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.
Download the Free 2027 Locks & Keys Companion Guide.
New episodes drop on Mondays. Discover and illuminate your inner phoenix with the vitality of this new energetic ecosystem set to emerge on Monday, February 15, 2027.
Subscribe on your preferred podcast platform
Watch and listen on
Listen on
Show Notes
The global background frequency is the ecosystem every one of us has lived in for our whole lives. That makes it difficult to imagine what a new one could feel like. This episode offers a way in through two ecosystems.
The era of the Cross of Planning and Cross of the Maya resembles a cultivated garden. It runs on plans, schedules, discipline, and promises kept, and the community decides what each person has earned. The era of the Cross of the Sleeping Phoenix and Cross of Penetration resembles an old-growth forest. It has no imposed order, yet it carries its own wisdom. Its qualities include emotional awareness in the moment, the dissolving of barriers to intimacy, personal power expressed in service of the common good, deep intuitive clarity, and the capacity to recognize and adapt to shock.
The episode also speaks to the fear of leaving the garden. Humanity has provided food, shelter, and community for millennia, and the Cross of Planning has existed for only about 400 years. The greater source of stress is trying to force the garden’s rules onto the forest. Your design stays the same through every era, and so does how you are built to make decisions.
In this episode:
- The past era as a cultivated garden and the new era as an old-growth forest
- Why importing the old era’s skills and values into the new one creates frustration and fear
- A note for those who never felt at home in the garden
- How old imprints held in the body release over time, and how new ones take hold
- Why your own design is the most important knowledge you can carry into any ecosystem
Reflection: Which of your beliefs about working, earning, and being worthy came from the garden, and which come from you?
Transcript
[00:00:00] Take a breath. Feel your awareness sink into the core of your being. Allow your sensory awareness to awaken all through your body. Sink gently into the stillness at the core of who you are. Welcome to Awakening the Phoenix in the new Human Design era. I’m Zette Harbour. Here we are going to explore the Human Design global background frequency shift.
[00:00:33] The new era carries the name the Cross of the Sleeping Phoenix. Rather than focus on the sleeping, this podcast is here to support you in the awakening of your inner phoenix, that extraordinary emergence of innate power and beauty and awareness. In Human Design, it’s said that the background frequency is shifting in February of 2027.
[00:01:00] The old era was created by the Cross of Planning and the Cross of the Maya. The energies that the gates of those two crosses brought to this global background frequency created a kind of ecosystem in which we have all lived for our entire lives. And because it was simply the ecosystem, the container within which we emerged, within which we came to know ourselves and our world, it’s really difficult, almost impossible to imagine what could the new container even be like.
[00:01:33] How will it feel? Will we be safe? How will we survive? Because the global background frequency gives you all of the influences that will direct humanity in answering those questions. It’s very natural when beginning to look back at where we’ve been, where we’ve come from, and we will look at the influences and energies of the Cross of Planning and the Cross of the Maya.
[00:02:00] However, this new era that is created by the energies of the Cross of the Sleeping Phoenix and the Cross of Penetration carries very strong qualities of being present in the now, looking to our emotional awareness, desiring to dissolve barriers to bonding and intimacy, allowing our individual power to rise up in service of the common good and to express that in the now, in the present moment.
[00:02:34] It provides the fuel for beginnings. It informs how we remember ourselves. It offers the fuel for memories and stories about the drive for transformation for the benefit of all, and it encourages deep intuitive awareness and clarity that can be expressed in the present moment, as well as initiating us all into an extraordinary awakening and innocence of our spirit and the ability to recognize and adapt to shocking changes There’s a really helpful way to think about this global background frequency.
[00:03:19] You can think of the past era like a garden ecosystem. There are plans and patterns and schedules and even rules and discipline that all ensure that the garden will thrive. There are rewards for people who work and deliver to their community, and that community decides what resources they have earned through their work.
[00:03:45] In the garden, how hard you work, how disciplined you are, how much you deliver on your promises, how well you logically organize the shape and structure and plan of the garden, how well you keep out weeds, how well you destroy or eliminate pests, how well you isolate different plants in different boxes All of that is the ecosystem that can help us understand the era of the past.
[00:04:14] And when we think about the new era, the one defined by the Cross of the Sleeping Phoenix and the Cross of Penetration, imagine an old-growth forest ecosystem. Place yourself now in your awareness in the silent beauty of those deep woods. As you center yourself and begin to settle in and receive the sensations and the sounds and the awareness from this new ecosystem, you discover that it’s not silent, it’s not barren.
[00:04:48] It lacks all of the rigidity and discipline and order and logic and patterning of the past ecosystem. What it provides instead is an extraordinarily wild beauty that has its own intrinsic wisdom, and it is an ecosystem to which we belong. It’s just having lived in the Garden for so long, we’ve forgotten that we can also live in this old-growth forest.
[00:05:16] We can reclaim our place in this extraordinary, expansive, vital, vibrant, diverse world that isn’t focused on growth above all else. The old-growth forest understands that life begins and life completes its cycle. It understands that there can be shocking moments, and it’s in the recognition and adaptation to those shocking moments that the forest thrives.
[00:05:44] And it is this new ecosystem that says that the most spontaneous action we can have for good results is to be deeply attuned to our emotional awareness in the moment as an individual and sensing into the absence or presence of empowerment within that moment, as well as the deeply mystical nature of this incredible landscape and our place in it.
[00:06:14] And when you live in the old-growth forest, there are no barriers to intimacy You are one with the earth and one with the trees and one with the creatures of the forest. You are one with the sky, the weather, the wind. And every moment that you allow your individual personal empowerment to arise through you and display it in service of the common good and manifest that expression in the now, you are living in harmony with this old growth forest ecosystem.
[00:06:52] And this old growth ecosystem creates the conditions where our memories, our stories that we hold and share will be of this drive for transformation. The forest itself lives out a drive for transformation moment by moment and throughout time. And in this new ecosystem, the leader that we all want to follow is someone who understands and can tell the stories of the new beginnings to show a path forward that is structured and progressive and leads to development and maturation.
[00:07:29] And here, the old growth forest itself is the role model of what it is to be deeply attuned to intuition and clarity, as well as that capacity to recognize and adapt to whatever comes. It’s natural for those who have only known the garden to be afraid of living in an old growth forest. The skills that it took to create and manage and receive the yield of that garden don’t have the same place in the old growth forest I think it’s safe to say that trying to import the skills and values and ideas and beliefs and motivations and goals of the old era into this new ecosystem will create great frustration, failure, bitterness, anger, and disappointment, and most of all, fear.
[00:08:22] How will we feed ourselves if we are all not contributing our life force energy, our commitment, our discipline to working tirelessly in the garden to provide for all of those we care about, all of those who get to decide whether we are worthy of being given those resources in return and being given time to rest?
[00:08:45] The rhythm of the old growth forest is completely different than the rhythm of the garden. In the garden ecosystem, it is the gardener who decides how they will apply force to have the garden behave in the way the gardener expects. And of course, the gardener has to be aware of the weather and the climate in the zone they’re in, and what plants grow well there and what don’t.
[00:09:10] All of those details and all that focus and all that discipline, that’s part of the old era. And so when you consider what it’s like to no longer have those be the preferred approach to life, the preferred approach to feeding ourselves and staying safe and healthy, again, it can create a lot of fear and a lot of uncertainty.
[00:09:32] I want to offer this perspective, though. The Cross of Planning has only been around for a little over 400 years. Humans have been providing food and shelter and safety and community for themselves and one another for millennia. So the change from the garden ecosystem doesn’t mean that life will stop, that humans will stop providing for themselves and the ones they love.
[00:09:57] Humans have done that regardless of what ecosystem they were living in. What’s gonna cause the most stress, fear, pain, and resistance is thinking that somehow you can force all of the attributes of the garden ecosystem onto this new old growth forest ecosystem, and you have been conditioned your entire life to believe that you can and that you should.
[00:10:22] Now, many of us never felt at home in that garden or world anyway. The pressure to provide, to deliver, to show up consistently, to deliver on promises that we were never correct in making, to wait upon the judgment of the authority, the tribe, whoever it might be, to tell us that we were finally worthy The exhaustion of being required to intensely focus on details for an extended period of time, and then to sift through those details and decide which ones are facts and which ones aren’t, and then to be able to acquire mastery over very specific talents and skills, and be able to demonstrate that, and be seen as having that mastery and those talents, those skills, and then be permitted to take your place among the chosen.
[00:11:15] All of that is gone, but the conditioning, the programming, the energetic imprinting that is still in the cells of your body, carried in the water molecules that are in every single cell, that vibrate with those imprints, that will take time for those vibrations to release, to dissolve. And there in that newly refreshed, cleansed palette, these new imprints will take hold.
[00:11:45] So the sooner you can recognize what is it about my beliefs, my emotions, even my actions or my pressure to behave in certain ways, what of that is coming from the old ecosystem? What is my authentic and unique design? How do I make decisions correctly for myself? Because what remains the same, no matter what ecosystem you inhabit, is your unique design.
[00:12:13] The unique imprint that you chose to incarnate into at this exact moment in time. You see, I believe that those of us who are here, we made the agreement that we would be incarnated during this powerful transition, and that we are accepting the assignment, the gift, the learning of becoming aware of the old conditioning, recognizing how it influenced who we thought we were and who we thought we had to be, noticing now what this new energy might feel like, the thoughts and beliefs and pressures that it brings.
[00:12:52] And none of that changes how you are designed correctly to make your decisions, to understand in your definition who you are here to express as, the energy you’re here to share with the world, the way you’re here to receive the world, the openness in your design, and how that influences the pressures you feel.
[00:13:17] It’s going to determine how much the program drives how you live. Now, you can’t escape your ecosystem. None of us can. However, you can live authentically and truly aligned as yourself within it. Just as each one of the dwellers of the old-growth forest has their unique constellation of attributes, their characteristics, their behaviors, their instincts, their form, their function, their role, so too do we.
[00:13:49] And so even as you learn about the new era and the energies it brings, and even as you get a chance to look back and see the energies that we’ve all just emerged from, the most important knowledge you can receive is your own design, and to clear the inner clutter in all of the places where not just the old ecosystem, but the people in your life, even the transitory weather, what’s moving through the cosmos every day, every year, imprinted on you energetically.
[00:14:23] And so whether you are working in the garden or dwelling in the forest, your work remains the same. Learn your design. Live your design. Love yourself