How do you explain intuition? What is it exactly? It’s a tap on the shoulder, a “heads up” from the universe. But what do we do with it, and how do we know when to follow it and when to dismiss it? Human Design Gate 57 can point us in the right direction.

Last week, we explored Gateway 48, “The Well,” the water source, the freshness of knowledge. And now, we move on into Gate 57, which is called “The Gentle,” or “the Gentle, Penetrating Wind.”

Each Hexagram/Gate in the IChing attunes to particular frequencies, Gate 57 is one of the really subtle ones that gives us a very personal inner knowing that comes spontaneously, once … that when you know, you know, and you may have nothing to back it up and no one around you that also gets it! What are you going to do with it?

Imagine you’re enjoying a beautiful sunny day and then suddenly you get a chill, and you realize you hadn’t noticed that there’s been this very gentle breeze blowing along. We can think of this “gentle, penetrating wind” in terms of intuition.

With intuition, we penetrate into things without necessarily noticing exactly how we got to see or recognize these things. It’s not logical. It’s not an intellectual exercise. It’s a subtle, sometimes barely perceptible change in frequency. In-tuition describes a personal inner learning from our sensitivity to frequencies, particularly in the acoustic range. The question is, do we pay attention to it?

Let’s see how this plays out in Human Design Gate 57 line by line:

First Line: Remaining Calm

The foundation of Human Design Gate 57 is to be intuitive, or to allow your intuition, because in order for it to be helpful, you’ve got to allow it to be. And here, the first line is called “Remaining Calm: The biggest fuss usually hides the silliest things.”

The mind can be so powerful. The disturbances around us can be so intense that even when we have an intuition, the mind can jump in and overthink it, overlook it, or override it. But the intuition isn’t working on a mental, or intellectual level. It is really a vibrational thing.

There are so many triggers that can get us really concerned about our lives and our future. And the fear of Gate 57 is the fear of the future. When you get an intuition about something, it can be startling. “What am I going to do with it?” you wonder, “what if it affects my life dramatically?” So, there’s always an impulse to question whether your intuition is real.

You can’t necessarily tell whether an intuition is real unless you’re truly paying attention to it and adjusting your awareness level, and life, accordingly. So, the first line is telling you to simply remain calm, maintain a steady awareness of your intuition and learn to trust it, regardless of distractions and smokescreens that people put up around themselves.

Second Line: Infiltrating

The second line is called “Infiltrating: recognizing hidden agendas.” Second lines always have the potential to be natural and easygoing. They have a tendency to intuit things out just by happenstance.

It’s very easy for a second line to recognize the agenda in any situation. Your intuition penetrates the meanings hidden from other senses, giving you the option to act nobly or not. In other words, you can see where people are coming from when they don’t necessarily know that you notice, which opens up the potential for taking advantage of them.

On one side, your harmonic nature enriches your clarity and virtue, and in turn, you use your intuition for the benefit of everybody. On the other side, your moodiness allows you to ignore your intuitive recognition in favor of your baser motives. So, that’s something to be aware of. You get an intuition, but the intuition doesn’t necessarily attune you to play fair. There’s always a potential to take advantage of situations.

Third Line: Being Aware

Third lines always have a kind of stop and go approach to things. They say, “am I going to commit or not? What’s my intuition telling me? Is it real? Is it substantial? Is it worth paying attention to?”

The third line here is called “Being aware: sensitive, vibrational attunement.” Everything in this universe, whether you’re looking at a rock, or a person, or a tree or an animal, or a distant star, everything has its frequency. And whether you think about it or not, you know when you’re in a perfect frequency, when you’re in the zone and you’re alert, fit, healthy, and well, and the vibration is just with you. And you know when you get out of balance and you lose that vibrational attunement, you lose your self-confidence, or you catch something that compromises your health.

So, the third line of Gate 57 is telling you to trust this sensitive vibrational attunement. Third lines are always pioneers. You can explore things where nobody else goes. You penetrate into things other people can’t get to. You have the ability to attune, to relate to your perceptions of life from a pure intuition.

The third line, with this pure awareness, has to be really clear. Constantly aware of whether you are stretching too far and going into a place where there is no clarity at all.

Fourth Line: Being Fearless

The fourth line here is called “Being Fearless: Clear intuition sees afar and must not succumb to fears.” Gate 57 is a very personal Gate. You are the one who gets the intuition. The world can just be carrying on as usual, essentially sleepwalking, and then BANG! All the sudden you get this intuition, this sense that there’s something completely different going on. And since the fourth line always wants to convey things to others and bring other people in, its first reaction is “Did anyone else get this? How am I going to convey this?”

Suddenly you see the whole picture where others cannot. You penetrated right into a situation. You can see it, you can hear it, and seemingly no one else can. You must not succumb to fears about how you’re going to tell everybody. Trust your Type and Authority to guide you and you’ll see that maybe some things are to be told, some things are not to be told.

You act rashly on your intuitions in directing others, sometimes treading on people’s toes. You can get this sense that you need to be involved, that you need to influence people or help them. After all, that is your gift. But whenever you push into a situation without being invited, or responding to it with your own clarity, you can end up taking over a situation and finding out nobody really wanted it, and you’re actually distracting them from their own pathway.

Fifth Line: Being Gentle

The fifth line has a leadership quality. There’s always the capability of being a teacher. There’s also the capability to be a rescuer. Because you can see things others can’t, you can intuit how things are going down for people and how people may have been missing out on what’s possible for them. Here, the fifth line is called “Being gentle: attuning to life situations, moment by moment.”

And this “moment by moment” is very much the key with the fifth line. You trust your intuition moment by moment. The picture now may be very different from what it was five minutes ago. Your intuition may say, “Hang on, everything’s changed here. Let’s go this way.” You deliberately evaluate your intuition or forge ahead regardless and deal with the results. But, again, this is a vibrational thing. So, evaluating your intuition doesn’t necessarily mean thinking it over. It means tuning in to it, moment by moment.

Your moodiness can be overwhelmed by events causing you to overlook intuitive updates. Just because we get an intuition does not mean that we won’t get another one a few seconds later or five minutes later or an hour later. But once you get that first intuition, your head might want to run off with it. But the intuition is a very different sense than the mind. It requires the clarity to allow for updates, reality checks, and being in the moment.

Sixth Line: Being Circumspect

You know those times in your life where you’re just getting bombarded by all kinds of different senses and stimuli? The sixth line always has a sense of responsibility. It wants to be able to handle the overload and direct it. So, the sixth line here is called “Being circumspect: curbing the intuition to relevant issues that are at hand.” This is a call to separate the unnecessary noise from the relevant things that are needed here in the present moment.

The difficulty here is that since you have this broad overview of what’s going on, and this ability to fix things in multiple different ways, there is the potential of sometimes getting stuck in that overview rather than being really present in what’s needed. In that moment, you either have the self-confidence to trust and act on your intuition, or not.

And again, we all have our own Type and Authority to go on. Gate 57 is just going to enhance our intuitive capabilities. Our sense of attunement and frequency awareness. The question is, are we going to pay attention? Are we going to allow ourselves to enhance our intuition, to see that there’s a lot more out there. A lot more than we’ve been told.

That’s the wrap up for Human Design Gate 57 and we’ll check in again soon. In the meantime, if you’d like to learn more about Human Design, and to discover how your own Design informs and shapes your life, get your Free Human Design Report today.