👁️‍🗨️ Let's Talk About Your Open Heart

Hello YOU!

They say the heart wants what the heart wants. But what happens if your heart doesn’t consistently know what it wants?

Strangely, I can actually tell you what happens—it gets filled up with the wants and needs of others.

This is the reality for around 70% of the human population. The Heart center in Human Design is also referred to as the Will or Ego center and it’s the place inside of us most associated with self-love, worth, worthiness and knowing what’s of value.

There are 9 energy centers in our design which can either be defined with the energy running consistently in the body, or undefined where that center pulses with energy. We often use the shorthand of defined centers as “on” and undefined centers as “off”, but I find it more helpful to think of defined centers as transmitters and undefined centers as receivers.

Don’t know if you have an open Heart? Find out here.

If you are part of the majority of humans who have the Heart/Will/Ego center undefined in your chart, you may resonate with these two things:

1. An underlying feeling that you always need to prove things to yourself and others.
   AND/OR

2. Feeling the need to make promises and commitments that you often don’t or can’t fulfill. 

Being ‘open-hearted’ is a lovely thing making us capable of displaying love and affection without guile. This is our child-like nature.

The Heart is here to give and receive love, but to access that love we first have to feel safe. The love we are seeking is the unconditional sort, yet disconnected, dysregulated caregivers often offer only conditional love to children—if you behave, I will love you. Conditional love feels completely unsafe to us. When the world doesn’t feel safe, all of our awareness is tuned to how to protect and preserve the physical body.

When we come in as children with this open, receptive heart energy, we need to be in environments and around people who are constantly feeding us with love, attention, acceptance and care. All children need this high vibrational energy in order to securely attach and ground on this physical plane.

Yet the modern world is not particularly kind, attentive or affectionate. This world has become increasingly hostile to children. The data and statistics are very clear that childhood has been severely impacted by the stress and pressure of a mechanized world removed from nature and natural rhythms. Because most of the adults in the world are deeply stressed and under inhuman pressures, that becomes the world for children as well.

If you have an undefined Heart center and you were raised in the world within the last 200 years, your little open heart had very little protection from the constant stream of dysregulated nervous system energy from the adults around you. You have been receiving and amplifying this energy within you since even before you were born.

So what does it look like to have an open heart in a stress filled, less-than-fully-humane world? The short answer is it looks a lot like being conditioned to people-please.

We learn early on that the best way to feel safe is to make sure others are happy first. Children do this in myriad ways—learning to be quiet when mom gets home from work, pretending that they are happy, getting straight As, and taking on adult responsibilities are just a few.

Even if we live in a relatively safe home, this child-like openness of love, wonder and amazement can get shut down in us early on. We ask one too many “Why” questions or want to linger much too long to watch the ants carry food back to their nest or draw a glorious crayon landscape that gets laughed at. When tired, busy parents and caregivers are short with us or reject our expressions of love and wonder, we learn pretty quickly that it’s not safe to bring our authentic self forward.

The natural pace and needs of childhood have no place in the modern world, so even with well-meaning adults in safe environments, our open Heart can be bruised and wounded quickly.

This conditioning happens rapidly and intensely between birth and 7 years old. So by the time we’re hitting our stride in elementary school, we are mostly already shut down to our own wants, needs and desires. We are already deeply aware that to fit in and feel safe we need to adopt the needs and desires of the outside world.

That was pretty bad in 1950 when the scope of outside needs and desires extended about as far as your neighborhood, but now children have their own ‘devices’— sometimes before they can even form complete sentences. These devices carry all the outside desires of the entire planet. How on earth is a modern child supposed to know who they are or what they want in the midst of all that?

This word ‘device’ is an interesting one because its root is from the Latin of ‘to divide’. I can’t think of a more fitting and accurate word. First they divided us from each other and now they are literally dividing us from ourselves. The more time we spend on them the less connection we have to our own true nature.

Especially if you already have a heavily conditioned open Heart center. You are so used to not knowing what YOU really want and what YOU really desire that you are primed to readily accept the images of desire you see on the device as your own.

How do you decondition from all of this? The first thing to do is become aware of this lack of connection to your own desires. Learning to notice the embodied sensations of what desire feels like for you and then stepping back to ask yourself, “Is this actually my desire?” “Is this something I actually want and need or is it something I’ve been conditioned to want in order to prove myself and feel safe?” 

You may not know at first, but with practice and trust in your own inner knowing there will be a growing sense of what’s truly you and what’s not.

Bringing awareness is where Human Design really shines. It’s a map to our energetics that allows us to see the places we are MECHANICALLY vulnerable to conditioning. It’s an inherently non-judgmental modality that can help us discern where we may be acting against our true nature and offers us the simple tools of following our Strategy and Authority to help us work through our shadows.

Each of our energy centers has a particular awareness question that can help us continually check in with how we’re showing up in the world. 

Now that you are aware of this open hearted nature of so much of humanity, you may be inclined to run the experiment of cutting yourself and others more slack. I can share with you what I’ve learned and how I see the world, but you have to run your own experiments to find out what’s true for you 

Do you have some stories or questions about your Heart center? I’d love to hear them. Maybe there’s some Human Design insights to help you navigate all the conditioning that sits in this most vulnerable of our energy centers. 

I hope your week is filled with lots of love. 

Go be the YOUest!

PS: I’ve teamed up with two amazing women from Your Life and Land to create Embrace the Chaos, a free, drop-in zoom space on Wednesdays at noon EST. It’s a place to come together to chat about how we are navigating these transitional times. There’s no agenda, but it is a Human Design informed space, so there’s an opportunity to ask questions and explore with other Design-curious folks. I’d love for you to join us.