In this episode, Kelsey dives into the mechanics of the Human Design Bodygraph and the foundational elements of the chart that create your Type, Strategy and Authority. She also explains the connections between the Rave Mandala and Astrology and the I-Ching. Kelsey also explores how both your conscious personality and your unconscious design are represented in the chart so that you can start to uncover some of the nuances beneath the surface of your design.

This conversation blends technical insight with accessible guidance, so whether you’re a detail-loving 1st line or a seasoned experimenter, you’ll leave with a deeper appreciation how the nuances within the Bodygraph inform your unique experience of life.

What's discussed in this episode:

• The various aspects of the Bodygraph including Gates, Channels, and Centers
• Mechanics of Definition
• Difference between Defined, Undefined and Open Centers
• The Rave Mandala and its link to the zodiac & I-Ching
• Black (personality) vs. red (design) activations
• The 9 Centers and their categories: pressure, awareness, motor, identity, and manifestation
• The flow of energy through the chart — from pressure to expression
• How definition shapes type, strategy, authority, and themes

If you would like full access to the course, including the videos and slides, make sure to join the Patreon, where you will find the full LYD course and exclusive Human Design and Astrology content.

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Not just talking about your natal chart. We're not just talking about the birth moment. We're also talking about this moment ahead of birth when the vehicle was formed inside of the body of the birth mother, and that that's literally half of your design. If we look really closely at all my channels, all but one of them require red definition, which means that on a conscious personality level, I don't realize I have all of this definition. I only really realize consciously this one channel.

Welcome to the Living Your Design podcast. I'm your experiMentor, Kelsey Rose Tortorice. This podcast is an audio only release of the full length in-depth human design foundations course I've been teaching over the last several years. It is a no bullshit, comprehensive, embodied introduction to the human design system that will challenge your ego mind and support you in your process of reuniting with the unique wisdom of your body. In episode one, I speak a bit about the process that led me to releasing this course for free in podcast form, and I offer a few notes that might be useful to contextualize and clarify what you'll hear in this episode and beyond.

I recommend giving that short intro episode a listen if you haven't yet. The LYD podcast is part of a larger living body of work, a growing archive of my teachings about consciousness through the languages of astrology and human design, hosted in an online community space where I stay in orbit with my students, mentees, alumni, peers, and collaborators. For more information about how to connect with me and tune in to my archives and ongoing live teachings, including how to access the original LYD course complete with videos and slides, stay tuned to the podcast or check out patreon.com/kelseyrosetort. Thank you for tuning in to my transmission of living your design. It's a deeply personal and somewhat vulnerable share that I feel honored, humbled, and excited to release into the world.

I hope that it helps you remember and come home to yourself. Welcome to unit two, in which we will have three sections, three lectures, three videos, where we will introduce the body graph. So this first video is gonna be all about orienting to the body graph, essentially the chart in human design. And then in the second lecture, the second video, we'll talk about these next two items here. So definition and openness as pertaining to what we see in the body graph and how our definition and openness relates to these concepts that have already been a little bit introduced in unit one of conditioning and the not self, conditioning, deconditioning, and the not self.

So we'll go a little deeper into this topic and how it connects to definition and openness. That's our second video. And then in the third video, we're gonna take a look at aura type basics. So just a very brief overview of the aura types and a little bit connecting aura type basics to what we are covering in the first two sections of unit two. So first, taking a look at the body graph, the human design chart, as some may say.

So we're gonna look at two questions in order to meet the body graph here. We're gonna tackle two questions in this lecture. And the first question is just what the fuck am I looking at with these shapes and these lines? What is it? And so in order to answer that question, we're going to just explore the body graph a bit, and I'm gonna orient you in particular to the gates, the channels, and the centers in the body graph so we all know what we're looking at when we take that in.

And then the second question that we're gonna cover in this video is, and how is all of this determined based on our birth data and astrology? How are the gates, channels, and centers that we're going to meet via the body graph today? How is that determined? Where does that come from? And in order to answer the second question, we're gonna take a look at something called the rave mandala, which will show us the relationship of these gates and thus these channels and centers to the zodiac, to the planetary positions in the sky, at two particular moments that make up your human design.

So that's where we're going in this lecture. But before we go there, let's, let's do just a classic Kelsey sort of disclaimer. Hey, listen up. This next section where I go into the details of the body graph, and especially when I get into the Rave Mandala piece is quite detailed, quite technical, and does not need to be fully grasped in order for you to receive this attunement of your design and to begin or or deepen your experience of experimentation with your design. I'm sharing it because for me, the moment of being introduced to the rave mandala, especially as an astrologer, was a moment when a lot of things clicked and blossomed for me.

I I personally really benefited from seeing how it's all connected, the big picture in order to be able to buy into these details of my center definition, my type, my strategy, my authority. So I wanna offer that to you all as well. But I I'd also just wanna remind you that this is really technical, and we don't actually we don't actually need it at this point, at this stage. So for the pieces that don't quite clunk into place for you, just let it go. I'm sharing this with you because there are some people, probably first lines and second lines, who will benefit from this info at the onset for the third lines of us, for the third line parts of all of us.

This piece is not really necessary right now. It's your experimentation with the practical application of this stuff. That is really the most important piece of LYD, which is type strategy authority. That's the, that's the practical stuff that we're implementing in this curriculum, but having a little foundation underneath that of the information and seeing how it all comes together might be more useful for for all of us to to different extents. So just to kind of trace that out here, I'm talking about this one, two, three process that we introduced in unit one with the lower trigram of taking in information and learning.

So what we're doing here throughout all of LYD, including today is we're building a foundation, first line, and working towards a holistic natural understanding of the system, second line. But the human design experiment itself is actually mostly a third line thing, a trial and error, go out and try it, see what works for you, what doesn't, what things feel like in your body kind of thing. And noting that I'm also throwing in some extras to to offer clarification of how other aspects of your design that you may have heard of that we aren't covering today, or maybe aren't even covering in LYD. I'm sharing how some of those things connect to the basics that we are covering today and in LYD, just for the sake of helping to complete and round out the bird's eye view that some of you might have, who have been sort of just like receiving little snippets of the human design system in a, in a nonlinear way before. So I'll often kind of sprinkle in how things are connected, but especially for those of you that are pretty new to human design, some of those sprinklings are just gonna be so beyond what there's even capacity for you to take in at this point.

So as always, trust your own process, trust what resonates, what makes sense in the moment, and and let the rest just sort of marinate. Okay. So what the fuck am I looking at when I look at the body graph? This is a picture of my design. And the main things that I wanna orient us to in this picture are the gates, the channels, and the centers.

So we're gonna start with the gates here. The gates are the numbers. And to in this moment, at least, what I want us to look at for the gates mostly is these numbers inside of each of these shapes or centers in the body graph, but you will see that there's also a bunch of numbers in these boxes to the right and the left. I'm gonna talk about the boxes on another slide, but we can point out, at least for the time being, that anywhere the first number that you see in each of these boxes, so for instance, my first two over here on the personality side, eighteen and seventeen, those are positions of planets or points in my natal chart in my astrology. And we can see that every number I have over here corresponds to a gate that has a little circle around it or a line coming out of it, which means gates I have defined.

So the 18, for instance, we can see over here is defined in my body graph. The 17, define. We can see this line coming out of it. Same with everything on this side. Pick a random one.

The 51 here, near the middle towards the bottom, defined in my body graph. So just drawing a correlation here between the numbers you'll see to the left and right of your body graph, those first numbers are gates. There's more underneath that that we'll talk about, but the number before the first decimal is a gate. They correspond to these same gates in the body graph. The gates in the body graph show up in the same place for everyone.

So, for example, 64, 61, and 63 are always the three gates that are in the head center. This is the head center up here. But depending on planetary positions at these two particular moments for you, you may or may not have those gates defined. K. So I got a little ahead of myself here.

We've got gates. I kinda skipped over channels, so let's look at channels now. Channels are these lines that connect gate to gate or center to center, and you'll see channels in two ways. Well, three ways, really, in your design. You'll either see a channel completely colored in, like I have here with the thirty nine fifty five at the bottom, and it could be colored in red or black or both.

We're not paying attention to that in this moment. So that would be a channel that you have or a channel you have defined. And you'll also see channels that are completely open or not colored in. That's a channel that you do not have defined or a channel that you have open. And the other thing you might see is a channel that's halfway colored in, which means you have one of the gates defined, but not the other.

So in in the case of this eleven fifty six, I have the 11, but not the 56. In the case of the fifty nine six. I have the 59, but not the six. And I know you guys probably can't really see these numbers that well, but you can have your body graph in front of you. And the, the numbers are gonna be in the same place, but the arrangement of what you have defined and undefined won't be.

So how does it all work together? You may have already sort of come to this awareness on your own, but what we're looking at is certain gates undefined or open and certain gates defined. And when two gates that could potentially make a channel are both defined, then we have that channel. Yeah. So I have the one eight because I have both of those gates.

I have the fifty eight eighteen channel because I have both of those gates. I don't have the thirty eight twenty eight channel because I only have the 38, not the 28. So that's gates and channels. There's 64 gates in human design. I can never remember the I think it's 36 channels because there's a couple places just right over here where multiple gates can make multiple channels.

So there's more more gates than more channels than just half the gates because of what we call the integration circuitry over here, which is beyond the scope of human design. And then there's nine centers, and that's that's primarily what we are first taking in when we first look at the body graph. And you can see just like with the gates and the channels, centers can either be defined, they look colored in when they're defined, or undefined. And the main the last main thing that I want you to see in the body graph here is that when the gates on either side of a channel are both defined, we already talked about this, the channel becomes defined, and here's the piece we're adding, as do the centers on either side. So because I have the fifty eight eighteen, my root and my spleen center, these two bottom left centers, are defined because of the channel definition between them.

My my root is defined again, and my solar plexus is defined by the thirty nine fifty five. My solar plexus is defined again, and my ego is defined through the thirty seven forty. K? You can see in my undefined centers, I don't have any channel defined going to that center. Even though I have half of this one, the 60, and half of this one, the 59, neither of those connect with either of the centers that they're aiming towards or from.

I don't have the channel that connects to the spleen, the fifty twenty seven, and I don't have any of these four channels that go from the sacral to the g. And so I have an undefined sacral. I don't have any gates or channels in the head, open head. I don't have, any channels that connect my Ajna center to the head or the throat, so I have what's called an undefined Ajna. So gates, channel, centers.

Two defined gates create a defined channel. A defined channel defines the centers on either side of it. And I wanna show one more example of a body graph here just because mine is, I mean, they're all unique, but I have a lot of channels. I have eight channels, which is a a lot of channels. Most people don't have that many channels.

So going into this next slide here, I have an example of another body graph where someone has only one channel. And when someone has only one channel, they're only gonna have the two centers that are connected by that channel defined. So here's an example of someone with the same amount of placements. Right? We all have 13 placements on both sides, so 26 total placements that can define up to 26 different gates, although, oftentimes, people have a repeat of a placement in a gate.

And you can see this person only has one channel versus I had eight, but you can also see this person has a lot more what we call hanging gates or dormant potentials. In this case, it's more dormant potentials where you see an undefined center with a bunch of gates coming out of it. And in every single one of their undefined centers, there's gates single gates or dormant potentials coming out. So they have more of those than I do because so many of my gate definitions just happen to connect with their counterpart in the other center creating a channel. So coming back to this other example, some of you are gonna see yourselves more clearly in this one, those of you who have less definition.

This person only they have the same amount of gate definitions, but it only creates one channel, which means it's only gonna define two centers. So another way of of looking at this is understanding that we nobody can ever have one center defined. Right? A center definition requires a channel. So people will have anywhere from two to all nine centers defined through their channel circuitry.

Or if someone has no channels at all, that means they have no defined centers, and that would make them a reflector, which we'll be looking at in a couple videos. It's very rare. About one or 2% of the population has zero centers defined. About one or 2% of the population has all nine centers defined. Most of us have a combination of undefined and open centers, again, based on our channel definition, which is based based on these gate placements and gate definitions.

Okay. And we're obviously gonna talk about what all of that means, but before we get into what it means, let's approach this second question here. So the second question is how is all of this determined based on our astrology and birth data? Without that, it just feels really random. Right?

And so, again, to answer the second question, how is all this determined based on our birth data slash astrology, we're gonna take a look at something called the rave mandala, which is the gate to zodiac relationship. Here it is. This is the rave mandala. It's a lot. I'm just gonna orient you to the pieces of it that feel most relevant at this entry point.

So before we even look at any of this text on the side, let's just look at the rave mandala. What all do we see? So inside of the raved mandala, we see the body graph with all of the centers, their gates, their lines, or channels. And then around it, we see the in this first wheel, we see the zodiac. So if you already have studied astrology, you've studied the zodiacal glyphs, you recognize these.

This is Aries, Taurus. My caption is covering Gemini, Cancer, Leo, Virgo, Libra, Scorpio, Sagittarius, Capricorn, Aquarius, Pisces. So we've got the tropical Zodiac, the three sixty degrees of sky divided into 12 signs. But as I mentioned in unit one, in human design, in the rave mandala, rather than focusing on the zodiacal position of our planets, that division of three sixty degrees into 12 signs, the Zodiac, we're looking at that same exact sky, that same exact 60, sorry, three sixty degrees, but we're dividing it into the 64 gates of human design. And so inside of the wheel, we see the tropical Zodiac that I just went over, but then juxtaposed on top of that, you see these 64 gates and notice they're not in numerical number, but these are the 64 gates that each correspond to these 64 gates inside of the body graph.

So I mentioned everyone always has 64, 61, and 63 up in the head center, but only someone who has a planet or a point, the Earth or the nodes are the points used in human design, in gate 61 would have that gate defined. And we can look over here, gate 61 is in Capricorn. It's gonna be in this later half, probably end of second decan, beginning of third decan, Capricorn is gonna be 61. So there's a chunk of degrees of Capricorn that are 61. If you have a planet there, you would have gate 61 defined.

So it's just a simple correspondence, a juxtaposition. These gates are in a fixed position around the zodiac and then a fixed corresponding position inside the centers of the body graph. And I have an example here of my sun. So over here, I've got the glyph for the sun. My sun natally in astrology is at eight degrees Aries, which in human design, here's early Aries, follows this raved mandala.

It's in Gate 17. That's the part of Aries that my sun is in. And to bring in a little bit of what we talked about with profile in unit one, each of these gates is divided into six lines, which it's kinda hard to see in the Aries section, but you can look back in Pisces. There's these six little tick marks if you look really closely that core that are inside of each gate. And so my I was born with the sun at the fifth tick mark or the fifth line of gate 17, the fifth out of six lines before the sun would have then moved into the next gate, which is 21 still in Aries.

And so that's what makes my sun align five. And that's where the five in my personality profile. I'm a five, two, that top number five comes from my sun being in the fifth line, the fifth tick mark of the seven of gate 17, which is at eight degrees Aries. So again, this is extra, but if you want, you can look at your natal chart, especially if you're someone who's familiar with astrology, you can look at your natal chart positions and just take a moment to pause the video and take a moment to kind of see that in the rave mandala and see how it corresponds to a gate definition in your body graph. So for me, I can go back to this picture.

We've got my 17.5 sun. And if I go back to the example of my body graph, here it is up here, personality sun seventeen five. 17 is in the Ajna center. So we can see I have the 17 definition. It doesn't create center definition because it I do not have 62, which is the gate the 17 is reaching towards in the throat center.

Again, this is extra. Okay. A little more extra to sprinkle on top. I mentioned that one of the handful of esoteric and ancient systems that was synthesized in the human design knowledge as Ra Uruh who received it is the I Ching, an ancient divinatory Chinese tool. And the I Ching hexagrams, there's 64 of them.

They correspond to these 64 gates in human design. And so anyone who's familiar with the I Ching and understands the energy of the different shapes of the hexagram, the 64 arrangements of yang and yin energy in the I Ching will see an energetic correspondence to the gates as you start to study them in human design. So we take that's, what's on the outer wheel here. These are the 64 hexagrams of the I Ching, and each of those correspond to a gate in human design, which is then juxtaposed onto the Zodiac and stationed in the centers in a fixed way. And I put another example here that I'll just name my Sagittarius moon.

I have the moon at 23 degrees. Sag is in gate 11, I believe line two. Right. So you can see my moon and Sag in gate 11 here, which corresponds to this particular I Ching hexagram. One extra little itty bit of info here, and this one is really, really, really beyond the scope of LYD, but this is for anyone who has learned a little bit already about color and tone in human design, which is gonna correspond to things like what's called variable or substructure, which is, it gives you things like your environment, your determination, your motivation, and your view, as well as your cognition and sense and leftness and rightness in terms of receptivity or strategic, those arrows that accompany the body graph also come from all of this substructure and that's what's underneath the line.

So, so far we have, okay. Zodiac divided into 12 signs or 64 gates. And then if you continue to subdivide, each of those 64 gates has six lines, which gives us profile. Right? That's the one through six we talked about in unit one.

But each of those lines is further subdivided into six colors, which is further subdivided into six tones, which is this is an error further subdivided into five bases. So I'm just gonna make myself a note to fix that slide. There's five bases, not six. So we've got 64 gates, slice each of those gates up, take one of them, slice it up into six lines, tiny piece of the zodiac, slice it that up into six colors, slice that up into six tones, slice that up into five bases, and that's how differentiated human design gets. Okay.

So some people come into human design and they go, oh, there's four types. That's it. That's like nothing. How could we know anything about that? That's huge.

Type is a synthesis as we will explore throughout LYD. Type is the practical strategy for you to work with that makes it so you don't have to know all of this. You can just move in accordance with your type, your strategy, and your authority, and all of that will be handled because that's how you help your body. You surrender to your body leading the way, but you are differentiated to such an infinite degree with these six subdivisions plus six more subdivisions exponentially, six more subdivisions, and then five subdivisions at the base level, because each of these levels of subdivision carry information and frequency. They change the way that planetary position, that definition shows up for you.

And there's 26 placements, right? There's 13 placements in our personality chart, 13 placements in our design chart, and then each of those are subdivided in all of these ways to give us the con the composite that is our body graph. So again, this is way extra, but assuming that there are some people taking this LYD course who have already heard some of these concepts, again, I just wanted to give you that bird's eye view and show you that it is all connected here. But we don't need to. And in, in LYD, we won't be studying all of that under the surface substructure stuff, because it's not necessary at this point.

It's not at all necessary at the point of just seeing and engaging with your own definition as well as your own openness, which is what we'll be getting into pretty soon. So one more sort of extra little layer to bring in here. I keep mentioning you have your personality side and your design side. And so I wanna just mention this. Again, this is beyond the scope of LYD typically, but I am going to include a little section at the very end of LYD where I go a little bit more into the black and the red and what they mean and how we can look at that in our design.

But for now, I just wanna show you where it comes from. You have two sets of planetary positions. I'm gonna start on the right here. What is labeled the personality and the definitions that are in black. These come from your natal chart placements.

So for anybody who knows astrology, knows your planetary positions in your natal chart, the moment of your birth, that's this entire array of positions. And so you'll recognize a lot of these glyphs. This is the sun. In human design, we also use the earth, which is the exact point opposite the sun. So this is my Aries Libra lands in Gate 17.

And this is did I say my Aries Libra? This is my Aries sun lands in Gate 17. And then this my earth is not a point that is studied in astrology or at least in any schools of astrology that I'm familiar with, but the earth in human design is the exact opposite point. So that would be a point in Libra for me since my sun is in Aries. And that's what defines my gate 18 down here in the spleen.

Your nodes are used in human design as are your moon, Mercury. This is Uranus. There's a for some reason, human design uses a different Uranus symbol in astrology, Venus, Mars, Neptune, Saturn, Jupiter, and Pluto. So those are the 13 positions that create your personality definition, and you can see each of those gates, the first number ahead of the decimal, will be shown with a black definition in my body graph. That's my natal chart.

That is what I'm conscious of. It's the personality that I identify with. Now, in human design, that's only half of your design. In Human Design, we also use planetary positions from a different moment and that creates your design placements or your design definition, which are shown in these gate line color, gate line color tone and base numbers to the left in red, and also depicted with red definition in the gates and channels inside of the body graph. So moment of birth personality, the design placements come from eighty eight days before you were born.

And the way that they're calculated is we take your personality son, so the exact specific placement of your sun at the moment of your birth, all the way down to base. And then we dial it back exactly 88 degrees of the Zodiac and the chart for that moment when the sun was exactly 88 degrees before your birth sun, your personality sun gives us the entire planetary arrangement for your design chart. This is said to be when the soul entered at the start of the third trimester. So ahead of when you were born, that moment of separation, where you came into life and took your first breath outside of the womb ahead of that eighty eight days before that there was something significant happening in utero, your vehicle or your form was coalescing was concretizing was coming together. And this particular moment in utero is just as important as the conscious personality placements.

Although these definitions are likely not to feel as obvious to you, but they are just as present and non negotiable and as concrete and absolute a part of your Auric mechanics and your somatic experience. They're just not ones that your conscious personality mind will have as much access to. And we will talk way more about like what that means and interpreting that and exploring that in your design. After we cover the actual LYD content, we'll come back and look at that a bit. But I wanted you to be able to know that kind of bay that other basic premise of design that we're not just talking about your natal chart.

We're not just talking about the birth moment. We're also talking about this moment ahead of birth when the vehicle was formed inside of the body of the birth mother and that that's literally half of your design. So, like, in my case, you can see that if we look really closely at all my channels, all but one of them require red definition. So I have the eighteen fifty eight, and you see the 58 has both red and black placements. There was something in my design chart, Saturn, and in my personality chart, Uranus, that define my gate 58.

And then I have the 18 in black. But every other channel I have requires at least some red, which means that on a conscious personality level, I don't realize I have all of this definition. I only really realize consciously this one channel in my design. So again, you could kind of pause and play with that in your design right now, if you'd like to take a look at your black versus your red definition and place some of those things. But that all is gonna be a bit extra, a bit peripheral as we start to get into type strategy and authority, we will circle and spiral back to it at the end of LYD.

And let's look at the actual living your design content here. We're zooming back in on the focus on the practical information. So here's our body graph, nine centers, and we're gonna do an overview of these centers here ahead of the next unit. So starting with unit three, we're gonna be diving into doing an actual deep dive on each of the centers. So here's just our bird's eye view overview.

There's five different categories of centers, and some of those centers fit into two. So before we go over the centers individually, I wanna just talk about these categorizations of centers. So we've got the pressure centers. There's two of them, and they are at the ends of the body graph. We've got the head center, the mental pressure center, and the root center, the physical pressure center.

We have three awareness centers, and those are the solar plexus, the spleen, and the Ajna. The solar plexus is over here on the right in bright blue. It's also sometimes referred to as the emotional center. Then we have the spleen center over here on the left purple. This is the intuitive awareness center.

So we have emotional experiential awareness in the solar plexus. We have intuitive instinctual awareness in the spleen center. And then up here in pink underneath the head center, we have the Ajna or the mental awareness center. Debating whether to talk about the story of evolution, I think I've mentioned it in unit one. So I'll just point to it here as well, that these three awareness centers tell a story of evolution of human awareness.

We were primarily splenic beings. We operated from splenic awareness for a very long time, And then we sort of evolved to operate from a slightly more sophisticated awareness center, which was the mind. The Ajna, the spleen can only be aware in the present moment while the Ajna is able to think in a linear trajectory of past present future, but still in a very two dimensional, maybe three-dimensional way. And we are right now in this period of evolving towards using a more sophisticated awareness system, which is the emotional awareness. System or the solar plexus experiential awareness, which has many more dimensions to it than past present future.

The, the spleen has like this one dimension to it. It's right now, am I safe or not? The Ajna can strategize and plan a bit more, but it's still very black and white in the way it operates. And the solar plexus is much more complex, kind of brings in the ability to be aware of the, the secret third thing, if you will. Okay.

So we've got pressure centers, pressure centers are where the impetus for any movement in the body in the form begins mental movement in the head center, physical movement, adrenaline, physical pressure, stress in the root center. And then that pressure can move towards these awareness centers, which then condition it or color it with these different flavors and types of awareness. Our third category is motor centers, and there are four motor centers in the body graph. And two of them we've already met. The root is both a pressure center and a motor center.

The solar plexus is both an awareness center and a motor center. And then you've got these two other motors, which are only motors. Their only function is to provide fuel to motorize. And that's the sacral right here in the middle, at the bottom of the body graph. That's the center for life force.

That's the primary motor of the body graph. And we've also got the ego here in the green. The ego is sometimes also referred to as the heart center. And this is the center for fueled willpower. Motivation is sometimes how it's thought about.

So all four of these motor centers add power fuel energy to the centers. A lot of times you'll hear people talk about the energy centers in human design, but the way that I learned about the body graph, though, at least when it really started to hit and resonate for me was when I was studying with Alakanand Diaz. And he's very specific to say, there is not energy in all of these centers. There's pressure, awareness. And then we have the G in the throat, which are their own thing or energy.

There's only energy in the motor centers. Otherwise there's awareness in the Ajna and the spleen. The solar plexus has both awareness and energy or pressure in the head and the root. And again, the root has both pressure and energy. So when we get a mental pressure, that's not actually fueled.

There's no energy. It's just a ping of pressure. But when we get a physical pressure through the root center, it's a pressure plus a little bit of a pump of fuel of energy, but it's not a lot of energy. That root pulse will need to go through the sacral and or the solar plexus and or the ego to get additional fuel to continue on its trajectory throughout the body graph. And so those are our three main categories of centers, pressure centers, awareness centers, and motor centers.

But then we have two other centers, which are all on their own. Their category is just theirs. And those two centers are the G in the throat. So we've got the G center in yellow here, sometimes referred to as the identity center or the self center, but most commonly referred to as the G center. And this is the identity center.

It is the center for your sense of self, your sense of directionality based on that sense of self. And I see it as having to do with love in a way. And, we're, we'll get way more into this when we're breaking down the centers. But for those of you who are familiar with the chakra system, I've asked my teachers, how do these nine centers correlate or not to the seven centered system of the Hindu Brahman chakra system. And what I've been told, I asked this of my teachers, John and Amy, was that they had never learned specifically an answer to that, but they'd had other people and teachers of theirs tell them their sort of sense of it, which made sense to them, which they passed down to me, which makes sense to me, which is that the ego and the G are the traditional heart center split into these two functions.

The ego being that willpower, what, what your heart is in that idea of like, if your heart's in it, if you have the will to do it, but then the G being the heart center in terms of what feels like resonance to you, what resonates as love in your heart. So the kind of open heartedness that we think about with the heart center in the chakra system, the Anahata, that piece I associate with the G center. And then I guess since I mentioned that I can go ahead and mention that the other place where the traditional chakra system may be sort of splits into two with this mutation towards nine centered beings is the roots and the spleen being the traditional root center, which is about worthiness and safety and well-being. It splits into the spleen, which is the aware part of that and the root, which is the adrenaline, the actual physical pressure and fuel to move. The spleen is just aware of the threat of state, the threat to safety or the state state of safetiness and security.

It's associated with survival. It's the awareness associated with the survival, but the root is the pressure and the impetus of pressure and, and fuel energy to move, to act. So there's an extra little lesson on top of that. And then the last center is the manifestation center, which is the throat center, which is up here in orange. And the purpose of the throat center, its functionality is to be able to release everything else from inside of the body graph into the outside world.

So I really think of the throat center as a portal or a gateway, a doorway. It's the, the center. It's the only center where all of this stuff happening inside of the body can come out through our expression. And so these last two sentences on this slide sort of articulate that all movement in the body graph begins in the head or the throat, or I'm sorry, the head or the root center. So the pressure centers at either end of the body graph, and that pressure then moves towards the throat center to be released.

And on the way it is powered by different motors. These four motor centers, the root, the sacral, the solar plexus, the ego energy centers, motor centers. It can be processed through our different awarenesses, our splenic instinctual awareness, our Ajna mental awareness, or solar plexus emotional awareness. And it can be filtered in our G center for resonance, but all of it is moving in the direction to the throat. So if it's coming from below the throat, it will have fuel energy or at least resonance from the G.

But if it's coming from above the throat, there's no energy. Our thoughts are not energized. Our thoughts are not powered. Okay. So there's so much here and we'll talk about a lot of it as we go through each center and talk about each center's relationship to type strategy and authority.

But for now just painting the picture of what are we looking at with the body graph, we're looking at this living ecosystem of the movement of pressure, awareness, energy, and resonance inside of our own body, our own form, our own aura towards the throat to be externalized or released out. Now we've looked at how based on our planetary positions and based on then based on the gates and then the channels, we each have a different arrangement of center definition versus openness. So next we're gonna start combining these ideas of defined and undefined centers with the functionality of each of these nine centers in the body graph. But first let's just note that each of us experiences every facet and function of this process in the body graph that is consciousness moving through our form. The body graph is essentially mapping out the way that consciousness begins with mental or physical pressure, and then is colored, filtered, enriched, fueled, processed through the other awareness centers and motor centers and the G center, the identity center to eventually be expressed through the throat.

Do you have if you have it defined, which channel defines it? If you have the channel defined, which lines of those gates, right? Which colors, tones, and bases, there's so much infinite differentiation within how we arrive to our undefined or defined centers. But that differentiation begins with this base octave that is the distinction between a defined center and an undefined center. And which centers you have defined and undefined are what provide the s the practical application of your type, your strategy, and your authority that then lock you have the potential to lock you into this way of being body led through your definition that will on its own without your mind having to do anything, take care of, take consideration of all those other technical, more differentiated, more specific details of your design.

So from this point forward, we're really launching into everything that LYD is about, which is about the study of the awareness of what it means to have each of these nine centers in your design, either defined or undefined in the way that that experience for you connects to your own experience of conditioning and thus deconditioning. And that is what we're going to get into next. We're going to go into the ideas of definition versus openness and deconditioning, conditioning, and the not self. Thanks for listening to the Living Your Design podcast. Stay tuned for the rest of the curriculum.

New batches of episodes are released every Tuesday. For immediate complete access to the full course and to explore other perks like learning and community, extracurricular astrology and human design workshops, and meeting with me face to face, go to patreon.com/kelseyrosetort. You can also listen to me on my other podcasts, the Maia games and conversations with the zodiac, and find me on Instagram at kelsey rose tort.