Take a moment. Allow your presence, your awareness, to sink into your body. Feel your breath expand your chest and your being. Let yourself return to center. Welcome to Awakening the Phoenix in the New Human Design Era. With this podcast, we’re going to explore not just what we’re leaving behind, not just what the transition will be like, but what it will be like to awaken the phoenix within.
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Show Notes
When we look ahead to February 2027, it is tempting to treat the shift from the Cross of Planning to the Cross of the Sleeping Phoenix as an abstract intellectual puzzle. But the global background frequency is an ecosystem—and our physical bodies have spent four centuries acclimating to the manicured, contractual rules of the “Cultivated Garden.”
In this mid-trek reset episode, we pause along the thru-hike to take off our boots, examine what we carry in our packs, and prepare our nervous systems for the living archetypes of the new era.
The old era, created by the Cross of Planning and the Cross of Maya, can be understood as a garden ecosystem, with its rules, roles, and rewards for contributing in just the right way. Gardens themselves aren’t going anywhere. What’s changing is an ecosystem that tells us there is only one way to be a worthy and good person. The new era can feel more like an old growth forest: wild, unfamiliar, and less concerned with how to be a good communal member. That can feel uncomfortable at first.
The conditioning of the old era lives on in our bodies, so it helps to learn your design. That means your Type, Strategy, Authority, Profile, definition, and openness. Dormant gates in undefined centers act like hooks that pull a fish out of its current. Openness is less an emptiness to fill than an open space in nature where weather moves through and enriches the soil. Every correct decision brings more spaciousness and vitality, and every incorrect one brings constriction. Each time we find a splinter of old conditioning and meet it with presence and compassion, the Dutiful Self can let go a little.
This podcast is less a sprint or a marathon than a thru-hike. Rest is part of the journey. As you go back to earlier episodes, listen with relaxed openness and notice what your body tells you, without needing to master the details.
In this episode:
- Why the podcast explores the new era as if we’re already living in it
- The garden ecosystem of the old era and the old growth forest of the new
- Dormant gates as hooks, and openness as open space in nature
- The ripples of the 2027 shift and why we may feel friction now
- Expansion and constriction as the language of correct decisions
- The Not-Self Conditioned Mind, the Dutiful Self, and dissolving splinters
- The journey as a thru-hike, and the value of pausing to integrate
- Listening acoustically
- Rewilding the self, and why self-empowerment isn’t selfishness
- A look ahead to the Cross of the Sleeping Phoenix
- Somatic practice: a warm rosemary foot soak, with a plant long associated with memory and friendship
Reflection: As you look back on the journey so far, what has your body been telling you?
Transcript
[00:00:00] Follow your breath. Feel your chest expand and your belly soften as you inhale. Release as you exhale. Center your awareness in the core of your being. Feel your energy flow from the soles of your feet up through your legs, your body, down and up through your arms and hands, through your neck, wrapping itself gently around your skull, and feel your face fully relax as the energy completely encases you, filling you with vitality and life force.
[00:00:38] Welcome to Awakening the Phoenix in the new Human Design era. I’m your host, Zette Harbour. In this podcast, we explore the transition from the old era, creating the global background frequency known as the Cross of Planning. We do this as if we are already in the new era because in so many ways, we’ve been feeling the energies of this new era for a long time.
[00:01:02] This podcast is an exploration, an experiment in pre-inhabiting, in placing ourselves in the future experience of these new energies, and learning to understand them through the lens of that era rather than from the old one. And to help us understand this better, I invite you to consider that the Cross of Planning, along with the Cross of Maya, created a kind of ecosystem that it can help to understand as a garden ecosystem.
[00:01:34] Now, there’s nothing wrong with gardens. In fact, gardening is lovely. It’s wonderful. And anyone who has that gift and that drive and that desire and that love of growing food and plants will have a place in the new era. We don’t have to not garden anymore just because we aren’t going to be encased in an energetic ecosystem that makes it seem like the only way to survive, to be a good person, to have love and happiness and success is by conforming to the specific rules and pressures of that ecosystem.
[00:02:14] And so using a garden ecosystem as a metaphor simply means that there are certain ideas, beliefs, skills, talents, tools, and actions that in that ecosystem really contribute to the success of the ecosystem itself, of that particular energetic container. In the new era, what those energies can feel like is an old growth forest.
[00:02:41] And most of us don’t live near or certainly in an old growth forest ecosystem. It’s going to feel and seem very unfamiliar. It might feel and seem very wild and unstructured, unpredictable, and perhaps really unclear who you can be in this new ecosystem, particularly because everyone we know and everyone who came before us for approximately the past 400-plus years have all been acclimated to learning how to thrive in an energetic system that says that contributing your energy, your life force, your love of work toward this communal community, this garden, and that those who hold the garden will get to tell you which resources you’ve earned.
[00:03:30] They’ll get to tell you what mastery and achievement is held up as the ideal, as the most successful. And also that focusing on details is very important in this old ecosystem. So for those of you who are gardeners, this is not the end of your time. It is not the end of having gardens. In fact, in many ways, more people having individual relationships with their food is definitely a part of this new ecosystem’s energy.
[00:04:00] And so I don’t want there to be confusion that, number one, no one’s gonna garden anymore, or number two, that growing food, there’s something wrong with that. Not at all. The metaphor of an ecosystem that tells you there are only specific rules and roles and tools and talents and techniques and behaviors that will make you a worthy and good person, that’s what’s changing.
[00:04:23] That’s what’s leaving. And instead, we’re moving into this energetic container that doesn’t have those kind of rules. In fact, it really doesn’t tell us a lot about how to be a good communal member, which for those of us who have been conditioned to believe that being a good communal member and learning how to contribute to the collective and the tribe in just the right way, it’s going to feel very uncomfortable and maybe even a little scary.
[00:04:48] So this podcast is really in service of loosening the grip of that conditioning, loosening the grip of those limiting beliefs and thoughts, and dissolving the fears that if you don’t have these very defined containers and rules and roles and ways of contributing, that you’re going to be less safe or there’s going to be something wrong with the world that we all live in.
[00:05:15] Something to keep top of mind as you continue listening to this podcast is that all the conditioning from the old era remains in your body, in my body, in the bodies and minds of everyone around us, and that even though we will be living in this new energetic container, the stress, the fear, and even the pain that we will meet will be the result of our assumptions, our interpretations, and even all the old self-blame, doubt, judgment.
[00:05:46] Those are gonna be in direct conflict with this new era. And to separate the idea that it’s not that the new energies are incorrect or causing the stress, fear, and pain, it’s the challenge of rinsing away all the old conditioning in order to meet this new container with a fresh energetic field. Now, that’s actually completely impossible.
[00:06:10] None of us can just rinse away every bit of conditioning that we’ve had. What we can do is start by becoming aware that the conditioning even exists. And so another really important thing to keep top of mind is learn your unique design. Understand certainly your Type and its Strategy, understand your Authority and your Profile.
[00:06:33] Go even deeper and genuinely learn and have an embodied relationship to what is it that is defined in you. What is it that is open in you? Where in any of your undefined centers do you have dormant gates that are just hanging there like little hooks? I like to talk about—
[00:06:53] Imagine a fish swimming along in the river, minding its own business, having a wonderful life, and suddenly a hook catches in its mouth and pulls it out of the currents of its life. Suddenly there’s stress, fear, and pain for this fish. My sense is that our dormant gates act like that. They pull us out of these beautifully happy currents that we are swimming in when we are in full alignment with our correct and True Self.
[00:07:16] And so simply being aware that when you get pulled off into these stressful, fearful, or painful moments where you seem to be at odds or at war with yourself, or with life, or even with other people, that you can look to these dormant gates and these undefined centers, and you can ask yourself which one of these energies might be causing me to believe that I should go in the direction that this hook is pulling me, no matter how unpleasant it feels.
[00:07:43] And when we can come heart to heart with particularly these dormant gates in our undefined centers, then we can actually remove the hook and return to that current that is our true, and correct, and most enlivening current in life. And then to look at your openness. It may be a center that’s undefined with one or more dormant gates.
[00:08:06] It may be a center that’s completely open. Perhaps you’re a Reflector and all of your centers are undefined or open. Coming heart to heart with our openness lets us make friends with this capacity because when you look at that emptiness, it’s natural to believe there’s something missing, there’s something wrong. In fact, when people see their design for the first time, that’s one of the questions, one of the top questions that gets asked is, “Should I be doing something to fill in those colors?”
[00:08:34] Rather, when we understand the true nature of our openness, that it is here to be receptive, to be like open spaces in nature where the weather, right, the sun, the wind, the rain, the snow, the tornadoes, the hail, even the wildfires, they’re all meant to come into these open spaces in ways that then enrich the soil of those spaces so that more life and more vibrant vitality can emerge.
[00:09:05] And so learning the voices of the openness, learning the voices, the feeling that that specific hook of those dormant gates has, that will allow you to genuinely embrace the beauty of the fullness of who you are. Another thing I want to remind you is to download the free guide. It’s a kind of a cheat sheet that gives you a very simple way to see and understand the particular details of the old era and the new one, and how they all fit, and the fact that every gate in the era, whether it’s the old or the new, is a Key that goes into the Lock that’s created by one of the gates in the G Center, and that our G Center is our center of identity and direction.
[00:09:50] It’s where our connection to higher self, source, our most deep truth of who we are all live. And it’s the home of what’s described as the magnetic monopole, which is just a way of talking about the connection that we all have to the universal field of consciousness, and that it is here to guide us along our path.
[00:10:14] And remember that it’s completely normal for you to feel nervous and uncomfortable about this change. And actually, we’ve been feeling it for quite some time. I mentioned in an earlier episode, if you imagine this moment of the shift that is predicted to happen on February 15th of 2027, if you imagine that like someone tossing a pebble into a pond, it’s already happened because time is not linear.
[00:10:42] And the ripple effects of this stone being dropped, this change, are going in all directions, including toward us in our time prior to experiencing that moment in time. Those ripples have been pushing against us, pushing back toward us. We may feel the sensation of friction or needing to push back against these ripples because they’re not going in the direction that we want to go or that life wants us to go.
[00:11:10] And then after February 15th, provided the prediction obviously is accurate regarding the date, and then after we pass that moment when the stone is dropped, those ripples now are moving in a direction that is aligned with our own direction, and we should experience more ease if we can allow the ripples to carry us.
[00:11:33] Again, the thing that’s gonna continue to cause stress, fear, and pain is if we feel those ripples wanting to carry us forward into this new energetic container and we fight it because we wanna try and paddle back or swim against the current and get back to the old era by believing all the old beliefs, by behaving in all the old ways of behaving.
[00:11:55] And so this is one of the most foundational elements of this podcast, is to give you a way to connect to your embodied experience of all these energies and your movement through them. And so we begin with a centering somatic moment of quietness, and we end with some somatic practices that you can integrate.
[00:12:17] And all along the way, what’s essential is that you strengthen your capacity to listen to your body. Listen to what the sensations are telling you, and this is something you do regardless of your Type, your Authority, your definition. The body is always communicating with us. We can, through our own presence, strengthen our capacity to receive the messages and understand them correctly.
[00:12:47] Because for me, learning about the details and the information of these two eras and the change is just not enough. I just didn’t find it enlivening or even particularly empowering. And those are my two primary drivers, and when you look at my design, it’s easy to see why. So this podcast was an inspiration from within me, my body, my inner wisdom saying, “Explore this.
[00:13:15] Dive into it. Explain it and share it.” And in doing so, I strengthen my own fluency in the details and the information, but mainly my own fluency in my relationship to it from a very embodied place. And the beauty of this is the more you understand the new era, the more you can see that the new era actually has more energetic support for tuning into your body and your sensations, your body’s wisdom, your body’s capacity to let you know moment by moment if something feels like it’s expansive and giving you vitality versus something that’s causing you to tighten and become restricted or constrict.
[00:14:00] And ultimately, that’s what your Strategy and Authority are for, is to help you figure out, is this action, is this decision going to give me a sense of expansive energy and vitality? Is it going to enliven me, or is it going to cause me to have to shut down a part of myself, to constrict some part of the flow of energy that is natural to me?
[00:14:24] Because no matter what your Type, your Strategy, your Authority, your definition, your Profile, your openness, none of that changes that the correct decisions always create more spaciousness, vitality, and enlivenment, and incorrect decisions always cause constriction, tightening, distortion, contortion of who you truly are.
[00:14:46] And that is who we have become. And all that tightening and constricting and contorting and distorting, that’s something we’ve done because we didn’t have a better way of meeting the conditioning of the world, of meeting the expectations of others, particularly the expectations we just absorbed and at some point forgot that they weren’t ours, that it wasn’t really us.
[00:15:11] They lived in there so long and so deeply, and in a way, very successfully in controlling our behavior, that we just began to assume that they were simply part of who we are. It’s simply the way things are. It’s the way we are. It’s just how it is. In Human Design, they use the term Not-Self Conditioned Mind to talk about this aspect.
[00:15:36] I love the term that I discovered from Angeles Arrien in her tarot guidebook. She talks about the Dutiful Self. And ultimately, every part of us, even the behaviors or the habits that we created that do cause stress, fear, or pain for ourselves or others, are all in service of this Dutiful Self trying whatever it thinks is the smartest move in the moment to lessen your pain, to lessen your fear, and to lessen your stress. So this whole construct of this energetic shift in the background frequency of the difference between the old era and the new era, none of it actually needs to be literally or dogmatically factual or true for it to be deeply helpful and empowering to connect us to ourselves.
[00:16:28] Every time we look toward the conditioning of the old era and we find where it’s sort of burrowed in and maybe like a splinter is lodged in our heart, we’re allowing that Dutiful Self to let go a little bit of its control. And every time we look to the new era and we find stress, fear, or pain thinking about what it might mean, that’s also helping us find one of these splinters.
[00:16:53] And our presence, our compassionate welcoming, our appreciation that we even get to have this communication with ourselves, and then the love that we can allow to flow toward that part of ourself because it simply was doing the best it could at the time with what it knew, then we can dissolve those splinters.
[00:17:15] And that’s what allows us to come to wholeness in our hearts, return home to ourselves, live in alignment with our True Self, experience those moments of expansive energy, of enlivenment, of vitality more often. And it also gives us permission to recognize that we won’t always make those choices, and that’s okay, because the purpose of being on this path is to experience all of the sensations.
[00:17:44] Dissolving those splinters, coming back into the wholeness in our own hearts, it isn’t to avoid stress, fear, and pain. It isn’t to prevent experiences, sensory awareness, energetic vibrations that may not feel great. We’re not trying to avoid living life. We are strengthening our capacity to interpret life correctly so that we can do what I believe is our job here, which is to collect these vibrational energetic imprints.
[00:18:17] And as we do, we are actually enlivening the universal field of consciousness itself. And of course, as a 3/6 Profile, I have a very direct and firsthand relationship to this idea about life being an experiment and also having the ability to look at the big-picture view, getting up to the 30,000-foot view and seeing with objectivity all the components of the landscape and the story they tell. And so I wanna offer to you that the journey of this podcast is not a sprint, it’s actually not even a marathon, it’s much more like a thru-hike.
[00:18:57] And that makes it even more appropriate for the energies of the new era. We are on this trek where we will be walking through a landscape that, for most of us, is going to be very strange and unfamiliar, and all we can take with us is what we have in our pack. And so it’s correct to stop and rest and to integrate what you’ve experienced up to that point on the trail.
[00:19:23] And so I encourage you, I invite you now in this moment to take the time to go back and listen to the episodes, but allow yourself to listen with a quality of relaxed openness as well. You don’t need to learn the specific details in order for you to be empowered and enlivened by what it awakens in you.
[00:19:45] And so giving yourself this time this week to sit and soak in what has already come, and even if you choose to go back and revisit what you hear again, listen to what your body tells you. As that sound is coming into your ears, into your body, feel the acoustic vibration, even if you don’t necessarily have acoustic circuitry.
[00:20:08] Although the good news is, the majority of circuitry is Individual, and Individual is acoustic. So odds are really good that some part of you has this gift of tuning in to the acoustic nature of a message, of what you’re hearing, and let that acoustic truth resonate in you and reveal to you some truth about yourself.
[00:20:31] And so for this week’s somatic practice, a very specific image rose up in my mind. Rosemary is wild, but many of us have it in our gardens or even in the front yard. And so I invite you to get one if you don’t have one. If your neighbor has one, you can ask them. Take four or five good-sized sprigs, cut them off, fill a foot bath or some kind of a basin that you can soak your feet in with hot water, put the rosemary in there, let it steep for a few minutes.
[00:21:02] Wait for the temperature of the water to be just right for you. Let your feet soak in there. You can also add some sea salt or some Epsom salt, add some minerals to that, and soak that in and let the aroma really soak into you. Rosemary is excellent for memory. It’s also a plant associated with friendship, kindness, loyalty, friendliness. Let this friendly, very loving aroma stimulate your memories of what you’ve noticed in your own body as you’ve listened to these episodes, what you’re noticing in your own body right now.
[00:21:37] And all the while, the amazing compounds that are found in rosemary being released by that hot and warm water are soaking in through your feet, and they are nourishing your entire body. Let this rosemary be a bridge for you. If you’re not used to being out in nature, if you’re not used to having a very mindful, conscious relationship with plants, with the wilderness, with the wild, this can be a great way for you to begin to create that relationship, a bridge that creates trust between you and the natural world.
[00:22:11] Because the new ecosystem strongly encourages us to remember ourselves in a way that is very wild and natural. And the word wild, I can feel it. You’re like, “Oh my God, no. Wild sounds dangerous.” If that’s you, I wanna encourage you that there is an experience of rewilding the self. That does not mean immoral, lawless, insane, selfish behavior.
[00:22:39] That is one of the things that people who talk about the new era often say that one of the things that’s gonna dominate this era is self-centeredness, or the correct terms are self-empowerment and individual empowerment. But it’s often conflated with the idea that if you are focused on individual empowerment, if you are focused on self-empowerment, does that mean you’re going to be selfish or self-centered?
[00:23:05] And so coming from the old garden ecosystem, it makes sense because everybody there was focused on the community, focused on contributing, focused on mastering in order to be an appreciated, recognized member who people could turn to, to lead them, to instruct them, to guide them, to be able to focus on details.
[00:23:26] And so the idea that there is great love and bountiful abundance in this new wilder era is going to feel and sound very strange. We’ll go into that much more in the future episodes, especially when we get to the next set of the four gates. So the previous four were the gates that make up the Cross of Penetration.
[00:23:50] The next four make up the Cross of the Sleeping Phoenix, which is, in many ways, the main evolutionary driver of the new era. And so we may experience those energies even more directly than we will the energies of the Cross of Penetration. So don’t get hung up on names, cross names, or gate names and things like that.
[00:24:11] All of that information is readily available, and it’s also in the guide in a very simple form. You can look at it any time if you wanna become more fluent in those terms. What I most encourage in this podcast is, again, check in deeply with what your body is revealing to you. Your body is communicating with you all the time.
[00:24:30] Your body has all the wisdom you’ll ever need. And so I hope this podcast supports you in cultivating, refining, deepening, and strengthening your relationship to this extraordinary, beautiful inner Sleeping Phoenix within you that this podcast is here to help awaken. I’ll see you there.