What do you fight for? What are you against? When the world throws its injustice and unfairness in your path, how do you choose your battles? The 38th Human Design Gateway sheds some light on the nature of our oppositions.

Last week, we explored Hexagram 58, which highlights how we sense and spread joy. Now, we shift gears into Human Design Gateway 38, which is very different in nature. Where the 58 was in the collective Logic Circuitry, which is concerned with foundational rules, perceptions, belief systems, and aligning with the tried and true, the 38 is in the Individual Circuitry, and as such doesn’t really register with established ideals. It’s all about personal empowerment, and particularly involves acoustics, how people and things sound.

The 38 is engaged with human rights. It wants equal access, equal opportunities for itself. So, there’s a lot of potential contention when it comes up against belief systems that say no, or rules that won’t allow access to certain resources or arenas in life. And this is where the opposition arises.

If you appear to be in opposition to any particular group’s rules and beliefs, you have the potential to get ostracized. So, what I always say to people when they have the 38 in their Chart is that you have to pick your battles. You really have to recognize what it is that’s worth fighting for, personally. And that’s got to be an internal thing. You’ve got to work that out within yourself.

The world is full of injustice. Racial injustice, economic injustice, gender inequality, etc. It’s all over the place. And the 38 registers all of it. Basically, it stands in opposition to unfairness and BS. It’s opposed to things that are not fair on an individual level. The 38 carries within it the potential viewpoint that you must fight with the whole world when all you want is an individual’s right to personal freedom.

Let’s see how this looks as we go through Human Design Gateway 38 line by line:

First Line: Being Impartial

The first line always lays out the foundation of the hexagram. Here the first line is called, “Being Impartial: No need to worry when a situation can resolve itself.” So, while the 38 has this opposition to things that are grossly unfair, the first line says, if it doesn’t really call to you, if there isn’t that huge urgency to get involved, just let it be, stand by and watch. It’s no use wasting your energy on things that will naturally play out in their own way and in their own time.

Do you need to be concerned with every complication in life? Or do you want to struggle anyway? And that can very often happen with the 38th hexagram. It has a degree of contentiousness about it. It likes to get involved. The 38 has this antenna that picks up on injustice, but this can get carried to extremes.

Your drive to continuously fight with life causes you eventually to expand your intuition. You go into things ready to take on the world, but sooner or later you realize, there’s a configuration to all this. There’s a pattern to the unfairness in the world. And the more you engage, the more you see where authenticity lies and where it doesn’t. But remember, the key word to this line is being impartial.

Second Line: Being Courteous

The second line is called “Being courteous: A spirit of conciliation furthers your purpose.” The second line has a very natural approach to life. It’s not necessarily involved with everybody else’s ways of doing stuff. It sees things for what they are, but it engages in a very natural and innocent way.

The second line does not enjoy being interrupted. It doesn’t necessarily understand why it might need somebody else’s input. It’s very happy in its own company, with its own way of doing things. So, when there are interruptions, there’s a reminder to be courteous. You don’t necessarily need to pick a fight here just because there’s an interruption.

Being relaxed in your attitude to others allows for the possibility to intuit your own purpose. Interruption can have the unforeseen benefit of giving you a little bit of a course correction, or a new perspective on things. And sure enough, you’ll have the realization that maybe you do want to get involved in this new thing. Maybe this interruption holds something of interest for you.

Third Line: Being Tenacious

The third line is always pushing the envelope, trying new things without necessarily knowing what might happen. Here the line is called, “Being Tenacious: Accepting challenges as part of your growth.” Third lines often have commitment issues. They want to try something new, rather than returning to or sticking with something they’ve done before. So, here the third line is saying that when something catches your attention, stick with it.

Accept this challenge as part of your growth. It may not be a comfortable thing, but staying true to what you know and who you trust aligns you in your quest for life’s meaning. And that’s what it’s all about. Life wants us to grow. Life wants us to expand. Life wants us to experience it fully.

Staying true to what you know and who you trust aligns you in your quest for life’s meaning. Does life have a meaning or are we just participating in a grand theater here? I would like to say that life does have meaning and that each of us plays a very, important part in it, in our own particular way. It may not make total sense to us, but what’s the alternative? Giving up? Suicide? This is just an extreme form of not accepting the challenge, not going along with it, not finding the resonance that is unique to us in the world around us. If you stick with it, stay true to yourself and the people you trust, your life’s meaning will continue to reveal itself along the way.

Fourth Line: Rejoining

The fourth line here is called “Rejoining: Turning away from being isolated in the face of adversity.” Fourth lines love having people on board. They want to bring people together. But, you have to trust in your own process to receive assistance during seemingly impossible situations.

It’s easy for you to succumb to outside pressures. A lot of people are gonna disagree with you in this lifetime. And sometimes you feel as though you have to struggle against the whole world. Like the whole world’s against you. You might feel as though you have to fit in and wonder why it’s so hard for you to go along with everybody else. But the 38 is not about fitting in. It’s the sore thumb that sticks out.

Sometimes life just throws a curveball that we see as being extremely unfair. We wonder “What is supposed to happen here? Do I just give up? Do I just throw my hands up? Or do I work around it?” There is a call to see if maybe somebody else is getting this same point of view. And maybe if you come together and combine your intentions, you’ll find the creative way through. Rejoin. Get back in the mix and find out who’s with you and who’s not.

Fifth Line: Actualizing

The fifth line is called “Actualizing: Penetrating through misunderstandings by encouraging company.” Fifth lines always have the potential to be the guide, the leader, the one who can point things out and see how to fix things. But they always have to have a reality check. They have to be clear on whether or not what they are getting involved with really relates to them.

When you have a fabulous idea about something, your first call is to see if it can be made practical. Can it be actualized? You have this genius of being able to see when things are out of balance, and how to maneuver around everybody’s misunderstandings and disagreements and get people to combine their intentions and energies. So, a struggle becomes a new pathway, a new opening, a new possibility.

As someone with the fifth line, you often feel like nobody gets you. You have all these people looking to you for answers, projecting their lives and their problems onto you and it can be overwhelming, alienating at times. However, when you recognize who is actually on your side and who actually can get what it is you’re pointing out, the unfairness of a situation can be rearranged into something that’s functional and beneficial for everyone.

Sixth Line: Mistrusting

The sixth line here is called “Mistrusting: Fighting with shadows.” Six lines are always at the top of the hexagram. They can see the whole nature of opposition, the whole nature of the unfairness of the world. And with that comes a sense of responsibility, a sense that you’re here to fix things for everybody. So, there can be a tendency to get overloaded.

Resolving adversity takes time and willingness. It’s not a quick and easy thing to change the unfairness into something that works for people, something that gives people back their freedom. But if you’re not careful, this can turn into simply fighting with life.

Your disciplined nature embraces life after examining your constant tendency to struggle. All the sudden you’ll see that what it is you’ve been pushing against isn’t even there anymore. It’s just become a habit. It becomes a way of life, and you end up dragging out needless tensions.

We all have to be very aware of that potential of distrusting life altogether. That’s how we end up feeling like the whole world is against us. The bottom line of the whole thing is to find the fun, the celebration. And the adventure is in finding that freedom again. That freedom to be wholesome and authentic in our own lives. And we all know what that authenticity feels like.

So, there we are, that’s the 38th Human Design Gateway. We’ll check in again soon. In the meantime, if you’d like to learn more about Human Design and discover how your own Design informs and shapes your life, get your Free Human Design Report today.