How to read your Body Graph, in the right order

You have generated your Body Graph, and there you are in front of a drawing full of promises: coloured centres, white ones, black and red channels, numbers everywhere, four little arrows, and a banner packed with unfamiliar words. The temptation is to look at everything at once. The result, almost every time: a cheerful sort of dizziness. Good news: a Body Graph reads in a precise order, from the foundations towards the detail, and that order changes everything. Here it is in one sentence: Type and its Strategy first, then Authority, the centres, the Profile, the channels and their gates, and only right at the end, the Cross and the Variables. We walk you through each step, with the classic traps and, every time, the page that goes deeper.

Why read in order?

Because a Body Graph is not a list of facts laid side by side, it is a construction. Activated gates form channels, channels define centres, and it is that configuration which determines your Type, your Strategy and your Authority. Read backwards, the chart turns into a cloud of keywords; read in order, each step lights up the next one. A lone gate, for instance, does not tell the same story depending on the Type of the person carrying it: starting there is like reading the last page of the novel first.

And you start with a head start: under every chart we generate, the banner already hands you four answers out of six. The Type (step 1), the Authority (step 2), the Profile (step 4) and the Cross (step 6) are written out in full. That leaves steps 3 and 5, which you read on the drawing itself. To illustrate the whole article we have taken a chart you may already know: that of Zinedine Zidane.

Step 1: the Type and its Strategy

Everything starts here. The Type describes the way your energy works and meets the world, and there are only five: Generator, Manifesting Generator, Manifestor, Projector, Reflector. Each comes with its Strategy, the smoothest way of taking hold of what shows up: waiting until you can respond, informing before you act, waiting for the invitation, letting a lunar cycle go by. Until you know whether your energy is built to initiate or to respond, the rest of the chart stays theory.

The banner serves your Type up ready-made, but learning to find it yourself on the drawing is well worth the detour: we showed you the method, with five celebrity charts, in How to recognise your Type just by looking at your Body Graph.

Step 2: Authority, your way of deciding

Second key, inseparable from the first: the Authority, the bodily mechanism you make your decisions through. Not the mind: it is a fine observer, but it was never built to decide. There are seven Authorities (Emotional, Sacral, Splenic, Ego / Heart, Self, Mental, Lunar), ranked according to your defined centres: a defined Solar Plexus always gives Emotional Authority; failing that, a defined Sacral gives Sacral Authority, and so on down the list. On Zidane’s chart: white Plexus, coloured Sacral, Sacral Authority, exactly what the banner says.

The pair Strategy + Authority is the absolute foundation of Human Design: that is what you experiment with first, and for a long while, before diving into the rest. We take the seven Authorities one by one in Strategy and Authority.

Step 3: defined centres, open centres

Now look at the nine geometric shapes. A coloured centre is defined: a stable, constant energy that depends neither on today’s mood nor on the people around you. It is from those areas that you influence others, often without noticing. A white centre is open: an area where you take in and amplify the surrounding energy. A wonderful space for learning, and the favourite way in for conditioning.

Count your defined centres, name your open ones. On Zidane’s chart: six defined centres, three open (the Head, the Solar Plexus and the Root). The page for each of the nine centres, with its defined / undefined dynamic, is waiting for you on The 9 Energy Centres.

Step 4: the Profile, your costume for life

The Profile is those two numbers in the banner, like 4/6 or 2/5. They come from the lines of your two Suns: the first number from the conscious calculation (black), the second from the unconscious one (red). Together they describe your natural attitude towards existence, a kind of behavioural costume you wear without thinking about it. Zidane is a 4/6, Opportunist / Role Model: influence that travels through the network, and a life in three acts. The six lines and the twelve Profiles are laid out in The Profile and the Lines.

Step 5: the channels, then the gates that stand out

Time for texture. A channel links two centres, and it only switches on when both of its gates are activated, one at each end. Every complete channel tells a precise story about the way energy circulates in you: start with those, they are the pillars of your definition. Only then look at the gates. First the ones that make up your channels, then the dormant gates: activated gates whose counterpart, at the other end of the channel, is not. A dormant gate is a potential that a meeting or a transit can wake up, not a guaranteed feature of how you work.

A marker to help you pace yourself: Zidane’s chart has twenty activated gates, but eight complete channels. Trying to interpret all twenty gates one by one on the first evening is the surest way to mix everything up. The whole thing, colour code included, is explained on Channels and Gates.

Step 6: only then, the refinements

This is where, and only where, the advanced layers start to mean something. The Incarnation Cross, formed by your two Suns and your two Earths, gives the background theme of your existence: there are 192 of them, and yours only makes sense in the light of everything that came before. The Variables, those four little arrows at the top of the chart, go down into the detail of your biology and your cognition: two arrows on the left for the body, two on the right for the mind. Below the Variables lie two further levels of fineness, and we devote an article to each: the Colours and the Bases. Definition, that is to say the way your defined centres connect to one another (Single, Split and so on), belongs to this step too.

The three traps that catch everyone

Reading it all on the first evening. A Body Graph packs in a formidable amount of information, and every word in the banner opens onto whole pages. Resist: Strategy and Authority are lived out in real life, over weeks, before the rest starts speaking to you. A chart is not to be devoured, it is to be savoured.

Over-reading a lone gate. Reading the page of a dormant gate as though it were a complete channel means telling yourself a story about somebody else’s chart. A dormant gate is a sensitivity, a potential that lights up on contact with others: interesting, yes; structural, no.

Starting at the end. Incarnation Cross, Variables, Colours: the refinements are fascinating, and that is perfectly normal. But without the foundation of steps 1 to 3, they stay mysterious formulas. Climb the staircase in order: the view from the top is far better.

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