The Sun is in the Gate of Assimilation, aka Distillation ✨ The Mandala 64 Walk

A Guest Post by Meg Koenig of Salty Muse! (May 9-15 · Sun in Taurus, Gate 23)

Hey friends,

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

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

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

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Gate 2 Reflections

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

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

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

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

Now, onto the Gate of the week!

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Art by Brynja Magnusson

The Distillation of the Moment

Meg Koenig on Gate 23

I love this gate.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

23 in the Gene Keys and I’Ching

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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A Somatic & Creative Practice for Gate 23

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

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

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

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

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

Let the movement draw it up.

Then come to stillness.

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

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

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

All about Meg:

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

@ saltymuse on Instagram.

Website: saltymuse.com/

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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