In this episode, we turn to the Ego Center (also known as the Heart Center), which is the smallest and most inconsistent of the four motor centers in Human Design. Despite being one of the smallest centers in the Bodygraph, containing only 4 gates, it is the fuel for willpower, commitment, competition, and material reality. This center also holds deep themes of self-worth, value, and self-esteem.

Kelsey explores how the Ego functions when defined versus undefined, the challenges of living in a world that overemphasizes willpower, and how to release the pressure to prove yourself. By understanding the Ego’s mechanics, you can begin to honor your own rhythms of motivation while letting go of unhealthy competition and comparison.

What's Discussed in this Episode:

• The Ego as the motor of willpower and its themes of commitment, control, and value
• Healthy expressions of the defined and undefined Ego
• Unhealthy expressions and not-self tendencies of the Ego
• Conditioning and how it distorts willpower, leading to over-commitment or low self-esteem
• Why most people are not designed to live from willpower or promises
• Practical guidance to working with your inconsistent willpower
• Biological correspondence, zodical placements, and circuitry

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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Only about 30 % of the population has a defined heart center. Most people are not designed to be conducting their lives based on the force of will, commitments, competition, or promises. And yet, once again, we tend to be very conditioned as an entire species. This is homogenization, right? The entire species is conditioned to be able to operate from a place of will, to force our will, to make something happen as long as we're motivated to. be able to follow through on commitments, whether it was a commitment to self or commitment to others, to make promises and meet those promises. This is not a healthy way of being for the undefined ego. And there's ways in which it's not a healthy way of being for the defined ego as well.

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 L.Y.D. 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 into my archives and ongoing live teachings, including how to access the original LID course complete with videos and slides, stay tuned to the podcast or check out patreon.com/KelseyRosetort. Thank you for tuning into 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. oh The Ego center. The Ego center is sometimes also referred to as the heart center. It has two names, but it only has one function. So unlike the root and the solar plexus, which are both motor centers as well as a pressure for the root and an awareness center for the solar plexus, the Ego center only has one function and it is to fuel something. So it's like the sacral in regards to it is only a motor center. but it's unlike the sacral in that it doesn't fuel life force. It fuels a specific thing and it fuels it less consistently. The ego center is thought of as the weakest of the four motors. If you look at the body graph, it is the tiniest looking of the four motors and really of all the centers. It's this little kind of edgy, it has an edgy feeling to it, but it is relatively weak in terms of what it can do, what it can power. And what it powers is It's about how we deal with the material world, including our ego. The ego really is in a lot of ways about asserting my will onto the material plane, right? It is about commitment, control, competition. And there's also themes in the ego center of self-esteem, self-efficacy, and value. For people with a defined ego, you're in the minority.

About 35 % of people have a defined ego. And remember, defined centers operate in duality. They're either on or off. They're fixed and we can't negotiate from our mind or from our sense of what we assume other people need from us or want. We can't negotiate with whether we have the will in this case or not. Define ego people have a fixed will. You either have the will or you don't and either way it can't be negotiated with it. If you have the will, if your heart is in something, you're going to be pretty motivated to do it regardless of what the mind is saying, regardless of whether others want you to do it or not. That will turns on and it's on. If you don't have the will, but other people think you should want to do something or you think you have to do something or should want to do something, there's going to be a painful process in regards to in the process of you trying to force your will somewhere where it just isn't going to go. It's a non-negotiable willpower, non-negotiable fuel or not. defined ego, when you feel motivated to do something, you can generally trust that you will maintain that motivation. That cliche phrase where there's a will, there's a way is true for the defined ego. If the willpower is there, that is a willpower that is present and existing in one's own form when their ego is defined. And so they can generally trust, okay, I have the will to do this. I can commit to this. I'm going to follow through. I can get this done. or I can get this going, I can assert my will in this direction. A defined ego person has the ability to commit and follow through when the will says, yes, now there are layers to this, right? Because the willpower can be there, but maybe the sacral energy is not there for the day if you're a generator, but that will is still there. So maybe it's just not right now. There's nothing, you're not responding to the thing right now, but you have the will for it. And that can happen. There's layers to our experience. The strategy is still response for a generator, right? So the will can be there and it might just not be time to respond. There's nothing to respond to now. For an emotional being, whether a projector, manifestor or generator with a defined will, you might have the willpower, but depending on where you are in your emotional cycle, in your emotional wave, your emotional process, which is always changing and gradually gaining awareness over time. You might have the will, but it really might not be time. There might not be clarity in regards to whether or how you're going to act via invitation, response, or initiation, depending on your type. So there's layers here, but there is a fixicity of will that can essentially be trusted. Because the defined will has sort of seen over time that where there's a will, there's a way. If my heart's in it, I can do it. There can be a natural sense of self-esteem and self-worth. The defined ego knows what it's capable of and has a natural sense of its value as a result of that. Like I've been saying for a lot of the defined centers, I think it's important to be mindful of your tendency to hold others accountable because the defined ego can have a positive relationship with accountability because if the will power is there, they can hold themselves accountable to it, right? But for someone with a fluctuating sense of will, and motivation, it's actually going to be very damaging for them to feel that they need to follow through on the things that they at one point felt motivated for. So just something to be understanding about for the defined ego, understand that you are in the minority and try to honor a fluctuating willpower from others. Try not to hold others to things, to anything, to any kind of commitment the same way that you might be able to expect yourself to. For undefined ego people, Your access to willpower fluctuates and is a form of conditioning. So your access to willpower is conditional, is one way of saying it. There needs to be ego definition, either through the transits or through another being, that also, there's more conditions to it than that, that also feels correct for you to move on or incorporate based on your strategy and your authority. The presence of willpower alone is not an indication that you should commit to something or go for something or try to make something happen. The undefined ego is able to see clearly and amplify the motivation of others. So the undefined ego, when healthy and deconditioned, can really be a great barometer for whether someone else's ego and use of will is healthy for them or not.

Only about 30 % of the population has a defined heart center, a defined ego. Most people are not designed to be conducting their lives based on the force of will, commitments, competition, or promises. And yet, once again, socially, societally, familially, we tend to be very conditioned as an entire species. This is homogenization, right? The entire species is designed to be able to operate from a place of will, to force our will. to make something happen as long as we're motivated, to be able to follow through on commitments, whether it was a commitment to self or commitment to others, to make promises and meet those promises. This is not a healthy way of being for the undefined ego. And there's ways in which it's not a healthy way of being for the defined ego as well. But focusing on the undefined ego here, it is not healthy and there is not a capacity. for the undefined ego to be able to conduct your life based on a force of will, commitment, competition, or promises. It's not healthy for the undefined ego to be in a competitive state, even with yourself. For the undefined ego, your value is not based on your ability to commit. The real medicine for the undefined ego that I watch people sort of relax when I say this to them, and I've heard undefined ego friends and peers in the human design space who have been in their experiment for so long, say that this is something that they are constantly reminding themselves. This is a medicine they constantly are returning to and that is that you have nothing to prove. The conditioning in the undefined ego will really try to trap you and convince you that you have to be on this like plight of proving yourself, proving your value, proving your worth, proving you can keep a promise, proving you can compete, proving that you have the will.

For the undefined ego, it is more aligned to make tentative plans and agreements and to use your strategy and authority to navigate how and when making tentative plans and agreements is okay. Understanding that things that you feel really compelled towards and motivated towards at certain points are not something that you can trust unless that compelling motivation is happening in a way that whatever your strategy and whatever your authority are can also attest to. A healthy, defined ego has consistent access to willpower, has a natural way of valuing oneself, doesn't try to force will where it doesn't exist, understands that if their heart's not in it, it's not for them. A healthy, defined ego has a fixed way of dealing with material reality, with bargains, promises, agreements, and commitments. These are all things that the ego center deals with. And so if you have a defined ego, you have a certain process a certain way that you tend to deal with these types of things with your contributions to the material world and the value or reciprocity that you receive back via those contributions. In the not-self state of a defined ego, conditioning from other centers will distort the ego energy or willpower. A defined ego might expect others to be able to compete with them or to want to compete with them and or to use their own force of will to operate. A defined ego can really like do some pretty impressive things when it's motivated.

For Define Ego people, it's important that we maintain a sort of sense of modesty and humility around that because otherwise we're putting out this like puffed up competitive ego energy into the world that others who are dealing with this potential pain and wounding of low self-esteem and low not understanding their inherent value. are gonna start to try to compete with, and that's really the source of all distortion in the entire world and the entire species is this inflated, distorted ego energy. So for the defined ego people, understand that this is the heart center. A defined ego means you have consistent access to your heart, to this ability to understand the inherent value in all people. The defined ego knows its inherent value. It knows it doesn't have anything to prove. And so that's the energy that the defined ego wants to be putting out, that a healthy defined ego wants to be putting out into the world for others to amplify is that we all have an inherent value. So we don't want to be putting out this inflated ego energy that kind of taunts or expects or pushes others to also try to manipulate a willpower that they don't actually have consistent access to, to try to operate on or follow through with. Another way of phrasing this is that an unhealthy defined ego will put pressure on others to prove themselves or keep commitments. The defined ego really can get set on what it wants. And so it can be very easy for the defined ego to then be kind of forceful with its wants. It's easy for that want of the defined ego to override what's correct for someone they are in any form of relationship with. can be a lot of force of will, even like manipulation that can happen in the not self state for the defined ego of forcefulness.

A healthy, undefined ego has a sense of self worth that does not depend on competition or proving oneself. They are able to work with others without making promises because they understand that this sense of will and motivation that they feel in the moment where they might be inclined to make a promise to someone may not last more than a day. It may not last when you're not in aura with that person anymore. And regardless of how long it lasts, if your authority doesn't subscribe to it, if it doesn't happen mechanically correct according to your own strategy, then it's not going to be correct for you. so understanding that you kind of need time to pull away from interpersonal ego conditioning to see how your body feels and whether in the absence of that undefined ego, there's still the yes. for you or the maybe for you, that can be a really big part, especially at the beginning of deconditioning for the undefined egos process. You don't necessarily need to pull away because your body already has its own strategy and authority and knows how to move through the world. It knows what tentative promises to make or not. It knows what is correct for you, regardless of whether there's ego definition conditioning you or not. However, at the beginning of deconditioning, it can be very helpful to sort of play with not making promises because you want to get a feel for actually what you physically, sensationally feel in your body when you are amplifying someone else's will versus not. The ego is about how we deal with the material world. And so an undefined ego is not going to have any fixed way of dealing with the material world. So they're going to rely on strategy and authority to determine how they deal with the material world. We're talking about, again, bargains. promises, agreements, commitments, money, resourceness. That's a bargain, right? The unhealthy, the not self state for the undefined ego has a low self esteem, low self worth and overcompensates for that by trying to prove themselves and compete. Proving themselves to themselves, proving themselves to others. The not self undefined ego has difficulty recognizing their inherent value because they're so conditioned to associate their value with what it is they're able to make happen with their will, which is not how it works for an undefined ego. And therefore, an undefined ego will often feel challenged in the process of determining, asking for, and expecting an appropriate reciprocity or an appropriate amount of feeling valued for what their contributions are. An undefined ego in a not-self state is competing. It's really not very healthy for the undefined ego to sustain any sort of competitive drive. That's usually a sign of the overcompensation of the low self-esteem and low self-worth. So the not-self theme for the undefined or open ego is trying to prove my worth. Whether you're trying to prove your worth to yourself or trying to prove it to someone else. This book, The Nature of Personal Reality. It's a Seth book. a channel book by an entity named Seth. I've been very slowly working my way through it for quite a while. And there's one point where he's the author, Jane Roberts is channeling Seth and he says through her that many of his readers feel that they need to vindicate their life's existence. And that phrase just really stuck with me and I've, even though the kind of main The that you'll hear for the theme of the not-self in the ego is trying to prove my worth. I've started to articulate it as well as trying to vindicate my life's existence. The defined ego knows it's inherently worthy. The undefined ego doesn't always have a consistent access to that knowing. And so when in the not-self will be constantly trying to vindicate for themselves or for others that they are worthy of being alive, that their life is worthy of existing. Ways this might sound for you is have to prove my worth, have to prove my value, I have to try to control the situation materially, right? Sometimes I think of the ego as like the director of the experience because in the defined ego, it's not making choice from a mind place, but it is moving according to its will. So there's like a fallacy of control that kind of exists within the ego. Defined ego people aren't in any more control than undefined ego people. But again, where there's a will, there's a way. When the heart motor turns on, there's an edge, there's an extra little edge to it. And there can be kind of an ability to direct, to impact the material world from that edgy defined heart energy. So the undefined ego is going to try to fixate on that. And they're going to feel like they have to try to control the situation in the material realm. But they can't. um None of us can. It can sound like if I don't follow through, if I don't make this happen, I'm weak. Or if I don't make this happen, I'm unreliable. If I don't follow through with this, I'm less valuable. I'm unloyal. It can sound like I need to keep myself motivated to X, Y, Z. And it can sound like I need to do it better. Better than I did it last time, better than this person does it, or I need to be the first. to do this so I can prove my value comes from my ability to do this thing, to make this happen, to control the situation. And to sum it up, the question to ask yourself is, I trying to prove something or am I trying to improve something? Approximately 35 % of people have this center defined, so the majority of the population, 65%, have an undefined ego. The biological correspondence of the ego is the thymus gland, the gallbladder, the heart muscle, and the stomach. Something kind of interesting about the biological correspondence to the stomach is it is said in the human design space, I believe Ross said this, that if you have a defined ego, your defined ego kind of needs to be fed, like the stomach, it needs to be fed, it needs to be nourished and replenished. So it's actually healthy for the undefined ego to know about and rely on its need for its. ego to be fed through recognition of their value. And that's where this idea of having a fixed need for and a fixed way of negotiating and bargaining and coming to agreements and dealing with the material world comes from. Because the defined ego goes, hey, I have inherent value and I need to be paid for it. I need to be fed for it.

The ego can be defined only as four gates, the least, or no, I guess the head has less, the head has three. So the second least gates. which is why both the head and the ego have smaller percentages of the population that have it defined. It's about 30 for the head, 35 for the ego. I've heard 30 for the ego as well, but all my notes say 35. The ego can be defined in connection to the solar plexus. That's going to be through the 37 in the solar plexus and the 40 in the ego, and that is emotional willpower. It can be defined through the throat. That's going to happen through the 21 to the 45 in the throat. This is about willpower being expressed via initiation. This is a manifested channel because it's fuel to the throat. It can be defined to the G through the 51, 25. This is the willpower for direction in life, the willpower for love, G center themes. Or it can be defined through the 44, 26, which comes from the spleen, the 44 to the 26. And this is intuitive willpower, instinctive willpower.

Zodiacally of the four gates in the ego center, three are in fire signs, two of which are in Aries. So half the gates in the ego are Aries. Find that very interesting. And another fire one with 26 and Sagittarius, and then one is in an earth sign, Virgo. So we see the like material, the quality of wanting to be able to adapt and impact the material reality, the material plane with Virgo, mutable earth. And then we see the like individual me, willpower. when it comes to Aries and Sagittarius, the fire signs that are very rooted in a place of me, me, me, the self.

Circuitry wise, three of the four gates, so 75 % of the gates in the ego center are tribal. Again, tribal channels, tribal gates are about material support and material reality. And so three of the ego gates being tribal is why the ego center is about dealing with the material world and this idea of exchange, which is very tribal. One is individual, the 51-25 is an individual channel. It's the one that goes to the G, the center about self. And this is the only center with no collective gates at all. So the ego center is really about affecting the material plane, dealing with the material plane from a three parts tribal and one part individual perspective. It's really not about the collective orientation for understanding and sharing or sensing and sharing.

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 @KelseyRosetort.