Using the Wisdom from the Open and Undefined Centers in Human Design

Open + Undefined Centers:

We’re driven to get what we don’t have. If you look at your chart versus your friend’s or your partner’s chart, I bet they will have gates and energy centers that “complete” your own personal chart.

We are deeply attracted to what we don’t have, it drives us to improve, it drives us forward but we can’t let the quest for what we don’t have overtake us, we can’t let it diminish us, or let it turn off our light. 

When we are driven by the mind (which is an illusion, we never have control) we can get caught up operating out of a lack mentality.I believe this is what fuels rampant consumerism, this drive to fill this void, this need to be externally validated that will never stop until we learn to work within our own internal framework. 

Our wisdom comes from an ability to accept our own humanity.

The wabi-sabi. We begin to stop the hemorrhaging when we learn to accept our own limitations. It’s not the same as giving up, but it is surrendering. Surrendering to the idea that maybe our mind doesn’t know all the answers. When we honor our body’s wisdom, we can see our gifts more clearly. I love Human Design because it’s a framework that honors all the ways we can be smart. School + social conditioning tamp down our inclinations for individualism, forcing us to be measured through testing. We have all these measures of success out there - success metrics however set up a system of winners and losers. We must widen the societal acceptance for success.

WE’RE AFRAID TO LOOK INTO OUR CONDITIONING BECAUSE WE’RE TOTALLY AND COMPLETELY FREAKED OUT ABOUT WHAT WE WILL FIND.

MYTH: THE THINGS THAT YOU ARE ASHAMED OF MAKE YOU A BAD PERSON.

FACT: YOU ARE A PRODUCT OF YOUR ENVIRONMENT + CIRCUMSTANCES

MINDSET SHIFT: YOUR CONDITIONING IS NOT PERSONAL - REALIZING YOUR CONDITIONING IS A PRODUCT OF YOUR ENVIRONMENT (WHO YOU GREW UP AROUND, YOUR CULTURE, YOUR SCHOOL, ETC.) AND NOT A REFLECTION OF WHO YOU ARE IS A MASSIVE AH-HA MOMENT.

JOURNAL: WHAT CAN I ADMIT TO MYSELF IF I CREATE SPACE BETWEEN MYSELF AND MY ACTIONS?

Join The Transformation! A 12-week Container to Grow into Your Authentic Self

Our body is in communication with us all the time. What’s difficult to capture online are the nuances of Human Design.

Understanding and learning about your unique Human Design provides the map, but you have to actually live and experience and play around to release your full potential into the world. When I found Human Design, what clicked into place was that our obsession with how the body looks is completely misguided. Exercise, movement, and eating the food that feels good to you IS important, but not for the reason you’ve been told.

Your body is a compass. To *implement* Human Design we have to establish a rapport with our bodies to tune into our own unique guidance. We can’t follow our intuition if we’re existing OUTSIDE of ourselves. If we’ve following someone else’s paradigm, we can’t follow what’s right for US.

As energy beings, becoming aware of this innate intelligence that flows through ALL OF US is the point of Human Design. 

As a map it helps make sense of the different messages and pressures we receive, pointing us to see which energies will be consistent versus not. 

A reading alone isn’t enough to change your life. It’s a jumping off point.

The purpose of a reading is to get you familiar with your design so you can live from the innate wisdom of your body instead of from the conditioning of your past. 

One reading can open your world, but the work doesn’t end there. We’ve got to sift through our energy and connect to our bodies so we aren’t making decisions from a place of pressure, but from our own authority.  This is why we made the Transformation. So you’ve got support, community, and accountability, as you find your inner voice.

I am the last person on earth to read Untamed, but when she said, “brave is not asking the crowd what is brave. Brave is deciding for oneself.” That really struck me as the motivation behind The Transformation.

This is the essence of the work that’s done in tandem with deepening your awareness of your own energy system. but I think Glennon captures the nuance that we frequently skip over in the energy world - finding your voice doesn’t make your life easy or perfect, it makes it YOURS. 

If you are looking for support as you find your voice, join us. You’ll get a Human Design reading with me, a reading with Jackie and Raisa to identify your blocks, and the patterns you have to break, which naturally will make way for your natural evolution. Taking these steps creates energetic waves that WILL change your life.

You can begin listening to your body wisdom at any moment. I find that through a mix of movement, meditation, and breath work that we can clear out the noise and make a better connection to our energy, which is what I’ll be teaching in my class, Inner Listening.

For me, understanding my design gave me the confidence to know I was on my right path and the strides I’ve been able to make by living WITH my design instead of fighting against it has been absolutely extraordinary. Finding and being in community with people who are also working to find their voice and their path? PRICELESS.  

Understanding Conditioning: Body Image + Human Design

I remember distinctly being in 4th grade and the girl next to me in music class lamenting her “fat thighs.”

As I heard this girl tear her body apart, I was struck by what she was saying. I hadn’t really given too much thought to my thighs before this moment and her words drove into me like a wedge.

Was I supposed to hate my body?

PAUSE: Human Design immediately makes me think about childhood body image? YES.

A huge part of living your design is releasing the conditioning that you’ve picked up along the way that pushes you to live in your NOT SELF.

As adults, we know that this 9 year old didn’t authentically hate her “fat thighs,” she was simply reflecting the conditioning of her family and the cultural beliefs that she had absorbed from her environment. Something I reference all the time on my instagram is the Beauty Redefined book and teachings. Lexie and Lindsay Kite, PhD’s have researched exactly how women are taught to self-objectify themselves and the harm that causes.

Finding the beliefs that keep us stuck from being ourselves is one of the first steps needed when you are working towards living YOUR fulfilling life. If you are living in a woman’s body, chances are you need to work through your self-objectifying beliefs so that you can get into your authentic desires and energy.

To connect to our inner voice and guidance, we must be IN and connected to our bodies. Facing memories and beliefs about what keeps us disconnected from our bodies is a HUGE part of the process. It is not pretty, it doesn’t really feel good either, but it is a part of the process that allows you to get to a place of authenticity within yourself and isn’t that the whole point of being alive?

Competition, comparison, body image issues, it all starts YOUNG. It serves as a distraction from living your life. It is also strategically used to oppress women because we can’t move forward if we’re too worried about how we look.

In Human Design terminology, this is called conditioning. We are conditioned to fit in and be acceptable so that we get our needs met. Women believe that their value is tied to how they look and therefore we shut down huge swaths of our authentic selves to divert precious resources to making ourselves “acceptable.” But you are not a stock. Your value does NOT rise and fall in concordance with your physical appearance.

Why does this matter? Conditioning holds us back from being who we are. If we are worried about HOW WE LOOK, then we are not clued into HOW WE FEEL.

How you look may get you rewarded externally for a bit, but tuning into how you FEEL will lead to actually being aligned with your highest self.

When we are in flow we are freely allowing our unique energetic signature to beam into universe with clarity.

When we are living in our NOT SELF, we’re scrambling or hiding our energetic signature - and we’re not calling in the correct opportunities and people for us.

In order to clear out our conditioning so that we’re beaming out a clear signal, we’ve got to get in our bodies to feel our authority so that we’re not overthinking and getting stuck in our conditioning.

Embodiment is the antidote to self-objectification. Striving to live fully in our physical being leads to our full expression of being. 

Embodiment is a word thrown around a lot lately. But what does it really mean when someone says this? If we look to the dictionary, we see embody to mean giving a body to a spirit. I see embodiment as a channel to deeper self-understanding. We need to be fully grounded in ourselves (our body) to make decisions that are truly the best for us. 

I find it can be helpful if we all understand that embodiment simply means being grounded in our body. Now, this isn’t a seamless transition. It’s taken me a long time to drop my self-objectification and just allow myself to BE. It feels awkward at first to not participate in diet culture. I felt self-conscious to just let my body be - but the more I just allowed myself to be, the more I realized I could hear what my body was saying. I felt what a yes and no was in my body.

Allow embodiment to be a daily practice. Notice how often you are disconnected and watching yourself in life. Gently steer yourself back into the present moment.

What do you feel? I found that slow flow yoga and yin yoga really helped me connect into my physical being. A physical practice of any kind that helps you be present and in the moment will help you connect to your inner voice.

Want to learn more? Let’s chat

Human Design: freedom through living as yourself

Human Design appeals to me because it’s proof that we’re all designed to be different.

As I child I felt so frustrated that my peers didn’t see how silly “favorites” were. Why limit yourself to one of anything? Didn’t they see how arbitrary picking one thing and elevating it over another was?

Why do we decide that one thing is important and special to the exclusion of other things?

This question has nagged me my whole life.

When I found Human Design I felt relief.

Relief that someone was finally seeing something my way - that we all are designed with unique talents, gifts, and views that bring something into this world.

Everyone is created to bring in a specific energy signature into the world. We all make an impact and play an integral part of the universal plan. Everything is interconnected. Nothing is better than anything else - everything holds value and purpose.

We could have so much more joy in our lives and in the world if we recognized that everyone brings a special flavor of perspective and talent into the world. If we recognized our own talents and didn’t look to try and make our talents look like someone else’s.

The root cause of a lot of suffering is living in the not self. We’re attracted and seduced by what we aren’t. A pothole so many people fall prey to is believing you build character through conquering what you aren’t good at - whether through competitive forces or through believing a cultural narrative that arbitrarily elevates certain career paths and traits over others.

I grew up in the Christian faith and the parable of the three servants is something that bubbles up constantly when I think about Human Design and feeling satisfied in life. We are given gifts in life and it is not about comparing ourselves to others, it’s about using what we have and sharing our talent with others that brings joy and satisfaction.

We’ve been so browbeat by narrative or linear thinking to realize that there are so many ways to be successful.

We will always be seduced by what other people can do because we don’t live in a vacuum. Recognizing that you are attracted to something isn’t the same thing as needing to be that thing.

MY PHILOSOPHY IS SIMPLE (and borrowed from that parable mentioned above):

WE CAN USE OUR TIME ON EARTH ENJOYING OUR TALENTS AND GIFTS OR WE CAN BURY OUR GOLD.

We’ll all be happier people if we accept who we are and explore what it means to be on earth with the set of energetic tools we’ve been given.

We all have talents, dreams, and wishes for our time - are you following those urges and desires or are you brushing them off?

We’re not meant to live a life to please our families or external sources.

We’re here to express our inner well of joy, creativity, and passion.

Ready to let your inner talents free? Book a session with me.

Field Notes + Observations - May 2021

What's funny to me is how tapped into the planets and the cosmic weather we all are, even when we don't consciously pay attention. Themes emerge in our lives that are tied into the planetary themes from above.

In my sessions and in my personal relationships, nearly everyone this past month was noticing the familial patterns + ancestral trauma that needed to be cut loose and dealt with. Is it a coincidence then that this past week's lunar eclipse focused on making sense of the past so you can be present for the future of your own making?

Familial patterns (well worn routines and automatic behaviors that have been taught and handed down in our families) and ancestral trauma (the pains that are in our familial line that we didn’t personally experience, but we physically carry the experience in our bodies) are big things that are coming up because those of us who are on earth right now are shifting the culture and traditions that we carry forward and pass on to the next generations.

We’ve got to be conscious about what we’re bringing into the world and preserving - so it’s our responsibility to take a deep dive into what needs to be shed.

In my own life, I’ve been noticing how my perfectionism is more than just something I struggle with in my life - it is a familial pattern that has been passed down. I was taught (unconsciously) to pay more attention to the image I was creating and preserving more than the experience I was having. How I felt was not valued, the value was placed on how I was being perceived from the outside. As I’ve sat with this - I realize this has been passed down as a matter of safety. We don’t want to stick out, but rather it is safer to blend in.

This pattern has been a problem for me because it conflicts directly against my design - as a splenic Projector, I have to be able to tap into how I am feeling and my natural instincts to make my best moves. If I am second guessing myself to preserve or maintain an image, I am not serving myself. Sitting with this and sifting out how these patterns are not my natural instinct but are learned has been a big part of my journey over the past year.

Sometimes we can release patterns quickly once we’ve identified them and other patterns take much longer to dislodge. Being patient as you identify where you are holding family energy and growing your awareness (even if it feels like it is taking for-ev-er) IS forward movement.

Shift into Your Body, Shift into Your Innate Worth + Connect with Your intuition

Letting go of weight loss, your ‘ideal body,’ and why loving yourself as you are right now is the key to getting through to your intuition

The biggest myth we face in our culture right now is that changing your external body will shift your internal worth.

OOF, this crock of SHIT… Y’all, if I could wave a magic wand right now and fix one thing, it would be to lift the veil and show anyone that believes changing their body will change their confidence how flawed that logic is.

First, if you are in IF then thinking or When then thinking, you’ve got it twisted. We must love AS WE ARE in order to move forward in our authenticity. Being rooted in the present is the only way we can be in touch with who we are. If we’re living for a future that hasn’t arrived, we’re missing the power in the present moment.

Loving your body right now and celebrating what it can do is how you connect to your intuition and find real confidence from within.

Not only does weight loss not solve confidence issues, but being overly focused on your appearance and controlling your body’s shape can be deeply damaging to your intuitive abilities. If you only see your body as an external appearance, you are cutting yourself off from your own power.

As someone who chased the thinness ideal for most of my life, I can tell you firsthand that this is myth. A new body will not improve your life. The only way to move the needle on your confidence is to look at your internal programming.

Despite the messages you’ve been receiving your entire life to the contrary, attaining a certain external look is never going to make you whole. Chasing thinness and youth is a losing game because you are making a tacit agreement that thinness and youth are “better” than growing old or having your body present differently that the cultural standard and ideals presented through mainstream advertising. (If you aren’t familiar with the work from Lindsay and Lexie Kite, who have literally written the book about self-objectification, check out Beauty Redefined, right now)

Your worth comes from within and it starts by being inside of your body instead of focusing on how you present to others. The biggest leap I made in my self-confidence and living my life for me, came when I began to understand this and integrate it into my life.

You do not have to change how you look to feel good about your body and about your life - you have to change how you look at yourself.

It’s not about how you look or how others perceive you, it’s about how you feel. If you need help with this, go on Instagram and see all the influencers who are outside of the very narrow mainstream beauty standards that are living their best lives and loving themselves.

What we want isn’t to fit the beauty standard, it is self-love. We conflate beauty standards and accepted norms as self-love and that’s why so many people are trapped on a hamster wheel of despair that they don’t know how to get off.

THE GOOD NEWS. THERE IS AN EXIT. You can unplug from these wild standards and start living from your authenticity (it does take practice and time, so be patient)

We transform our day to day experience when we shift from living outside of ourselves to living in our body. If you’re stuck as an observer to your life, you’re losing out on truly living your life.

The culture we live in disconnects us from our body, deceiving us into believing that our body must look a certain way before we can achieve our goals.

We take our power back when we root back into our bodies and connect with our innate power within.

If you do not connect to your physical experience, you cannot connect to your intuition. GO BACK AND READ THAT AGAIN.

IF YOU DO NOT CONNECT TO YOUR BODY AND LIVE INSIDE YOUR PHYSICAL BEING, YOU ARE CUTTING YOURSELF OFF FROM YOUR POWER SOURCE. I know this because I lived outside of myself for most of my adult life. I was watching my life as a 3rd party instead of living firsthand in my own body.

If you are disconnected to your body, it’s likely for very good reason. We shift out of our bodies for many reasons, trauma being one of the big reasons and diet culture being another. If you’ve grown up in a woman’s body - then you’ve grown up in a world that has trained you to objectify yourself. Women learn and internalize from a young age that how men perceive you is your value (thanks patriarchy) While this is not true, it’s a powerful message that has been perpetuated in the media and is used to keep women small. (Another reading recommendation - Burnout by Emily and Amelia Nagoski)

If we are so self-focused on how we are perceived, than we cannot enjoy our lives fully. Living fully happens when we let go of what it looks like and enjoy the physical experience of being present and in our bodies. We cannot go full throttle on accomplishing our goals if we’re too distracted trying to make ourselves acceptable from the outside.

I spent years on the loop of believing that my worth came from my external appearance until it dawned on me that all that pressure I was putting on myself was slowly killing me, what was the point of trying to look good if I didn’t FEEL GOOD?!?!

My brain was dedicated to beating myself up and there wasn’t any space to really let loose and enjoy my life. I was living my life as an observer to myself - stage mothering myself; over-controlling every move, worried about how others might perceive me instead of living from my heart and body.

I was so miserable I had to give up. What was the point? What was all of "this” performance for? Certainly it wasn’t for me. If my life wasn’t for my enjoyment, then what? When I let go of trying to be everything for everyone else, I opened up space to truly find out what it meant to be me.

Your worth isn’t what someone else thinks. Your worth and experience is centered in being YOU.

It takes time to let go of your old mindset that keeps you small and build a new one that supports you.

If this is new work for you (and even if it’s not) being gentle leads to more growth than being harsh on yourself (trust me, I’ve done both).

TAKE ACTION

Practice + Reflection Questions:

How can you be kind to yourself and your body today?

Are you listening to the messages your body is sending or are you too worried about what it looks like to listen?

If you know you aren’t treating your body with respect - see what happens if you get curious about what’s happening in your body instead of having expectations.

Who benefits from your negative self-talk to your body?

If you’ve got the time today - assess your relationship to your body and your intuition. Are you expecting your body to be something different than what it is? Why? How is that affecting your ability to listen inward?

Shifting into the driver’s seat of your life is letting go of any external expectations and checking in with your energy and needs. Affirm that you are making progress just by considering these questions.

Are you missing the point of exercise?

It’s time for some spicy 🌶 opinions 🔥 if you are only exercising in the name of weight loss or making your body smaller, you are entirely missing the point of exercise. 

I say this as someone who entirely missed the point of exercise for years. I internalized exercise = weight loss and smaller body = better body narrative that we are soaking in every single day and tbh, I am angry that this is the world we live in and I hope my pain and experience can help shift your perspective. 

It wasn’t until I blew out my hip joint so terribly that I had to take a year off of strenuous exercise, that I was able to examine my relationship between exercise and my body. I was so focused on how my body wasn’t changing enough, that I missed how I caused my own injury by not paying attention to the cues my body was providing for me to stay safe. 

I was driven to exercise not for how it made me feel, but for how it could make me look and honestly, I felt shame for years that I didn’t look different despite how often I exercised.  I felt I must be doing something wrong that I wasn’t smaller or more muscular. I felt full-on betrayed that my body didn’t reflect the work that I put into it. I felt judged by others who knew how much I worked out and I assumed they thought I should look different too, that my body should take up less space, that my muscles be more pronounced. I had no idea that this was all internal and that while others may have been judging me, the person who was making my life a living hell was me. 

Have you missed the point of exercise? 

Did you know it is a time of moving meditation, of creating resilience, of releasing stress and stuck emotions? 

Are you punishing yourself because you are so results focused that you are causing your body harm like I did for so long? 

Are you creating an internal hostile environment for yourself because nothing is ever good enough for you because the standards for women’s bodies are moving goalposts set up for failure? 

It makes me so angry and sad that how we view bodies, especially women’s bodies, is so harmful that even the joy of exercise is taken from us.

You do not have to exercise for weight loss. You do not have to exercise to change your body. 

Exercise to CELEBRATE YOUR BODY. Exercise to free yourself from all the old trauma that’s literally stuck inside you. Exercise because your body is a temple just as it is. 

If you are steeped in diet culture like I was for so long that this seems impossible, know that it is all about small steps to open your mind to the possibilities beyond weight loss. Yes, exercise can change your body, but it can also change your mind. 

If you are working so hard that you are experiencing injury, take the time to connect with your heart and listen to what your body is telling you. Honor your body with rest. Honor your body with gentle movement. Honor your body by loving it as it is. 

I want to know your feelings and experience - have you over-exercised to the point of harm? Are you ready to let go of weight loss as the ultimate marker of success? How does exercising make you feel?

Drop me a note on IG or set up a free 15-min appointment to chat.

HUMAN DESIGN MYTH BUSTING: HUMAN DESIGN ISN'T A PRACTICE

There is nothing to practice in Human Design. There is nothing to believe. There is nothing TO DO. Human Design isn’t another skill you’re adding to your to-do list. 

FACT: You are already living your design! 

FACT: YOU ARE ALREADY WHOLE + COMPLETE.

You don’t need to practice your design because your design is innate to you. 

So why learn your unique energy dynamics?

So you can see that you do already know to trust yourself. So that you can move from a place of anxiety to deep trust within yourself. You don’t need to practice your design. When you consciously understand your design you can begin to gently release everything that is NOT YOU. 

Human Design is the art of coming home to yourself. It’s the art of releasing. 

A lot of our internal suffering is rooted in the not self. We’ve been conditioned to act differently than what is natural to us - so the push and pull of our conditioning and the wearing of false identities we think we need to survive is typically what is causing our strife. 

Understanding how you were designed brings you back home to yourself. 

If you’re ready to learn your design - let’s talk.

What I Learned from Trusting Myself (and my career journey to Human Design)

PLANT YOURSELF WHERE YOU WANT TO BLOOM

If you told me when I was in high school that I would be spiritually advising people, I would have been like THAT IS RAD and also how is that a thing? I’m grateful for all the twists and turns my career path has taken because without the duality to life, I wouldn’t know the depths of life as I do now. If you’re reading this and you’re feeling stuck or unsuccessful right now, remember that we’re always changing and evolving.

My perceived “failures” (how I saw things at the time) led me directly to my successes. I definitely know that I would not have ended up here had my first career path been “successful” instead of deeply frustrating.

So, how did I end up here? My career path has been a weaving of retail, teaching, and wellness. Figuring out how those pieces fit together has been a journey. I’ve found my footing by taking agency over my life, my experiences, and most importantly, my body.

My 20s felt out of control and held some very high highs and low lows. I was living OUTSIDE-IN. Hoping that if I could get the external circumstances right, my internal life would calm down.

I know now that the only way to get out internal life calm is to go INSIDE OUT. We must begin within.

Now, I live an incredibly low-key lifestyle. Every day is a wonderful day because I’m right within (and if it’s not a good day, I have the tools to realign). I see clients, I work at an indie retail shop here in Austin, and an exciting night for me is making art in my own home. I love it. Super slow living.

HOW DID I MAKE THIS SHIFT HAPPEN?

Let’s start at the beginning. I used to like to learn my lessons the hard way. Why do I believe in body wisdom so deeply? Because I’ve lost my health multiple times from not listening to myself.

After graduating college (undergrad) with a degree in fashion (and another one in communication, because hello, I was your typical perfectionist overachiever) I began my professional career bright-eyed and oh-so-naive in NYC.

My first year of city living caught up with me by blowing out my immune system. I think it only took about 6 months. I had to do all the things. Be amazing at my job, go to all the happy hours, make friends outside of my office, be the perfect girlfriend to my boyfriend at the time. I’d been so out of place in college, that I was determined to make up for “lost time.”

In reality I was a people-pleaser trying to be everything to everyone, seeking approval and validation, and desperately trying to fit in. I was living for the checklist. I figured I could find salvation through achievement. If I have a brag-worthy job and am in a relationship with someone who also has a brag-worthy job and we look good and do cool things, then I’ll be happy, then I’ll feel successful and not this empty void. I was totally caught up in my perception instead of how I was feeling, cultivating externals and completely ignoring my internals.

All of this trying-to burned me out. I hated my job, I didn’t know if I liked my boyfriend, and I barely had friends. I didn’t know how to cope. That first winter, I got sick with a fever that nearly wiped out all my white blood cells and bone marrow. I was grateful to have to go to the doctor’s office at least once a week as an escape from the office. My doctor tried to figure out why I barely had an immune system left as a 22-year-old who seemingly had just had the flu. They tested and tested me for months and finally settled on the solution being gain some weight, but really, no one had answers.

The “great recession” hit and I got switched into a position that was a terrible fit for me, but I was grateful to be employed. My Projector vision showed me that commerce was rapidly changing and that millennials were not mini-boomers. HOW WOULD WE CHANGE AND ADAPT? I had ideas to reach out to marginalized communities and to younger people. No one would listen to me because it wasn’t “worth it” financially. It was unproven. I continued to give unsolicited advice and provided endless ideas to my team to no avail (ahem, not-self Projector) and I became increasingly depressed as I kept hoping for someone to see my value and put me in a position that was a better fit or give me more power (haha, I would have had to have been much better at doing my ASSIGNED work).

Why wasn’t anyone listening to me? During those 5 years that I spent in corporate merchandising and buying, I learned many invaluable lessons.

1) How we run businesses is absolutely insane. If you are a good individual contributor, you are rewarded with a completely untested skill set of managing people. Not all individual contributors should be managers and people who would make good managers may not be good individual contributors. We promote to the level of incompetence and that’s why there is so much ineptitude in business.

2) Just because a lot of people believe something, doesn’t make it true or the best. I call this the myth of the best-seller. General wisdom is that something that sells the most is BEST. No. It just means a lot of people bought it. Validation isn’t the same as quality. When we would go to market, it was so depressing to see all these incredible products that would never make it to mass market because they were new ideas or not broadly enough focused. This is illustrated best by watching Shark Tank. Good ideas aren’t always marketable ideas. Things that are good for society don’t typically square with the principles of capitalism which is solely focused on growth and profits.

3) Betraying yourself to belong comes with a hefty price tag. If you give up on being yourself, your insides go to shit.

4) RESISTANCE IS A CALL FROM THE UNIVERSE TO LET GO. Learn to cut your losses. Admitting defeat is a good thing. When we keep trying to make something happen and it’s not happening - it’s time to look at your ego. Resistance is a sacred call from the universe to take another path.

SILVER LINING! Being in a job that wasn’t the right fit gave me an amazing opportunity to get clear on my values. If it wasn’t for the rampant waste I was exposed to and the insanity of our capitalistic society that centers on growth at any cost, I wouldn’t know that I am all about sustainability and minimalism. It was only through experiencing corporate values firsthand and seeing how mainstream companies are run that I found out that I was personally driven by the values of minimalism, sustainability, and understanding entire the life-cycle of a product.

When I finally accepted that the only person who could fix my life was me, I went back to my roots. When I finally realized the mainstream retail industry wasn’t going to bend to my value system, I quit my job and started again. I had loved being a camp counselor in high school and college, so I went back to school to become a teacher. I was still tethered to old paradigm programming, so I didn’t fully go for my dreams which at the time were a recurring fantasy of working on an organic farm or becoming a body-image and confidence counselor for young women. I let other people’s opinions and my own practicality get the best of me and I landed in a master’s program for special education.

My first teaching job was hectic and an extremely unsupportive environment. I was scared, out of control, and I headed straight back to burnout town. My health problems came back even worse and I ended up needing a lot of medical care. However, the lessons came through strong:

1) We live in an extremely racist society. During grad school I faced my white privilege more than I ever had to before. It was extremely eye-opening as I realized how many internalized biases I had to dismantle (this work continues to this day).

2) Resources pool at the top. Rich schools have rich PTAs and access to resources well beyond what the school system provides. Schools on the other end of the spectrum are underfunded and overwhelmed with a lack of resources and adequate help.

3) Our educational system is backwards and broken. Testing students is the focus of schools because of educational policy at every level of government. It is ineffective and goes against how students learn best. Every single student has different needs, strengths, and weaknesses, but traditional schooling elevates a very small skill set and ignores many skill sets that are deeply needed in life. Students who excel in school may be very ill-equipped for “real life” many students who have incredible skill sets that would serve them well in “real life” aren’t celebrated or acknowledged in a traditional school setting.

4) A warm, safe environment is the root for learning and collaboration. If our emotional and physical needs aren’t being met, we cannot learn or grow. If you are actively facing trauma or are feeling unsafe, you cannot learn (and may not even be physically growing). Environment is critical for our wellbeing. Until we are safe, we cannot thrive.

I was so lost and confused, but along my way I found kundalini yoga and an entirely new world of thinking. I read Conscious Loving by Gay and Kathlyn Hendricks and I was hit with lightning. I understood my health issues in an entirely new light. I also understood that I was quite far from operating in my zone of Genius.

A new chapter: discovering body wisdom + the power of being present

If students can’t learn when they are actively in a traumatic environment, what does that say for those of us who inflict trauma onto ourselves?

My health was out of control. Since I was so out of alignment personally, my body was screaming at me to change course. In Conscious Loving, the Hendricks identify that tamping down our emotions manifest as illness later on and if we fight our natural rhythms, our bodies will fight our battles for us.

When I didn’t know how to communicate for myself that my boundaries had been crossed or I was in the wrong place, my body would generate illness so I could escape my circumstances. Since I wasn’t listening to my body or allowing myself rest (and my internal environment was a wreck with perfectionism) I would manifest sickness as an escape or an out from life. I didn’t know another way to stop the train.

Lessons:

1) We are most effective where our passions and skills lie - if we are happy we create positive environments for others and ourselves. If we’re unhappy and not using our talents, we’re not being effective for anyone.

2) Our bodies hold so much intelligence. Honoring our energy and feelings is the key to finding our correct path.

Now that I know my body communicates what is right and what isn’t, I listen to my body and let it lead me. In the years since reading Conscious Loving, I’ve only had one major relapse with my health (and it was very much stress-related).

Armed with a new way of thinking, I completely stayed in the present moment and let go of the future entirely. We make leaps and bounds in our life when we can be here now (thank you Ram Dass). By feeling my feelings, honoring my body, and acknowledging what I was going through internally instead of burying it deeper and deeper within (and pretending everything was fine), I changed my life.

My job (actually my whole life at the time wasn’t the right fit for me) but I focused on taking it one minute at a time. Slowly, my circumstances began to shift. I was grateful for all the good things. I realized my external circumstances didn’t dictate how I felt.

Lessons:

1) WE ARE NOT MEANT TO DO IT ALL. Teachers, especially special education teachers, have an impossible job. My colleagues that felt that they had to do everything and save the day were drowning. Since I had so much on my plate and had gotten so behind in my school work from my health problems, I had to let go of doing it all. I just couldn’t.

2) You can let go of your baggage at any time. Since I was so overloaded, I became free. When everything is a crisis, nothing becomes a crisis. I was able to stop thinking about what could happen, or what would happen, and was radically present in my life.

Serendipitously, I found another teaching job much more suited to my skill set in a much more supportive setting. Some might call this manifesting. I’ve found in my life that the next step comes the more that I detach from the outcome. Many teachers talk about how being present is the secret to co-creating with the universe and when I look back over my life, that’s certainly been the case for me.

The new school I worked at was wonderful, and the quality of my life improved. I love being around people and especially kids, but even in this better suited job, I was present enough to see how our education system is so terribly broken. At first I wanted to work against the system, but I realized that it absolutely drove me mad that my students were so aware of their “shortcomings” and not given more time to work on their incredible gifts and talents. Why did we work in a system that focuses on where a student doesn’t thrive instead of supporting them in their interests and talents?

lessons:

1) keep clarifying your values. As a special education teacher I realized so deeply that everyone deserves to be celebrated and acknowledged for who they are. Celebrating our differences became so much more important to me than test scores.

2) Not every fight is your fight. I feel so strongly about education, but just because something is important to you doesn’t mean you have to make it your life work. My mother and grandmother were both teachers and it is a very noble profession. Allowing myself to leave was critical to my evolution. Just because you care or you tried it, doesn’t mean you have to do it forever.

I didn’t want to do my job, I wanted to work with students on their self-worth and self-esteem.

The way I see it is like this: if we erode your self-esteem how will you even have energy left to do what you love? If you aren’t doing what you love then the world misses out on your talents and joy. It would keep me up at night that I wasn’t able to help these students in their area of interest but had to sit with them while they did the subjects they hated the most. I just didn’t agree with the school system at all, even though I loved my students and my school, teaching just wasn’t the right fit for me.

So after teaching in public schools for 5 years, I had a revealing moment of clarity. Who was I living for? What was the point of everything I was doing? I could stay and teach forever at the incredible school I was so blessed to work at and feel like I was compromising, or I could follow that nagging in my heart that said I hadn’t really let myself chase my dreams.

I was done denying who I was. I was done hoping I could wrangle myself into submission, hoping I could fit myself into the mold I felt I needed to succeed, so in the summer of 2017, I traveled to Texas, following my intuition that I was meant to live here and I quit my stable life.

I FINALLY SAID TO THE UNIVERSE, WHAT’S THE WORST THAT COULD HAPPEN IF I BET ON MYSELF?

And it turns out, the doors just keep opening the more that I listen and am honest with what I am feeling. Living my values and staying true to my heart are the things I believe in most.

It was here that I serendipitously found out about Human Design.

Finding Human Design (and finding out I was a Projector) was one of the biggest aha moments for me. All of a sudden my life made sense. As a Projector I operate differently than most - I work in intense bursts, I work best one-on-one (no wonder teaching was so draining!) and I am meant to share my unique perspective with the world.

I realized we don’t have to fight our nature, we must embrace it.

When we make a commitment to ourselves to be authentically us, we are able to cultivate a sense of stability and inner peace that grounds us in who we are.

We can become unshakeable.

The amazing thing is it’s never too late to find your truth and find yourself.

I’ve rebuilt my life completely by learning to trust myself and living my design. You can too

I used to feel so frustrated that I hadn’t just followed my heart right after college, the heart that would routinely keep me up until 2 in the morning googling life-coaching and freelance writing wondering if a 22-year old could be qualified to tell anyone anything about life. No, I would think, I can’t do that - it doesn’t have health insurance.

Now, I am thankful for all my experiences. I don’t hold a grudge against my younger self for not knowing what to do or feel confident to follow my heart (I have an undefined G-center and ego after all) and everything has had a lesson and has enriched my life. Showing me what I want and what I don’t. The duality of life and our experiences is what brings richness and meaning to our experiences. If I hadn’t experienced such low-lows and found myself in so many doctors offices, I would never appreciate and treasure my time and health like I do now.

Things that felt like wrong turns have taught me so much about my boundaries and my self-worth. Living my values and allowing my values to evolve have brought me to this moment in time where I can now help facilitate this experience of clarity for others.

Finding our way is a winding road and there’s no destination. It’s just one long journey of self-exploration. We lead with our hearts when we’re ready to tune into what our heart has to say to us.

I had a memory recently about a talk I attended at my old corporate job where our CEO urged us to bloom where we are planted. I would say it to myself all the time to try to find the good even thought I knew the situation I was in wasn’t right for me. Now I know I it’s actually the reverse that true for me- plant yourself where you can bloom.

If you’re ready to live more embodied - reach out. I’d love to talk to you - drop me a line at hello@jenigage.com, I’d love to hear your story.