The Gate of Innocence 💫 The Mandala 64 Walk
Sun in Aries, Gate 25 · March 18–24
Hello everyone! Welcome to the first gate of the Mandala 64 Walk, a project where I’ll be sharing keynotes, art, embodiment exercises and creative prompts for each of the 64 Human Design gates that the sun transits through along the wheel of the year.
We’re beginning here at Gate 25: The Gate of Innocence. This is the gate where we celebrated the Spring Equinox, the energy that took us from the final waters of Pisces season to the fiery new sprout of Aries season.
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!