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Embodied Energy Chart

The Embodied Energy Chart is a single picture of how a person's energy is said to be put together: where it runs the same way all the time, where it takes its colour from other people, and how the person is suited to making decisions. It follows the Human Design tradition, which Ra Uru Hu began setting out in 1987 and which draws this picture as a "bodygraph". The structure is the tradition's; the name, the drawings and every word of explanation here are our own.

It is a reflective framework, not a science. Nothing in it is measured, and nothing in it is a verdict about anyone. It is offered as a mirror: a set of questions to try against your own experience.

What it is built from

Most charts are cast for one moment. This one is cast for two:

  • the moment of birth, which we call the aware side (the tradition's "Personality"), and
  • the moment the Sun stood exactly 88 degrees of arc earlier along the zodiac, about three months before birth, which we call the built-in side (the tradition's "Design"). Finding it is described under the design moment.

At each moment thirteen points are read: the Sun, the Earth (the point opposite the Sun), the Moon, the North Node and South Node, and Mercury through Pluto. That gives twenty-six positions in all.

Each position is then placed on the gate wheel: the zodiac cut into sixty-four equal slices called gates, one for each hexagram of the I Ching. A planet sitting in a gate activates it. Each gate is cut again into six lines.

From gates to centres

The gates belong to nine centres, drawn as shapes on a figure: Head, Mind ("Ajna"), Throat, Self ("G centre"), Will ("Heart" or "Ego"), Vitality ("Sacral"), Feeling ("Solar Plexus"), Instinct ("Spleen") and Drive ("Root"). The names borrow from the body, but they are symbolic, not anatomy, and nothing on the chart is health advice.

Fixed pairs of gates form thirty-six channels between centres. Here is the one mechanism everything else depends on: when both gates of a channel are lit, from either moment in any combination, the channel completes and the two centres it joins become defined. Nothing else defines a centre. A centre with no complete channel is open.

What falls out of it

From which centres are defined and how they connect, the chart works out, in a fixed order:

What it does not ask

The chart is built only from where the planets sit along the zodiac. It has no houses and no angles, so the same instant gives the same chart in London or in Sydney. Place matters only for turning a local birth time into a universal one. That is a real difference from a birth chart, where the Ascendant changes from city to city.

Birth time matters a great deal, though. The Moon crosses a gate in about ten hours and a line in under two, so a time that is an hour out can move the Moon's gate, and a time assumed to be noon can change a channel, a centre and even the type. Where a value depends on more precision than the birth time has, we say so or leave it out.

In your chart

On the drawing, a filled shape is a defined centre and an unfilled one is open. The numbers around each centre are its gates. A lit gate is coloured by the moment that lit it: warm gold for the aware side, blue for the built-in side, violet where both lit it. A line between two gates is a channel, drawn in two halves so you can see which side holds each end. A * beside a number marks a hanging gate. The same chart is also shown as a ring of sixty-four gates on the zodiac, and as a table listing every position and the gate and line it falls in, so any statement in a reading can be checked.

Next → The aware side

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