How to Work with Your Human Design Gates
A lot of us are curious about the gates in our chart!
Should we learn about our gates? Absolutely! Learning is wonderful. However, there are a few things we should keep in mind when learning about gates, or really any part of our Human Design chart!
WHAT ARE GATES?
Gates are where energy enters and exits our Human Design chart. The gates themselves are mapped according to those planetary activations listed to the right and left. If a number appears as one of your activations, that gate will be defined.
All the black and red lines are gates:
Each gate has a particular flavor to its energy. Therefore, if you have a gate activated, it means that energy leaving and entering that center and will hold that particular flavor.
The combination of all of these gate “flavors” constitutes the frequency of your aura.
THE COMPLEXITIES AROUND GATES
Here are some things to take into consideration when you are reading about your gates:
Conscious and Unconscious
When you are looking at the gates in your chart, make sure to check if they are red or black (unconscious or conscious). I covered this more in-depth here. Whether they are conscious or unconscious will have an effect on how they show up in your life.
Planetary Placements
Each gate is attached to a certain planet - it is that planet’s position that is activating that gate. If you look at the corresponding planet to the gate, you can get an idea of what aspect of you that gate is related to.
Here are what the planets represent:
Source: The Definitive Book of Human Design by Lynda Bunnell and Ra Uru Hu
As you can see, some of the meanings for the planets are slightly different from the common astrological meanings. However, they are generally the same.
3. The Line of the Hexagram Associated with the Gate
Each gate also sits on a different line of the Hexagram. For instance - in the image above, you can see that it shows the gate, then has a period and another number between 1 and 6. This number between 1 and 6 are the lines of the Hexagram.
The most common place we see the lines of the Hexagram are with our Profile (for instance, I am a 1/3 Profile). However, they appear at the deeper levels of our Human Design charts, too.
In this case, it is useful to know the line of the Hexagram because it gives us more insight into how the energy of that gate will behave.
Here are the 6 lines of the Hexagram, as described in “The Definitive Book of Human Design: The Science of Differentiation”:
6 - Role Model: administrator, optimist, peacemaker
5 - Heretic: universalizing, projection, the general
4 - Opportunist: externalization, friendliness, abdicator
3 - Martyr: trial and error, mutation, adaptation
2 - Hermit: the natural, projection, democrat
1 Investigator: introspection, chameleon, empathy
If you aren’t familiar with the energy of the lines, I would encourage you to look into it further! The language around these can be a little dense but many different people have different ways of describing these energies. Understanding these energies can help you gain a deeper understanding of how the energies of your gates behave.
HUMAN DESIGN AS AN EXPERIMENT
The idea that I always want to drive home is to not give your power over to something that you yourself have not experienced, or that doesn’t resonate with you. The whole point of Human Design is to decondition - to recognize what is you and what isn’t, and to feel that amazing relief as you breathe deeply and sink into yourself.
If we are reading about a gate in our chart and thinking “oh, that’s me and I have to be that!” then we are just further conditioning ourselves!
My advice would be to learn about the gates in your chart, file that information in the back of your mind, and keep living! Notice how different situations, dynamics, and energies are showing up in your life. When you start to notice patterns or have questions, then it can be good to revisit the information you have on your gates to see if they contain any wisdom that would help you on your path.
Our lived experiences always trump anything we might read about ourselves. Your life is your experiment…Human Design just provides permission for you to be yourself!
Love,
Rachel
Make sure to keep in touch!
