05. Definition, Conditioning & the Not-Self

Kelsey: 00:00

Where we're undefined or open, we are actually susceptible to, and in fact, always taking in conditioning from the outside world. Where we're defined when we're in alignment, that's where we recognize ourselves, because this is the part of us that again has some type of consistency. We have seen over time, we've watched our bodies move in this way. We've watched this type of awareness return, but when we're operating in alignment from our from our undefined centers, that's where we're tuning into the mysteries of life, the inconsistencies. 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 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/kelseyrosetorte. 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.

The concept of definition in human design applies to centers, channels, and gates, as we've explored when we looked at the body graph. But in LYD, we're focusing primarily, almost entirely on center definition, as this is the basis for all the other focuses within this curriculum and within these first stages of your human design experiment, which are type strategy, the themes that come with each type and authority. So note that everything we're going to go over in these two columns about defined centers and undefined centers today are concepts that can also be applied to defined channels and defined gates, but we're focusing on centers primarily, if not entirely. So defined and undefined centers, just beginning with what do they look like? So this example here is the center definition in my body graph.

You should have yours out and be looking at and taking yours in as well. The defined centers look colored in on the body graph. So not in pink, most likely, but colored in any of the colors are defined. Your undefined centers look white. So in my body graph, I have three undefined centers and six defined.

Take a moment to become aware if you're not already of your amount of defined versus undefined centers. And now let's get into what does it actually mean? Each of these nine centers represents some kind of functionality within this process of pressure in the body. Being colored by awareness, being fueled by energy, filtered through resonance and eventually expressed through the throat and where you have defined centers. That is where you have a fixed way of functioning according to whatever that center is about.

Where you have undefined centers, you have a fluctuating way of experiencing whatever it is that center is about. And I almost, I kind of wish I didn't have the word suggest there, to be honest. Maybe I will go ahead and delete that from the slide because as I've mentioned before, human design is an absolute mechanical system. So it isn't really suggesting it. It is showing you that absolutely concretely, according to the actual auric makeup of your body, of your form.

And some of these cases, you are fixed in the way you function. And in others, you are not fixed. You are fluctuating. Definition is fixed, openness or undefined centers fluctuate. Where we are defined, we are demonstrating, transmitting, and broadcasting that frequency, that functionality out into the world and where we are undefined.

We are taking in receiving, absorbing, and amplifying that functionality, that frequency, that energy, that awareness from outside of our own being from outside of our own form. Where we're defined, we have a consistent access to energy. If it's an energy center or functionality or awareness or pressure, whatever it is, It doesn't mean that we always have energy if we're defined in energy centers or that we always have a solid awareness if we're defined in our awareness centers, but there's a consistency with which that energy or that awareness or that pressure, whatever it is shows up. There's a consistency in the way that that functionality shows up for you where you're defined when you are living your design, when you're operating in alignment with your form. Where we're undefined, we don't have that consistent access.

The access that we have is always changing based on what conditioning force it's coming in from. We can be conditioned by someone else's definition. So if you're undefined in the emotional center and you're in presence with me, you're being conditioned by my emotional wave, by my emotional awareness, my emotional energy, but that experience you're having as you are absorbing and amplifying, I'm gonna come back to those words. My emotional energy in the case of the solar plexus is unlike any other experience you will have where you're taking in emotional energy from a different source. And therefore where you're undefined, you have this gift of perception.

So we might say the gift in the defined centers is this gift of consistency versus in the undefined centers, the gift is the gift of inconsistency, the gift of potentiality, where you can take in and sample all these different ways of being and functioning in whatever that center is. And there is also this gift of empathy in the openness and the undefined centers, because your body is literally taking in the frequency of that center in a defined person, in someone who has that center defined. And your experience has the, the capacity then to be enriched. You can integrate whatever it is you took in from, from all of that sampling into your own awareness, but it requires an openness to fluctuating with what's coming in and when it's coming in and not attempting to latch onto or identify with it or expecting your own form to have that consistency such as the consistency that someone with that center defined would have. Our defined centers, they don't actually get conditioned in terms of energetically taking in outside frequency, but they can become distorted when the conditioning from wherever we're undefined or open overwhelms the system.

So I said I was going to come back to this idea of absorb and amplify. I want to do that now. So you'll hear this language a lot in human design where you're undefined, you absorb and amplify outside energy. So I'll use a different center. As an example, this time I have an undefined Ajna center, the mental awareness center.

So when I'm in the presence of a defined Ajna, I'm absorbing the way they think that's coming into my mind. It becomes the experience of mental awareness that I am having, And I'm not only absorbing it, but I'm amplifying it. So where we're undefined, things get very loud. And so it is very easy without awareness for that amplification to then overwhelm the system. So even though my emotional center, my solar plexus is defined, it's not receiving emotional conditioning from the other, the way that an undefined center would, but it still is able to get distorted.

My emotional awareness, my emotional energy can get distorted from the experience of amplifying mental awareness in my undefined Ajna. But where we're undefined or open, we are actually susceptible to, and in fact, always taking in conditioning from the outside world. Where we're defined when we're in alignment, that's where we recognize ourselves, because this is the part of us that again, has some type of consistency. We, we have seen over time, we've watched our bodies move in this way. We've watched this type of awareness return.

We've seen the way this pressure shows up for us. And we begin to start to identify with that. We recognize that as the truth of our experience, what can, what tends to show back up, what remains consistent. But when we're operating in alignment from our un-, from our undefined centers, that's where we're tuning into the mysteries of life, the inconsistencies, right? That's not always with me.

That functionality doesn't always return in a consistent way. Therefore, it's always changing. It's a mystery. I don't, there's nothing that I regularly hook into here. It's a fluctuating thing.

So the mysteries of, of life, the universe consciousness are what we take in and explore through our openness or undefined centers. Our defined centers operate in duality. They're on or off where our undefined centers operate outside of duality. All potential possibilities exist in our undefined centers. So coming back to this point here, When I said defined centers are where we have consistent access to energy and functionality.

Again, it doesn't mean that you always have it. It's not always on it's either on or off. And when it's on, it is on in a way that is unique to you. And that is a consistent flavor of functionality of energy or awareness or whatever that center is that you are transmitting and broadcasting out when it's on that is consistent flavor and energy of awareness or pressure or energy, whatever it is that you are conditioning others with through your own being, even just simply your own presence, because this conditioning doesn't necessarily require the verbal externally externalization through the throat in order to impact one another. That will add impact, but our frequencies are present in our aura regardless of what is or isn't being said.

So we are conditioning each other just on an energetic level, on a frequency level all of the time. And, and whether your sacral is turned on or not, your sacral is conditioning the undefined sacral is around you. But when it turns on for you, it's turning on or off in this fixed way, operating in this dualistic way. The duality is the on or off, but specific to you and your frequency. And it's not something that is negotiable.

Defined centers are non negotiable. They are fixed. Right. But undefined centers, there is a level of negotiability to them because they can take in this or they can take in this and they have this potential to operate outside of the realm of duality, all potential possibility. But where we're undefined again, we're absorbing and amplifying.

And so it can really overwhelm the system. So when we get to type strategy, themes, and authority, those are all practical tools to help us rest into allowing both our defined centers and our undefined centers to operate the way that we are designed for them to operate within us, which means that letting ourselves watch the movie of life through our openness, watch all these changing variables, but not getting so lost in all that amplification of conditioning of outside forces, outside energy, that we start to identify with and attach to those things or expect those things to remain consistent throughout our life. The, the magic and the beauty and the potential of the openness in our design requires the lack of consistency, requires a sort of level of detachment where we can just watch. And on the same note, there's a an extent to which we cannot detach from our definition. Okay.

We might try really hard to make ourselves changeable where we're fixed because that's what's expected of us relationally or societally or whatever. But if you have a defined ego, for instance, the willpower center, you don't get to change what you have the will to do or not. That's not something that can be negotiated. You can't sample willpower for this willpower for that. Your willpower is either on or it's off and that's it.

And so we all experience, again, we all experience all nine of these centers, but whether we have that center defined and that we experience it in a fixed way or undefined where there's no fixity, there's nothing that we can really expect about it or depend on within the functionality of that center. It's very different experiences. And probably don't need to say it, but I will just to be very clear, neither one of these is better or worse. Right? There are beautiful gifts in every aspect of your design, whether it's defined or undefined, Suffering and struggle tends to come from fighting with trying to change either a defined center into something that's negotiable or an undefined center into something that's consistent and persistent and dependable and or something that you allow to guide you.

You never really want to be guided by your undefined center is because that's conditioning. That's something coming in from the outside world. It's not a part of you that is consistent. That is with you always. So I mentioned already with relationship, we we condition each other through our defined centers.

Via relationship, we can also condition each other in other ways. If you have an undefined center with a gate that doesn't meet its partner gate, and someone else has that gate, that's called an electromagnetic. And so we can plug into each other through our half channels and we can be defined by someone else's gate that then gives us this passing experience of center definition as well. And the same thing happens with the transits. As the planets move through the sky, move through the Zodiac, they move into each of these 64 gates.

And while they're there, they define those gates by transit. So again, coming back to the rave mandala, as planets move through that, they're also corresponding to these different gates inside of the centers. And so you're gonna experience definition where you don't have it in your form through the transits. But whether it's coming through a transit or coming through a person, it's not you. And so it's part of your movie.

It's part of what's changing and you don't need to run from it. You don't need to hide from it. Conditioning is great. It's what life is. It's neutral at least, but an awareness that of what parts of your life are your movie versus which parts are the consistent life force that is you has the potential to really support our process of deconditioning and regularly coming back into our own form and our own somatic knowing and allowing the changing fluctuation through our openness to be the movie that enriches our lives, rather than something that we're trying to hang on to over identify with or amplify in a distorted way.

So even before going into each center here, right, consider your ratio of definition to openness and its particular arrangement in your energy body. So this example I have here is someone who only has the root and the spleen defined, only two centers defined and seven undefined. That's gonna be a pretty different energetic experience than in this example of my design, which has six of the nine centers defined, way more definition than openness. So just take a moment to consider in your own design one, what's your ratio? Do you have more openness or more definition?

Is more of the the nine functions of the auric potential in your form coming from you in this consistent fixed way? This is my flavor of existence that I color the world with, or is more of it coming from the outside world? One way to think about this is, is your form a bit more active? Is it putting out frequency more, or is your form a bit more receptive taking in? And this is just one way to look at your design because there's also this idea of strategic or active and receptive and passive in the variable that bring a whole other angle to this.

And there's also the the channels and the centers, you know, I'm sorry, the channels and the gates. So, some of us, some people have a lot of definition, seven or eight or nine centers defined, but they're still gonna be so deeply conditioned by the channels that are open inside of that center definition. So this is not like a, a generalized, oh, if you have more centers defined or undefined, this is how it works for you. This is just one angle to look at that through. So yeah, taking a moment to see, there's nine centers.

So you either have the closest you can get to even as five or four, five and four. I also think it's worth just taking a moment because as I've said before, like just seeing your body graph is sort of a potential energetic attunement for you. Like if you are someone who only has a little bit of openness or only has a little bit of definition, where does that lie in the body? Is it up here in the head? Is it down here and you're the rooted places of the body?

Is it closer to the center in the heart? And even before really studying the centers, like notice if there's an immediate sort of recognition or resonance with just the depiction of where definition and openness is in your body graph. And then a little note on, the use of this word openness, anything that's white in the body graph again on the center or channel or gate level is undefined or open, and they do technically mean different things. So specifically when it comes to centers, they mean different things. An open center means there's no gates defined in the center at all.

Whereas an undefined center means that it's not a defined center, but one or more gates are inside of it. No channel, but one or more gates. So just noting there is a difference, both linguistically and functionally to an undefined versus an open center, but that's something that's again, beyond the scope of LYD. And I do usually try to be specific about whether I'm talking about a defined or undefined center, like when I'm talking to clients and students. However, when I say openness, I'm kind of meaning more generally like undefined ness when I say openness.

So just clarifying that. We talked in unit one a little bit about the, this primary concept within human design of conditioning and deconditioning. But now that we've looked at the body graph a bit and started to get into the functionality of your openness versus your definition or undefined centers versus defined centers, now we can place this concept of conditioning and deconditioning into our experiential orientation of the body graph through our actual form, because we are conditioned through our openness. So kind of just spiraling back to this idea of conditioning and deconditioning at large, before we take a look over the next few units in the specific conditioning tendencies and deconditioning strategies through the center's type strategy and authority. So we're all conditioned through homogenization.

There's a, the Maya is the homogenized movie. It's the myth of homogenization. Homogenization is not real. Every single one of us is having, is watching a completely different movie. Even when we stand in the same room and watch the same scene, we're all coming to it with a completely different history, completely different belief system, completely different physical energetic orientation based on our design and a different vantage point based from where we're standing watching it.

These are very like solar Leo principles for those of you into astrology. However, we are all conditioned, taught, told programmed that there is some kind of homogenized norm that we should be measuring up to or measuring ourselves against. Okay. So we're all conditioned through this myth of homogenization. Conditioning itself is universal.

It's inevitable and it's, it's differentiated the way that that myth of homogenization hits our system is differentiated based on our definition. But the idea of that myth of homogenization conditioning, each of us is universal and inevitable. We can't get away from it. Even with awareness, we are still being conditioned always through our openness. So conditioning is inevitable, but deconditioning is a potential and like conditioning is differentiated because your route back to the frequency and the awareness that is your definition is different than anyone else's route back to it because each of us is unique.

Each of our bodies, each of our somatic knowing, each of our vantage points is completely unique, unmatchable. And so the process we take moving through our human design experiment is also gonna be infinitely differentiated. No one else's experience, no one else's experiment, no one else's awareness, no one else's path towards deconditioning looks like yours. Underneath your homogenized conditioning, you are unique. Thus, your process of deconditioning is specific to you.

A hard little truth here for the parts of us that really want to feel a sense of, excuse me, belonging and a sense of being understood is that no one outside of you can direct validate or fully comprehend your uniqueness or your deconditioning journey. It's not possible. And so there's an aspect of this human design experiment that is extremely isolating. If you really do it, if you really surrender to no choice to passenger consciousness, There is a constant returning to this awareness that everything you see, everything you experience, everything you learn to trust and fortify and validate in your own inner world based on your own authority, your own inner authority in most cases cannot be ever fully validated by anyone outside of you. And there's something really quite lonely in that, but it's also extremely freeing.

Your human design experiment maps out your differentiated experience of con of deconditioning, and it helps you attune to the parts of your somatic experience, your bodily experience, your body's wisdom that offer you an inner verification of your process, your knowing, and your uniqueness. So the silver lining is that the more you decondition, the more you learn to trust the way your body, your form communicates to you and moves you through the world without any efforting, doing, forcing, convincing, strategizing of your conscious mind, the less you actually need that external validation. But I'm just saying from my own experience and watching others move through the experiment and what we call the shattering that I will talk about, I think on the next slide or in a few slides, there's a there's pain and grief and mourning in that process because we have been conditioned by, and we have become dependent on to an extent, a need for the outside world to validate the inner experience and specifically for the outside world via relationships or religion or morality or ethics to tell us we're doing it right. We're doing it correctly. But correctness, which is a word that you will find in human design a lot is extremely differentiated.

What's correct for you in terms of how you operate, how you live your life, the awareness you have, none of that matches verbatim correctness for another person. So this is an isolating journey as much as it is a liberating journey. I wanna talk about the neutrality of conditioning here as well, because if you like me in any way have kind of found human design after a period of time spent identifying as like anti capitalist or anti colonial social justice, whatever, you likely have an association with the idea of your conditioning or your programming that it's bad, that it's a problem. And, you know, I'm going to go ahead and say it's a secret third thing here, because it's not bad in the binary good, bad, right, wrong way. But without awareness of what our conditioning is, it can absolutely take over and distort the life and create more suffering than is necessary.

However, one thing that I'm really grateful to human design for is helping me get out of a pattern of feeling like I am versus my conditioning or versus my programming. Because through the study of human design, both the study and the experimentation, I've been able to see that conditioning is inevitable. Even someone like me who spends most of almost every day alone in my house, I'm conditioned by my partner. Every time he comes home, I'm conditioned by his sacral, by all of his channels and gates that I don't have every day. I'm conditioned by the, the pentas and the wahs, the energy of people.

Anytime I go to the grocery store, I'm conditioned by what I take in online. I'm conditioned by what I take in on the TV shows that I watch. I'm conditioned by the conversations that I have over the phone and online with friends, all of that conditions me always. And particularly through the flavors and voices of my undefined centers, as well as my undefined channels and gates. And none of that is bad.

Like we, we need conditioning. It's how we relate. It's how we connect. It's how we interact with each other on both the mental plane and the physical somatic and energetic planes. So it's inevitable and it's neutral.

It's not bad. It is what we, we only plug into each other through this conditioning field. So we don't need to be versus our conditioning. We don't need to be fighting our conditioning. However, conditioning without awareness and without a practice of deconditioning regularly to continuously return to the frequency of self, to the knowing of self, to the uniqueness of self, that is what leads to distortion.

So we'll talk about distortion a lot in LYD. Distortion is the identification with an amplification of conditioning, of our conditioning as manipulated by the not self mind. So what's the not self on the not self. This is language that we'll hear a lot in human design. And it refers to a lot of different concepts.

So just kind of looking at not self in general here, when we say not self, we're referring to the part of the individual that is advocating and often acting on behalf of their conditioning rather than the truth of their own knowing. The not self exists in simple, clear, and absolute duality to the true self, which is the definition that one carries and the type strategy and authority that exists within that definition is the synthesis of a person's consistent and unique frequency. The vehicle of the self, the true self is the body. The vehicle of the not self is the mind. When we say not self, we can be referring to any of these things.

We might be referring to the types, not self strategy. So for projectors, the strategy is to wait for the invitation. When projectors are stuck in a response mode, the generator strategy or initiating the manifestor strategy, that's a not self strategy. Manifesters are the initiators, our strategies to inform as we initiate. If we are constantly stuck in response or just sitting around waiting for people to invite our initiations, that's a strategy of our mind.

Okay. The manifestor body naturally organically moves to initiate the projector body naturally organically gazes, watches, penetrates, and is in recognized and invited to offer. That is what is organic in the projector body. The gen the mind of the projector will try to convince it to initiate or to be in constant response rather than waiting for cur for invitations that actually recognize them and what they see. For generators, the vehicle of the self is the body.

For generators, the strategy is to respond, to wait, to respond, or to be in response. Generators are here to see what lights them up and just watch their body move into action towards the things that light them up. And generators are trying to force things or base their movement based on purely interpersonal relationships, waiting for invitations like projectors, that's going to be the strategy of the not self mind, the not self strategy. And for reflectors, the strategy of waiting a lunar cycle of, of experiencing and detaching from all these changing definitions by transit and sampling definition via interpersonal conditioning. The strategy is to take that all in, but wait until you can see the whole picture of things before making a decision, the lunar strategy for reflectors and anything other than that is going to be the not self mind, trying to convince you to move in your not self strategy, which is what is organic for you.

We also, when we refer to not self, maybe referring to the types, not self theme. So for generators, the signature theme is satisfaction and the not self theme is frustration. Projectors signature success, not self bitterness, manifestors signature peace, not self anger, reflectors signature surprise, not self disappointment. So when we're tapped into that frustration, bitterness, anger, or disappointment, excuse me, we'll sometimes shorthand that to say I was in my not self when I'm angry. There's something about my not self mind that is at the wheel that has resulted in that anger.

We also will refer to the not self in the context of the not self voice of each undefined center. So you'll through LYD, you'll get to learn about and explore how each of your open or undefined centers tends to speak to you. The types of things it tends to say to you it's voice, again, being the vehicle of your not self mind. As you get deeper into design, you might learn about something called motivation. Excuse me.

This is part of that variable and substructure. It comes from the color underneath the line of your sun earth and motivation. Each of us has a motivation and then also a transferred motivation. So I'm motivated conceptually by innocence for me. And when I'm transferred into desire, that is the motivation of my not self personality.

That's another way the word not self will show up as you get a little deeper into design. The mind in general. Sometimes when we say not self, we're just literally referring to the not self mind, and there's probably some other ways people articulate it as well. So in general, we're referring to the part of you and your experience that is advocating and acting on behalf of your conditioning rather than the truth of your own consistent knowing. And I also want to note that the not self is an inevitable part of our experience through our experimentation, through our deconditioning, those not self parts of our experience can become more peripheral because passenger consciousness is watching the not self mind do what it does and say what it says without attaching to it without getting lost in it or entangled with it.

However, as long as we are alive, we have our openness and we are being conditioned through it. And thus, we will have some relationship to the not self, and that's not something that we need to shame or suppress. We'll come back to this. We'll come back to the idea of not self once we've established a fundamental understanding of centers, type, strategy, and authority. But for now, I just wanted to establish that the not self is an inherent part of our experience, something we benefit from seeing for what it is rather than identifying with it as truth.

But it's not something that we need to suppress or shame in ourselves or in anyone else. And lastly, I just wanna touch on this idea of the seven year deconditioning process and the shattering. So in human design, you'll hear people talk about this seven year deconditioning process. When you first begin to, to live your design, to experiment with your strategy and your authority. When I heard this was another one of those things that when I heard it, it just, I was able to kind of immediately intuitively accept it.

It just made sense to me without having to think about it or figure it out because it fits with a concept that I've heard in astrology and also elsewhere. And astrology seven years is a Saturn square. It takes Saturn about twenty eight and a half years to get all the way around the Zodiac and at each seven year mark of that. So around seven years, around fourteen years, around twenty one years, we have a hard aspect from Saturn to its original position, a square, an opposition, a square, and then a return. And those are core moments in the realm of like physical materialization, Saturn being our planet that is about materiality, the reality of materiality, the cross of matter over the Crescent of the mind matter over mind is the Saturn glyph.

And so I'd heard in astrology before the idea that a Saturn square about seven years is also the amount of time it takes for the cells in our body to regenerate. Right? So you've probably heard before this idea that like our cells are in this constant process of regeneration, regeneration. And so we don't have the same cells that we were born with now. They're different cells they've regenerated.

They hold memory, cellular memory of what came before, but they're not physically the exact same cells anymore. Our actual physical makeup is different. Supposedly it takes seven years for that cellular transformation to occur. And so the idea here with the seven year deconditioning process in human design is that once you're seven years and beyond into your experience, you have cells that have been operating to some extent via passenger consciousness and have been deconditioning and reattuning to the truth of your form, the truth of your design. And so it's a completion of one cycle of deconditioning.

It doesn't mean that you're done deconditioning after the seven years, everyone I've ever interfaced with or heard talk about their deconditioning experience, who is beyond seven years. In some cases, ten, in some cases, twenty something, thirty years with human design and their experiment, they talk about it very loosely. Like, oh, yeah. Well, then another deconditioning cycle just begins. Another seven year cycle begins.

But I have had. Like my teacher Alok has definitely stressed this seven year thing to me before as well when I've been, when my not self mind has presented me with some sense of pressure that I should be further along, you know, I, I know I'm a manifestor. I know I'm an emotional manifestor. So why doesn't my life look like that yet? Like, why am I not, why are the circumstances of my life not me living as a manifestor all the way without ever having to fall into any of this not self stuff?

Like very head Aja stuff. Like why, why am I not there? Just thinking about it, the mental pressure to get there sooner. And a lot consistently points out to me, like you're a few years in, like you haven't even had your seven year process yet. Right.

So there's something here where it's like, there's something to it. And it's also not, it's not a concrete thing where like anyone pre seven years is in the not self and anyone post seven years is totally doing it. No. Right. It's time linear, it's time real.

We're gonna go with the secret third thing here. Right? Like we're spiraling through this deconditioning process. We're pendulum swinging, we're returning, we're finding ways that the not self mind, we cleared it. And then it came back under this costume in this new illusion.

We're working through it. Our cells are transforming as we go. And time in this third dimension plane in our corporeal temporal existence is real on this dimension. And so we do have to kind of wait for physical reality, both in terms of our actual bodies, the cells, as well as our external reality, mirroring back our inner reality to us to catch up with our awareness. That's how I experienced it often.

There's like an awareness expansion and shift that happens through my deconditioning, through my experiment. But the physical sensation, the physical reality of it is not happening in real time. Right. And I think of that as being because I am simultaneously connected to these other planes of existence, these other more subtle dimensions and awarenesses, but I'm also still here in my physical body, which is not an escapable thing. And then I want to mention this idea of the shattering as well.

I mentioned it a few slides ago. The shattering is when the ego mind's self identification shatters because it's your tuning to your design and who you thought you thought you thought you were on a conscious ego mind level dies. Okay. And like there's for many of us, I can't imagine this not being the case. So I want to say for all of us, there is a grief process that returns.

There is a mourning of who you thought you thought you thought you were. That happens usually kind of immediately when once really embarking in the experiment, but also then over and over to various extents throughout. And if not immediately, I think often like the immediate sensation of finding human design and experimenting with it is like this relief, like, oh my God, I'm not broken. There's nothing wrong with me. I don't have to keep on going in this way that my body is screaming at me to stop.

And so there tends to be this, this period of immense relief and liberation and empowerment. But at some point, usually overlapping with that to a certain extent, the ego mind gets freaked out because it's, it watches you take it, watches you divest. It watches the, the actual you that is life force behind the ego mind start to divest from the stories and identification and fallacy of control that the ego mind has been perpetuating your entire life through your conditioning, and it starts to freak out. And so there's all sorts of things that are happening within this texture, texture of, of process. There's the deconditioning, there's the liberation, there's the realizing you were never broken.

There's the sigh of relief. There's the grasping of the ego mind to try to make, tell a story about your conditioning and convince you that, oh yeah, yeah. You're, you're, you're deconditioning now, but we're still in control or this part of us is still true. We're just trying to make sense of things. That's always ego mind.

And then there's the part of you on a somatic level that knows that all this ego mind stuff is not real. And that is requiring and facilitating a process of death and detachment from that version of yourself that you thought you were. 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.