Human Design Series – A Case for Downplaying the Types
While Human Design is a helpful resource, it can also be dogmatic. The dogma often comes down to the 5 Types. Look up Human Design on TikTok or Instagram, and you’ll get video after video about each type’s roles. I’ll refresh them here:
Alchemists and TimeBenders* (Generator and Manifesting Generator) – Here to do the work, aka builders of the world.
Initiators (Manifestors) – Here to have the ideas and make things happen, but don’t have the energy to do the work so they hand it off to a generator type. They are trailblazers.
Orchestrators (Projectors) – Here to guide people with wisdom, but don’t have the energy to work a 40-hr a week job. The image is often a guru sitting on a meditation pillow.
Calibrators (Reflectors) – Here to reflect the health of the community around them, highly sensitive and have to wait 28 days to make major decisions.
In these type descriptions, there can be a perception of one is better than another. Most of the time, people want to be an Initiator or a TimeBender because of the perception that those people are the leaders and other types aren’t.
Blech.
Once I started learning more about Human Design, I noticed an uneasiness with the boxes those descriptions put us in. I get it, I’ve describe the Types in similar ways in the early days of working with the chart, but as so often happens when working with a system, I start to pull it apart as I’m working with it, figuring out what I like and don’t like.
We as humans love labels (look up every personality test ever created), but labels can become problems when we box ourselves in with said label. I think it’s especially prevalent with a system like Human Design because it’s a natal chart, similar to astrology.
Personally, I’ve had to come to a reconciliation of what the chart means, its usefulness as a tool, and the dogma that inevitably accompanies a system like this. Not only that, but sometimes people don’t resonate with the types in one way or another:
When I gave a reading and suggested that Generator types are the workers of the world, she frowned and interpreted it to mean I told her she couldn’t be a leader.
When I gave another reading and gave the oft cited statistic that Generator types make up about 70% of the population, his immediate reaction was to say, “So I’m not special.”
When talking with a friend who said, “I feel like a Projector, not a Generator”, I looked at other parts of her chart and understood why she may feel that way.
Much of self-help and coaching is focused solely on us, how we feel, and what we need to feel good or ok with ourselves. The turning inward is needed as we uncover and shed all the people-pleasing behaviors and the tunnel vision of what we think we ‘should’ be doing to be happy (get the next promotion, succeed at a goal, etc,).
But it’s only half the story.
We still interact with the world around us, we still have to show up in our jobs, families, and friend groups and contribute to society at large. This where Human Design is helpful in broadening our perspective as we work through transformation.
While I can’t get away from typing, other than to make my own software (probably not going to happen anytime soon), I can reframe the Types in this way:
Alchemists and Time Benders – Have sacral definition. Time Benders also have an energy center motor connected to the throat.
Initiators – Have an energy center motor connected to the throat. Do not have sacral definition.
Orchestrators – Do not have sacral definition or an energy center connected to the throat.
Calibrators – Have all energy centers open.
This way, we’re talking about the energetic definition within the chart, not which “roles” each of us plays in society.
I invite you to look at your chart, and contemplate it through the lens of defined/undefined energy centers, not what your “Type” says about you. How do you look at it differently?
Don’t have your chart yet? Run it here.
*Quantum Human Design language with traditional language in parentheses. Quantum Human Design is a trademark of Karen Curry Parker.
