Episode 19

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Published on:

7th Oct 2025

19. Aura Type as a Practical Synthesis

In this episode, we begin our exploration of Aura Type, which is the foundational synthesis of the Human Design system. Type takes the infinite complexity of the Bodygraph and makes it universally accessible, offering a practical entry point into the deconditioning process.

Kelsey dives into how Type weaves together definition, openness, strategy, and themes, and why awareness of your Type alone can be transformative. By aligning with your Strategy and honoring your aura mechanics, you can begin to witness how your body naturally moves through life, without forcing or proving.

What's Discussed in This Episode:

  • What Type is and why it’s the most practical synthesis in Human Design
  • How Type reconciles the system’s depth with its accessible simplicity
  • Type as an immediate access point for deconditioning and coming home to self
  • The relationship between Type, Strategy, Signature, Not-Self, definition, and openness
  • How following Strategy supports surrender into passenger consciousness
  • The “9 potential problems” of undefined centers and the “4 potential solutions” of Strategy
  • Sacral vs. Non-Sacral Types and their relationship to life force energy
  • Aura mechanics as differentiated ways of navigating life and relationships

If you would like full access to the course, including the videos and slides, make sure to join the Patreon, where you will find the full LYD course and exclusive Human Design and Astrology content.

Follow Kelsey on Instagram

Transcript
Speaker A:

Human Design offers a complex, logical, mechanical, objective and sophisticated system for witnessing the arrival, movement and expression of energy, awareness and pressure through the form of a human being in a concrete and universal way.

Human design also offers a simple, somatic, experiential and deeply personal tool for navigating the subjectivity of what we call reality from the vantage point of one human form.

Type is a way to reconcile these polarizing aspects of human design, its formidable depth and complexity with its accessible simplicity, its logical structure with its abstract and subjective application.

Type as this practical synthesis takes the incredibly intricate and infinitely varied thing that is the body graph and the human design system as a whole and universalizes its application so that it can be received and understood in a practical way as many people as possible who wish to experiment with it.

Speaker A:

Welcome to the Living Your Design Podcast. I'm your experimentor, Kelsey Rose Tortorice.

This podcast is an audio only release of the full length in depth Human Design Foundations course I've been teaching over the last several years.

It is a no bullshit, comprehensive, embodied introduction to the human design system that will challenge your ego mind and support you in your process of reuniting with the unique wisdom of your body.

In episode one, I speak a bit about the process that led me to releasing this course for free in podcast form and I offer a few notes that might be useful to contextualize and clarify what you'll hear in this episode and beyond. I recommend giving that short intro episode a listen if you haven't yet.

Speaker A:

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/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.

Speaker A:

In this unit we're going to take a look at aura type and the strategy and themes that come with it as a practical synthesis to both the LYD material covered up to this point, so specifically deconditioning and center functionality as well as the knot self. This synthesis of type is also going to Many ways cover much more minuscule, technical, advanced components of the system that is human design.

And I will say that authority is also a part of this practical synthesis. But authority will be what we take a look at in the next unit.

What we're going to be looking at in this intro to type, under the umbrella of this concept of type being a practical synthesis are these four sort of core components. So one, we're going to talk about how Ra, the messenger of human design was the 5:1.

And just some observations I've made around the nature of the human design system, as well as how he messaged it to us that I see as being correlated to or very much demonstrations of his five one profile. We'll talk about this idea of nine potential problems, four potential solutions.

We'll talk about how the synthesis of type encompasses center, definition and much more.

And we'll do a little bit that's sort of an intro into the type videos, the separate type videos of this idea of life force and how we engage with life force in differentiated ways according to our aura type. But first according to whether we have sacral definition or not.

So for sacral types, the generator, including the manifesting generator versus the non sacral types, the Manifestor, the reflector and the projector, how we orient to life force differently. So this idea of ra being a 5:1, it's not an idea, it's a fact. Ra was a 5:1.

Where I was first sort of struck by, by the evidence of his profile and the character role that Rob played as a 51 in the transmission of the human design system was when I was, I guess it was a bit more of a slow trickle than my mind is wanting to remember it. But when I was learning with Amy and John, there were these references sort of in passing that type came online a little bit later.

Type wasn't a part of the original download or transmission that Ra received in his eight day encounter with the Voice. It came online a little bit later.

And at that point in my human design journey and my education was interesting to me, but there wasn't really space to consider that.

However, a bit later, when I was studying with Alok Alakanon Diaz, Aloq would talk about it a lot because Aloq was friends with Ra and studying with Ra and learning human design from Ra before type was a part of what R.A. was teaching.

And so I found myself in, in presence with Alok and in my experience of learning from a Lock, I found myself really just wanting to ask questions about that. What was that transition? Like why Did Rob bring type in? And I, as Alok started to speak to it, he.

He didn't have a whole lot of specific answers for me.

But as he spoke about his experience of that transition and of Rob bringing type in very quickly, I, as a fellow fifth line personality, was able to see that type and strategy and authority and these sort of summarizing ways of delivering and talking about and mentally grappling with the human design system, which is so complex and so intricate, were a tool. They were a very fifth line personality way of conceptualizing all of this stuff and offering it in a practical, clear sort of package.

And when we think about the fifth line, the fifth line is here to deliver a message so that it can be heard and received as far and wide as possible. And one of the things that a Locke kind of alluded to was this anger, I guess, impatience.

It's a big manifester theme that I am familiar with and also can.

Can see in this sort of story that I'm speculating on here based on what I've heard in a fifth line manifesto such as R.A. a lot kind of talked about R.A. being sort of like irritated and impatient around why, why won't people just get it? Like, he had all this information, but people weren't getting it, people weren't learning it.

And so his fifth line mind, his fifth line personality over time came up with or further channeled. It's kind of unclear the extent to which it was like, you know, raw formulating after in a separate experience from the voice.

Or maybe there were essences of that experience with the voice that. That remained with him that were part of this conceptualization moving forward. And a little note on that. Ra Uru, who.

He changed his name after that encounter with the Voice. And so he really talked about how like his life was completely changed. He wasn't the same person anymore. So I'm.

This is very much Kelsey speculation and Kelsey conceptualization. But I see it as.

I see it as like everything that came through Ra in all of the ways that he came up with these teaching tools such as type, strategy and authority and. And these other. He came up with a lot of teaching tools in the decades that followed the encounter with the Voice.

And I sort of see like whether or not it was viscerally the case. I sort of see. Personally, I sort of see it as like the voice became a part of him and was a part of his future development of these teaching tools.

So let me rein it back to this connection to the five one here. The. The one being Unconscious.

One way to, to translate this, a bit of an oversimplification, but one way to translate this is that Ra's body as a vehicle was a first line.

And I know we haven't talked a lot about first line yet in the, in this course, but what you'll remember and what you may know from your own exploration of the lines up to this point is that the first line is very invested in taking in all of the information, creating a solid foundation of information. So I've really come to see this bringing in of the.

The teaching tool that is type and authority and the strategy and themes that go along with type as a way of RA dealing with this massive invasion of information that he's. If you listen to him talk about the encounter, he talks about the. The information being like, forced into the cells of his body.

So that feels very first line to me.

The body just downloaded or collected all of this information, received all of this information, and then his fifth line mind was left to try to make sense of it, to conceptualize it, but specifically to message it, to bring the heresy, the message of all of that information to the world. That's the fifth line role, and in particular that's the 5:1 role. So as I started to ask A lock some questions about how was type?

How did type come in? What was that like? Was it channeled all these things? You know, Alaq is a fellow emotional manifestor. So like me, he.

He speaks in a pretty spiralic and storytelling kind of way. But what I'm sharing today was sort of my what, what I integrated from that conversation.

And A LOCK is in many ways my most direct connection to ra, I listen to source material to RA on my own as well. But when I get to engage with a lock, and specifically when I get to ask a lock questions out of my own curiosity, like, how did type come online?

What was that like? I get this other.

This other, like, connection point to RA through relationship, through my relationship with a lock and his with RA and my interactions with a lock and his with ra.

So I just wanted to share that with you because as you deep in your human design studies and your human design awareness and human design experiment, you will likely come into many moments of wondering, like, which components matter now and which components are rooted in the mechanics and the information and which ones are sort of like RA's spin on this information or you're another teacher, someone on the Internet spin been on this information.

And what I found through my own study is that I specifically with ra, I'll say There are a lot of things that Ra will say that when I first encounter it, sound like prophetic. You know, they sound like, what is this rooted in? And over time, most if not everything that I encounter, eventually I understand it.

And the way inspiring not only understand it, but understand the way that it connects to this system as a whole. And I really kind of see that process as Ra's dilemma.

The first line, body all this information, and then the fifth line, mind trying to figure out how to deliver it in succinct and practical ways. And you see that all over the place with RA's material and with Jovian.

But I've really come to see type, strategy and authority, these most practical tools, as the main synthesis for everything within the human design system. So yeah, type comes with strategy, it comes with the aura, functionality, and it comes with the themes.

And each of those three things are going to be largely the focus of what we cover in the videos to come about each of the four aura types. And then type doesn't really come with authority.

Your center definition tells us both your type, which comes with strategy, authority and themes, as well as your authority. And certain types can have certain authorities, but there's. There's a cross as well.

Like projectors and manifestors can both be emotional, splenic or ego. Projectors can also have a couple of other authority configurations that manifestors can't have.

Only generators can have sacral authority, but they can also have emotional, like projectors and manifestors. And then reflectors have their own authority. So there's a correlation between authority and type, but not a direct. Not a direct correlation.

I hope I'm using that word correctly, but authority will be in the next section. This section is focusing on the part of this practical synthesis that is type and the strategy and themes that come with type.

And as part of my studies with a Lock, I had to write a number of essays. And one of the essays that I wrote was just on answering this question, what is type?

And it was through this process that I really came to feel into what I sensed to be RA's dilemma as a 5:1 with all that information in his body, in his system, and then the mind's intention to. To message that information in a practical way.

And so on the next few slides, I've just taken a couple excerpts from this piece that I wrote called what is Type? The full essays on my website.

And just borrowing those slides and borrowing that text, I'll read these next few slides and perhaps I'll expand on them, but they're essentially a more succinct way of saying some of what I've said thus far.

Human design offers a complex, logical, mechanical, objective and sophisticated system for witnessing the arrival of movement and expression of energy, awareness and pressure through the form of a human being in a concrete and universal way. So in this first sentence I'm essentially talking about the body graph, right? The centers and everything we've talked about up to this point.

Human design also offers a quite simple, somatic, experiential and deeply personal tool for navigating the subjectivity of what we call reality from the vantage point of one human form. Type is a way to reconcile these polarizing aspects of human design.

Its formidable depth and complexity with its accessible simplicity, its logical structure with its abstract and subjective application.

Type as this practical synthesis takes the incredibly intricate and infinitely varied thing that is the body graph and the human design system as a whole and universalizes its application so that it can be received and understood in a practical way by as many people as possible who wish to experiment with it. Type as a concept supports an immediate access point for the deconditioning process that human design is all about.

With awareness of type alone, one can begin the process of coming home to self.

The deeper layers of human design can be a part of this recalibration on an energetic level without needing to be intellectually understood, as long as there is a basic awareness of type.

So, for example, I'm talking a lot about variable right now, because that's an aspect of human design that I'm starting to really integrate on a somatic level in my own body.

But I can see how for the last three and a half years that I've been in my human design experiment, even though I didn't really totally understand intellectually or somatically, my variable, my shore, artificial shores, environment, my peripheral power view, my focused innocence, motivation, so on and so forth. Through experimenting with my strategy and my authority, I have been able to attune to those parts of me.

I just maybe wasn't aware that I was doing it, or I didn't consciously feel that part of the attunement happening. I couldn't name it because I didn't intellectually understand it.

Now as I'm integrating and understanding it, I can see that my deconditioning process up to this point, just using the tools of strategy and authority have served my calibration in according to my variable as well. And same with things like channels and gates, hanging gates, dormant potentials.

I don't have to understand what all of My channels and gates mean I don't have to understand necessarily some of these more intricate things about circuitry, like my tribal versus my collective versus my individual, or my red versus my black, or my split definition versus my bridge.

I don't have to grapple with all of that because living my design at the most basic level, following strategy and authority, will calibrate me to all of those intricacies as well. So how is type so powerful?

An awareness of one's type can have this much impact because the construct of type takes into consideration, holds and advocates for all of the other more dense, esoteric and substantial aspects of human design, especially signature and not self themes, strategy, definition, openness, and the reality of a differentiated existence in general. I mean, really just beginning to become aware of and witness the differences mechanically and how the four A types move through the world.

Even just that, really integrating the distinction between the four aura types can be such a shattering of the mind, of the homogenized mind's way of thinking, that we all operate the same. And that's just at the type level. Underneath the type level, there is infinitely more differentiation.

But type is like the first tuning fork to the many, many layers of differentiation. Below that, type is a synthesis for the entirety of the human design system. It attunes you to your form, your definition, and your strategy.

And in doing so, it teaches you how to surrender into passenger consciousness by showing you how your body already leads, the rest follows.

Experimenting with type, strategy and authority will lead you into awareness and experimentation of the rest of the system, if and when it's correct for you. So noticing in your body what aspects of all of these. There's so much to study in human design.

There's rave cosmology, there's the changing of the global cycles. There's variable substructure, leftness and rightness, red versus black circuitry. There's so much that you can take in.

And the mind in its own way for each of us is going to try to distract you from the true process of shattering and deconditioning with all of the information. Your strategy and your authority are now these tuning forks, but also these accountability, these personal accountability tools for you to watch.

Why do I feel a. Well, maybe even before, why is this a pressure that I'm feeling to learn more, to understand more? Or am I truly responding to this?

If I'm a sacral being or if I'm a manifester, am I truly initiating this study on my own terms?

For reflectors and projectors is my authority the lunar cycle for reflectors or for projectors, my splenic authority, my emotional authority, my ego, my g, my mental authority and my process with those really pulling me into this next layer of study?

Or am I approaching this next layer of study from a not self place, trying to prove something, feeling a sense of urgency, trying to feel safe, and all the different variations on that that we covered in the units on the centers. We do not all need to know everything about human design. We don't.

And the things that we do need to know, we are not from an ego mind place, in control of when or how we come into that.

Your strategy and your authority will help you to surrender to the timeline and the process that is going to happen that is correct for you in terms of learning all this other stuff or not within the human design system.

And in the meantime or forever, all of the intricacies of your design, of your infinitely nuanced, complex and differentiated design are served by you following your strategy and authority, regardless of whether on a mental level you are grasping those intricacies and those complexities.

Now, another very like fifth line way of orienting to what we've talked about up to this point, largely with the body graph and the nine centers and what we're moving into from this point forward with the four potential solutions. This idea of nine potential problems, four potential solutions is a very fifth liney idea.

And this was something that I think I've heard it from all of my human design teachers, Amy and John of the Human Design Collective, as well as Alakanon Diaz. But it started with ra.

This was a way that RA sort of messaged the content we've covered up to this point, the centers and how they relate to the types, what we're moving into now, nine potential problems, four potential solutions. So the nine potential problems are the not self that lives in the undefined centers. Undefined centers themselves can be potential problems.

They are not inherent problems. Undefined centers are gifts. They are exactly correct.

If you have an undefined center, you are designed to be conditioned to amplify through your absorption, to learn to become wise about, to sample, to experience a wide range of potentiality in each of your undefined centers. It's when you fixate on them, identify on them, try to experience consistency, regularity, or identify with that openness.

That's when they become a problem. So there's potential problems in each of the nine centers. And the potential solutions are the strategies that come with the types.

So the the solution for any of your potential open center problems, if you are a Sacral being is to respond, to wait. To respond. Your strategy, right?

To wait for the invitation if you're a projector, to wait a lunar cycle if you're a reflector, and to inform if you're a manifestor. Strategy is an interesting word because a lot of times when we think about the process of strategizing, we're in.

I mean, not a lot of times always when we're in the process of strategizing, we're up here in the mind, we're in the mental realm. And strategy in the case of human design in this context, is not actually a mental strategy.

It's the organic way of your vehicle, of your form, of your body. It's actually not mentally strategical. It's the most organic, simple practice. And you, as in your mind, your personality, aren't doing it.

You aren't controlling this strategy. Your body does it. Your mind will try to interfere according to your undefined center conditioning.

But strategy is just the natural way your body, your aura, already moves through the world. And I have a little asterisk here because this is not actually true for manifestors.

And when we get to the manifester section, we'll talk about this a lot more. But informing for manifestors, it's not actually a mechanical strategy the way that all three other types strategies are.

So manifestors have to approach strategy and authority a little bit differently. It's much more about authority for manifestors than strategy versus for the other type.

Strategy is kind of like in the front, and authority backs it up or adds nuance or layers to that strategy. But really what I want to focus on here is introducing strategy as a solution, but not a mental strategical solution.

What's happening on the mental plane is we're relaxing away from strategizing. We're relaxing into passenger consciousness.

We're allowing the mind to become a passenger by observing that strategy is already what the body does and thus surrendering to it and letting the mind get out of the way. So following your strategy is really just a tool to help you gain awareness that this is what your body already does, so you can surrender to it.

Strategy helps you to watch the problems rather than engage with them or get locked into them.

And that's when these potential problems stop being problems or have the have the capacity to stop being problems and actually become wisdom, which is what we are designed for in our undefined and open centers.

One last little piece here that I want to talk about, a sort of practical universalization before we jump into the individual for a types and their Strategies and themes is. I want to look at type also and strategy as a differentiated way of navigating our relationship to life force.

Life force we've talked about as being really referring to the sacral center, right? And so I want to talk about life force in the sacral type, the generator and the manifesting generator, versus the three non sacral types.

The sacral center is what powers up the entire body. And I'm saying this both in terms of the individual body.

If you have a defined sacral, that center is consistently powering up your individual vehicle, your body. But the sacral life force on the planet is what powers up the entire body of the planet, the entire human species. It's very powerful.

And thus its effect on the aura, on the whole of the aura, is immense. So when we talk about the aura in human design, our aura is an energetic biofield that holds all of the intricacies of our design within it.

Everything you'll learn in Lyd and many, many things beyond what you'll learn in Lyd, those frequencies, those distinctions, those nuances, complexities, all of that infinite differentiation lives in your aura. Aura type is like the base octave. It's the literal shape and function of your aura at the most base octave level.

And if you have a defined sacral, even though there's so many variations of what your design could be like beyond having a defined sacral, because of the power in that defined sacral center, the effect on your aura, again, is so immense. And that's why all defined sacral beings are generators.

So I have this image here of sort of how I visualize the generator aura, the generator open and enveloping aura. It is this massive energy emanating, this warm, fiery, massive, open energy emanating.

I picture it like steam emanating out of a steam engine, out of the generator form. And it's coming from that sacral center. It's coming from the seat of life force in the sacral.

So this is just essentially how I visualize this defined sacral, this really powerful motor turned on, and then all of its energy emanating out of that aura, which is what creates the open and enveloping aura of the generator. I want to specify here, though, that it's not that the non sacral types don't experience life force, right?

We just experience life force in our undefined sacrals.

So through the process of amplifying and absorbing life force from outside of us, Very different than the experience that generators have of holding and carrying that life force within them, all types experience. Life force generators are the carriers of this life force that is the auric function of the generator.

All of the other non sacral types have an Auric function that has to do with absorbing, amplifying and guiding life force in their own type specific way.

And so in the next video we're going to be focusing specifically on generators and their auric function of being the carriers of this life force and how their strategy of response, their themes of satisfaction and frustration, all of that, their open and developing aura, all of that is based on the mechanics of this defined sacral center.

Because the sacral center being the primary motor of the body, the seat of the life force, has such a massive effect on the way their energy wants to move through the world, AKA on their aura and all of the other non sacral types, their aura shape, their aura functionality begins with the effect of having an undefined sacral.

We don't have all this energy emanating out of us, so we don't have these open and developing auras and the other specifics of our and I'm saying our because I'm a non sacral the other specifics of our center definition or not for the manifestor, the projector and the reflector, those all contribute to our own unique Auric shape and Auric functionality.

But what projectors, reflectors and manifestors have in common, even though they have very different aura functionalities and aura types, is that the undefined sacral center is a big part of what our aura type does. So whether we're looking at the sacral or the non sacral type, we're looking at an aura whose functionality has to do with life force.

In the case of the generator, carrying and tending to that life force within your own form and in the case of the projector, reflector and manifestor, absorbing life force through the undefined sacral and then doing what it is you do from there, penetrating, absorbing and guiding if you're a projector, sampling and evaluating and reflecting if you're a reflector, and initiating if you're a manifester.

Speaker A:

Thanks for listening to the Living Your Design podcast. Stay tuned for the rest of the curriculum. New batches of episodes are released every Tuesday.

For immediate complete access to the full course and to explore other perks like learning and community, extracurricular, astrology and human design workshops and meeting with me face to face, go to patreon.com/KelseyRoseTort you can also listen to me on my other podcasts, the Maia Games and Conversations with the Zodiac and find me on Instagram @kelseyrosetort.

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About the Podcast

Living Your Design
Your Comprehensive Introduction to the Human Design System
The LYD podcast is a free, audio-only release of the standard foundational Human Design curriculum as taught by IHDS Certified LYD Guide, Kelsey Rose Tortorice.


This transmission of Human Design fundamentals clarifies the basics, including core principles and mechanics, centers, aura type, strategy, authority, and profile. Kelsey demystifies these concepts so that listeners can understand how every piece is rooted in a clear, cosmic, mechanical system, as well as how they’re all synthesized together for practical, differentiated, embodied application.


Kelsey (5/2 emotional manifestor) is a lover of nuance, a challenger of the binary, an agent for upheaval, and a natural at finding ways to make the complex systems of Astrology & Human Design intuitive, organic, and accessible. People from all points on the novice to seasoned spectrum are drawn to Kelsey's teachings and transmissions on these languages of cosmos and consciousness - less because of what they already know or don’t know and more because they feel a resonance with Kelsey's voice and the potential for impact that their spirit craves.


The LYD podcast is a great place to begin your Human Design studies. It's also a fitting place to fill in the holes from self-study, to challenge the superficial understandings that are especially susceptible to mental distortion, or to revisit these foundations with the intent to integrate them in a more rooted, intuitive, personal, and radically honest way.

About your host

Profile picture for Kelsey Tortorice

Kelsey Tortorice

Kelsey is a post-capitalist astrologer, teacher, human design experiMentor, and community initiator. Ruled by a 7th house Jupiter in Gemini, she is a student-teacher of the Maia; seeking to understand and universalize the mechanics of reality within the context of individuality, relationship, cosmos, and consciousness as a whole.

Her frequency facilitates upheaval; disrupting homogenized programming and re-orienting people to their differentiated truth and separateness as a means to arriving to connection & inherent wholeness. With reverence for differentiation and a knack for universalization, Kelsey embraces the simultaneous uniqueness and sameness of each human experience. Their work incorporates various modalities, frameworks, and spiritual teachings in honoring and navigating this apparent contradiction.

Accompanying others on their journeys towards remembering what they Know, Kelsey invites deeper levels of autonomy, authenticity, faith, freedom, and surrender.