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

A quick plug for something that might be useful:

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

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

Get a Transit Calendar

Gate 51: The Story

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

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

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

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

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 In its more withdrawn form it goes quiet, unable to channel the shock, irritated with the energy and unable to trust that the disruption might be moving somewhere useful.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

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

Gate 51 in the Body

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

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

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

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

Season, Channel & Polarity

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

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

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

A Somatic Practice for Gate 51

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

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

Creativity Prompts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sun in Gate 21: March 31-April 4

Gate 21: The Story

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gate 21 in the Body

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

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

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

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

Season, Channel & Polarity

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

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

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

A Somatic Practice for Gate 21

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

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

Creativity Prompts

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

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

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

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

Have a beautifully valorous week, everyone!

Alison

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

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

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

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

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

Sun in Gate 17: March 24-30

Gate 17: The Story

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

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

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

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

Gate 17 in the Body

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

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

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

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

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

Season, Channel & Polarity

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

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

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

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

A Somatic Practice for Gate 17

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

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

Gate 17 Creativity Prompts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Have a beautiful week ahead,

Alison

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

Please enjoy and let me know what you think..

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

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

The Foundations of the Mandala 64 Walk

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

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

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

It can also be framed as:

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

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

The Gene Keys

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

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

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

Why start the walk now?

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks so much for being here.

Sun in Gate 25: March 18-24

Gate 25: The Story

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

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

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

Gate 25 in the Body

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

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

…The Bodygraph, explained

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Magic of the G Center

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

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

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

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

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

Gate 25: Season, Channel & Polarity

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

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

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

A Somatic Practice for Gate 25

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

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

Gate 25 Creativity Prompts:

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

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

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

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

Thanks for taking this first step with me, friends.

xxo,

Alison

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Welcome to the Mandala 64 Walk.

Why now?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to walk with me

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

A few ways to engage with the walk:

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

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

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

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

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

Rituals for the 8 Gates of the Heart Center

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

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

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

A Physical Anchor: the Mandala 64 Deck

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

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

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

Order Your Deck Here!

The walk begins tomorrow with Gate 25: Innocence.

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

The Sun is here now, and so are we.

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

Stay tuned tomorrow for the full post on Gate 25.

xo

Alison

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

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