Human Design for Beginners

Everything you need to know - and nothing you don’t

A step-by-step Human Design Guide for total Newbies

Welcome to Human Design! If you are on this page, I'm going to assume that you are brand new to the world of Human Design, and I am excited for you to get your feet wet. I am going to guide you quickly and easily through the beginner basics so that by the time you are done with this page you will have a great grasp on what Human Design is, and how Human Design can help you in your life and business (if you have one) even if you are a total newbie. Trying to put the entire Human Design system in a nutshell is literally impossible, but I can definitely give you the beginner pieces in a nutshell so that you won’t be too overwhelmed.

I would have named this "Human Design for Dummies", but honestly there are no dummies here. Just inquisitive, curious people like you, who want to understand Human Design and what it can do for you, even if you’re a total beginner. 

Human Design History for Beginners

I'm not going to dive too deep here because if you're a newbie, it’s just going to overwhelm you with information that you don’t really need to get started with Human Design. Just know that the history is not really something that affects your design, it's just a fun piece of trivia to know for a beginner. Here’s how it all started - Human Design was imparted to Ra Uru Hu in the '80s while he was on the island of Ibiza. He channeled the entire system with the help of 'The Voice’ over the course of 7-ish days. And that’s it in a nutshell.

The Foundations of Human Design for Beginners

Human Design is based on quite a few things, and I'll share a few with you now. The first thing to know for beginners is that Human Design involves the science of neutrinos. Now of course neutrino science in and of itself could take up thousands of books worth of research and information so we’re not going to dive too deep there. To put it in a nutshell, it's basically that energetically charged stardust is flowing through the universe and it imprints us with data from stars and planets far, far away. The next thing to understand as a beginner is that Human Design is based on the 64 hexagrams of the Iching, which is an ancient Chinese text. Now what's really fascinating is that there is a strong connection between the 64 hexagrams and our genetic codes. But as a beginner and newbie, none of this is going to help you understand your Human Design blueprint better, so we'll save the rest of the foundation for another time.

Entering into your Human Design Experiment as a Beginner

So when you first find out about Human Design, there are two directions you can take. You can either write the whole thing off as “too confusing” and/or “potentially unnecessary.” Or you can get curious about Human Design, learn about your type, strategy and authority as a beginner, and begin building awareness and using the information to get into alignment and feel free to be who you really are. If you make the second choice, you are entering into your Human Design experiment. Ra Uru Hu had a “take it or leave it” approach to teaching Human Design. Meaning you can choose to believe it, or not. The choice is up to you. That's why you'll often see 'or not' when he is being quoted. So if you're here now, and you're curious and you want to continue, welcome to your Human Design experiment! On behalf of Human Design enthusiasts around the world, we are happy to have you!

In this article I aim to arm you with the exact information you need, and leaving out the little stuff that you can dig into later, perhaps even years from now. All the little extra stuff will just serve to confuse you at the beginning of your journey.

The Human Design Bodygraph chart for Beginners

So when you put your birth info into a Human Design bodygraph free chart generator, you will get back your unique Human Design bodygraph chart that shows your personal energetic blueprint. Now just beware, as a beginner to Human Design, the bodygraph chart will seem very overwhelming at first. Which honestly is fair, because there's over a thousand points of information in any given chart. But don't get overwhelmed, nobody expects you to be a Human Design expert overnight. Since you're a beginner, you're going to start with the basics. The key as a newbie is getting acquainted with one thing at a time before moving to the next. If you find yourself getting overwhelmed as a beginner, you're simply moving too fast. It takes years to really grasp the depth of this modality. But there's no reason why you can't start using it and implementing it today. Because everything starts with one step. I will get to what is actually on your bodygraph chart later on this page.

Common Mistakes with Human Design for Beginners

If you're just getting started as a beginner with Human Design, one of the biggest mistakes you can make is thinking that you need to learn the entire system before you begin applying it.

If you are going to try to do that you will be wasting a whole lot of time. The system is designed for you to learn, apply and contemplate as you go. As I always say, you can't learn how to ride a bike until you actually get on the bike and learn. You're not going to be able to learn how to ride a bike through watching YouTube videos about it. So make sure that you are not waiting to learn everything about Human Design first and then implement. As a beginner and newbie, it's imperative that you implement as you go. Align yourself piece by piece, as you learn.

How to get your Custom Human Design Chart for Beginners

You can get your custom Human Design bodygraph for free from many places on the internet. If you need one, you can grab my free one, here. Look at it and get curious. As a beginner you'll notice that absolutely none of it makes any sense - and that's okay. In this article, I'm going to help you start unraveling this thing one piece at a time.

Luckily, most Human Design bodygraph charts come with a sort of cheat sheet. The bodygraph cheat sheet (the written stuff that comes along with it) is going to help you translate the information that is in the bodygraph picture. The cheat sheet will not give you all of the information, but it will give you the basics, which is perfect for a beginner. If you grab your Human Design bodygraph chart from me here, it gives you an extended version with 80% more information than a bodygraph chart from other websites, which makes it so much easier as a beginner to have all the information right there at your fingertips. Plus when you grab a chart from me, you get a series of follow-up emails to help you learn more over time.

Getting Acquainted with your Human Design Bodygraph as a Beginner

At first your eyes will be drawn to the colored shapes in the body graph portion of the chart. We will see that some are colored in and some are not. You will also see some lines coming out of these centers, some which are colored in and some which are not. Even though these pieces of the chart look very interesting, the very first thing you need to start with as a beginner in Human Design is your type, as well as strategy and authority. Those are the first three things to grasp and understand. Now to figure out your type by looking at your chart is going to take a whole lot more than I can explain here, so that's why it has been calculated for you. Your type, strategy and authority will be in the written cheat sheet area of your chart. 

So again, even though those pieces in your body graph look very interesting and eye-catching, you want to start by understanding your type, strategy and authority. I actually have a free masterclass and workbook right here, that dives into each one.

The Pieces of the Human Design Bodygraph Chart for Beginners

Once you have fully understood your type, strategy and authority, then you can begin making sense of the beautiful, yet confusing bit of the picture part of the bodygraph itself, even if you’re a beginner.

Pull out your chart and let’s take a look.

The colored shapes you see are called centers. If they are colored in, it means that you naturally produce strong energy in that center. So strong in fact, that the energy can actually overflow out of that center, And sometimes people around you might pick up on that. In fact, because they feel it in their body, they might even mistake it for their own energy. When the center is colored in, we call it defined or closed.

If the shape is white, or empty, it means that you produce a smaller and inconsistent amount of that energy naturally. And because that energy center is never completely full with your own energy, that means that you can pick up on others overflow in that center.

Now look at your chart. Where you have the centers colored in, you have the theme of that center very strongly.

Where you have the Human Design center white/empty, that means you have very little of that energetic theme.

Now each of these centers has an energetic theme. Here's a chart that labels the name and the energetic theme for each center.

Examples

If you have a defined/closed Ajna you will have a lot of certainty. If you have an undefined/open Ajna You will have a lot of uncertainty. Feeling uncertain can cause you to try and be overly certain to try to escape the uncertainty.

If you have a defined/closed head, you will feel informed, and if you have an undefined/open head, you will feel uninformed. Feeling uninformed can cause you to be obsessed with getting more information because with the “uninformed” energy, you always feel you don’t have enough.

So in these undefined/open centers we can really get out of alignment trying to do and be things that we are not.

Read all of that through a couple times and really let it sink in.

Now just a warning. You've already reached overload-level of information as a beginner. Things might start to get a little blurry. If at any point you feel overwhelmed, go back to focusing on your type strategy and authority. No matter how many years you are into your Human Design experiment, you will always fall back on your strategy and authority so get acquainted with it now.

Ready for more? Let’s Go!

Understanding the Lines on the Bodygraph Chart as a Beginner

If you feel comfortable with all the information so far and are tracking along, let's take a look at the next step. Now across your chart you are going to see these little lines poking out of the centers. If the line is chopped off halfway through getting to the other side, it's called a hanging gate. If the line makes it all the way across and to the other center, it's called a channel. As a beginner, you don’t need to know anything else about these lines yet. Don’t worry that some are different colors - if the line is colored in at all- it’s active for you. As a beginner, that’s all you need to worry about right now.

What you do need to know is that each of these gates has its own energetic theme as well. And when two gates meet in the middle they mix up the energy of the two gates to create a channel.

Here is a list of the gates that you can match up with the gates of your chart to see what "flavors" you have in your design. This is a great and simple way to start learning the gates as a beginner.

Do you want all of your Human Design Chart written out in a 50-80 page customized book that carefully walks you through everything step-by-step in a way that is easy to understand? Let me give you a custom tour through your type, strategy, authority, centers, gates, variables and more. Check out how you can get your copy of “The Book of You” now.

Planetary Activations in the Bodygraph Chart for Beginners

Along the sides of your body graph you will see a bunch of numbers and symbols. Each of the symbols represents a planet. And every planet in the list there, has activated a gate within your chart. Sometimes one gate can be activated by multiple planets.

Underneath the planet symbol, you will find the number of the gate that it activated. The bigger number is the gate number. That's the one you want to focus on for now.

The first planet in the right side symbols list, at the top is the Sun. So look at the sun symbol (again, in the right-hand side list of symbols) and look at the number underneath it. Again the number is the gate. So now you can tell which gate the sun is activating for you.

The next planet down is the Earth. Look at your own chart and see which gate is activated by Earth. The sun and earth are always important ones because Sun and Earth energy make up 70% of the chart. So that's a good one to focus on for now as a beginner.

You're doing great! So even though you are a beginner in your Human Design Experiment, you should be getting a little bit of a grasp of the Human Design bodygraph and what you're looking at.

What to watch out for as a beginner with Human Design

Again, as a beginner it can feel easy to quickly become overwhelmed with the sheer amount of information. It feels so exciting to run around and follow every single Human Design account on Instagram, dive into all the Human Design blogs, join every Facebook group and endlessly search Google for more information. You will be certain that you will learn faster this way. But what you will quickly find is that in doing so, you are essentially gathering puzzle pieces when you don't understand how to put the pieces of the puzzle together. Not only that, there are a lot of people out there sharing Human Design, but what they're really sharing is their own version of the information which is not always accurate nor directly from source.

Learning Human Design from Source

Human Design as taught by Ra Uru Hu, is often referred to as 'source' and consists of the original teachings as well as interpreting the human design data through the original teachings and meanings. While original source teachings consist of thousands of books, videos and courses, I might compare the collection to something like the Bible. It's like the stepping stone on which everything else is interpreted through. Everything I teach and share about Human Design is based on my studies of source material.

Many people feel that we need to stick to the original teachings, and not make changes or updates, much like we wouldn't go in and try to make changes to the Bible.

About “Pop” Human Design

Now there's another set of people out there that believe that Human Design needs to evolve. Some people have gone as far as to rename each piece of the system and create descriptions and meanings of their own. Others combine Human Design with other things like astrology or Gene Keys to come up with their own twist. Yet others learn from these "evolutions" of Human Design and then create their own concepts based on those. Honestly it has become a bit like the game of telephone. In some cases people are literally making things up. This side of Human Design is often called “Pop Human Design” by those that like to keep things according to source. So if you hear of something in Human Design being referred to as “pop” then it’s probably not from source.

Especially as a beginner, you will want to learn from people who keep their teachings as close to source as possible so that you are learning the real Human Design. If they say things like they are teaching Human Design through their "own lens" or through their "own perspective" or that they mix modalities, you probably will want to wait until you're a little bit more experienced before diving into those so you can make sense of what is what.

Human Design for Beginners - Wrap Up!

I hope you have enjoyed this taste of Human Design for newbies. This article is literally everything that I wish that I would have known when I first started my Human Design experiment. And also I purposely left out the things that you don't need to bother with as a beginner, they will just confuse you and keep you out of alignment longer. (And listen, if that triangle with a very top of your chart on your head is empty and not colored in, you are going to feel compelled to find every piece of information that you possibly can. That is the low expression of that center. It's important to know, because if you overload yourself with information, it will take you that much longer to actually implement which is the whole point of your experiment. Take a deep breath, let go of the need to know everything right now and work on what we talked about above.)

Continue staying curious and remember - take things one step at a time.

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A final note from Chelsie

I believe in keeping Human Design content as close to source as possible. My gate and channel interpretations are based on the original Human Design data through the Rave Iching, the International Human Design School and the Jovian Archive - which is Ra Uru Hu’s. I do not follow “POP” Human Design where people add their own twists to the original Human Design by Ra Uru Hu and call it “evolution.” No twists here. Just pure Human Design. 

-Chelsie Kenyon-