16. The Splenic Center

Kelsey: 00:00

The undefined spleen tends to, in a conditioned state, overly attach to people or circumstances in an effort to give yourself the experience of security. So it feels safe to have that security blanket of a defined spleen or of a job that gives you a sense of security or a home or a circumstance, a relationship. But remember where you're undefined, you're meant to experience things on a fluctuating basis and you're meant to sample all sorts of different potentials for that center. And so when an undefined spleen fixates, on something that at one point gave them a sense of security that felt good. They will end up being attached to something that is no longer correct for them or the circumstances of it are no longer correct for them. But the fear of losing it and losing what was supposed to be a temporary source of security anyways, will override that person's strategy and authority.

Welcome to the Living Your Design Podcast. I'm your experimentor, Kelsey Rose Toririchi. This podcast is an audio only release of the full length, in depth Human Design Foundations course I've been teaching over the last several years. It is a no bullshit comprehensive embodied introduction to the human design system that will challenge your ego mind and support you in your process of reuniting with the unique wisdom of your body. In episode one, I speak a bit about the process that led me to releasing this course for free in podcast form, and I offer a few notes that might be useful to contextualize and clarify what you'll hear in this episode and beyond. I recommend giving that short intro episode a listen if you haven't yet. The LYD podcast is part of a larger, living body of work, a growing archive of my teachings about consciousness through the languages of astrology and human design, hosted in an online community space where I stay in orbit with my students, mentees, alumni, peers, and collaborators. For more information about how to connect with me and tune into my archives and ongoing live teachings, including how to access the original LYD course complete with videos and slides, stay tuned to the podcast or check out patreon.com/KelseyRosetort. Thank you for tuning 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.

The Spleen Center is our oldest form of awareness as a species, four million years old. It's the Center for Instinctive Awareness, and it deals with our awareness of how to hold on to life, aka our awareness around survival, both as a species, as groups, tribes, and as individuals. It processes our sense of security, fear, health, and well-being in the moment. The Spleen only operates on a moment-to-moment basis. And it communicates to us, it communicates its awareness to us somatically through light, spontaneous moment by moment hits and telling us what is safe and healthy for us and what is not. It's instinctive awareness in the now. It's often referred to as our instincts, as well as in human design, it's often referred to as intuition. I will sometimes use the word intuition for the spleen, but I sometimes worry about using that word for the spleen, even though it is commonplace in human design to associate the spleen with intuitive knowing and intuition, simply because of the popularity of the word intuition and intuitive outside of human design. Because I think the sort of generalized understanding of intuition out in the non-human design world can be applied to the idea of inner authority in human design, like an emotional authority person might understand their emotional knowing and their emotional processes, their intuition, but that use of the word is different. Inner knowing, inner authority is a different thing than the intuitive instinctive hits of the spleen. So just sharing that depending on who you're talking to and the extent to which they've learned the language of human design, like formally or through their lineage of learning human design. They might use the word intuition a little more widely, which I might sometimes as well, and I will usually tend to say instinct per spleen instead of intuition in order to remain clear about that.

People with a defined spleen center, a defined instinctive awareness center, have a consistent access to spontaneous awareness and alertness through the body and the senses. The defined spleen has a sense of knowing that it's safe unless it's feels that it's not safe. And when those instincts hit, it trusts them. It trusts their body's system for alerting them of their safety or not in the moment. Splenic people, defined spleen people, and maybe even especially people for whom the spleen center is the authority. So that would be defined spleen people who are undefined in both the emotional center and the sacral, will sometimes just suddenly know things and not know why. Like not be able to explain from a mental perspective, a mental plane, why they know things, but they just suddenly know things in their body, these quick, spontaneous light hits, and they know they can trust them. So these tend to be spontaneous people. It's correct and healthy for people with a defined spleen to be spontaneous and to trust those instinctive hits. If you have a defined spleen, you likely have a sense that you know how to survive and that you are safe unless you are not. Although, This can definitely be one of those things that defined spleen people take for granted. Their consistent sense of being able to trust that unless their body is alerting them that there's a threat to their safety and survival, that they're all good. Definitely something that I know as a defined spleen person, I've taken for granted. I've had to do a lot of squinty eyes and considering, is this something that I know? And then over time, as I observe people with undefined spleens and hear about their experiences, I'm able to see, yes, I suppose it is true that I generally trust the health and wellbeing of my body, but I didn't realize that wasn't the case for everyone, right? So defined spleen is one that I think is really easy to take for granted. People with a defined spleen have a fixed way of processing our fears, which are, tend to be consistent for us. And it can be correct for the defined spleen person to inquire into our fears, because again, if the body is alerting you, there's something not safe here. I feel threatened. My life feels threatened, my well-being, my health, my security feels threatened. That's your own instinctive awareness coming online and so something that you can generally trust and it can be safe and aligned for you to look into. Defined spleen people can provide a feeling of safety and security to others. A defined spleen can feel like a security blanket to someone with an undefined spleen or oftentimes we talk about like animals with undefined spleens will be the animals that gravitate. towards people with defined spleens and just want to like stay on their lap or in the case of my bird, stay in my hand constantly, because it just feels safe and the same sort of dynamic can exist between an undefined spleen person and a defined spleen person. A person with a defined spleen, you may enjoy scenarios in which you have to rely on your instincts. you know, certain like sports where you have to be, your reflexes have to be on point, your instinctive reflexes have to be on point. Driving. being able to like kind of defensively drive, like keep yourself safe. We don't really think of driving as highly dangerous necessarily anymore, but it is like people of long ago would have been probably terrified in cars on the highway. And defined Spleen people might have a more natural sense of security in a situation like driving, but also even enjoy it. Things like camping, survival skills, even things like waiting tables or jobs that rely highly on your quick, intuitive, instinctive, spontaneous awareness. and ability to handle things quickly as they come up. If you have an undefined spleen, your access to this spontaneous awareness will fluctuate. This also means that your sense of your own safety, health, and wellbeing, and of your tribe or of the collective, if you're more of a tribal or collective person, may shift and may vary significantly. You will not always feel safe and healthy in your body. You're going to be experiencing all sorts of little hits that might not actually feel that little in your body because you're amplifying them from others, of fears, of perceived potential threats to the health and wellbeing of yourself, of your tribe, and of the collective, but those may not be for you. There can be, from the not-self mind's perspective, a perceived lack of safety and security that can feel very scary and threatening to the undefined spleen.

The undefined spleen is taking in and amplifying the fears, the instincts, the intuitive hits, and the ill health of others. Intuition and instinct are a variable for the undefined spleen. Spontaneity may not be for the undefined spleen because there's not a sense of reliance and trust in the hits, the spontaneous hits as they come. So an undefined spleen person might not feel as safe driving. They might not feel comfortable with high risk situations like survival things, camping, even not high risk situations, but things like I used in the other example, like waiting tables or sports or games that require those quick instincts. It's possible that in certain situations, the undefined spleen and the wisdom of it and its ability to pick up on the instincts of others could be really supportive. Like consider that in regards to, I'm watching the NBA playoffs right now. So in regards to basketball, maybe an undefined spleen would do really well to be able to pick up on the instincts of the players around them. Someone's going to pass to me or this person's going to try to fake me out and actually run that way, right? So it's not that that person might not enjoy or excel at those things, but it's going to be a different sensation, a different experience with high instinct things. And for a conditioned undefined spleen, especially that might just be a lot. someone has an undefined spleen and doesn't know how to engage with all of those instincts and fears and hits coming in from the outside, they will get lost in it and it will manifest in a lot of over-amplified fear and perception of a risk to their health and their well-being and their survival. An undefined spleen person is designed to witness and become wise about fear, not to identify with it or be driven by it. The spleen tends to have a lot to do with survival in general and fear can be a threat to survival in any way that fear shows up. But one of the things that I've started to really see in the experiences and the lives of the undefined spleen people that I'm close to who are deconditioning or have done deconditioning work on their spleen. So in many cases, these are my human design friends with undefined spleens. There tends to be a commonality of having an orientation towards health, like understanding the human body in general and being wise about many different multimodal approaches to tending to the health and survival of the human body. So for me, these are people who have like some cancer survivor, people who have done a lot of work with, have a lot of experience with alternative medicine, with oils, with essences, with acupuncture, and people whose work in many cases has started to be very oriented around health. So I just wanted to bring that in that the spleen is not only health in terms of like the health of the body on an ongoing basis, it's also health as in literally holding on to life in any given moment. So safety, security, survival, but I do really see health and becoming wise about health and the many different approaches that one can take to live well and stay living well. tends to be associated a lot with the undefined spleen, which, you know, that kind of relates here to this idea of you have a sense that you know how to survive and that you're safe if you have a defined spleen. Defined spleen people, we don't need to become wise about health because we don't need to try many things. Our default is we feel pretty safe and healthy in our bodies. And when we don't, the spleen gives us a clear intuitive hit around what might need to happen in order to remedy that. So we just, we don't really, we're not called, we're not naturally compelled in most cases to need to be wise about health, the way that the undefined spleen person might naturally see themselves becoming. The undefined spleen may tend to, often tends to, in a conditioned state, overly attach yourself to people or circumstances in an effort to give yourself the experience of security so it feels safe. to have that security blanket of a defined spleen or of a job that gives you a sense of security in one moment or a home or a circumstance, a relationship. But remember where you're undefined, you're meant to experience things on a fluctuating basis and you're to sample all sorts of different potentials for that center. And so when an undefined spleen fixates on something that at one point gave them a sense of security that felt good, they will end up. being attached to something that is no longer correct for them or the circumstances of it are no longer correct for them, but the fear of losing it and losing what was supposed to be a temporary source of security anyways will override that person's strategy and authority. So it's correct for an undefined spleen person to use strategy and authority to navigate what fears that you have to confront and process and when it may be time to let go of people or circumstances that are not right for you.

A defined spleen in a healthy state is tuned in and responsive to your instinctual awareness. It trusts those momentary, spontaneous, instinctive, quick gut feelings and intuitions as they come. Now typically when we say gut feelings in human design, we're referring to the sacral, but there's a lot of people whose spleen is defined through the sacral. Or if we're talking about generators, 70 % of the planet, people who have splenic definition and are generators. Whether or not that definition is connected, the sacral to spleen, there might be an association with a gut feeling and the instincts and intuitions. A defined spleen person, regardless of what else you have defined, you're designed to move with a bit of spontaneity, to trust those hits as they come, even if they're totally unexplainable or totally stray from the plan you had or what you anticipated. A healthy defined spleen has a consistent way of processing fears, which offers them a consistent sense of security in their body. Again, something that would be easy to take for granted probably. Healthy defined spleen has a natural sense of being able to survive. In good health, a defined spleen will give a person a sense of wellbeing, good feels, and safety and protection that they are then also able to condition others with. So a healthy person with a defined spleen literally carries the feeling of good health. feeling good and healthy and regulated in the body into the room and into presence of other auras that they interact with. A defined spleen person in a not self state is someone who is having an experience of conditioning from other centers distorting their acceptance, awareness of and trust of their own instincts. So they're not gonna trust that need. to move spontaneously according to intuitive hits. They're gonna ignore their instincts and ignore their intuition. Often they'll let their own mind and or other people's emotions, energy or urgency override their intuition in the now. And something that's often talked about with the spleen is that it communicates in the now moment and it comes once, it hits you once and then it leaves. That intuitive awareness, those instincts hit and then they go. So when you ignore them, you miss it.

And I don't want to condone like a scarcity or a mental fixation or obsession with splenic awareness, but it's just something to play with and consider as you experiment with strategy and authority, especially for people who have a spleen as their authority, but even for people with sacral or emotional authority who also have a defined spleen. It's something to be aware of and play with and experiment with. Notice if you can tell when you have the instincts to change something or say something or do something or move in a different direction than you were planning to or you're used to, and if you ignore it, and how that process interfaces with your strategy and with your authority if you don't have splenic authority. It'll come back and tell you what you need to know in a new form, in a new moment, but the hit that you get when you get it is not something you can return to. That spontaneous acknowledgement of the splenic awareness is pretty crucial, and it can be easy. As we've discussed with many other centers, when someone else's life force, if you have an undefined sacral, is overcoming you and it feels good, that can overpower your instinct that's saying, it's time to go, it's time to go right now, go home, get out of here. Or someone else's emotions or ego are wanting, are making you feel like you have to people please, or you have to prove something that can override your splenic instincts that are actually telling you what's safe and healthy and correct for you in the moment. When an undefined spleen is in a healthy state, not operating from conditioning, they feel comfortable taking their time processing their intuition and navigating whatever comes their way. So when we talk about like, who's intuitive, like who are the intuitive people? It's kind of like with the solar plexus, you can't really say that defined or undefined is more emotional than the other. It's just a different orientation to emotions. A defined solar plexus person It is a pretty emotional person because we're always cycling through our emotional process. We're never not somewhere in our emotional wave. But an undefined emotional person, while their default might be very calm, cool, collected, when they're not operating from conditioning, they seem pretty cool and unemotional. When the emotions come in, they feel really big. There's a lot of emotional empathy. So same idea here with splenic awareness. One thing that I didn't mention. Anything that filters through the spleen, so the left side of the bodygraph, is going to have this kind cool, calm orientation to it, this like cool, instinctual sense. Anything that is circulated through the emotional center, the right side of the bodygraph, the solar plexus, is going to have a more heated, warm, emotional, passionate sort of sense to it. So... If you continue to study human design and you learn more about the different circuits of channels, that's something that will become clear. But I guess I just kind of wanted to point that out that splenic people or people with a lot of circuitry, the channels that go through the spleen have a cooler orientation to them, whereas emotional people have a more heated. And we can see the ego is over there near the solar plexus too. So that whole side of the body graph is a bit more emotional and passionate and warm and heated.

But yeah, coming back to this idea, apologies for that, for going astray there for a moment. Coming back to this idea that we're not more or less emotional necessarily, like that's too black and white as a way to approach whether people are emotional with an undefined or defined solar plexus. Same thing with the spleen, you know, everybody wants to know, I, everyone's ego mind wants to know, ooh, am I intuitive? Well, yes, you are. It's just a matter of are your intuitions and your connection and access to instinctual intuitive awareness. Is it something that's consistent and always for you in your subjective experience? Or is it something that's inconsistent and fluctuates and amplifies the instincts and intuitive awareness of others? So someone who's got a defined spleen is very intuitive in the sense of their instincts are guiding them all of the time. versus someone who's undefined in the spleen is extremely intuitive in the sense of their picking up on other people's intuitions and instincts. And that can be really useful in settings like, you know, counseling or divining for people, tarot, different forms of divination, stuff like that. But when it comes to your own intuition, a healthy undefined spleen person is going to feel more comfortable taking their time to process these instinctive hits that are coming in. because it needs to get filtered through your own strategy and authority process for you to know what to act on and what not. So in a not self state might be a little bit more spontaneous versus an undefined spleen person in a healthy state is gonna allow themselves to take their time processing these intuitive hits.

A healthy undefined spleen uses strategy and authority to know what fears to confront and use a strategy and authority to know when to hold onto and when to let go of circumstances and relationships. Trusting that the absence of security, of familiar security, can be correct for you if it is what your strategy and authority are calling for. A healthy, undefined spleen feels comfortable with their health and how they take care of their body, becomes wise about health and well-being without obsessing over it. And not self-undefined spleen is going to hold on to people things, situations and circumstances that are no longer healthy or correct for them. So staying in a relationship much longer than is actually good and healthy for you. Staying in a job much longer than is actually good and healthy for you. A living situation maybe because there's a familiar sense of consistent security. But this is a familiar sense of consistent security according to the mind, which is fearful of letting go of that security. Your body is actually designed to experience all sorts of different versions of feeling secure and safe and healthy. And in order for you to have those experiences, sample those things, and ultimately become very wise about health, immunity, survival, and life, you have to be able to detach from these different versions of security that you come into. So on the same note, the not self state of the undefined spleen is going to drive someone to be overly dependent on relationships, circumstances, or habits that bring a consistent sense of security.

The undefined spleen in a not self state tends to then develop quite rigid habits in attempts to hold on to things. So even habits can be something that the undefined spleen can cling to, like I have to stick with this healthcare regimen exactly, or I won't be safe. And part of When I think about what it must be like to have an undefined spleen, there have been moments in my process where I've really thought that seems scary. But that's because I have a defined spleen. You know, I can't fathom what it would be like to operate without that consistent access to knowing I'm safe and secure. But the truth of the matter is that if you have an undefined spleen, you don't actually need that consistent sense of safety and security in order to survive. Everything you need in order to survive and hold on to your life is accounted for in your own body graph, in your own design, in your own definition, regardless of how many centers you have defined or not. So what's important for the undefined spleen person to look at, to experiment with and play with is that when you obsess over these fears, that's actually your not self mind, right? You don't actually have control over your survival, over whether you're going to die or not, or how long you're going to live. and your body through its strategy and with its authority, which is not the spleen, is going to take care of your trajectory in life and take care of you and show you who you need to be near and what forms of splenic definition and splenic conditioning are good for you and when, so that absence of security itself for the undefined spleen is not actually an indication that you are unsafe. The not-self state of the undefined spleen is gonna be overwhelmed with a fear of safety, health, et cetera, and will react spontaneously to those fears rather than taking their time processing intuition and navigating those fears using their strategy and their authority. The theme of the not-self spleen is, as we've already kind of found through the last couple of slides, holding on to what isn't good for me. And the undefined or open spleen center not self-voice can sound like I can't survive without blank. I'm not going to do this because I might fail and failure makes me vulnerable and unsafe. I don't want to do anything that makes me feel insecure without this blank job relationship routine savings account. I will not be safe. I can't do this or I can't save this because it might upset this person. So, you know, I was talking about. the two sides of the body graph. And in many cases, the body graph's not perfectly symmetrical, but where it is, it is sort of a mirror, the splenic orientation to something versus the emotional orientation to something. And so you can see a bit of a mirror of the solar plexus and some of the aspects of the not-self spleen. The not-self solar plexus wants to avoid truth and confrontation and ends up people pleasing. because it wants to maintain the emotional bond with someone without having to take in their uncomfortable emotional reactions. The spleen wants to maintain a bond with someone for the sake of survival and holding on to the sense of security that that person or that relationship offers them. And so there's a different but similar sort of potential for fawning and people pleasing with the undefined spleen with not wanting to upset someone. but not because you're afraid of the emotional outburst necessarily, you might also have an undefined solar plexus and relate to that, but because you're literally fearful for your life and your wellbeing if you can't maintain that connection and access to whatever version of security your mind thinks you're getting and you need from that person or that relationship. The not self of the undefined spleen can sound like I'm only safe if I blank. If I have this healthcare regimen, if I live in this house, if I stay in this relationship, if I maintain contact with this abusive parent, if I am inadequate, I might lose blank and that would be a threat to my safety or wellbeing, my job, money, my reputation, my relationship, literally insert anything. So in summary, the question to ask yourself to discern whether you might be stuck in a loop having to do with your not self-spleen conditioning is, Am I holding on to what is not good for me? About 55 % of the population has the spleen defined, so close to half and half, but slightly more people have splenic definition than do not.

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