The Magic of the North Node in Astrology and Human Design
Today, let’s talk about one of my favorite topics and one of the Soul Purpose topics I cover in the Glow-Up for Generators and MGs—North (and South) Nodes!
North Nodes are astronomical points where the Moon’s orbit intersects the Earth’s path around the Sun. They are calculated mathematically, so they aren’t a physical place but rather a point of soul magnetism.
Each North Node comes with an opposite South Node. In essence, the South Node shows you what experiences you already brought with you into this life - things that are familiar to you and that you’ve mastered. The North Node shows you the new territory you’re treading.
While the North Node may feel new or uncomfortable, it will also feel the most rewarding. If you keep heading towards your South Node, likely you won’t be able to experience your desires in this lifetime, and your path will keep nudging you away from that direction.
As a collective, we are always transiting through a certain North Node, but we also have one in our own birth chart. As a person obsessed with life purpose on the deepest levels and using that to guide decisions on the surface, it’s the personal North Node that is one of the most interesting parts of the astrological natal chart for me. The concept behind the North Node and South Node is relatively simple; like everything I talk about with Human Design and soul work, it’s living it out day to day that reveals its true magic.
If you’d like to calculate your astrological North Node, you can do that here:
Explore your free birth chart with the birth chart calculator .
North Nodes show up in both our Human Design BodyGraph and our astrological natal chart, and today I’ll talk about both.
NORTH AND SOUTH NODE KEYWORDS
Here are some keywords to familiarize you with the North Nodes:
ARIES NORTH NODE (LIBRA SOUTH NODE)
A journey from codependency to personal power.
Embrace: a strong sense of self, independence, assertive nature, trusting your impulses, boundaries, leadership abilities, adventurous side
Release: codependency, defining yourself through relationships, indecision, fear of speaking your truth, attachment to fairness
TAURUS NORTH NODE (SCORPIO SOUTH NODE)
A journey from chaos to stability.
Embrace: patience, gratitude, connection to Mother Earth, honoring your needs (and the needs of others), sensual experiences, forgiveness, persistence
Release: attraction to drama, obsessive tendencies, overanalyzing others, resisting cooperation, being judgmental, impatience, destructive tendencies
GEMINI NORTH NODE (SAGITTARIUS SOUTH NODE)
A journey from zealotry to curiosity.
Embrace: connecting to the community, critical thinking, opening to new possibilities and experiences, tactful and thoughtful communication, empathy, logic, nurturing your sense of curiosity
Release: rigid thinking about philosophies or ideas, zealotry, speaking without thinking, opinionated/know-it-all attitude, irresponsible spontaneity
CANCER NORTH NODE (CAPRICORN SOUTH NODE)
A journey from masculine rigidity to feminine nurturing.
Embrace: nurturing yourself and others, connecting with your emotions, opening to love and sensitivity, connecting with your inner child, empathy, protecting the innocent (and the innocent parts of all of us)
Release: feeling superior to others, desire to control, needing respect from others,
rigidly enforcing rules, stifling your emotions, focusing on status and fitting into society
LEO NORTH NODE (AQUARIUS SOUTH NODE)
A journey from cool and collected in the collective consciousness to big-hearted creativity and flair.
Embrace: individuality, honoring your heart’s desires, enthusiasm, shining as the center of attention, self-confidence, your fun, and playful side, healthy self-reliance, creative self-expression, leadership
Release: needing to identify with a group, emotional detachment, being aloof, running away from confrontation, relying solely on logic, rebelling for rebellion’s sake, self-sacrifice for a cause
VIRGO NORTH NODE (PISCES SOUTH NODE)
A journey from the undefined to the detailed.
Embrace: being of service, routine, details, structure, plans, being present, nourishing your body, moderation, analyzing and categorizing, moving past fears
Release: victim mentality, withdrawing, dissociation, escapism, oversensitivity, inaction, extremism, self-pity, relying on substances, being vague
LIBRA NORTH NODE (ARIES SOUTH NODE)
A journey from impulse to consideration.
Embrace: cooperation, diplomacy, creating win-win situations, understanding another’s point of view, giving freely without expectation, supporting others, weighing both sides, careful decision-making
Release: selfishness, impulsiveness, expecting others to be like you, resistance to compromise, focus on the self, survival mode, angry outbursts
SCORPIO NORTH NODE (TAURUS SOUTH NODE)
A journey from stubbornness to transformation.
Embrace: transformation and change, enjoying things without owning them, going deep emotionally, partnering/supporting/merging with others, taking risks that make you feel alive
Release: over-identifying with the material world, attachment to the status quo,
possessiveness, stubbornness, resistance to change
SAGITTARIUS NORTH NODE (GEMINI SOUTH NODE)
A journey from logic to intuition.
Embrace: intuition, connecting with higher consciousness, optimism, trusting yourself, spending time alone, connecting to nature, patience, spontaneity, speaking your truth
Release: indecisiveness, always seeking more info, relying solely on logic, impatience, saying what others want to hear
CAPRICORN NORTH NODE (CANCER SOUTH NODE)
A journey from the inner world to a concrete foundation.
Embrace: inner strength, masculine energy, stability, self-control, dependability, building a legacy, logic, managing money, responsibility, setting and achieving goals
Release: moodiness, clinging to the past, codependency with family, needing to be needed, fear of striking out on your own, spending too much time alone at home, emotional manipulation
AQUARIUS NORTH NODE (LEO SOUTH NODE)
A journey from drama to objectivity.
Embrace: objectivity, developing friendships, participating in groups and communities, considering what’s best for the collective, awareness of equality and social justice, your unconventional or “weird” side, seeing the unique and special side of everyone
Release: stubbornness, needing to get your way, melodramatic tendencies, going to extremes, focusing too much on yourself, taking risks for the adrenaline rush, being reactive based on fear, needing approval from others
PISCES NORTH NODE (VIRGO SOUTH NODE)
A journey from rigidity to flow.
Embrace: uncharted waters, emotions, faith, spirituality, oneness with the universe, healing, openness and non-judgment, compassion, meditation, welcoming change
Release: perfectionism, control, overly-analytical thinking, clinging to the material, criticizing yourself and others, hypochondria, worry, obsessing over details, inflexibility
THE NORTH NODE IN HUMAN DESIGN
In Human Design, North Nodes have the same basic idea but manifest a little differently, in accordance with how the Bodygraph differs from our basic astrological natal chart.
The North and South Nodes can be found listed with the other gate activations on your Bodygraph:
© Pure Generators. This image cannot be used without permission.
Using my chart as an example, you can see that my North Node is in Gate 25 (Aries), and my South Node is in Gate 46 (Libra).
At this point in the New Paradigm, many of us want to find/express/grow into our purpose. This is a good inclination - we are transitioning into an age of living as our unique selves, and figuring out what that really means for us is incredibly important. Our North Node is a great tool for that because it pushes us past the surface of who we think we are and how we’ve been conditioned. Often we’ve been rewarded for our South Node traits or incarnated into situations that make expressing our North Node traits difficult because, well, the soul loves a challenge!
The cool thing about looking at our North Node through the lens of Human Design is that it allows us to begin to see how we might decondition from these surface characteristics of who we think we are (which are typically more aligned with our South Node) and begin to understand what our soul is truly craving. Essentially, by operating according to our Strategy and Authority, we reveal the true self that our soul came here to express through our North Node.
The other cool thing is that because we are looking at a Gate, we have a more precise description of the kind of energy we are here to embody. If you’d like to know about the gates, I suggest purchasing a book like The Definitive Book of Human Design by Ra Uru Hu or Human Design: Discover the Person You Were Born to Be by Chetan Parkyn.
The Nodes are also split into our Personality side and our Body/Design…we get two sets of North and South Nodes! On the Personality side (the nodes listed on the right side of the Bodygraph), the Nodes show what our personality thinks about the world and how we show up as a personality.
Our Body/Design nodes (listed on the left side) speak to our relationship to our environment and the people around us.
MY NORTH NODE STORY
I will share my North Node story as an example! As an Aries North Node who is learning to have a strong sense of self, this is very aligned with where I’m going in my life.
I started learning about my North Node about five years ago, and it has changed my life. When I learned that I was a Libra South Node, everything made sense. We typically spend our youth (up to middle age, potentially) reintegrating our South Node and remembering to live as humans in this lifetime with the strengths our souls already have. So, I spent my teens and twenties very much engrossed in my South Node - supporting others, teaching and working with children, engaged in a lot of codependent relationships where I felt it was my job to keep the peace, and serving a team as a worker in the background. This felt good to me because I was expressing things I was good at and remembering what it was like to be me as a soul.
However, as I got older and moved into my late 20s, I felt something shift. That way of operating just wasn’t satisfying anymore. It was time to embrace my Aries North Node. Thankfully, I was now armed with this knowledge, and I could see it was true - my soul craved autonomy, a unique identity, and bold moves.
Knowing about my North Node wasn’t something I felt I should do; it was more of a permission slip to allow myself to do what I knew I wanted to deep down, but that I also found extremely uncomfortable. Feeling powerful? Being confrontational? Focusing on myself and *gasp* maybe even being a little selfish? This was not how I had lived my life. Yet, I knew that I needed to do these things to have the life I wanted.
The more I embraced my North Node, the more I saw my life transform. Frustration gave way to freedom. I made more money, felt stronger, entered a partnership that was exactly what I wanted, and went all-in on my ultimate dream of becoming an entrepreneur. I never lost my loving, supportive, cooperative side; it serves me every day. But it’s not where my focus is because I know that I’ve already figured out how to be all of those things; instead, this is my life to boldly be me.
Per my North Node in Human Design, I’m transitioning from Gate 46, which is all about being present, going with the flow, synchronicity, and the sensual experience of life to Gate 25, which is about enjoying life on Earth as an individual and loving in a cosmic, impersonal way.
This really tracks - so much of my journey has been about stepping out as an individual, moving away from codependency, and diving deep into what it means to love in a way where everyone feels free and autonomous. I love life, I feel best when I radiate love and acceptance, and I see beauty in everything. But, I don’t want to be too deeply involved in the intensity or specifics of one thing…it removes my ability to radiate cosmic love. I have gone through some challenging initiations in order to retain this innocence but I love being a spiritual warrior. It didn’t always come naturally but it feels so meaningful.
ARE OUR CHARTS PLAYING TRICKS ON US?
I often find that our charts can play little tricks on us! For instance, your Sun sign might be the same as your South Node, which means that your personality will strongly align with the direction your soul is trying to get away from. I have this show up in my Human Design chart - my South Node is in the same gate as my Conscious sun (which has a big effect on my incarnation cross).
This isn’t an accident…it just keeps things interesting. It forces me to dig deeper into the soul level and figure out how my personality can support my soul lessons without steering me in the wrong direction or keeping me on the surface.
From doing many readings, I’ve also noticed that some people’s souls come here to do a big 180 and shift into new energy, while other people come to make a smaller adjustment and stay balanced. It depends on what you’ve got going on in your chart.
HOW TO LEARN MORE
If you’d like to learn more about your North Node, I recommend joining us in the Glow-Up for Generators and Manifesting Generators!
North and South nodes are one of the soul purpose topics we cover, as well as going deep into the Generator and Manifesting Generator experience.
These are epic times, and understanding where our soul is trying to go is so helpful - by getting our personality aligned, we can make so much progress and feel deep satisfaction.
Love,
Rachel
Make sure to keep in touch!
