Are you living your own life, or the one you’ve been conditioned to live? How do you know? How can you find out? And if you don’t like what you find, how can you change it? Your Human Design Life Chart has the answers.

Last time, we explored Hexagram 46, which showed us how to embrace the gifts that the world offers us. Now, we shift gears as we go into what’s known as the Spleen Center of the Human Design Life Chart. Which has to do with our sense of health and wellbeing, our immune system, our lymph system, and ultimately, the fear of survival.

The first gate we come to in the Spleen Center is the 18th, which I call “Improving.” In the traditional I-Ching, this gateway is called “work on what has been spoiled by the parents.” So, we can see that we are dealing with a gateway of conditioning, the conditioning we’ve received from our parents, teachers, priests, social groups, etc.

This is why I also like to call this the “Go to hell” gateway. The great thing about this gateway is that while it shows us that we might be, in one way or another, in hell—i.e. being held back or held down by someone else’s dogma—it also shows us the way out of hell. And that is to find your own truth and follow it.

Anyone who comes across gate 18 in their chart has to come to the realization at some point, that pretty much everything they’ve been told about life is… questionable (to put it mildly). A lot of it is just plain nonsense. And none of it really applies to the individual. 

Anything to do with Gate 18 is collective, comparative and most certainly NOT personal. It is about systems and processes and finding better ways to do things. It can have a certain kind of perfectionist streak in its procedures, but again, this perfectionism is absolutely NOT personal.

Let’s see how this plays out in the Human Design Life Chart line by line:

First Line: Being Paternalistic

The first line here is called “Being Paternalistic: The difficulties involved in updating male traditions.” We’re all aware that there is really a massive imbalance in the male patriarchal systems at play in the world. We don’t have to look very far to see it, particularly here in America. From pay inequality to the male control over women’s reproductive rights, the imbalances are clear, and they are many.

The first line here is interested in finding some balance. There is great difficulty in updating male traditions, but there has to be some equalization. That is really the foundation of the 18th gateway. It says, “Am I in hell or is there a way out here? How do I get out? How do I bring balance? How do I bring love into the world?” And the answer, in this instance, is “step by step.” You have the endurance to gradually bring practical modifications to ancient judgments. So, we see that things need to change, but changing them is a gradual, logical, and methodical process.

By expounding life from traditional views, you’ll remain stuck in someone else’s past. A lot of traditions are being pushed aside these days, some of them barely hanging on by a thread. But some of them are so entrenched, so much a part of our history, that we don’t even see the ways in which we adopt and expound them. But, when you simply adopt the traditional viewpoints that the world likes to feed us, we’re not going to get any growth whatsoever, especially when it comes to patriarchal constructs.

Second Line: Honoring the Goddess

The second line here is a bit of a puzzle for many. It took me ages to work out what this line was all about. But it turns out that as the first line is very much about the male side of things, the second line has a lot to do with the feminine. So, I came to the conclusion that the real name for this line is “Honoring the Goddess: Instilled fears involving the power of the feminine.”

Again, any woman will know the displacement that’s taken place both in the modern day, and in times past when women who had any semblance of power were squashed, or in the worst cases burned at the stake, simply for having a wisdom that was natural to them.

This is why we so often see a tendency to suppress the feminine side of our nature—men and women alike. And the second line, in its very natural way, is asking us to be watchful of this impulse to suppress the feminine. It wants us to honor the feminine, to honor mother nature, the mother planet that nurtures us. And that natural act of honoring the goddess here helps to bring us out of this state of self-denial.

Third Line: Progressing

The third line always has a pioneering quality. It wants to break out and try new things. And here, the line is called “Being Impetuous: Driven to break with the past and get to the future, now!” So, there is a real urgency to break away from the orthodoxy, to get away from being told what to do by people who think they know better.

Examining what is no longer needed in your life gives you the possibility to be free of it. The only person who can know about your life is you. You’re the one living it. That’s the most important thing to realize. This is your life. You’ve been subjected to a lot of programming, a lot of other people’s input and ideas. But this is your movie, your universe.

The danger here is the potential to focus only on the negative. If you’re always in a state of pure reaction, rather than actually finding something that is relevant and in attunement with your own life, you run the risk of missing the point. So, the key is to live your life your way, but that means being in touch with your Human Design Life Chart and trusting your Type and Authority to help you find out how to bring about this improvement in your life.

Fourth Line: A Call to Meditate

The fourth line is called “Allowing things to be: Attempting to cure symptoms and not causes.” This is a very common tendency, to just fix something a little bit rather than getting deeper into it and finding the real root of the issue.

Going to the heart of problematic issues, you see whether or not you actually attract them. As long as you follow somebody else’s path, you’re going to run into things that really don’t relate to you at all. There is a call to meditate here. A call to really have a look within and find your own clarity. It is a time to be really careful about how you respond to the input you are getting from the outside—be it praise or criticism—and to really drill down into discovering the things in your life that really resonate with you.

Mental anxiety and procrastination are brought on when you indulge others’ criticism. If you take criticism personally, you can run into trouble. It can really trip you up. But if you are able to step back and look at any mistakes or perceived mistakes as a failing in the system within which you were operating, rather than a personal failing on your part, you’ll open the doorway to making improvements.

Fifth Line: Self-Correcting

The fifth line here is called “Self-correcting: An integrity to resolve conditioning through being alert.” Fifth lines always have that potential to lead, to guide, to oversee and manage things. But they have to be practical. There has to be a practical approach.

Breaking free from conditioning requires quite some effort, quite some awareness and quite some integrity. And this integrity is an inner integrity. It says, “I’m going to get through this. I’m going to work this out, whatever it takes. I’m going to look at this conditioning and I’m going to look at these things in my life that don’t resonate.”

This inner integrity allows you to escape from things that have been drilled into you. The idea that we are all born in sin, for instance. We live in sin and die in sin*. This is somebody else’s mantra, and it might not assist you in any way. And taking things like this on board only serves to cause and maintain imbalance.

So again, it’s about finding what is true for you and self-correcting your course away from what isn’t. The fifth line really shows us how that can take place. Anywhere in our life where we tend to be reactive or we’re stuck in somebody else’s dogma, something approaches, or some interaction takes place that holds up a mirror for us. This mirror reflects whatever that conditioning is that we’ve been stuck in. And in that moment, we can self-correct.

Sixth Line: Being the Buddha

If you know the Buddha’s story, you know he really went through it. He had a life of luxury and relaxation for many years, and then around his Saturn return, aged 30, he suddenly realized there’s more to be seen here. So, he goes on a 7-year pilgrimage. He tries out everything, does all the initiations, experiences all the hardships, progresses through all the things he’s told to do. And in the end, he gives up. And that is the moment where the resolution comes. He transcends all the conditioning and all the dogma he’d been fed.

That’s why the sixth line here is called, “Being the Buddha: going beyond all conditioning.” Because the 18 requires something of a dedication to go through hell, to go through the pains of coming to terms with the fact that all of what we’ve been told is questionable, we have to find our own truth.

If you’ve got the 18 with the sixth line in your design, you’ll see that you dedicate yourself to universal concerns and spiritual development for all beings. There’s a part of you that can see the way through, out of conditioning, out of hell, and into reality.

That’s the bottom line with the 18. This gateway reminds us that a lot of what we’ve been told, a lot of why we’re towing the line, is somebody else’s trip. We’re giving our power away unnecessarily into other people’s traditions and concepts and ideas, and the 18 gives us that reminder: find your own truth.

That’s the 18th Gateway. We’ll check in again soon. To learn more about Human Design, and to discover how your own Human Design Life Chart informs and shapes your life, get your Free Human Design Report today.

*(The word “sin” derives from the word to “forget.” Sure, we’ve all forgotten, but we can begin to remember why we came here and what’s involved. Human Design opens that doorway for you).