design activations of the Full Moon in Libra, happening this week on April 1st-2nd (depending on time zone). See you there!

With spiralic love,

Alison

I know you just received a post from me yesterday, and I do apologize for the onslaught. Going forward, these posts will be sent out every 5-6 days, on the first day that the sun enters a new gate.

I plan to do a little art for each gate as well, and just couldn’t quite get to it for yesterday’s post, but here’s my belated interpretation on Gate 25: Innocence! If you end up creating anything inspired by the gates, please do share with us in the comments or the group chat. Can’t wait to see what emerges!

Call for Guest Writers: If you’re interested in writing a guest post for any one of the gates, I’d love to hear your perspective on a slice of the mandala and co-promote you and your work <3

Shoot me a DM and let me know which gate you’re interested in- I’d love to hear from you!

Sun in Gate 17: March 24-30

Gate 17: The Story

We have just come through the birth of Gate 25, the wide-eyed lamb stepping into the world for the first time. And now, barely upright, already the mind begins to stir.

Gate 17 is the gate of Opinions, which sounds small until you feel how powerful it truly is. The mind has just received its first impressions of the world and immediately begins sorting, categorizing, pattern-matching, and wanting to know what it all means and where it is going. This is the energy of the young ram looking out across the hills, bleating his cute little bleat and seeing who responds. Through witnessing the opinions of others and making his own, he’s beginning, for the first time, to form a view of the landscape he was born into.

In the I Ching this hexagram is called Sui, Following. This translates to the notion that the opinions we grip to and defend out of habit are not the ones that serve us. They are the ones that follow naturally from what we have observed in the world, and that remain willing to follow new evidence when it arrives.

The shadow of 17 is Opinion with a capital O- it’s the mind that has calcified around its own conclusions and mistakes certainty for truth. The gift is far-sightedness, the capacity to hold a wide view and see the larger perspective, to form views that genuinely serve rather than simply protect. And the siddhi, omniscience, is what happens when the mind becomes so clear and empty of defensiveness that it can simply mirror reality as it is.

Gate 17 in the Body

Gate 17 lives in the Ajna Center, located in the center of the head, behind the forehead and between the eyes.

The Ajna is the second center from the top of the bodygraph, sitting between the Head center above and the Throat center below. It is the center of conceptualization, mental awareness, beliefs, and the way we make sense of the world through pattern and logic. In the physical body it corresponds to the pituitary gland, often called the master gland because of its role in regulating hormonal function throughout the entire system. The pituitary sits at the base of the brain in roughly the same position as what many traditions call the third eye, the seat of inner vision and higher perception.

Gate 17 specifically is associated with the right eye, the eye of visual pattern recognition and forward projection. Gate 17 projects outward, scanning the horizon for what is coming. This is why the gift of far-sightedness lives here, rooted in how this part of the brain and visual system actually works.

The Ajna has an important relationship with pressure. It sits directly below the Head center, which is always generating questions and the need to know. The Ajna receives that pressure and tries to resolve it into concepts, opinions, and frameworks. When the pressure is too much and the Ajna is overworked, it can show up as chronic mental tension, headaches, eye strain, and needing to figure everything out.

The invitation of Gate 17 is to let the mind do its work of pattern recognition without demanding that it produce certainty. An opinion is a working hypothesis, not a verdict.

Season, Channel & Polarity

Season: We are still in the Thunder season, that span between the spring equinox and Beltane where every gate carries the lower trigram of Thunder in its foundation. Gate 17 falls in early Aries, the second gate of the Ram’s journey. The ram has found its legs and is starting to look around.

The upper trigram of Gate 17 is Lake, the energy of joy, reflection, and open receptivity. Lake sits above Thunder here, which is a beautiful pairing. The sudden initiating energy of Thunder rises up into something that can hold it, something with depth and stillness at its surface even while movement happens below. Lake is the quality of the mind when it is open, even delighted by what it encounters. It tempers Thunder’s urgency with spaciousness. The opinion that forms here, when the gate is working well, carries both the aliveness of a fresh impression and the reflective quality of a mind willing to sit with what it has seen before drawing conclusions.

Channel: Gate 17 completes its channel with Gate 62, the Gate of Details, in the Throat center. Together they form the Channel of Acceptance, the design of an organizational being. Gate 17 sees the big picture and forms the concept and Gate 62 translates that concept into language, names it, makes it communicable. Without Gate 62, Gate 17’s far vision stays inside the head. Without Gate 17, Gate 62’s details have no larger framework to hang on. Together they form one of the great thinking-and-speaking channels of the bodygraph.

Polarity: The complementary gate across the wheel is Gate 18, the Gate of Correction, in the Spleen center. Where Gate 17 forms opinions about what could be better, Gate 18 feels instinctively where something is off and drives toward correcting it. They are two sides of the same impulse, the mind that sees the pattern and the body that feels the wrongness. Together they complete a picture of discernment as both a mental and a somatic knowing.

A Somatic Practice for Gate 17

Sit comfortably and bring your attention to the center of your head, somewhere behind your forehead and between your eyes. You do not need to visualize anything specific, just rest your awareness there. Notice if there is any buzzing, pressure, or busy activity in this area. The Ajna often runs hot, generating thoughts and opinions without pause.

Take a slow breath in and on the exhale let the forehead soften, as if the space behind your eyes could widen and expand outward. Do this a few times and with each exhale invite the grip of the mind to loosen slightly. You are not emptying the mind, just giving it more room. Notice the difference between a tight contracted opinion and a wide open perspective. Gate 17 at its gift is spacious and omnicient. The far-sighted eye is a relaxed eye.

Gate 17 Creativity Prompts

Pull out your favorite notebook, your paints, your colored pencils, whatever calls to you, and give yourself 15 uninterrupted minutes with one of these prompts:

• Write about an opinion you have held for a long time that has quietly shifted or softened. Or write about the way a view changes as you move through a landscape, what you can see now that you could not see before.

• Draw or paint what far-sightedness or omnicience looks like as an image. A wide horizon, an eye that has gone soft and open, a bird overhead looking down at the full shape of something you can only see in fragments from the ground.

• With the Mandala 64 deck, pull the Gate 17 card and sit with both sides. Notice which frequency you are living in this week around a particular topic or situation in your life. Let your hand move from there.

⭐ Let me know how Gate 17 is showing up for you- through your art, poetry, or insights! Post it in the comments or the chat.

And please share this project with a human-design-curious friend !

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Have a beautiful week ahead,

Alison

This post will be a little longer than usual because I’m including some foundational background information on the Mandala and the Bodygraph. I will also normally be posting about each gate at the very beginning of it’s solar transit- except for this post since I decided to do this project fairly last minute! We are in the final day of Gate 25, so you can expect another post tomorrow for Gate 17.

Please enjoy and let me know what you think..

Also: Guest Posters Wanted! If you’re interested in writing a guest post for any one of the gates, I’d love to hear your perspective on a slice of the mandala and co-promote you and your work <3

Shoot me a DM and let me know which gate you’re interested in- I’d love to hear from you!

The Foundations of the Mandala 64 Walk

Over the coming year, we’ll be walking the year along with the sun as it passes through the 64 gates of the Human Design Mandala. These gates are arranged around the Zodiac wheel/Wheel of the year according to the Fuxi sequence of the I’Ching. Thisis an ancient ordering of the 64 hexagrams attributed to Fu Xi, the mythic first emperor of China and one of the founding figures of Chinese cosmology.

Unlike the King Wen sequence most people encounter when they use the I Ching for divination, the Fuxi sequence orders the hexagrams by binary progression, pure yin and yang alternation, which creates a map of how energy moves and transforms through nature over time. Ra Uru Hu placed these 64 hexagrams around the Zodiac wheel to form the Rave Mandala, and it is in this order that we walk them through the solar year, following the Sun as it moves through each gate.

Gates are another name for hexagrams, the 6-line symbols from the I’Ching that you can see around the outer ring of the mandala below. Each hexagram is made up of 2 trigrams, the lower and upper. The lower trigram represents the inner world- what is forming internally, the situation as it is developing from within, the subjective or private dimension. The upper trigram represents the outer world - what is manifesting externally, how the situation appears in the world, the objective or public dimension.

It can also be framed as:

Lower = the earth, the body, what is below, what is rooted Upper = heaven, the spirit, what is above, what is reaching.

As we walk along the wheel, the lower trigram stays the same for 6 weeks, between the yellow threshold gates shown below. These yellow gates represent the winter solstice (gate 10), the summer solstice (gate 15), the spring equinox (gate 25), and the fall equinox (gate 46). The other 4 gates are the cross-quarter days that fall exactly between solstices and equinoxes.

The Gene Keys

Another system I will pull from in this series is the Gene Keys, a contemplative framework created by Richard Rudd, a former student of Ra Uru Hu. Like Human Design, the Gene Keys are built on the foundation of the 64 hexagrams of the I Ching, and the two systems share the same basic map. Human Design tends toward the mechanical, like how energy moves through your body and how you are designed to make decisions. The Gene Keys invite a slower, more inward journey of contemplation.

The central teaching of the Gene Keys is what Rudd calls the Spectrum of Consciousness. Every one of the 64 gates carries three frequencies: a shadow, a gift, and a siddhi. The shadow is not something we need to fix or eliminate, but is contracted expression of the gate’s energy, the place where fear, conditioning, and unconscious patterning live. The gift frequency emerges when we bring awareness to the shadow instead of fighting it. And the siddhi (a Sanskrit word meaning divine gift) is the highest possible expression of that energy, the frequency the gate carries when it is fully embodied and awake. Most of us move between shadow and gift throughout our lives, and that is enough. The siddhi is the fullest potential.

Throughout this series I will name the shadow, gift, and siddhi for each gate as a way of mapping the full range of what that energy can be, as an invitation to notice where you are living in it right now.

Why start the walk now?

In Human Design, the new year does not begin in January, or even at the spring equinox like the Astrological new year dos. It begins in late January, when the Sun enters Gate 41 in Aquarius. Gate 41 is the start codon, the only initiating codon in human genetics, the moment when the contraction begins that will eventually push new life through. It is the seed feeling the pressure of the soil above it, the body gathering itself before the first breath. Everything that follows in the wheel is set in motion by that compression.

In our DNA, every genetic sentence in every living organism on earth begins with the same codon: methionine, known as AUG, the only initiating codon in existence. In the Human Design mandala, that codon corresponds to Gate 41, which is why Ra marked the new year there rather than at any of the more obvious astrological starting points. When the Sun enters Gate 41, it is moving through the one gate that genetically initiates all of life, written into every cell of every living thing.

Ra used the image of a gardener cutting back the garden in winter, consolidating everything that the plant could ever become already held inside it in contracted form, the dream of experience before experience itself begins. From Gate 41 the energy moves through what Ra called the Human Experiential Way, the stream that runs through Gate 30, into Gate 36, and up to Gate 35 at the Throat, the stream of desire, crisis, change, and eventually wisdom. Animals hunger to survive. Humans hunger for experience itself, and Gate 41 is where that hunger first stirs.

By the time the Sun reaches Gate 36 at the end of Pisces, we are in the birth canal. Gate 36 is the darkening of the light, crisis as threshold, the intensity that comes just before something new breaks through. And then the equinox arrives with Gate 25, the first gate of Aries.

This is the Astrological New Year, symbolized by the horns of the ram, the green sprout that has made it up through the hard ground. So even though the contractions began on the Human Design New Year back in February, we’re beggining this walk with the energy of the sprout.

Thanks so much for being here.

Sun in Gate 25: March 18-24

Gate 25: The Story

In Gate 25, the first gate of Aries season, I visualize a baby lamb that has just been born. Wide eyed, he takes a wobbly step into the world, where everything, to him, is fresh and new.

This is the gate of love that asks nothing in return. It is a place where love is a natural state of being rather than something earned or negotiated. Wu Wang, from the I’Ching means without entanglement, free from guile, without a need to fix or figure out. It is the energy of pure beginning, before experience has taught us to protect ourselves.

In the Gene Keys. the shadow of 25 is constriction, the armor and tension we have in our bodies after too many losses or after a major crisis (like going through the birth canal). The gift is acceptance, full contact with what is, not what we wish it was. And the siddhi, universal love, is what remains after that constriction gradually and finally releases fully.

Gate 25 in the Body

Gate 25 lives in the G Center, located in the chest around the heart and sternum.

This is the center of identity, love, and direction. When we are out of contact with it we look outside ourselves for a sense of who we are and where we are going. When we are in harmony with it we simply know, through felt sense, what intuitively draws us forward.

…The Bodygraph, explained

The Human Design System’s most familiar symbol is the bodygraph (above), the chart of the human body that shows how the energy centers, or chakras, connect with each other energetically.

You’ll notice there are 9 centers in the bodygraph: the Head, the Ajna (third eye), the Throat, the G, the Will, the Solar Plexus, the Sacral, the Root, and the Spleen. Each of these centers corresponds to a physical location in the body, a biological system, and a specific quality of intelligence.

Some centers in your bodygraph will be colored in, meaning they are defined, consistently active, and a reliable part of how you move through the world. Others will be white, meaning they are open, receptive to the energy of the people and environment around you. Neither is better than the other. The defined centers are where you consistently access energy, and the open centers are where you take in the world. Open centers are often where your greatest wisdom lives, once you learn to stop over-identifying with what passes through them.

The centers are connected by channels, and the channels are made up of gates. Those gates are the 64 hexagrams of the I Ching, distributed around the wheel of the zodiac in the Fuxi sequence. When you have a gate activated on both ends of a channel, the channel is defined and energy flows consistently between the two centers it connects. When you have only one end of a channel activated, that gate is what Ra called a hanging gate, an openness, an invitation, something seeking its other half.

This is the architecture we are walking through together, gate by gate, season by season, as the Sun moves through each one over the course of the year- in the body and in the cosmos.

But we have not always been nine-centered beings. Before 1781, the year Uranus was discovered, humans operated as seven-centered beings, organized around the chakra system most of us are familiar with from yoga and Vedic tradition. The discovery of Uranus marked a shift in human consciousness, and according to Human Design, the energetic architecture of the human body shifted with it, from seven centers to nine.

Human Design itself arrived through an unusual transmission. In 1987, a man named Ra Uru Hu spent eight days and nights in Ibiza receiving what he described as direct instruction from a voice, an encounter that became the foundation of the entire system. Whatever you make of that origin story, what emerged from it is a remarkably coherent map of human energy, one that has continued to resonate with people across very different belief systems and frameworks.

In the old seven-chakra map, the heart center held everything in the central chest. In the nine-centered Human Design bodygraph, that territory split into two. The Will center, sometimes called the Ego or Heart center, became the pump, the organ of the heart itself, muscular and pressured, concerned with willpower and the material world. The G-center became something else entirely, the intelligence that surrounds and orients the heart.

The Magic of the G Center

Some say the G stands for Ji, the Chinese word for pole, the axis around which everything turns. Ra Uru Hu taught that the G center is home to what he called the magnetic monopole, a point of singular attraction with no opposite pole. Unlike a magnet, which pulls in two directions, the magnetic monopole draws in only one: forward, toward what we are meant to encounter. It is the force that orients a life, the deep compass that cannot be overridden by the thinking mind no matter how hard we try.

Others simply point to the shape of the letter itself, G- a spiral with a center point, radiating outward. The shape of a galaxy or a nautilus shell, where origin and destination folded into the same image.

In the body, I experience the G center less as the heart organ itself, and more as everything surrounding it. The pericardium, the fascial sheath that cradles the heart in place. The deep front line of connective tissue that runs continuously from the arches of the feet, up through the inner legs and pelvis, wrapping around the organs, opening through the chest and out through the hands, continuing up through the throat all the way to the tip of the tongue. This fascia tissue is literally continuous in the body. It connects the ground beneath your feet to the center of your chest to the tip of your tongue in one unbroken web. The G center lives here, in this living connective tissue, as the body’s own capacity to know where it is and where it is going.

And then there are the eight gates of the G. The G center is the only center in the bodygraph that touches all four quarters of the zodiac wheel, and its eight gates correspond precisely to the eight holy days of the Celtic and Pagan Wheel of the Year: the solstices, the equinoxes, and the four cross-quarter days that fall between them, Imbolc, Beltane, Lammas, and Samhain.

These are the astronomical hinges of the year, the moments when the light shifts and something in the earth reorients. If you have been marking these days in your own practice, you have already been attuning to the G center without knowing it. It is the place in the body where we feel the turning of the year, where the cosmos and the chest meet, where time lives in the tissue.

Gate 25: Season, Channel & Polarity

Season: The season between the spring equinox and Mayday (Beltane) is aligned with the lower trigram of Thunder. In the Fuxi sequence this is the quarter of initiation. Thunder is the energy of the first crack, sudden movement after stillness, or the illumination that lights up the landscape after being in the dark. In the natural world this is the season of emergence, when the ground is still cold but something underneath it is pushing hard toward light. There is an urgency to Thunder, a restlessness, an aliveness that cannot be contained. The six gates of Aries and the first 2 of Taurus all carry this lower trigram, which is why this spring season tends to feel like we’re being launched into a new world.

Channel: Gate 25 completes its channel with another Aries season gate: Gate 51, the Gate of Shock in the Heart/Ego center. Together they form the Channel of Initiation. This channel is the energy of someone who leaps into the unknown and is carried through the free fall by love. Innocence can deepen through initiation, and shock can become tolerable when the spirit of self underneath it stays open.

Polarity: The complimentary gate to Gate 25 is Gate 46, known as the Love of the Body. Where Gate 25 loves without agenda, Gate 46 loves being embodied, in this life, in physical form. Together they hold the polar tension of both spirit meeting matter and the soul feeling at home in its vessel.

A Somatic Practice for Gate 25

Place one hand on your sternum and breathe in slowly through your nose. On the exhale let your chest soften and feel the weight of your hand there. This is the G Center, the place in the body where your sense of self lives. This is the place where love originates before it becomes about anyone or anything in particular.

Notice if there is any holding here, any bracing. There is no need to know why it is there or how long it has been there. Just breathe into it slowly and let the chest receive the breath. This is what acceptance feels like in the body, a softening, the spirit of the self coming back into contact with itself.

Gate 25 Creativity Prompts:

Pull out your favorite notebook, your paints, your colored pencils, whatever calls to you, and give yourself 15 uninterrupted minutes with one of these:

• Write about a time you moved before you were fully ready. How did you feel in your body taking that first unsteady step? Write about the tenderness of what it felt like to begin something before you had any proof it deserved to exist.

• Draw or paint the moment just after breaking through. The shoot that has no idea yet it will become a flower, or the lamb still wet from being born, legs shaking, the whole world enormous and new. Draw what comes to mind when you hear the words Innocence and Universal Love.

• With your Mandala 64 deck, pull the Gate 25 card and place it somewhere you can see it, like on your altar or mantle. Keep it there throughout the sun’s transit through this gate. Flip between the shadow and the gift side of the card and draw or write about the feeling that comes up as you change the frequencies of the gate.

Thanks for taking this first step with me, friends.

xxo,

Alison

⭐ Let me know how Gate 25 has shown up for you in the comments or the chat, and please share this project with a human-design- curious friend!

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Happy spring, happy Aries-season-energy-explosion, and happy Neptune cazimi <3

I’m writing fresh out the gate of all that brand-new astro with some exciting news:

Last year, I walked all 64 gates of the Human Design mandala alongside the Zodiac on my podcast, Living the Spiral. I put out one episode a week for 52 weeks, with audio reflections about what was alive for me in each gate and sign as the sun moved through them.

It was one of the most grounding things I’ve ever done.

Now, after taking a little much-needed break from my weekly podcasts, the Neptune Cazimi in Aries lit up a dream within me to dive into that walk again- but this time a little more specific and a little more actionable.

What re-inspired me to walk the wheel in this way again this year was the Decan Walk I just started doing, a project by Christa of Practical Astros. With her walk, she’s invited people to move through each of the 36 decans of the Zodiac every 10 days- a living practice that syncs life up with the Tarot and the planetary rulers of each Zodiac segment.

I wrote a guest piece for one of the decans - Gemini III- which will be coming out on her Substack in June. Writing that essay lit me up inside, and also reminded me how beautifully astrology and Human Design speak to each other, how they’re really two languages for the same wheel of the year. And it sparked a deep desire in me to return to the gates, to feel them in my body and share them with you in real time.

This time around, instead of podcasting it, the walk be short posts that include writing, art and an embodied practice. I’ll send out a post here on Substack right when the sun enters each gate, so you can read about it and then reflect on how it’s showing up in your life over the following 5-6 days.

I’ll keep doing my new and full moon Astro-HD podcasts, and I’m excited to record some bonus audio content for the gates from time to time too - but this project will mostly be word & image.

I would also love to include guest posts about different gates from people who are familiar with them! If you’d like to write a short piece about a gate that is defined in your chart or otherwise meaningful to you, send me a DM!

I’m really excited to live through each gate of the spiral with you all, once again…

Welcome to the Mandala 64 Walk.

Why now?

Lately I’ve been thinking about how the main job of our brains is to find a path toward certainty when things feel uncertain. That’s not a flaw, it’s simply what minds are meant to do.

Right now, we are living in a time of profound uncertainty, where the nature of basic reality feels wobbly- and already, our minds are deeply exhausted. We’re all living through a time period when when our brains keep reaching for solid ground, some sense of stability based on systems we used to trust, and finding none. There are simply too many variables in motion, and everything is changing too fast.

So, instead of putting so much pressure on our minds to figure it all out, the Mandala 64 walk is an invitation to try something different.

Instead of searching for certainty in societal norms or through mental logic, this walk is an opportunity to attune inward at regular intervals - to your body, to the environment you’re in, and to the specific quality of energy the Sun is moving through right now. It’s time to give your mind a little rest and listen to the wisdom of the seasons. And the wisdom of the heart, the solar plexus, the spleen, and the gut.

My hope is that this walk will help you attune with a fresh way to feel oriented at a time when orientation feels extra challenging.

The 64 gates of the Mandala map onto the solar year. As the Sun moves through each gate - spending roughly five and a half days there - we get an invitation to feel into a particular part of the body, a particular quality of life force, and a particular question. This walk isn’t about analyzing the information of the gate… it’s more about the art of noticing.

I know from experience that , over the course of a full year, that practice of noticing becomes something incredibly valuable. From a deeper attunement to your own body’s knowledge, to a felt sense of relationality with the earth’s seasons, this walk can give you a quiet, profound kind of direction.

How to walk with me

I know that I can sometimes err on the side of long-winded :), but I’m aiming for each gate’s post to be short and concise. (There are a lot of planets in Aries these days, and Aries means bite-sized and punchy :) Each post will be a short written reflection, an image, and a simple embodiment practice. One gate at a time, moving in solar order through the year. It’s free to all subscribers.

A few ways to engage with the walk:

• Watch for omens. Once you know the gate’s theme, you’ll start seeing hints of it everywhere. In conversations, dreams, and what keeps catching your eye. Write those things down.

• Keep a journal or sketchbook. Even a few lines or scribbles. What’s alive this week? What’s asking to be seen? You don’t need to know anything about Human Design. Just notice.

• Attune to your body. Every gate that the sun travels through along the wheel also lives somewhere in the body. I’ll name it in each post and invite you to bring your awareness there, to breathe into it. That’s the whole practice.

• Join the chat. I’m opening the chat up to all subscribers so we can share our noticings about how each gate is showing up in our personal worlds and the greater collective.

Rest assured- you don’t have to read or participate with every gate or every post. Some gates will land and some won’t, and you can take a break whenever you like. Follow what pulls you- the wheel always comes back around.

Rituals for the 8 Gates of the Heart Center

Eight times a year - at the solstices, equinoxes, and cross-quarter days - the Sun crosses into one of the gates of the G center- the heart of the bodygraph. In Human Design, the G center is the seat of identity, love, and direction, and along the wheel, these 8 gates are the hinges of the year, the moments when we’re invited most deeply to reorient. The position of the 8 G/Heart -gates around the wheel looks like a compass, and I’m using it as my compass this year- a reminder to come back to the heart for my sense of direction as we pass seasonal thresholds.

At each of these gates, I’ll host a live ritual - a chance to drop in together, in real time on Zoom, at the seasonal marker. I just hosted the first one on Saturday for the Spring Equinox- thank you so much to everyone who joined in! It was such a blast to chat about the holiday, do some meditation and candle magic, and dance into spring with you all.

Paid subscribers to this substack get access to all 8 live rituals, as well as seasonal guidebooks for all the gates, a google calendar of Astro-HD Transits for the year ahead, and extra offerings like somatic practices and guided meditations woven through the year.

A Physical Anchor: the Mandala 64 Deck

Mandala 64 is a learning and oracle deck I created last year, with one card for each gate, plus 14 cards for each of the planets and luminaries that transit through the gates.

If you want something tangible to hold during this walk, order a deck! My favorite practice is to pull the card for the current gate and place it on your altar for the week. Let it sit in your field. It’s one of the most embodied ways I know to learn the gates - not through study but through slow, repeated encounter.

Decks are 20% off now through April using this link:

Order Your Deck Here!

The walk begins tomorrow with Gate 25: Innocence.

This is the gate that rings in the Spring Equinox, the moment that Pisces season melts into Aries season, and the astrological new year. Gate 25 is alternately known as the Gate of Innocence, Universal Love, and The Spirit of the Self. As we begin Aries season, spring and the new year, this gate reveals the energy of a pure heart- like a baby lamb just born, it’s filled with love that’s unconditional, undirected, and unarmored.

The Sun is here now, and so are we.

These boots were made for walkin’, and there’s no time like the present to start, I suppose!

Stay tuned tomorrow for the full post on Gate 25.

xo

Alison

PS » Please share this post with anyone you think might be interested in the Mandala 64 Walk! It’s a wonderful way for astrology folks to learn about Human Design & the I’ching, as the solar gates correspond with the Zodiac season and decans too. Thanks loves. xo!

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The spring equinox, that cusp between Pisces and Aries, is a major hinge in the wheel of the year. As we pass through it, something inside your body likely registers the shift before your mind does. There’s a felt sense of a door opening onto a path of new fertile ground that longs for your footsteps. How will you walk them as the sun and inner planets all make their through the sign of the Ram?

This year, the astrological new year’s threshold carries a bit of extra weight. Saturn is in Aries, and has now been there long enough that it’s starting to pressurize the question of what you are actually building- and can your body sustain it? Saturn in the sign of the self asks us to stop performing our initiations and begin living them. This isn’t a call for urgency, though- this is the Aries of the blacksmith at the forge, or the archer drawing the bow slowly, reminding us that

Slow is Smooth…. and Smooth is Fast.

Speaking of which, Neptune is a recently new inhabitant of Aries as well, which means that the atmosphere of the collective dream is changing. For over a decade, Neptune moved through Pisces, dissolving boundaries and thinning the veil between this world and the spirit world. That work is never fully finished, but the tides of the ocean have shifted.

Neptune in Aries brings the dissolutionary quality of the sea god inward, to your embodied sense of self. Now it is the ego itself that is being softened, the hard shell of personal identity gently eroded by something larger than individual will. This can feel disorienting in the body, asking you to consider who you truly are when the story you’ve been telling about yourself turns out to actually be quite permeable.

Neptune in Aries asks the question: What is left of you when the performance of your selfhood is buried by a massive wave? The invitation here is less about losing yourself underwater, and more in discovering that the “self” is more fluid and more resilient than you believed. Dreams will be more vivid this season, and the line between intuition and impulse will blur, so I’d advise to move slowly enough to tell the difference between the two.

Jupiter has recently stationed direct midway through it’s time in Cancer, and its presence there softens and expands the domain of the body’s home ground. Jupiter is exalted in Cancer, and the themes of this throne are an expanded emphasis on emotional safety, homeland, nourishment, and people and places we return to when we need to remember who we are. In this space, the roots are growing thick. Pay attention to what your body seeks out this season when no one is watching, because Jupiter in Cancer rewards instinct over strategy.

Aries season is also the last month of Uranus in Taurus, as well. For the past 7 years, the sky god has been disrupting what we thought was solid. Everything from our body’s relationship to the earth to money, the material world to what it means to feel safe in physical form. During Aries season, Uranus stands at the very last degrees of Taurus, gathering everything it has learned and preparing to move on. There is a quality to these final degrees that feels both like completion and like the last tremor before stillness. For some, the disruption has been external, with land and livelihood shifting. For others it has been more intimate, a rewiring of the body’s relationship to pleasure and stability.

Whatever Uranus has been excavating in your material life over these years, this season asks you to reflect honestly about what has been uprooted and what has, against all odds, held steady. Something in you is more durable than you knew. Uranus crossing the threshold into Gemini is coming on April 25, and the world’s communicative nervous system is about to be electrified to an entirely new register. This season is the last breath before that initiation. Feel the ground while it is still, briefly… ground.

For every rising sign, Aries season 2026 is asking a version of this same question: what does it mean to be present in your own life, in your own body, as a full and sovereign participant? Everyone’s answer will be different, but the springy ground underneath is the same. This season wants you here, awake at the starting line… and ready to begin a new cycle.

Horoscopes for your rising sign are below. But first,

I’d love to invite you to join me to ring in Aries Season with some gentle breath & creativity! I’m hosting an event called Sprouting into Action: A Spring Equinox Ritual, happening tomorrow, Saturday, March 21 at 10am on Zoom. We’ll learn some of the mythology, history, astrology & human design of the holiday, do a guided meditation to reflect on the past astrological year, and wiggle our way into spring.

Sign up here!

Or, become a paid subscriber to get a code for free tickets to all of my seasonal events this year, plus monthly horoscopes and bonus content <3

Your Aries Season Horoscopes

ARIES RISING

Saturn has been living in your first house long enough now that you are being tasked with becoming someone more solid than you were before. Aries season arrives and the Sun joins in on that game- think of it as a kind of anointment or initiaton. You are being asked to inhabit yourself more fully, to stop standing slightly outside your own skin and step all the way in. The work this season is physical. What does it mean to be present in your body as prayer rather than performance? Notice where you brace. Notice where you hold your breath before speaking. The myth you’re tasked to tap into is the quintessential hero at the moment they put on their armor. Aries season for you evokes the private, unglamorous act of suiting up before stepping onto the world’s stage. Take your time here, and build your power in the small moves.

TAURUS RISING

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