Open Centers & Decisions
As a Reflector in Human Design, I live with transitory definition. While you’ll find nine open centers if you look at my birth chart, the openness of that snapshot in time hardly represents the way I live in my day-to-day life. Something I have been intentionally reflecting on now that I’m moving through my eighth year studying Human Design, is how utterly different my life was before this journey began. I made about 99% of my decisions mentally, and the other 1% felt like sheer dumb luck. Let’s just say, my life felt chaotic, I reacted chaotically, and so chaos and entropy filled the world I lived in and experienced. There is a clear line between the life that I was living and the life I live now, and it’s clear that the true transformation in my life didn’t happen by dreaming up a new life for myself. It came from making the correct decisions. The decisions that supported me in moving towards the dreams and goals I’d set for myself rather than leading straight to confusion, self-doubt and energy exhaustion. Making decisions from the pressure of the Open Centers pulls us out of our natural rhythm, clouds our ability to feel into our body’s deep intuition and listen to the voice of our heart rather than the voice of the mind.
In short…
It’s a trap!
The undefined centers are open to stimulation, and are literally designed to draw us into life. It is the curiosity of these open centers that attracts us to the definition in others. It really shows us one living expression of how ‘opposites attract’. With definition, the life force energy has a focused way to be expressed, and its focused path creates an imprinting stream that conditions the openness in others. When conditioning is received from the outside, this puts pressure on our openness and triggers our mind into thinking about all we are missing - amplification is driven by identification.
Whenever we react to something and take it personally, our mind begins to weave a story around the event and before we know it energetically we are much deeper involved with that reaction or emotion than a minute before. Where focus goes, energy flows, and in energy dynamics this is absolutely true. We have a definitive way to navigate through this life, and it comes through the context of definition. Decisions made out of pressure, for whatever reason, will bring resistance at some level. When we use our mind to make decisions, the collective pressure of our open centers become part of what is called our not-self mind. Since the aspects that are reliable and consistent about us do not interest our busy mind, what is open or undefined becomes a source of deep attraction. It is what we long for, what we feel drawn to experience, what we think we have to have or want to be.
This attraction can lead us away from our core nature, which is why understanding the activations in your chart that bring definition is the catalyst to healthy living - when you operate according to how your energy flows naturally through you, and honor that process, these outside conditioning forces are no longer deep sources of temptation. Each decision we make in life either keeps us on an aligned path or takes us on a confusing and sometimes painful detour; either moves us closer to or further away from our true nature and purpose. Decisions made by our mind, and based on conditioning from our undefined centers, cause us to veer from our course. When this happens we find ourselves confronted by situations we are not equipped to deal with, making commitments that drain our energy and inhibit the use of our true talents. Correct decisions made from our personal Authority, from that which is defined in us that we can trust, align us with our destiny, and place us in relationships, locations and jobs that are correct for us.
Bringing back the color in your eyes
Learning how I operate saved me in a way. I really didn’t know that all of the deep self-loathing was rooted in my mis-understanding of my-self. That I hated who I thought I was and who that person was to everyone else, that I really didn’t know myself. As a Reflector it’s been a true learn as I go process, one day at a time. Slowly, with each decision that came from a place of trust in the body, the world began to feel lighter, and so did I. Only it was happening from the inside-out.
The good news is that when we find we’ve lost track or fallen off course, we can use our body’s natural strategy to respond to life simply by committing to re-enter our experiment. It’s that simple. The challenge comes when temptation arises again and the pressure comes up saying “do this, do that.” This is where I’ve found breath-work, mindful meditation and even light asana flows to be extremely helpful in releasing pent up energy. And at the end of the day, learning to love my open centers is how I really learned to appreciate me for me, for the good and the areas with room for growth. It’s all a blessing. This journey has made me grateful in so many ways. It brought the color back in my eyes, and changed the way I looked at self-care forever.
