Happy New Moon in Gemini- hope it’s been a sweet one for you!

We’re onto the Gate of Caution, the last full gate of Gemini season. Do you have Gate 12 defined in your chart? Drop a note about how you feel it in the comments!

And, I have to ask- how did Gate 45: The Gatherer appear in your life over the past few days? Did you notice anything shifting in how you hold what you have or how you offer it?

Let me know in the comments <3

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Gemini season is coming to a close….

Gemini season is known to be chatty. It brings a flittery quality of aliveness through language, asking questions, coming together and putting things into words and seeing what sticks. This whole season has been full of that Mercurial energy, with ideas and words moving fast and connections sparking.

Gate 12 is the last full gate of Gemini season. In five days the sun moves into Gate 15, which sits on the cusp between Gemini and Cancer, the G-Center gate where we celebrate the Summer Solstice. So I see Gate 12 as a distillation gate. A gate that asks: of all the ideas and words that have moved through you this season, what is actually worth keeping? What has been waiting for the right mood, the right moment, or the right listener to speak into the world? What can you let go of quietly?

Yesterday’s new moon in Gemini landed here in this gate. New moons are always about planting seeds in dark soil, and the seed Gate 12 offers is not about having more to say. It’s about learning to trust the pause before you speak.

To make it personal, my unconscious North Node sits in Gate 12, and my conscious North Node is in Gate 45, the gate the sun just passed through.

The teaching I keep returning to is that most of us spend the first half of life living our South Node. It’s our inherited frequency, the groove that feels like home. My conscious South Node is Gate 26, the energy of knowing how to move things through a compelling story. My unconscious South Node is Gate 11, the gate of Ideas, a mind that is always already full of new concepts.

I feel these deeply, and have lived with both of those energies for a long time.

Gate 45 as my North Node is asking me to move from persuasion and salesmanship toward gathering together and holding space for the tribe. It’s asking for less crafting of a story that might land and more trusting that the field I hold is already enough. And Gate 12 as my unconscious North Node is the part I can’t see directly but can feel underneath things. It’s a pull toward waiting to release, of expressions that have had time to become true before they leave my mouth. Not every idea needs to see the light of day, or feel the vibration of speech.

I definitely feel the pole-shift happening as I approach my big midlife transit, my Uranus Opposition. The South Node grooves are deep and I know them well. But recently I have noticed more of a tendency to slow down and pause before I speak. This new moon in Gemini feels like a marker on that path for me.

Lately I’ve been doing a lot of Nodes of Fate readings where we explore your conscious and unconscious life path, and they’ve been super fun and revealing! If you’re feeling the pull of your own nodal axis and want to explore the direction it is calling you, you can book one here.

Book a Nodes of Fate Reading

Onto Gate 12: The Story of Caution

In the I’Ching, Hexagram 12 is Pǐ, made up of the trigrams Heaven over Earth. The image is of two forces that belong together but are moving in opposite directions, heaven rising, earth grounding, and the space between them widening. It is the hexagram known as Standstill. Here, things are not flowing. The usual channels of communication have become unreliable or blocked. The wisdom in that is not to force the connection but to tend your inner state and to hold what you carry until the moment when exchange and flow becomes possible again.

This is the standstill of holding your breath for a moment before something deeply true comes out.

The shadow frequency of Gate 12 in the Gene Keys is Vanity, which means speaking to be heard rather than speaking from truth, filling the silence with words that are more about managing how you’re perceived than about genuine contact. We all know this pattern from the inside. It’s the voice that performs rather than reveals, or the laugh that covers the thing you really wanted to say.

The gift is Discrimination, and I love this word in this context. Discrimination is the capacity to sense which words are true enough to use your throat to speak. This week, be discriminate in thinking about which expression will reach the person in front of you, which moment is ripe and which is not. This is the intelligence of the body as much as the mind, a felt inner sense of rightness before you open your mouth.

The siddhi of 12 is Purity. This is an unmixed signal, speaking from a voice that has stopped managing itself and is simply, plainly, vulnerably true.

Sometimes it takes a sacred pause to arrive at that signal.

Gate 12 in the Body

Gate 12, like most Gemini Gates, lives in the Throat Center, and its voice is one of the most intimate in the bodygraph. It is the voice of genuine attempt, of willingness to reach across the distance between one person and another knowing the outcome is uncertain.

Gate 12 connects down to the Solar Plexus, the emotional center. This matters enormously for how this gate works in the body. Emotional energy builds in waves, and Gate 12 carries individual emotional truth that is still finding its form. If you speak too soon, what comes out is the high or low of the wave, not the true meaning underneath it. The practice of Gate 12 is learning to wait for emotional clarity before expressing, to let your feelings mature into something that can actually be received.

This gate has a strong aura that communicates without speaking. People with Gate 12 defined often don’t need many words. Their presence already says something. What they carry tends to come through in how they say things, the quality of their voice, their timing, the texture of contact, more than in the content of the words themselves.

(I have my unconscious north node in this gate, and lately I’ve gotten a lot of feedback about the sound of my voice… I guess I’m a podcaster, so that tracks, but it is quite interesting how it lines up with Gate 12! )

Physically this gate connects to the throat, the vocal cords, the resonating chambers of the chest. There is often a kind of shyness that lives here, a vulnerability around being truly heard, because what Gate 12 wants to express is close to the heart. It can withdraw completely when the mood isn’t right, or open fully when it is. That oscillation, despite how we may judge it, is not inconsistency. It is wisdom.

Season, Channel & Polarity

Season: We are still in the Earth season of Kūn, the receptive field that has been building since Beltane- this will shift when the lower hexagram shifts to MOUNTAIN on the Summer Solstice. At this threshold, Gemini’s last full breath before the solstice, the upper trigram of Gate 12 is Qián, Heaven, which is like pure creative force moving upward. Heaven over Earth is the image of two things yearning toward each other across a gap. This is the energy of late Gemini season: so much has moved through, and now something in you is reaching toward what it all really means.

Channel: Gate 12 connects to Gate 22 in the Solar Plexus, forming the Channel of Openness. This is an individual channel, with energy that is deeply personal and not oriented toward the collective. It is the channel of the artist, the mystic, the person whose emotional truth is particular to them and must find its own form before it can be shared. Gate 22 brings grace and social openness when the mood is right, and Gate 12 brings the capacity to articulate what that grace is based on. Together they form a channel that moves between inner emotional experience and outer expression, always contingent on timing, always dependent on the emotional wave.

Polarity: Gate 11, the Gate of Ideas, sits directly across the wheel. Gate 11 lives in the Ajna and is a gate of conceptual abundance, where images, insights, and frameworks arrive faster than they can be processed. The polarity between 11 and 12 is the axis between having a thousand ideas and knowing which one deserves your voice. Gate 11 gathers and ideates, and Gate 12 distills and refines. Together they describe something I think of as the full picture of Gemini season, the huge rush of pollinating input and the quiet time afterward when you sit with what rose to the top.

A Somatic Practice for Gate 12

Find a comfortable seat and let yourself arrive in your body, not thinking about it but feeling it: the weight of you, the temperature of the air, whatever is touching your skin right now.

Bring your attention to the solar plexus, the soft place just above your navel. This is where Gate 12’s emotional truth originates. Don’t try to identify what’s there. Just feel the quality of it, the texture of it, whether it’s moving or still, whether it’s full or empty feeling.

Now let your attention travel slowly up through the chest, past the heart, into the throat. Notice whether there is anything held there, braced or waiting.

Take a breath in, and on the exhale, let a sound come out. Not a word. Just a sound, whatever wants to move. Do this two or three times.

Then ask yourself: what is the thing I’ve been waiting for the right moment to say? You don’t have to say it now. Just let it be known to you.

Creativity Prompts

Take fifteen minutes with your favorite notebook or whatever calls to you, and try one of these:

Write about something you’ve been holding back this Gemini season. A feelingor a thing you’ve half-said in your head a dozen times. Let yourself write it out fully, messily, for no audience but yourself. Then notice: what in it is ready to be spoken, and what still needs to wait?

Draw or paint the image of Heaven and Earth as two fields moving apart, drawing on how it feels to close that gap with deeper meaning.

With your Mandala 64 deck, pull the Gate 12 card and sit with both sides. Where is Vanity showing up in how you’ve been expressing yourself this season, speaking to manage rather than to connect? And where is Discrimination already operating, where have you held something back and felt the rightness of that waiting? Let the card sit with you through this new moon week and see what it clarifies.

Thanks so much for being here and participating in the Mandala 64 Walk!

If you’d like to learn more about your Human Design and Gene Keys as they relate to the Zodiac seasons, you can book a reading with me. It’s been life-changing for me to get to know the specific gates where my natal planets live in my chart, and I’d love to explore yours with you as well.

My Books Are Open

See you in 5 days for Gate 15: Extremes, the cusp gate that carries us across the threshold into Cancer season and the Summer Solstice.

Alison

Alison

Participating in the Mandala 64 Walk is free.

Paid subscribers get free access to my live rituals at each of the 8 G Center gates through the year, plus extra goodies along the way.

For my Summer Solstice ritual, instead of a live on Zoom event, I will be sending out a recorded conscious-connected breathwork session that is focused on the gate of the holy-day: Extremes. This gate has the gift of Magnetism and the siddhi of Florescence, so this session will be about attuning to the brilliance of the longest day and releasing stuck patterns and emotions to attune to our internal magnetism.

Sign up as a paid subscriber to get this session in your inbox this week!

This week the sun enters my conscious North Node AND design sun gate, 45: The Gatherer, also known as the Queen or the Sovereign. It’s one I think about quite a lot! Do you have 45 defined in your chart? Drop a note about how you feel it in the comments!

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Gate 45: The Story

In the I Ching, Hexagram 45 is Cuì, Lake over Earth. The image is water that has gathered itself into a low place, drawn there by gravity and the shape of the land. The lake doesn’t demand anything from the streams that feed it, they arrive because the terrain makes it possible. This is the energy of Gate 45: the leader who becomes the lowest point in the landscape, the person toward whom things naturally flow because they have made themselves a place of gathering, of welcome, of real resource to the tribe.

The shadow of Gate 45 in the Gene Keys is Dominance. This is the old model of leadership, the one most of us were raised inside, where someone at the top holds the resources and determines who gets access. Dominance doesn’t always look like cruelty or control. It can look like over-managing, like needing to be the one who directs the tide. It can look like hoarding your gifts because you haven’t yet trusted the field around you. It can also show up as its inverse, the person who defers constantly to whoever seems to hold authority, who bows their head before they’ve even been asked to. Both patterns live inside the same shadow, just expressed from different positions within the hierarchy.

The gift is Synergy, which Gene Keys founder Richard Rudd connects to the concept of heterarchy: a mode of relating that still has structure and leadership but where each person’s particular offering genuinely matters to the whole. I love this word. Synergy is what happens when you stop needing to be the most important thing in the room and instead trust that you are one essential piece among other essential pieces, a star within a constellation of other stars.

The voice of Gate 45 is “I have.” What you have is meant to move, to be placed into the hands of those who can carry it further. The siddhi is Communion, the place beyond exchange where the very act of giving and receiving dissolves, and what remains is pure undivided contact between beings. The ancient image for this is the eucharist, bread and wine, the ritual of sharing what sustains life. That is how deep this gate goes.

Gate 45 is sometimes called the King or Queen energy, and it’s worth sitting with what that means underneath the cultural baggage. A sovereign in the truest sense is not above the people. They are the one who holds the field, who ensures that what has been gathered is circulated, and who says with their whole presence:

There is enough here, and it belongs to all of us.

Gate 45 in the Body

Gate 45 lives in the Throat Center, the only center in the bodygraph where what is interior becomes exterior, where your inner reality crosses into the shared world through sound, speech, and the quality of presence that can be physically felt in a room. Gate 45 holds one of the eleven Throat voices, and its voice is “I have,” which is among the most primal statements a human can make. It is an utterance of belonging, and resourced ownership that is meant to be generous.

Physically, Gate 45 corresponds to the larynx and the resonating chambers of the throat and chest. The Throat Center is connected to the thyroid gland, which governs the body’s relationship to its own resources: how much energy is produced, how much is stored, and how the body calibrates between abundance and scarcity. When the shadow frequency of Gate 45 is running in the body, there is often a kind of metabolic guardedness, with a sense that not enough is available and what you have might run out. You might notice this as tightening in the chest before you speak, a rehearsed quality in your voice, a way of calibrating your words for reception before they have left your body.

The channel partner, Gate 21, sits in the Will or Heart Center and carries the energy of the Hunter: determined, driven, capable of commanding resources. When Gate 21 and Gate 45 are working together, the Throat and Pump of the Heart are in full communication. The voice emerges from true willingness to be responsible for others, and the will is guided by orientation toward shared flourishing. In the body, this lands as the difference between speaking from the throat only and speaking from somewhere much deeper, from below the collarbone, from the place where your actual values live.

Season, Channel & Polarity

Season: We are still held in the Earth season of Kūn, the lower trigram that settles in at Beltane and carries through the Summer Solstice. Its quality is receptive, generative, and stable, a field that is already giving. The upper trigram for Gate 45 is Duì, the Lake, associated in the I Ching with joy, openness, and the quality of reflection. Lake over Earth is the image of Cuì: an open, still surface gathering what comes to it, held by the steady ground beneath.

Channel: Gate 45 connects down to Gate 21 in the Heart Center, forming the 21–45 Channel of Money. This is a tribal channel, oriented entirely toward the maintenance of the collective, ensuring that resources are not just accumulated but circulated as well. Gate 21 is the Huntress, the one who goes out to gather what is needed, and Gate 45 is the sovereign who holds and distributes it. In the Channel of Money, these two gates depend on each other completely: the Huntress needs the Gatherer to give her labor meaning, and the Gatherer needs the Huntress to bring things to the table. When both are operating well, the channel creates real material abundance that flows outward and is felt by everyone in the field.

Polarity: Gate 26, the Egoist, sits directly across the wheel in Sagittarius. Gate 26 lives in the Heart Center and carries the energy of persuasion, knowing how to move information and resources through a convincing story. It is sometimes called the Trickster gate or the Salesperson. It is someone who knows that framing matters, that how something is told shapes what is received. The polarity between 45 and 26 is the axis between gathering for the collective and influencing for the individual, the sovereign and the salesman. In their highest expression these two are complementary: the 45 holds the ground and names what is available, and the 26 finds the story that makes the gathering irresistible. When the axis is working, abundance is both created and communicated in a way that draws people in.

A Somatic Practice for Gate 45

Find a comfortable position with your feet touching the ground. Take a moment to feel the weight of your body, the actual substance of you, and let yourself be held by whatever is underneath you. This is Kūn, the Earth trigram. You do not have to maintain yourself. The ground is already doing that.

Now bring your attention to the center of your chest, just below the sternum, where the heart physically sits. This is the territory of Gate 21, the channel partner, a place where willingness to be responsible for something larger than yourself lives. Let your awareness rest there for a breath or two. Then move your attention slowly up to the throat, to the soft front column of it, and notice whether it is holding anything. Tension, bracing, a sense of needing to get something right before you can speak. You don’t need to change any of it. Just notice it. Then, in a voice as quiet or as large as feels true, say out loud: “I have.” Say it again. Notice what comes. The practice is to feel that statement resonate in the chest and throat together, to let it be both a declaration and an offering.

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 when you were truly received by a community, a group, or a gathering of people. What did they receive from you? What did you feel in your body as you gave it? Then write about a time when you withheld something you had to offer, kept it to yourself out of fear or uncertainty. What were you protecting, and what might have been different if you had placed it in the field?

Draw or paint the image of a lake on still ground at dusk, fed by many streams you cannot see but can feel the evidence of. Let the surface of the lake be luminous, full of the last light of day. Don’t worry about technical accuracy. Let the image be about gathering, about the ground that makes gathering possible.

With your Mandala 64 deck, pull the Gate 45 card and sit with both sides. Notice where Dominance is showing up in your life right now, in how you lead, in how you hold what you have. And notice where Synergy is already happening, where something is being gathered by many hands, not just your own. Let the card sit on your altar for the next few days and see what it brings up for you.

Thanks so much for being here and participating in the Mandala 64 Walk!

If you’d like to learn more about your Human Design and Gene Keys as they relate to the Zodiac seasons, you can book a reading with me. It’s been life-changing for me to get to know the specific gates where my natal planets live in my chart, and I’d love to explore yours with you as well.

My Books Are Open

xo! See you in 5 days for Gate 12: Caution.

Alison

Participating in the Mandala 64 Walk is free.

Paid subscribers get free access to my live rituals at each of the 8 G Center gates through the year, plus extra goodies along the way.

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. This week’s gate, The Gate of Change (35), was selected by Jahje Ives, a brilliant artist and human design guide who I met last year at the High Desert Human Design conference in Santa Fe (speaking of which, you should totally come this year!) .

Jahje is creating an amazing deck called The EmbodieHD Landscape: The 64 Gates where she has created portraits of 64 individuals who have each of the 64 gates defined in their chart. She also writes the Substack The Art of Human Design- follow or subscribe to her newsletter here:

The Art of Human Design

Come explore the art of Human Design with me, Jahje Ives, a certified Human Design Specialist, Mystic Artist and Intuitive Guide as I teach you how to transform and re-align your life using the unique map within us all... your Human Design.

By Jahje Ives : Human Design

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

(PS. If YOU would like to be part of this project and write about one of the 64 Gates, I’ve still got openings, and would love to share your experience and insights- you don’t have to be an expert, just a felt experience. Please DM me with the gate you’re interested in!.)

“I’m fucking going for it”

Leaps of Faith with Jahjehan Ives: Mercury & Jupiter in Gate 35

Gate 35 is the energy of “I wonder what might happen if?” and then you go and do the thing. In traditional Human Design, it’s the Gate of Change, in the I Ching it’s the Hexagram of Progress, and in the Gene Keys, it holds the shadow of Hunger, the gift of Adventure, and the siddhi of Boundlessness.

I have a lifetime of experience with this Gate as the only channel I have in my chart is the 35-36 channel. I am foundationally built to take the leap of faith.

Or at least that’s how I like to think of it. Gate 35 for me shows up as “here’s what happened when I stretched and did that thing that made my gut twist”. It’s why I often find myself sharing what I’ve done and helping clients emotionally calibrate their own leaps and bounds when you say, “I’m fucking going for it.” and DO.

The Gate of Change & Progress

Gate 35 lives in the throat center and carries the energy of the storyteller who regales you with tales of how they pushed beyond what they thought was possible and what happened when they did.

This gate has the capacity to shift others through sharing your lived experience. It’s part of the collective circuitry meaning your experiences aren’t just for you. They become the medicine of possibility and a gateway into expansion for others too.

In the IChing Gate 35 is called Progress and I believe progress begins when we are open to change, trust in the flow of life, and see each transition as an essential part of our journey.

I often say growth requires discomfort. That’s because growth is taking us to a place we’ve never been before and our nervous system likes business as usual, it likes to know what to expect, it likes consistency.

But growth is going into the unknown with the understanding that while we may not see the end of the path yet, if we begin we will get there eventually.

When we can let go of the fear that change will take something away from us and instead learn to flow, to maybe even find joy in the unknown, and to trust that every experience is an invitation to grow then we are truly free to progress.

That said one of the challenges of Gate 35 can be that when the flow for progress takes too long, the restless jump ship. In the Gene Keys 35 carries the shadow of Hunger, which can show up as restlessly moving from experience to experience.

This can be an endless hunger of constantly needing something new to feel fulfilled and being unable to find contentment in what is. So you move on to the next thing, thwarting progress by chasing the next adventure instead of staying and exploring what might still be unfolding.

Gate 35 is defined in my Mercury and Jupiter

In my own chart, I have Gate 35 defined in my conscious Mercury as 35.2 and in my conscious Jupiter as 35.6. So for me, this energy dwells in what I speak about, what I teach through, and what I naturally expand into (and find my fortune through).

Which makes perfect sense as I’ve always been an artist and a writer and much of what I create comes directly from my lived experiences. Some of my most potent work has come from moving through the emotional wave of the 35/36 channel, processing an experience deeply, and then turning that experience into art or writing that inspires others.

That’s the core of the gift of 35 for me. It’s not just about having experiences. It’s about synthesizing them to share in a way that helps others move beyond their own limitations.

This gate lives in my throat center, which is one of only two defined centers I have in my chart alongside my emotional solar plexus. I’m an Emotional Manifestor, so I speak and create from my emotional truth as my experiences move through me and become tangible.

The 35/36 is called the Channel of Transitoriness, though I like to call it the Leap of Faith Channel because that’s what it feels like.

Again and again, my life has been shaped by taking leaps into the unknown (Gate 36) and then sharing what I discovered on the other side of them (Gate 35).

What’s interesting is that the things that tend to impact people the most — the artwork that resonates most deeply, the stories that bring in clients, the moments people remember years later — are almost always born from that vulnerable place.

I used to feel self-conscious about that.

I used to think I was oversharing and talked about myself too much.

Someone would tell me what they were going through and I’d immediately respond with, “Oh, when I went through something similar, here’s what I learned.”

Now I realize that’s the medicine of Gate 35.

The gift is being willing to share the story. To reveal the vulnerability. To say: I’ve been there too and here is what I learned.

Because through that sharing, people begin to see new possibilities for themselves.

Can you give a specific story where this gate showed up or felt relevant in your own life? What did it feel like in your body?

An example of this gate in my own life was closing down my old business, Baby Jives Co, a company I had built over fifteen years that was still successful and “working” from the outside.

But it no longer felt aligned.

So 3 years ago, I took a massive leap of faith and walked away from it to completely reimagine my life.

I had encountered Human Design in 2020 and it gave me language for things I had intuitively known about myself my entire life. But three years ago, I dove all the way in to my studies and certifications.

And I remember thinking: I don’t fully know what this next chapter looks like but I know I have to trust where this energy is pulling me.

And honestly? The last few years have been an ongoing lesson in surrender. Surrendering into not knowing where the leap lands or when it ends.

It feels like being out on a vast ocean riding wave after wave after wave. Hoping the waters will settle only to realize that the waves never truly settle. You just get used to the waves and learn how to ride them.

So even though change can happen in an instant, it can also unfold in waves.

3 years ago I also received a wave of inspiration that I’ve been riding since (the paintings I’m sharing here are part of it) illustrating the 64 Gates of Human Design.

This project is another leap of faith as I know I’m creating something that wants to exist and can already see it completed but it’s taken its time unfolding and been a huge labor of love. But I know when it’s finally here, one of the most meaningful parts (aside from having created this) will be the story of becoming the person who stayed with it long enough to bring it into reality.

The 35-36 channel is one of the few manifested channels in the human design chart. Which means what you speak can easily become your manifestation.

So the question becomes what would you like to choose?

Would you like to choose the energy of:
“That’s a beautiful dream, but it probably won’t happen for me”?

Or would you like to choose:
“I don’t know exactly how this is going to unfold yet… but I’m willing to take the leap. I’m willing to see what becomes possible if I don’t give up on it.”

That, to me, is the heart of progress in Gate 35.

A Creative Practice to tap into Gate 35

Play with watercolors (my favorite media) by just adding color onto your paper and seeing how the colors interact with each other. Explore line, marks, how the colors flow. Just let go and see what gets created. And if it turns into a mess, tear it up to create a collage or write little notes to inspire your progress.

Or if you like a bit more structure, take an emotional experience you’ve moved through that really impacted you and turn it into a creative piece (painting, poem, photo, etc) and share the results along with a little bit of insight into why you created it.

Set a timer for 5 minutes and use your notes app (or paper if you prefer) to speak out a list beginning every sentence with “What if…” to make a list of all the possibilities you can dream into. Then pick one and take the first step forward and see what happens.

If you enjoy journaling, here are a few questions you can ask yourself and see what comes:

• What leap(s) am I waiting to take?

• What’s holding me back?

• What’s the worst that could happen if I did this?

• What’s the best that could happen?

Go on an adventure. Take yourself somewhere you’ve been yearning to go - maybe a new hiking trail, maybe a new city, maybe a new shop, maybe a new country. Take the leap. Have the experience. Tell someone what you learned.

The 64 Gates: The seeds, weeds, and growth themes that shape our life story

I see the 64 energies as the building blocks of all the potential archetypes that live within us to create our unique story. I think of them as an inner landscape living inside the chart that holds the seeds, weeds, and growth themes that shape our life story.

The Gates are my favorite part of Human Design because they are where our real nuance emerges and when we begin to understand how they flow through us we can use what we learn to navigate our life in greater flow with our natural gifts and potential challenges.

Of course when I first started learning human design the Gates were the part that eluded me the most. That spurred my creative urge that has been unfolding exploring the 64 Gates through different individuals who I photograph and interview to learn about their own experience with specific gates.

The results are now culminating in a card deck called the EmbodieHD Landscape with the resulting illustrations, contemplative prompts, seeds and weeds reflections, and inspirational mantras to explore these themes within yourself and your life.

I’ve been sharing these artworks and interviews on my site and substack as I go and finally after 3 years of growing this I’m excited to be finally launching it this September on Kickstarter.

You can learn more about the EmobodieHD Landscape and sign up to be the first to know when it launches here: https://www.jahjeives.com/blog

How to work with Jahje

Jahje Ives is a Human Design guide, transformational coach, and intuitive artist who helps people navigate seasons of life reimagining with greater clarity and growing self-trust. Using Human Design, creative storytelling, energetic release, and embodied art practices, she guides clients beyond limitations and into the full bloom of who they are becoming.

When she’s not coaching or teaching, Jahje loves to hike the parks around Philadelphia with her family or retreat to her studio and create intuitive artwork using crystal watercolors. She is currently completing the EmbodieHD Landscape, an illustrated exploration of the 64 Gates of Human Design and the 14 celestial bodies that will become a card deck and expanded body of work.

Website www.jahjeives.com

Instagram https://www.instagram.com/jahjeives/

and https://www.instagram.com/jahjehan

Substack https://substack.com/@jahjeives

Thanks so much for walking the Mandala 64 with Jajhe and I!

See you in 5 days for the sun in Gate 45: THE GATHERER.

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!

I also offer Astrology & Human Design Readings and 1:1 Coaching that weaves together Astro64, embodiment and breath, and creative practice. View my offerings on my website:

Hearth & Spiral Offerings

Participating in the Mandala 64 Walk is free. Paid subscribers get my undying gratitude, as well as access to my live rituals for each of the Holy Days through the year, plus extra goodies along the way. The next ritual is for Summer Solstice, which corresponds with Gate 15: Extremes… hope to see you there!

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. This week’s gate, The Gate of Skills (16), was selected by Mel Rolfes, a new friend based in Roanoke, Virginia who works as a psychotherapist and mind-body practitioner. She shares her brilliant creative writing on the Substack Underbelly.

If YOU would 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 with the gate you’re interested in!.

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

Cultivating Devotion to a Craft

Mel Rolfes on Gate 16

In Human Design, Gate 16 is located in the Throat Center and is often associated with enthusiasm, talent, versatility, and the refinement of skill through practice. It corresponds to Hexagram 16 of the I’Ching, traditionally translated as Enthusiasm. In the I’Ching, enthusiasm is not just excitement or hype, but a kind of energized alignment that helps mobilize movement, creativity, and collective momentum. There’s something deeply alive about this hexagram. It speaks to the power of inspiration, rhythm, preparation, and emotional resonance, especially when that energy is grounded and directed toward something meaningful. It reflects the spark that helps us engage more fully with life and devote ourselves to what wants to be cultivated through us.

In the Gene Keys, 16 moves from the Shadow of Indifference to the Gift of Versatility to the Siddhi of Mastery. This progression speaks to the difference between disengaging from life versus fully participating in it. The Shadow of Indifference can show up as apathy, scatteredness, self-doubt, cynicism, or withholding ourselves because we’re afraid of failing, being seen, or not being “good enough” yet. The Gift of Versatility emerges when we allow ourselves to experiment, stay curious, and engage with life more creatively and wholeheartedly. Over time, that sincere devotion to practice can evolve into the Siddhi of Mastery, not as perfection or performance, but as a deeply embodied relationship with one’s gifts.

To me, this gate is about finding your gifts through cultivating a devotion to a craft. It’s the energy of refining something over time, not because it is obsessed with mastery in a polished or performative sense, but because it believes in the transformative powers of the actual process. Practice doesn’t make perfect, practice makes purpose. Through repetition, experimentation, failure, and continued engagement, something slowly gets polished, whether it’s a skill, yourself, or more likely, both. It requires presence, curiosity, and a willingness to accept that mastery rarely arrives fully formed.

And because it’s a process, fully showing up with your gifts often means sharing them before you feel like you’ve mastered them. That takes vulnerability. And vulnerability tends to sit pretty close to our wounds.

I chose this gate because I have it as my conscious Chiron placement (16.4), and it feels deeply intertwined with my broader astrological makeup, especially my 9th house Gemini stellium. There’s a strong part of me that longs to learn, synthesize, teach, and translate complex ideas into something relational and accessible for others. But that desire sits surprisingly close to a fear of being misunderstood, scrutinized, or seen before I feel fully “ready.” I think this placement is asking me to learn how to share imperfectly anyway.

Gate 16 strengths are often described as enthusiasm, talent, and versatility, but for me, it also speaks to the willingness to stay engaged long enough for something meaningful to take shape and emerge. As someone with a strong Gemini influence, I know how easy it can be to become fascinated by many things at once, constantly moving toward the next idea, insight, or possibility before giving myself the chance to truly deepen into something. Gate 16 seems to ask us to not just discover our gifts, but tend to them. Return to them. Refine them over time without turning it into a performance, a productivity machine, or simply another source of external validation.

Because of that, I think the shadow of indifference can sometimes look less like laziness and more like disengagement, self-doubt, or withholding ourselves because we’re afraid of not being good enough yet. Almost like a form of self-protection that manifests as apathy.

Having this gate as my conscious Chiron feels deeply tied to the “wounded healer” archetype and the tension between expression, visibility, and self-worth. There can be a fear of not being ready enough, skilled enough, or polished enough yet. There is a temptation to believe that we have to perfect ourselves before we can fully offer our gifts. But I think Gate 16 teaches something softer and wiser: that devotion itself is transformative. Through practice, repetition, and continued engagement, both the practitioner and the gift are refined together. The gift is not meant to emerge fully polished. Part of its refinement happens through the vulnerable act of sharing it before it feels complete.

Writing this piece honestly feels like a living example of Gate 16 for me. I don’t identify as a Human Design expert, and there’s still a part of me that wonders whether I’m “qualified enough” to speak on this gate at all. But the more I sat with that tension, the more I realized that is the gate for me. Learning how to share what’s emerging before it feels perfectly refined.

In my body, this energy feels like vulnerability and aliveness existing side by side. A kind of creative charge in my chest and throat, like something wants to come through me and be expressed, but needs practice, structure, and devotion so it doesn’t scatter itself in too many directions. Almost like learning how to channel something being born in real time rather than waiting until it feels complete before allowing it to be seen.

The Practice

When the Sun transits Gate 16, I think it can be a beautiful time to reconnect with the practices, skills, or creative expressions that make us feel genuinely alive. One practice I’d recommend is setting aside time to engage in something imperfectly but devotionally (aka: make some bad art). The point isn’t mastery or productivity. It’s participation. Let yourself reconnect with the experience of practicing something simply because it lights something up inside of you.

This could look like painting, dancing in your living room, practicing an instrument, writing poetry, coloring, learning a new skill, or returning to something you once loved before becoming overly concerned with being “good” at it.

Before beginning, you might reflect on:

• What am I longing to practice or cultivate right now?

• Where have I confused mastery with perfection?

• What wants to be expressed through me, even imperfectly?

• What would it feel like to approach my gifts with curiosity instead of performance?

Then spend some time engaging the practice slowly and attentively. Notice what happens in your body when you allow yourself to be a beginner again. Notice where joy, resistance, frustration, enthusiasm, self-consciousness, or self-judgment arise. And remember that some things become luminous only because we keep returning to them.

Practice Makes Purpose

The 64 gates and the I’Ching hexagrams are symbolic patterns and archetypal energies that help illuminate different dimensions of being human. I don’t feel the need to approach these systems with absolute certainty in order to find them meaningful. For me, their value is experiential and reflective. They offer mirrors, frameworks, and invitations into greater self-awareness and wholeness. These systems aren’t here to tell us who we are, but to guide us toward remembering who we came here to become.

Gate 16 is an invitation to participate more fully in the unfolding of our own lives, trusting that along the way our gifts will reveal themselves. Stay curious. Experiment. Follow the thread of what makes you feel alive. Mastery doesn’t arrive overnight. It’s shaped through returning, over and over again, with sincerity and devotion. And maybe our unique soul purpose isn’t something we excavate fully formed, but something we slowly grow into through practice.

And yes, vulnerability is terrifying. Being seen, and the potential of being misunderstood or rejected, can feel deeply threatening to the nervous system. But if we never allow our messy authentic selves to shine through, underdeveloped gifts and all, then the people who are looking for us can’t find us.

Happy Gemini season, everyone.

All about Mel:

Mel is a psychotherapist and mind-body practitioner based in Roanoke, Virginia. She has a telehealth private practice, as well as a second business where she weaves together psychology, somatics, and contemplative practices to support folks in moving toward greater wholeness and developing more resourced nervous systems. She is currently completing a two-year diploma program in astropsychology and looks forward to weaving this symbolic system into her already integrative healing work. She keeps a low-key Substack where she practices devotion to her own unfolding gifts through creative writing:

UNDERBELLY

some of this is true. some of this is not. most falls somewhere in between.

By melchemy ✨

You can learn more about her private practice at www.inhaleexhalecounseling.com and her mind-body care at www.melrolfes.com.

Thanks for walking the Mandala together, y’all.

See you in 5 days for the sun in Gate 35: CHANGE.

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.

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Now onto the energetic frequency of the next 5 days- The Gate of The Now, the first Gate of Gemini Season! This is the gate where Uranus is currently hanging out, so as the sun passes through this region, Uranus will experience his annual cazimi moment - sitting on the throne of the Sun. This week will likely have some electrical charge, reminding you to surrender to the present moment. Remember, even the best of plans aren’t set in stone.

Gate 20: The Story

Something happens right at the edge of Gate 8 and Gate 20, the cusp of Taurus and Gemini Season. Gate 8 asked what distilled offering you were ready to bring forward, what essential thing had been gathering itself into a form specific enough to be shared with the world. Gate 20 is what happens when that offering actually meets the present moment and you discover, all at once, that the only place it can live is now.

In the I’Ching, Hexagram 20 is known as Guān, Wind over Earth. It’s the image of wind moving across the whole landscape, touching everything without pausing, reading the terrain as it goes. Ancient commentaries on this hexagram describe a high tower, a place of seeing. Like a lighthouse scans the sea, this is the energy of witnessing what is here, right now, in this exact moment. The voice of Gate 20 in the bodygraph is the most existential statement in the entire Throat Center- it says “I am”.

The shadow of Gate 20 in the Gene Keys is Superficiality, which is the way we can check out from the present moment while technically still occupying it. You are talking, but part of you is already somewhere else, managing the next thing, rehearsing or reviewing, running a background track of commentary over the top of what is actually happening. Your body is in the room but your being, your soul, is elsewhere. This can show up as being busy for the sake of being busy, or over-preparing in a way that insulates you from the aliveness of the actual moment.

The gift of Gate 20 is Self-Assurance. This is not just “confidence” in the usual sense of the word, or the loud kind of assurance that comes from assuming in advance that things will go well. Self-Assurance here is surrendering the need to know something in advance, and instead trusting the moment enough to show up in it without a prepared position, letting what is true and alive in you speak from where you actually are.

The siddhi is Presence. In the Gene Keys, Richard Rudd’s language around it moves toward something that cannot fully be spoken. It’s the moment when a person who has been trying to be present dissolves, and what remains is simply the now itself, The Presence with a capital P, moving through a human form.

There are teachers in the lineage of this gate - Ramana Maharshi is one - who said very little and whose presence was itself the transmission. The teaching was not in the content of what they said. It was in the quality of attention behind it. Maharshi taught that the present moment is the only reality. He stated that past and future are mere mental projections. By quieting the mind through Self-enquiry (asking "Who am I?"), one dissolves the ego and rests permanently in the eternal "Now," where the true Self is realized. That is the siddhi territory of Gate 20: your being in this moment is the offering.

Uranus in Gate 20

Uranus has been moving through Gate 20 since April 28th of this year, and it will stay here until May 26, 2027. That is a long time to have the planet of disruption and awakening sitting in the gate of presence. The sun will meet the sky god here this week on Friday, adding extra light and heat to this liberatory transit.

What Uranus tends to do is break up whatever has calcified. In Gate 20, that means the old habits of speaking without landing, of being somewhere without really being there, or of moving through your days on autopilot. Uranus here is not going to be gentle about that. It will keep surfacing moments where you realize you checked out, where you said the expected thing, and where you were technically present but not fully in your body. A big clue here is to pay attention to what your eyes are doing as you move through the world- are they connected, alive, meeting the entities of the day? Are they darting about too fast to take anything in? Or are they glazed over, looking inward only or toward the past or the future?

The invitation over this whole year-plus with Uranus in this gate is to let that disruption do its work. The throat’s nature wants to speak from now, from this specific unrepeatable moment, and Uranus is going to keep making the alternative (zooming too far to the past or the present) feel increasingly uncomfortable. What wants to come through you that could only come through you right now, in this season of your life? That’s the question this transit keeps asking.

Gate 20 in the Body

Gate 20 lives in the Throat Center, the same center where Gate 8 lives, along with many of the gates of Gemini season. The Throat is where energy crosses from the interior body into the larger world. It’s only center in the bodygraph where what is happening inside you becomes something outside you, with sound, speech, action, and breath taking on physical vibrational shape. Gate 8 was the voice of contribution, the willingness to put forward what has been distilled from your life experience. Gate 20 holds a different voice, the one that speaks from pure present-tense aliveness rather than from accumulated knowing.

Physically, this territory includes the larynx and the thyroid, and the vagus nerve as it moves through the throat. These are the mechanisms that regulate both speech and the parasympathetic tone of the whole nervous system. There is also a connection in the Integration Circuit in the bodygraph, which is a circuit that runs through the gates that form the spine of individual self-empowerment: 57, 34, 10, and 20. This circuit is sometimes described as the energetic backbone of the chart, and Gate 20 is its expression into the Throat. It’s the single point where the whole self-sustaining individuality of the Integration Circuit finally breaks through into voice.

When this gate is under pressure, or when the authentic present-moment quality of it is habitually bypassed, what shows up in the body can look like chronic busyness or a kind of low-level fragmentation, the feeling of being scattered across several timelines at once. In this shadow frequency (which always has an underlying current of fear), the body never fully lands. Something in the throat or the chest stays slightly braced, holding against the full arrival of right now. I always associate Gemini season and it’s buzzy energy with pollinators- bees, butterflies, hummingbirds. These creatures can carry a high frequency, but they must decide to land on one flower at a time, or they will burn out from exhaustion.

The correction away from hyper-business is not to slow down exactly, but to let your body actually be in the moment it is in, to stop running ahead of it or behind it and feel what it is like to be here, with nothing else required. Is the flower next to you ripe for pollination? You can’t decide in advance, you have to trust the moment.

Season, Channel & Polarity

Season: We remain in the Earth season, Kūn, the lower trigram that settled in at Beltane and holds through the Summer Solstice. The grounded, receptive, generative quality of this season is the felt foundation beneath everything during these weeks. The upper trigram for Gate 20 is Xùn, Wind, which is the trigram of penetration, of reaching into everything. Wind is the gentle force that moves through every opening it finds, and Wind over Earth is the image of Guān. Earth as the whole terrain, stable and receiving, with wind as the presence that touches all of it without needing to hold any of it.

Channel: Gate 20 reaches down to Gate 34 in the Sacral Center, forming the 20–34 Channel of Charisma, also called the Channel of Responsive Power. This is a pure Manifesting Generator gate, where sacral energy connects to the voice and center of expression. Gate 34 is pure, raw sacral force, the most potent generative energy in the bodygraph, and Gate 20 is the bridge through which that force becomes presence in the now, something that can be heard and felt and received by others. When the channel is active, the quality people sometimes call charisma or magnetism is not about performance or strategy. It is about what happens when enormous life force and full present-tense awareness arrive at the same time in the same body, in the same moment. The whole being becomes the message.

Polarity: Gate 34, Power, sits directly across the wheel in Sagittarius, and these two gates form one of only three pairs in the whole bodygraph that are both polar opposites on the mandala wheel AND channel partners in the chart. Gate 34 is raw power looking for a channel to move through. Gate 20 is the present-moment awareness that gives that power somewhere to go. The question between them is whether the life force you are pouring out is actually meeting the now, actually landing in real time in real contact with what is here, or whether the power is running ahead of the presence, busy and activated but not quite arrived.

A Somatic Practice for Gate 20

Find a place to sit or stand where you can be still for a few minutes without having to perform being still. Let your feet feel the ground underneath them, the actual surface, whatever it is. Notice whether you are here, truly, or whether some part of you is already somewhere else in time. There is no need to chase the elsewhere part back. Just notice where you are.

Take a slow breath in through the nose and let it go without deciding what should come next. Let the next breath arrive on its own, when it arrives. Repeat this two or three times. Then take your attention into the throat, not the larynx specifically but the whole soft column of the throat, and let it be exactly what it is. Let it be warm or cold or tight or open without correcting it. Let yourself exist, uncurated and unfiltered, in this moment. The practice is not relaxation. It is arrival. Your body knows how to be here now, and the invitation is to stop removing yourself from it.

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 moment when you were genuinely, fully present. Not trying to be present, just actually there. What was happening? What did it feel like in your body? Then write about a moment recently when you left the present moment by zooming into the future or the past. Where did you go, and what pulled you out of the now? What is the difference between those two experiences when you let yourself feel them side by side?

Draw or paint the image of wind moving over a wide landscape at dusk, touching everything it passes but holding nothing. Let it be loose and exploratory. Let the land be whatever the land wants to be. Notice what it feels like to let a whole scene exist without having to resolve it.

With your Mandala 64 deck, pull the Gate 20 card and sit with both sides. Notice where you are living in the shadow of Superficiality this week, skimming the surface of something that wants your full attention. And notice where Self-Assurance is already present in you, surrendered to this instant in time. Put this card on your altar for the next few days and let the words, image, and hexagram remind you that there are two sides to everything- at least.

Thanks so much for being here! Participating in the Mandala 64 Walk is free.

Paid subscribers get free access to my live rituals at each of the 8 G Center gates through the year, plus extra goodies along the way.

Before we begin, how did Gate 23: Assimilation show up for you over the past 5 or so days? (Thanks again to Meg of Salty Muse for contributing your piece about the gate!)

Did you feel the distilling happening, the excess falling away, something underneath the noise becoming clearer? I'd love to hear what showed up. Drop a note in the comments or the chat.

Up close and personal with Gate 8:

This is the new moon gate

This week, the sun is in Gate 8, and on Saturday May 16th the new moon joined the sun here. It’s a supermoon, conjunct Mercury and two other significant presences: Algol, the fixed star known as the Medusa star, and the asteroid Ceres.

Algol sits at the severed head of Medusa in the constellation Perseus and has one of the fiercest reputations in the fixed star lore. For centuries astrologers called her malefic, a demon star. But that reading belongs to the people who feared Medusa.

Before the hero myth overwrote everything, Medusa was a face of the goddess herself, and the gorgon mask was sacred, used in ritual to protect the threshold between the profane and the holy. What the culture called monstrous was originally the gaze of the divine feminine meeting you fully, seeing through every performance of yourself down to the core essence.

The star’s name in Arabic, ra’s al-ghul, shares a root with words for returning, for coming back, for what cannot be killed or kept down. A new moon conjunct Algol in the Gate of Contribution asks: whose truth are you holding in your throat right now… and how much longer are you planning to hold it?

Ceres is in Gate 8 with the sun and moon and mercury, too. Ceres is Demeter, the mother who lost her daughter to the underworld and in her grief let the earth go fallow, withdrew every green and growing thing from the surface of the world until the terms were renegotiated and Persephone came back. Her presence at this new moon is asking what you are willing to nourish even after loss, what you are willing to plant again after a season of fallow ground. Gate 8 is exactly where Ceres belongs: contribution and nourishment are not separate things. The thing she brings to the table here is whether you trust that the giving itself is part of how you get replenished.

This is a new moon, with dark soil for planting something real that comes from your heart, your gut… your whole being. New moons are native territory for beginnings, and this one has the weight of some historical goddesses and priestesses at its back.

Gate 8: The Story

There is something deep inside you that has been gathering itself together.

Not just this week, not just this month. Over time, through the receptive opening and the closing and the distilling, through every season you have moved through and everything it pressed out of you, something has been concentrating into a specific, irreducible offering. Gate 8, where the sun lands this week, is where that offering meets the world.

In the I Ching this is Hexagram 8, known as Bǐ, Holding Together. Water over Earth. The image is of streams moving across the land from every direction, all finding their way toward a single place of convergence. Things cohering around a center that is solid and knows its own essence. Gate 8 is a throat center gate, and its particular voice in the bodygraph says: I can make a contribution.

The shadow of Gate 8 in the Gene Keys is Mediocrity. Mediocrity here is the very specific way we make ourselves acceptable, the sanding down of the edges, the offering of a version of ourselves so carefully managed that nobody can actually be fed by it because all the nutrition has been removed. We do it because it is safer, because showing up fully has cost us before.

The gift is Style, which Richard Rudd describes as the irreducible specific quality of a true rebellious human being, unchained by external definitions, unfettered by conditioning. Style is the thing that is yours so completely it could not belong to anyone else. And the siddhi is Exquisiteness, coming from the Latin exquisitus, ‘pressed out’, the most essential thing, offered in its wholeness.

Gate 8 in the Body

Gate 8 lives in the Throat Center, located physically at the throat itself — the larynx, the vocal cords, the thyroid gland, the place in the body where breath becomes speech. The Throat Center is the only center in the bodygraph where energy actually crosses the threshold into the world. Every other center processes, holds, generates, or transforms energy internally. The Throat is where something finally gets said, made, and done.

The thyroid gland governs metabolism, the rate at which things are processed and moved through the body. When the Throat Center is chronically under pressure, or when the authentic voice is habitually suppressed, the thyroid often carries the first signal. The body is not subtle about this territory. It will eventually say what the mouth has been refusing to say, and it will say it in the only language it has.

Gate 8 specifically holds the voice of contribution, the offer of what you are and what you see, extended toward the collective without any guarantee of reception. When this gate is in its shadow, the throat holds too much. The truest thing you know stays down because you have learned that saying it fully has consequences. You have learned to manage it into something more palatable, something less likely to cost you. The correction, though, is not to speak more or even to speak more strategically. It is to let what has been distilled from your life be what you offer… the irreducible, specific, fully committed thing that is YOU: your style, your exquisiteness, something that only you could imagine up.

Season, Channel & Polarity

Season: We are in the season of Earth, Kūn, the lower trigram that settled in at Beltane and stays through the Summer Solstice. Gate 8 pairs this Earth foundation with the upper trigram Kǎn, Water: the abysmal, the force that moves and adapts and finds its way through everything. Water over Earth is streams converging across a landscape. The Earth holds the terrain. The Water moves through it until it gathers. This is the felt quality of late Taurus tipping toward Gemini: the deep groundedness of the season is now in active relationship with something that wants to travel and to reach beyond where it originated.

Channel: Gate 8 reaches up to Gate 1 in the G Center, forming the 1-8 Channel of Inspiration. Gate 1 is the Creative: the spark of self-expression that arises from a deep and specific sense of self, the most yang gate in the system. Gate 8 is the contribution of that creativity to the collective. Together they form the Channel of Inspiration, sometimes called the channel of the Creative Role Model: someone whose way of living, whose particular path and aesthetic, is itself the offering. Without Gate 1’s creative originality, Gate 8 has nothing genuinely distinctive to bring forward. Without Gate 8’s willingness to make it available, Gate 1’s creativity stays private forever.

Polarity: Gate 14, Power Skills, sits directly across the wheel in Scorpio. Gate 14 is the sacral gate of abundance. Its the capacity to pour life force into what you love and generate real resources through it. The polarity between 8 and 4 asks: what are you pouring your energy into, really, and is the contribution you are making in the world an honest expression of where your deepest life force wants to go?

A Somatic Practice for Gate 8

Bring one hand to your throat, resting gently there without pressing. Feel the warmth of your own palm against that part of your body. Notice if there is any holding here, any habitual tightening or bracing. Notice any subtle closing that has become so familiar you stopped registering it. There is no need to know how long it has been there or where it came from, let that go.

Take a slow breath in, and on the exhale let sound move through — whatever sound wants to come. It does not have to be a word. A hum, a tone, a long slow sigh with some texture to it. Let it be quieter than you think it needs to be. Stay here for several breaths. Notice what shifts in the chest when the throat begins to move freely, when the offering is no longer held back but allowed to travel.

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 the offering you have been holding back, or the version of what you know and have lived that you have learned to manage into something more acceptable. Let yourself write it without editing for palatability. Then ask: what is the most essential thing in all of that? What is the distilled offering underneath the long explanation?

Draw or paint the image of water finding its way across a dark landscape — streams from different directions, all moving toward a single place of convergence. Let it be literal or let it become personal. What are your streams right now, and what centerpoint do they want to cohere into?

With your Mandala 64 deck, pull the Gate 8 card and sit with both sides. Where are you living in the shadow of Mediocrity this week, managing yourself down to the lowest common denominator? And where is your exquisite personal style

Participating in the Mandala 64 Walk is free.

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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.

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.

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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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!

This week, the sun is m…

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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 g…

Read more

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 …

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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 reflection…

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