Hello YOU!

If you’ve travelled around the Sun even half as many times as I have, you’ve probably made and broken a fair number of New Year’s resolutions. Personally, I stopped the practice back in my 20s. Early on it became very clear that promises to myself at arbitrary moments in time had little to offer me. I am a willful and stubbornly individual person by nature, so partaking in communal practices of self improvement were never particularly appealing.

But that’s not true for lots of people. Many of us are innately wired to do better when we approach something alongside others. Especially things that involve our ability to follow through on promises to ourselves. So there can be real value in these yearly rituals.

The tradition of reviewing the previous months to take stock of what to carry forward, what to release and how to expand is actually a really useful practice. What’s wrong though, is the timing. In modernity we’ve mistakenly become wedded to the Gregorian calendar, which has almost no relationship to the natural cycles of the universe.

So, January first falls in some netherworld in the dead of winter or the height of summer depending on what little corner of the planet you inhabit. It isn’t connected to any solar or lunar cycle that actually underpins life on earth, so even though you might make resolutions in your mind, your body and the environment do not have initiating energy to support them.

But, when the Sun re-enters Gate 41 each year, that IS the background frequency of the start of a new cycle. In Human Design it’s the Gate of Contraction. In the I Ching it’s often translated as Decrease. Neither of those words immediately conjure initiatory energy, but when we dig deeper into the archetypal narrative of 41, we begin to see this energy as a fuel for dreaming, fantasizing and, at it’s core, the energy for all human feeling. And feelings only happen in the process of experiencing. That’s what 41 is—the fuel to feel.

Why the word Contraction then? The answer there might be found in some of the traditional Chinese parables used to illustrate these archetypal energies. For 41 the story is about the farmer who cuts down the dead stalks and other plant material in late fall in order to prepare the garden for spring. The decrease is not harming the potential that continues to live within the roots of the plants. It is just reducing what is not essential to growth.

This idea of clearing away and simplifying is very much the energy of this time. We have come through a long cycle of too-muchness. We can see all around us the problematic effects of not keeping our desires in check. We have been handed a story of limitless resources, yet deep fissures in this conditioning narrative are now unavoidable.

I’ve been researching the various energies of this Gate before our Aquarius Season recording and because it is going to have such a profound affect on our lives over the next few years—Pluto is transiting Gate 41 in Aquarius for the next 2 years or so. Aquarians are often truth tellers. Pluto energy is transformational. With the Sun and all the personal planets — Mercury, Venus & Mars also transiting Aquarius this Aquarius season, that is going to bring out the trailblazing revolutionary in all us.

Curious how the transiting energies intersect with your Design?
Get your free chart.

So, play around with that. Notice what comes up for you between Jan 20 and Feb 17th. If you’re feeling like you would like to start a simple new practice that helps reconnect you to these energies in 2026, I have a downloadable Sun Transit Journal available in the shop now. Several of us have been using it over the past year and have found it to be a surprisingly useful tool for helping better orient us to the all the quiet (and sometimes not-so-quiet) background energies that exist in our daily lives. If you would like to join us on Zoom Monday Jan 19th at 11:30a EST for the next Sun Transit recording for Gates 41 & 19, we’d love to have you.

Get out there and be the YOUest,

PS: If you're curious to learn more about your unique energy and how it works, you can get your free Human Design BodyGraph here. If you want to go deeper in a conversational small group setting, I’d love for you to check out my Monday evening Study Group. I’m also always happy to personally walk you step-by-step through your BodyGraph in an Essentials session.