How to Read Your Human Design Bodygraph

The bodygraph is the graphic map of your energetic makeup. The stylized body shape carries 9 centers (the geometric shapes), 64 gates (the numbered points on the centers) and the channels that join two gates each into one continuous line. Together they make up your unique energetic blueprint.

Human Design draws on astrology, the I Ching, the Kabbalah and the chakra system for this. The 9 centers are a further development of the seven classical chakras, and the 64 gates match the 64 hexagrams of the I Ching. The bodygraph gathers all of it in one picture.

The same makeup can also be shown as a Rave Mandala, the circular view in which your 64 gates sit around the zodiac wheel. At Birth Codex you can switch between both views in your reading.

The 9 centers are the first thing you look at when you read a bodygraph. Each center stands for a theme of life: Head and Ajna for thinking and perspective, the Throat for communication and action, the G Center (Self) for identity and direction, the Heart for willpower, the Sacral for life and work energy, the Spleen for intuition and health, the Solar Plexus for emotions and the Root for pressure and drive.

A center is either defined (filled with color) or open (white). This one distinction is the key to the whole bodygraph. It shows where your energy is constant and where you are receptive.

The 64 gates: Each gate is a single theme, anchored in one of the 9 centers and linked to an I Ching hexagram. The gates that were activated at your birth carry the fine nuances of your personality.

The 36 channels: A channel forms when both gates of a connection are activated in you. Energy then flows continuously between two centers and defines them both. Your channels are the fixed lines of your system. They decide which centers are colored.

Conscious and unconscious: Your gates come from two levels, the Personality (what you experience consciously, from the moment of birth) and the Design (what works unconsciously, from a point about 88 days before birth). In the bodygraph they carry different colors.

Defined centers are your reliable energies. Here you function consistently. You bring these qualities into every situation, whether you want to or not, and you radiate them to others.

Open centers are not a weakness but your fields of learning. Here you take in the themes of other people and amplify them. That makes you receptive and empathic, but it can also lead you to mistake someone else's tension or pressure for your own feeling.

When you read, it pays to observe: which themes occupy you most in company, such as recognition, pace or decisions? Often an open center sits exactly there, one in which you learned to prove something you do not actually need to prove.