“Welcome to Living Your Design 2024 with Genoa Bliven. I have been preparing for this class quite honestly for over 12 years. I have written 40 journals of 250 pages each, reviewing everything that I have studied. That’s somewhere around 10,000 pages about the Human Design. What I’ll be sharing today is a distillation of all the work that I’ve done, and in particular, to focus on the body-graph as the source of the Human Design System.

Ra mentioned in his narration of the Voice, his experience with the Voice, that the very first thing that happened for him after the Voice said, “Are you ready to work?” was he saw the body-graph come out the end of his pencil onto a page. Everything that happened after that, and nearly every word that he ever said, came from and was sourced within the body-graph itself. So if you want to learn Human Design, you focus on two things:1) the body-graph and everything that you can learn from it, and 2) your own chart to study until you truly understand it.

The main topic of the first four and a half classes of this series will be the essence of the nine centers. We’ll really focus on the centers in a very different way where we go into quite a lot of depth to study each one of them individually and from their own point of view. In other words, each of the centers operates in a unique way, and each of the centers sees the world and itself from its own point of view. And secondly, those centers are gathered together into the body-graph to form juxtapositions with each other, which means they’re entirely different from each other, but they are assembled in a way that they get to communicate and cooperate. So as we come to understand the centers, it will be first of all in terms of how they understand themselves and how they see themselves. Then we’ll understand them in terms of how they cooperate and communicate with each other, where we get to yet another level of meaning from them.

First of all, I would like to thank everybody who made this possible. First of all, Lasita Shalev, my devoted partner, who has worked absolutely tirelessly together with me for the 28 years that we have both been studying Human Design together. And then Richard Corbett, who is our lead assistant teacher today, who’s been teaching classes for Human Design America in such an exceptional way and leading discussions and sharing between people, which really is the hallmark of our work at Human Design America, how we relate to each other. And then Cheendana Martin and Carl Johnson, who are here today as assistant teachers; you’ll all hear from them very, very soon.

Student Introductions happened here…

I was really struck by a feeling of joy as I was listening to everyone and could see joy on a lot of people’s faces, which is very exciting to me because that’s why I’m teaching this class. Human Design is really something that can bring a lot of joy into our lives. Part of my goal in teaching is to really bring in that mystical side of Human Design, that uplifting side of Human Design in the interest of raising our frequency and our expectations of what Human Design can give to us, which is quite a lot, actually, quite a lot. I loved it when somebody says, “Well, you know, this is the one subject I just never get bored of,” which reminded me of the late Randy Richmond, who was a friend of mine, who passed away several years ago, and said something very similar about Human Design, which was, “Thank you, you gave me something I can contemplate for the rest of my life.” And he took it with him on such a deep level: he was such a special man – with a fantastic sense of humor.

So going back to the essence of the centers, we’re going to be speaking about and sharing about centers in a very different way. We’re going to avoid as much as possible an intellectual interpretation of what centers are about and what Human Design is about. Human Design is not really about the intellect. It’s not really about what you understand with your mind. It’s really about what you understand with your body and with what I call the holographic body-mind, in the sense that the body-graph is a map of how you comprehend reality, how you file your experiences.

I like to say that the body-graph is like a memory palace. People who speak about these things, people with these extraordinary memories, “Oh, I just have this memory palace. And it’s like this large house and has many rooms and many bookcases, little vases on the mantlepiece or whatever. And whenever I learned something, I just put it into my memory palace,” which always sounded a little fishy to me, actually… ” Like, really?” It sounds a little artificial. But the Human Design body-graph is a real memory palace, where you can review your life and the experiences you’ve had and everything that you have felt and everything that you have gone through, and particularly everything that you’ve learned from your experiences, past and present, gets filed into this miraculous body-graph in very specific places, where you can recall these lessons that you’ve learned, where you’ve grown and developed as a person, and that all of those things get categorized and linked into very specific places within the body-graph. And those places start with the study of the centers.

Oftentimes, we kind of rush through the centers. “Oh, yeah, okay. So there’s the Head Center. There’s the Ajna, and this is kind of what it means.”

But let’s go into them much more deeply, much more deeply. We’re going to be having reading material that will be available to you on the learning platform under Lesson One, right after this class. There’s a number of documents there, and they’re numbered and lettered so that you can read them in order. And then we’re going to do what we call wild-mind-writing about what we’re learning.

Wild-mind-writing is a very bold kind of free associative writing that we always do with a timer. And we’re going to be doing throughout this whole course, a series of 10-minute wild-mind-writing experiences, where we just pick a topic, and you can pick that topic from the documents that you will receive, and just dive in. You don’t really know why. Something in what was said, some tone of voice maybe that I used, or some reference that I’m making, or one of the points that you’ll find in those documents, you don’t really know why. But there’s something that twinges, that feels, “Wow, I’m not sure what it is about that, but it just resonates with me.” And then you set your timer for 10 minutes, and you just dive in. The wild-mind-writing just simply means that you keep writing, your pen is always moving, you’re writing down whatever crosses your whole being, what crosses your mind, what crosses your heart, what the process is for you. And you’re just writing that down.

And that is what we’re going to want to hear from you. This is how our classes will go, where you have the opportunity to read from this free associative writing and share whatever came up for you, whatever experiences it reminded you of, what people it reminded you of, what situations came up for you, because there we’re building the substance of your memory palace. And we get to hear from you, which is one of the most precious things ever. Because when we’re listening to each other, yes, we’re listening to what we have to say, we’re listening to our opinions, maybe, or whatever we’re thinking. But actually, what we’re listening to is we’re listening to your design speaking. And the more you speak about who you are, in your whole being, what your experience, what your experiences have been, what you feel about it, then we truly get to hear from you. And one of the most important things for Human Design is this increasing multiplicity of voices.

Because just like your voice is unique, you are unique. And when we hear from you, we build the knowledge out into the real world, in terms of who you are, how you feel, what you’ve gone through, what your associations are. And the most surprising thing of all, is how much you know, and how much you already know about these centers within yourself. This is what we’re looking for. What is your experience like? What have you learned, and so on.

Now, let me just go over this very briefly. We’ll take a look at this nine centers overview. This nine centers, essence study, first of all… This slide shows the three awareness centers. And the three awareness centers are very, very crucial in terms of your learning process. So I will go over very briefly, just after the top of the hour, how we learn through each one of these awareness centers, because they’re learning in completely different ways. Totally different ways!

You’re constantly learning in three different ways, simultaneously . There’s a process whereby these different ways reconcile with each other: they synergize and create a higher dimension of consciousness. But that’s something that requires patience, a lot of self-love, and self-caring. And as you allow things to come together for you, in your own way, and in your own time, then we’re going to go through the centers in a very specific order.

And this order is very important, actually, because when we go through them in this order, we not only see each of the centers, but we see where they’re located in the body-graph, how they’re related to the bilateral symmetry of the body as an example, and how they are juxtaposed and how they communicate with each other. So we start out with the Spleen, we go to the Solar Plexus because they mirror each other, and they’re entirely opposite in the ways they see the world and process energy and information. Then we go to the Head center, where we explore something that has hardly ever been talked about in Human Design, which is idealism and our aspirations as human beings. Then we go to the Ajna center, to the G center. And we take a little bit of a look at the deeper aspects of how the G center is symmetrically organized and anchored into the Cosmos as the center of centers within us as a Spiritual Being. Then we go to the Root center, to the Sacral center, to the Ego center, and to the Throat.

This is all summarized on this one slide, which you can study. It’s very important to realize that going through the centers in a certain order is like a storyboard. You’re going in a certain order, and because you’re going in a certain order, you see certain relationships, and the story of the body-graph begins to emerge.

The good news is that all these centers fit together in a very specific way. They each make sense within themselves, and they also make sense in terms of how they communicate, reflect each other, juxtapose each other, synergize with each other, and work something out with each other. Many of the things that just get said in Human Design make sense suddenly because you see how it all fits together. That fitting together thing is what I’ve been working on for the last 12 years, preparing for this class today. How does it fit together? How does it make sense? How does the story of the centers and their sequence support each other?

Just to share my chart here for a moment, I’m a single definition Splenic Authority Manifestor driven by the Ego, which animates the Spleen through the channel of the Transmitter. It’s really called the channel of Surrender, to surrender to the transmission. And then it comes up from the Spleen to the Throat through the channel called the Wavelength, which means it’s my job to get on the wavelength with you, to transmit information, the intuitions of the spleen on the wavelength so that you can take it into your wavelength and understand it. Then you see the channel of the Alpha right here from 7 to 31, going up to the Throat to lead, to transmit on the wavelength in order to lead, and then the channel of Mental Individuality, the 43-23 here, to make these concepts understandable to you.

Now that’s how we read a chart. I mean, that’s the three seconds reading. You can transmit on the wavelength, go ahead and convey your intuitions through the wavelengths to really connect with people and lead them through insight. That’s my five-second Human Design reading. Then we go to the open centers.

Interestingly enough, open centers are some of the most important centers in your Design. This is where you interface with the outside world. This is where you encounter other people. This is where you receive the challenges of life, those things that you need to deal with, decisions that you need to make. The definition of Living your Design is to understand in a very specific way how your Design works, and particularly the priorities within your Design, and how your Authority, whether it’s an inner Authority or an outer Authority or one of those Authorities that have to do with openness, the echo-location Authority of Mental Projectors, or that highly unusual and very special Authority of the Reflector. How do we make decisions?

And those decisions can be made by an inner Authority center and as a central focus of most charts, not all charts, because not all charts have inner Authority. They have something else that has to do with openness. But to understand the structure of your Design, how you make decisions, and being able to make decisions about what you encounter through openness, and to be able to communicate with other people, to be able to bring your truth to them, this is the function of Strategy. To be able to first draw close to yourself and understand how your Design functions and works, and how you make decisions, how you connect with and understand your own truth, and then how you can carry that truth to your relationships with other people so you can collaborate with them, communicate, connect with them in order to have a life and bring your decisions into the world, to bring your truth into the world.

So while we go through the centers, we are not going to speak about what is the difference between a center that is defined and a center that is open. I will tell you right now what the difference is between a center that is defined and a center that is open. A center that is defined, like the ones you see here in my particular design, has a channel connected to it. And channels are extraordinarily powerful things, whether they happen by permanent definition within your design or whether they happen through your relationships with other people. Channels are something extraordinarily powerful. This is the subject of Rave Cartography, and oh, believe me, do I look forward to teaching that class afresh as well.

But in terms of LYD and centers, a center that is defined by a channel is much more specialized and therefore much more narrow. It’s narrow. It has a very specific job to do. That’s the job that you hear my Channel of the Transmitter doing right now. It’s specialized. It’s narrow. But it has something very creative within it, doesn’t it? An open center is much more unlimited. It has a much broader scope of activity. It can take in way more information. It is way more interested in the world. It’s much more connected to the world. It contains a lot of creativity, adaptability, creativity in terms of your personality characteristics of wanting to be open, adaptable, flexible, friendly, connected, to be able to form bonds and relationships with other people.

Generally speaking, Open centers need guidance, and they receive that guidance through your Authority, the Authority of your design, whatever that Authority is. In terms of mine, it’s the Spleen. And in terms of my chart, it has to do with Manifestation. What does this have to do with what I’m transmitting on the wavelength? What does it have to do with what I’m manifesting? And the Spleen, of course, in this case, gives guidance to those open centers.

Going back to the definition of what it means to Live your Design, it means to make decisions about what you encounter through openness, being informed and educated about how your Authority works, how your Design is structured, and how it makes those decisions, and what it makes those decisions about. When you’re doing that, you are living your design. And obviously, the goal of this course is to bring you directly to that point where we look at your chart in great detail. We go over your chart in many, many different ways so that you can understand how that works so that when you’re encountering things from the outside world, as we go through our openness, not just open centers, also open channels, open potentials: how do we make decisions about all of those things?

This is what I want you to be able to leave this class with firmly, firmly in hand. And so we’ll put off talking about open centers until we go through Type Determination and Authority and your Strategy, because that’s when you learn how to deal with Openness.

In the meantime, we’re going to be talking about Centers in terms of their essences. We’re going to take the time to go into them in a great deal of depth and see how they fit together and how they work together and how they go in a certain order, in order to make thorough and complete sense. That is the foundation of the Human Design System. If we skip over that part, we always feel there’s something missing. What is it that I missed? And I was so delighted to hear so many people say that they take delight in going back to the very beginning because yeah, after all those years of teaching, I said, “Okay, there’s something more that I’m missing. There’s something more that needs to be taught and understood.” I knew that in every bone of my body. That’s what led me to write those 40 journals. I realized if I kept teaching it in the same way, I wouldn’t get that. I just wouldn’t because I had to open it up and look at things very differently. So I’m looking forward to that.

Let’s talk, a little bit, about how these three Awareness Centers work. By an Awareness Center, we mean that it is aware of the outside world as well as it’s aware of your inner life. And it’s forming an interface between these two levels of Awareness, if you will. They have a lot of work to do because the stimulation that they’re aware of in the outside world is considerable, obviously. And the inside world is these other centers that you see faded back into the background. It’s not like the Root has no awareness or the Sacral center has no awareness, the Ego, G center, Throat, and Head center. But they’re inwardly aware. They’re aware of who you are inside of your being. And particularly in relationship to aspects of your nervous system that run your body, that are deep awarenesses of your homeostasis, your state of being, your way of being yourself and moving from day to day in the world, in the circadian rhythm between days, how you stay stable as a person. These Centers are aware of that. They’re aware of everything else that’s going on. And so what is there, just very briefly, because we’re going to go into the Spleen and the Solar Plexus in a little bit more depth in a few minutes.

Very briefly, what is that all about? Well, the Splenic system, the Spleen down here, and you know what, I haven’t been drawing. Maybe I should be doing that. But it’s pretty obvious where the spleen is, so I won’t worry about it.

The Spleen is very skeptical. It looks at new things and says, “Whatever.” There’s very little that the Spleen hasn’t seen already. Its awareness is rooted in thousands, millennia, millions of years of instinctual trial-and-error learning. And through all of that experience, it’s built up a huge database of knowledge of what it’s seen and how all of those situations turned out. So its reaction to most everything is, “Yeah, okay, I’ve seen this before. I kind of know how this turns out.”

It cherishes traditional life-ways, the ancient ways, hunting and gathering, subsistence farming, and traditional values, tried-and-true processes. It examines what you’re learning logically. And from this skeptical point of view, it wants proof; it wants evidence. If we’re looking at the Human Design, it is wondering “what does it do for you in some kind of practical, concrete way?” That’s just its nature. Logic. Logic is the way we transfer information and knowledge from one person to another. Knowledge is transferable, but it needs to be logical.

And so it’s very grounded in what we call critical reasoning. It’s into critical reasoning. It’s trying to take care of you. This is one of the aspects of this Spleen that’s very rarely spoken about, that it’s caring and nurturing. It’s protecting you. It doesn’t want you to believe things that have no basis in truth.

And when we go over to the Solar Plexus, the situation is very different. The Solar Plexus learns through a trial-and-error process of emotional evaluation. It kind of tries things on to see if they fit, to see if they work. It will very quickly join in with new knowledge and start trying it out. It often will apply to all of their friends and want to talk about it with their friends, want to connect with it to see if it helps them in terms of this up-and-down frequency that is produced by every relationship. Its mood goes down when communication collapses. And when we’re successful in communicating, its mood rises. This is admittedly a pretty painful process that we go through in our relationships. We trigger each other. We say something and the people that we love the most can misunderstand us. And this can cause conflict. But the Solar Plexus sees conflict as a gateway to the future. It wants to engage with people. Of course, it’s just as scared of conflict as anyone else. It’s just the way it is. How could you not be afraid of conflict? But at the same time, the Solar Plexus moves toward their relationships with other people. It wants to encompass those relationships. It wants to go through those relationships. And above all, it wants another cycle of development to occur.

Now, no, it’s not skeptical. It’s very subjective. It’s very connected. It wants to go through things. It wants things to develop. It’s always looking forward to the evolutionary potential of every relationship, every situation. And so we have this polarity. And the left side, as we’re looking at the chart, and the right side, as we’re looking at the chart, form this juxtaposition, which is very, very dramatic. The Spleen is oriented to the Past and its learning and its immense database that has instant recall. The Solar Plexus is in the present time looking toward the potential of the future, wanting to live out relationships so they become better and better.

And in fact, that may be on the basis of our success within relationship, we can found a deeper world, a world where people get to really be themselves — where we get to communicate, where we overcome the painful genetic limitations of our species, which can tend towards violence. These are the hopes of the Solar Plexus: that through going through all that it goes through, all the hope and pain encompassing relationship, we will have a better future. The Spleen wants to preserve the Past. The Solar Plexus wants to open up the Future.

And the Ajna Center sits there on the dividing line between the left-hand side and the right-hand side of the bilateral symmetry of the body. And it’s sitting there. This is what we normally consider our mind. It’s like it’s watching a tennis match between the Spleen and the Solar Plexus. They’re in a very lengthy volley that has been going on for many, many years. And the Ajna Center is clearly torn to a degree between these two different points of view. We leap in enthusiastically into our new learning. We’re very skeptical about it. We’re looking forward to what we learn next. Yeah, but we wonder whether it’s going to be one more thing that I have to examine with critical reasoning. The tennis match goes on and on. The Ajna is watching this. It kind of sides with the Splenic Center because the Splenic Center was our first Awareness Center. You can notice that the little person in the body graph is looking in the direction of the Spleen because it’s all about the transmission of knowledge. And as I was saying before, knowledge gets transmitted through logic, accurately transmitted. And then we make of it what we do through our Solar Plexus side. We see how useful it is.

But the Ajna Center at first sides with the logic of the Spleen because it’s pretty important that we stay mentally stable. But then the Ajna Center is sticking with that logic while it’s observing and quite fascinated actually with what happens socially through the Solar Plexus and the breakthroughs in communication that the Solar Plexus can make and the new kinds of relationships that the Solar Plexus can establish. And at a certain point, the Ajna Center does something truly miraculous. Instead of just sticking with what it knows, all of a sudden it leaps to an entirely new level of consciousness. It is shocking.

This happens all the time actually in somewhat minor ways. But when you’re learning about something like the Human Design, there are those moments when this mutation happens. It may come as really surprising news that the Ajna Center is one of the Centers where we experience profound mutation. We hold to that old way of looking at the world; for a while, it doesn’t seem like the Ajna Center is learning much. The Spleen is being really skeptical and Human Design can use every bit of skepticism and deep examination that we can give it. In fact, it needs to meet each of these demands of the Spleen. But suddenly, the Ajna Center just goes like, “I’ve changed my mind. And now I see the world in a different way. It’s as if the scales had fallen from my eyes. And I suddenly see this totally new world, this world that we all are hoping for.”

Now, the Ajna Center is also under pressure from the Head center and its ideals and its aspirations, which we’ll talk about in some depth next week. It’s so important to talk about the aspirations that we have as human beings when we come into this world as infants: our true hopes, our desires for reconciliation, our desires to loosen, if not untie, the karmic knots, to clear the pathway toward our life-purpose. That is the other direction that the Ajna needs to be balancing. And as I said, we’ll go into this in some detail next week.

But this breathtaking leap that the Ajna Center can take is something that requires patience. You cannot force it to happen. It is a true mutation. The tennis match goes on between Splenic and Solar plexus and the Ajna watches. You take in new information; you can be skeptical about it, or you can be enthusiastic about it. You can be both. In fact, you usually are and need to be. But that moment when the Ajna Center says, “Okay, I’ve seen enough. I’ve seen enough from that Solar Plexus. I can see that human beings can do things differently. Yes, yes, I cherish the traditional values of the Spleen. But through conflict resolution, I see a new world; I see new possibilities. And I actually see real human beings living this out. And I will accept it.” Bam! A new level dawns in your world, but you can’t rush it. Mutation happens unexpectedly. And this is perhaps the most important message with regard to this learning that we’re talking about. For you to be patient, as I said, the Ajna Center may not seem to be learning much, because it’s stubbornly holding to the way it sees the world. And that’s fine. Nothing wrong with it. As long as you’re patient, and as long as you’re self-accepting, that mutation will happen. And that is one of the magical, extraordinary things of the Human Design System. Because it works; it really does. And that’s super, super extraordinary, that it does work. It even works if you don’t quite learn it in the right way. You just go like, “Hey, this seems to be working. I think maybe I need to go back to the beginning and find out why this is working.” But it does work. Because as you connect with the body-graph, it’s like you’re linking in with the magic of this memory palace. Every little thing you learn gets stored in the body-graph. As we go on through Circuitry and ABC, as we go on into the depth study of Channels and RC, we understand more and more where those things get stored. But they’re stored there. They’re there. This is your life, which is precious. Because you are who you are. And you have learned what you have learned. And this is the opportunity to bring all of that forth.

So if we go to the Spleen and talk about it a little more deeply, I mean, we kind of went into it in a pretty deep way just now. It’s your instinct. It’s like the tip of an iceberg. You know, those famous pictures where you see the little iceberg poking up through the surface of the ocean and this gigantic iceberg that is below. We see the tip of it. We get the information through it. We get these lightning-fast intuitions. They’re so fast.

And this is true, by the way, whether it’s defined or open, it’s just important to say this. You have all nine centers and they are all working and they are all essential to your life and how you live. You cannot do without them. If you didn’t have a Spleen, you wouldn’t be alive. If you didn’t have the whole body-graph, you wouldn’t be alive. They just work differently and they work differently with each other.

But the essence of the Spleen, it’s skepticism. It’s like an old curmudgeon or this person who you might refer to as a ‘salty dog’. The old wise one, the ancient Saturnian father who seems like a brutal disciplinarian early in life, but becomes like the warm understanding kind old man or old woman, the crone, who understands and loves you on a level that is difficult to comprehend. How much it knows about you, how much it wants the best for you, how nurturing it is, how uncomfortable it can feel because of what it has seen and what it now sees.

We see children doing things that are really quite frankly very, very risky and dangerous, especially with regard to their relationships or their activities. And when they become teenagers, of course, they don’t want to listen to the Spleen at all. Writing about the Solar Plexus, the whole teenage world comes flooding forth for us to really look at, to understand that we move from being immature to being mature, that we are born immature in order to be able to have the opportunity of growing up.

But the Spleen, it’s ancient, ancient. And I was mentioning how uncomfortable it can be because it doesn’t want to be a stick-in-the-mud. It doesn’t want to be the ‘party spoiler’. It doesn’t want to bring everybody down. It doesn’t want to be that horrible person who just can never have a little bit of joy. That’s not its true. essence. The Spleen constantly upgrades itself, especially under pressure from the Root Center. It upgrades its logic. It knows and evaluates risks and whether those risks are likely to turn out well.

That process of evaluation that I’m talking about is getting these messages, one after another; they’re like photographs. If we look at the Spleen, it’s taking still photographs; it’s taking one shot, one photograph after another, click, click, click, click, instantly, instantly evaluating that situation and the people that it loves and whoever else is present, in the context of danger, life-and-death.

I’ve been a photographer since I was 11 years old. If you look deeply into any photograph, there are worlds upon worlds upon worlds within that single photograph. If you take the time to really look in deep, this is like what the Spleen is doing every moment of every day. Even when you’re asleep, it’s taking a deep, deep look, cherishing those values that are tried-and-true, cherishing those life-ways, the 40 centuries of farming that have happened on planet earth, those ways that we know we can survive, those values which we know uphold life and family and nurtures the children. That takes us from birth to death and honors the fallen.

It’s an intense world, the Spleen, is here to protect you. If you’ve ever come close to a very serious car accident and you survived, you will have seen yourself do things so fast. You go like, “How did I do that?” I wasn’t thinking. I realized that I was going to be in this terrible accident. I turned the wheel this way, I turned the wheel that way. I threaded the distance, the distance that was closing between two cars, I scooted between them. And afterwards, you pull over to the side of the road and your legs are shaking. You couldn’t stand up to save your life at that point. You just have to say, “Thank you.” This is the Spleen. This is what it does for us.

Along the lines of the written material that you’ll have, and which will be posted immediately as this class closes, will be a document on this learning process that we just went over and on each of these centers that we’re talking about today. You got the extemporaneous version just now. And so we go from there to the Solar Plexus that as I said is enthusiastic. It participates in motion, in emotional evaluation of what is happening. It wants to be a part of… it wants to connect; it wants to be in the flow of conversation; it wants to discover new things and particularly new things about other people. It wants to be able to share its story and to hear the stories of others. It’s very much attuned to openness. Just as the Spleen is attuned to definition and the Design consciousness of billions of years of the evolution of life. The Solar Plexus is similarly attuned to the future and to the end of time and where we all will be and who we will be at the moment that evolution closes and we move on to a different form.

We all know that experience of falling in love. Sometimes, during my life I’ve thought,  this is the natural way of being. Why would you ever live in any other reality? And as my life has gone on, I’ve begun to be able to live in that reality far more consistently than when I was young. Because through going through things, through encompassing relationship, by encompassing the hope and the disappointment, the agony and the ecstasy, the falling mood of a break in communication, the rising mood when the breakthrough in communication gets made, and the journey wave by wave of hope and despair, of hope and despair… we can evolve.

As we grow and we develop over time, as we mature over time, as we go from that being who came into the world as an infant and as an adolescent that carried a certain spectrum of attitudes, where those attitudes come from. Well, there’s a lot of different theories about that. But the truth is that, as we live, we learn how to adopt new attitudes. I find that terminology to be very, very interesting. We don’t create new attitudes. We adopt them like they’re children. We adopt them because they work, especially in the realm of relationship and especially in the realm of conflict resolution, especially in our ability to find common ground with other people. And especially as we learn how to collaborate, to find solutions to problems, to hear each other’s stories.

You can disagree with somebody vehemently on a political level and scratch your head and wonder what is wrong with these people. But if you hear their story, they’re just like you. They’re human beings. They’re learning and they’re growing. And they may be right at the end of how a certain attitude really doesn’t work for them. It’s just, wow, are they getting to the end of their rope? And oh, oh, is it going to be hard when they hit that end because it’s like a noose that breaks your neck. If you’re resisting change, because the Solar Plexus is all about embracing change and growing through change to endure the agony and the ecstasy because of what comes out of it.

Because ultimately maturity is a superpower. Through the Solar Plexus, a new level of consciousness is entering our species. It is necessary that that level of consciousness does enter our species. Absolutely. Absolutely. It’s the greatest fear of the Spleen, ironically, that what the Solar Plexus discovers will not be accepted because that is the Solar Plexus. It discovers what is new, what is truly mutated, what can go that extra mile to leap ahead of the genetic limitations that threaten the existence of our species.

The Solar Plexus is where the mutants of every generation go to play, to relate, to connect, to experiment, and to find out what works and what doesn’t. Relationships founded, made, and often broken, hopefully to be made again. In fact, made again every day if possible, because that’s how we progress.

We may have thought naïvely that human beings have been communicating effectively for thousands of years. If you read history, it is very clear that that is not true. That the time to communicate and to evolve and to mature in our communications, to adopt new attitudes is now. It’s that moment that the Solar Plexus is striving for, not just on the outside. “I’m going through all these changes because I’m in a relationship and gosh, it doesn’t seem to be working out so well,” or whatever you’re feeling at the moment. No, it’s not that. It’s not really what the Solar Plexus is about. It’s the ability to incorporate new attitudes, ones that facilitate communication, that heal relationships.

And, you know, it’s just part of how karma works — we just stick with what we know until it really stops working. It’s the content of any drama. The hero whom you learn to love receives a slam. That’s what they call it in script-writing lingo, the tragic circumstances. And they’re down for the count. You’re hoping, as you’re watching this drama, that, boy, I just hope they get through this and they search through their bag of tricks, their conditioned ways of surviving.

And, “oh, this is the way I got through this last time” and they reach in there and they pull this out and they manage to slip through it. And then the second slam comes and it’s much more difficult. And so, their search for that magic tool in their toolbox that somehow will exempt them from this situation is much harder to find. Where do you suppose that tool is? It’s a new attitude. Because they’ve built themselves, they’ve swept themselves into a corner, not because of some external circumstance that they can blame on somebody else. Oh, believe me, they’re likely to try.

But eventually you realize I’m looking for this tool and, well, yeah, the second slam, they managed to pull something out of their bag of tricks. It’s not defeat that is our enemy, sometimes it’s success. I’m going to talk about conditioning. It’s thinking that the success you had in the past is going to work in the present or the future. But every moment is new. Every single moment is new. You’re going to get another one in the next second. You’re getting them right now. It’s all an opportunity. It’s all an opportunity to adopt new attitudes. This is what the Solar Plexus is about. So on the third slam, our hero is down, their head is on the pavement, there’s blood coming out of their left eye. And they’re not looking through that old toolbox. They found something inside themselves that they did not know was there, some element of character that they were born to live out. We come into the world born to live out certain things that we have inside of us. The hero finds that one thing and they change and they make it through. Or if they’re the antihero, they don’t. Again, we’re talking about script-writing here as a metaphor of how these things were. The Solar Plexus is very much about  script-writing.

It’s about our stories. It’s about how we can share our stories together. We talked earlier about doing wild-mind-writing, and mostly about the surprise that we can have when we sit down with pen and journal, or we’re on our keyboard, whatever your preference is, and you set a timer. What you’re doing is you’re saying, “Things take as long as you give them.” If you have something that you have a strong feeling about, you’re not really sure what it is or why you feel that way, but you just start feeling it and you start writing about it.

Or you’re hearing about the Solar Plexus or the Spleen. It’s always interesting because you can always pick on the Spleen as an old curmudgeon, that stubborn one, that one that just refuses to be enthusiastic. I mean, we all have people like this in our lives. We all have these parts of ourselves that can be very stubborn and blocking things out, going: “I don’t know.” It makes a very interesting character to write about — that part of ourselves.

Or your memory of finding a new relationship and being in those moments of absolute love, where, you know, this person has problems. I mean, let’s be real, of course they have problems, but they don’t seem to matter. By a moment of grace, you see them at the end of time and who they can be and who they will be at the end of time. And then at the moment that those projections begin to collapse, you realize, “Oh, they really do have problems.” And that’s where the Solar Plexus comes in, and it says, “Okay, you know, we really can work with this. We can really grow and develop.” And the Solar Plexus only really gives up when progress really stops.

You’re in a relationship. It’s not changing. You’re trying your best. You’re making every effort to be kind or to be understanding, and you start conversations, but they don’t really go anywhere. You notice that, for whatever reason, and you’re not in control of these things, and certainly one shouldn’t judge your partner for this, but occasionally you can find yourself in a situation where the person or persons you love, maybe it’s one of your parents or grandparents, they just don’t want to change. There’s not going to be any progress there. Not really. Particularly with partners, you know, there can be that moment where you realize, “Gosh, things have been not changing for quite a long time. I’m trying, I’m trying.” And if the change doesn’t happen, that’s when the Solar Plexus will finally give up. Usually it goes through three rounds of getting clear about this.

Now, the way we normally talk about the Solar Plexus, it’s important to say this, is from the point of view of the Spleen. In fact, the way Human Design has largely been taught, and this is no surprise, is largely from the point of view of the Spleen. So when we talk about how the Spleen sees the Solar Plexus, it says, “Well…” And I’ll just switch the slide back to the Spleen. “Well…” The Solar Plexus seems to be a little bit nervous, you know. They’re unclear. They really don’t have that clarity that, of course, we all need because the Spleen has clarity one second to the next. Remember those photographs, one photograph after another.

But the Solar Plexus is where all those photographs get combined into a movie, and the movie is in motion. The people move. The characters speak to each other. They grow and develop with each other. But the Spleen feels that the Solar Plexus just isn’t clear enough, so I give it a day or two, you know, sleep on it. And then it gets clear enough. Well, it is true that the Solar Plexus does have this pretty amazing superpower, which is to be clear enough and to know when it’s clear enough. “I’m clear enough that this relationship hasn’t changed in months.” Or “I’m clear enough that this relationship is still growing and developing.”

One thing is for sure that the Solar Plexus does not give up easily. It just doesn’t. It will stick with the process. It will live through the process. It will grow through the process, and it wants other people to join it in that growth through the process, which is what I mean when I say it wants to encompass all of the relationships, the ups and the downs, the conflict, the anguish, the whole thing. It wants to come to that point where that crucial step in communication gets made.

This is what is coming into our species now, and one can see the evident need for it now. So oddly, the Solar Plexus exists in the now for the sake of the Future. The Spleen exists in the now for the sake of the Past. These two parts of Self come together in the Ajna center, as well as all nine centers of the body graph. So, as we go through the body-graph in sequence, we see how these Centers fit together, how they make sense with each other.

And one of the things that happens when you study Human Design for a very long time, 28 years in my case; it seems like I’m about to have my Saturn return of the moment that I came into contact with Human Design. And I actually have the exact time of my first reading, which was my first meeting with the Human Design System. After a long time, and after I’ve taught through all of the professional training and all of those things multiple times, you come to this point of going like, “Well, this really works. You know, this really is an extraordinary thing, but I don’t really know how I got here. It must be simple. It must really be simple. It must be simple to teach about the Human Design, and somebody would be able to get it all at once.” Unfortunately, that’s not true. Well, fortunately and unfortunately.

If we go through these Centers, as we’re talking about going through them, in this four and a half weeks that we’ll be focusing on Centers before we get to the Descent of Authorities and to Type Determination and Strategy, we focus on them step by step by step. We will have laid an extraordinary foundation, actually. As I’ve written about each of these Centers, I’ve been shocked at what I have learned. Shocked. Delving deeply into it, I’ve been very, very surprised at how much you can learn from just these nine centers and what they stand for and how they work.

I look forward to that process with you. I am so thrilled to be doing this, to be sharing my discussions and my discoveries with you, particularly these discoveries that I’ve really won through writing.

There are short-form versions of the nine centers. There’s a number of documents that will be waiting for you. One of them is on the wild-mind-writing process. It’s simply a quick review of a book by Natalie Goldberg on wild-mind-writing in her book: Writing Down the Bones. Natalie Goldberg is a personal friend of mine, so I got the opportunity of connecting with her work early. It’s an amazing book. I recommend going to Amazon or wherever you buy books, your favorite place to buy books and buying this book. You won’t regret it. But this review of Writing Down the Bones gives just a very, very quick overview of what wild-mind-writing is about.

I’ve spoken about it a little bit here. There’s also a review there of Julia Cameron’s book: The Artist’s Way. And this is about a morning practice of using wild-mind-writing just at the beginning of your day to check in with yourself and write for three pages. Those three pages are probably in a half page size journal, not necessarily three huge A4 or eight and a half by eleven sheets of paper. That’s a lot of writing. Just a real substantive morning pages where you just check in with yourself. And that’s just for you. It’s a wild-mind-writing where you get to say whatever you want — to be as angry or frustrated or ecstatic or slightly crazed, whatever you need to be, in order to really check in with yourself for that day. It’s a practice that some people take to very strongly. It’s something that I highly recommend.

Then, we’ll have documents in there, having to do with the three awareness centers and what we went over today. There’s a second document for the same three centers where I’ve listed out the points being made about the learning process for each one of those centers, numbered points. Those points are made by simply extracting the sentences that made up the piece that you just read. Seems a little silly in a way. But I don’t know what it is. I find if I read these things and I go through those points in order and I read them one at a time, I find it to be very, very helpful.

Then we’ll have documents on the Spleen. And this will be my written documents. There’s a brief, which is around 500 words, four to 500 words or so, on each of the Centers that I’ll be sharing with you. And this week I’ll be sharing the Spleen and the Solar Plexus. You got the extemporaneous version today. And this will be the written version in brief form. And then there are long forms. The long form runs around 4,000 or so words. It’s fairly substantial. This is something that I’ve written over the past years about each of the nine Centers. I’m very happy to share it with you. In fact, I’m very excited to share it with you. At the same time, I do need to say that these pieces that I’ve written are intended for publication. Out of an abundance of trust and love for you as students, I’m somewhat trepidatiously sharing them with you before publication. And I ask you very kindly to not share what it is that you’re getting through this course, especially with regard to the writing.

Now, the documents that you will receive are on the website of our educational platform. They are read-only docs. So as tempting as it may be to copy them and to download them, you won’t be able to do that. But they will be there for you in perpetuity. I think I pronounced that right. We’ll keep them there and you can refer to them anytime you want. And actually, the things that really speak to you in there, I really encourage you to copy them out by hand. There’s nothing quite like copying things out by hand in your own handwriting in terms of your learning process. Of course, you can use your keyboard, you know, to select those things that are particularly meaningful to you.

Copying things out by hand, I really encourage it. And I also encourage you to take whatever my wording is to, and to put it into your own wording. Because once it’s your wording, and it’s something that is heartfelt in your experience, which is what we’re going to be practicing here, then it’s yours, right? It’s totally yours.

And so that is the process that I want to support, that you take what I’ve said, and my point of view, which is only my point of view. I’m interested in your point of view. I’m interested in what you have to say. This is the most precious experience, as far as Human Design is concerned — to hear your voice. And so, when you come to something like this brief, four to 500 words on the screen, it will also have the points that are made in that brief writing piece, broken out into a numbered list. Your assignment is, very simply, to pick something out of that point-list for each of the things that we’ve been talking about today. To take it, set a timer on your phone, I assume, a timer on your phone, or an egg timer, if you still have one of those. And take 10 minutes to write about something that caught your attention in particular. To do so by talking about what it reminds you of, a situation, a person, something you’ve learned, something that you went through, to make it very real in terms of your own life. That’s what we’re looking for here in this class, that we study these things, not in an intellectual way, but in a very Solar Plexus way, if you will, with the depth, with your feelings, drawing on the challenges of your life, how you’ve understood your own attitudes. Not philosophically, please, but in terms of what happened, when did it happen, how did it happen, who did it happen with, what did you go through, what did you learn? This is what will naturally come forth from your wild-mind-writing. It’s just what happens. It’s somewhat miraculous.

And the last thing is just how much you already know. Human Design can seem so mysterious and so enigmatic and not that accessible because often it’s written or spoken about in these somewhat philosophical ways, let’s say, intellectual ways, or almost as though we’re making proclamations about truth. We can’t help ourselves. But when you get down to it yourself, and you’re talking about, “Ooh, there’s something in that point #7 that I don’t know what it is, it’s really catching my attention.” You set that 10 minute and you just write for 10 minutes, “Pellmell,” just as fast as you can, because you’re recording what is going through you and putting it on the page. And that is what we’re going to ask you to share next week.

The way the classes will go is the second part of the class, like today, and I’m sorry for going over a little here, will be for my presentations. But when we come back next week, Richard will be leading our discussion and sharing about what it is that we’ve learned. We want to go very directly for you to read what it is that you’ve written, to step forward and to read something that you wrote that was meaningful to you. No judgment, much appreciation, much empathy, and a real connection and appreciation of who you are and what it is that you’ve communicated. And then some appreciation from Richard or myself, or one of our assistants: “wow, you know, that really spoke to me. I really particularly liked this part” where you said something that caught their attention. And then, we move on to the next person.We have many people in this class, and we really want to hear from as many of you as possible every week.

Please go to your connection to the educational platform. There will be documents there for you, with links there that you can click on and start your reading. Take notes. Go back as often as you need to. Find those things that tweak your interest and something mysterious in you. Set your timer, 10 minutes, “things take as long as you give them,” and you will be really surprised. I see some people knowingly smiling because they’ve done these exercises before. It is truly surprising. So with that, thank you so much for being here, and we’ll look forward to seeing you next week. Bye-bye. And oh, thank you so much for your joy. I mean, wow. Okay. Look forward to next week.”

© Genoa Bliven 2024 All rights reserved.