If Human Design is real (and I very much believe it is), my defined emotional center means that I arrived on this planet full of emotions.

Even if I had the world’s most perfect childhood, if no trauma ever touched me, if literally every single thing that could have gone right did go right – I’d still ride the wave of emotional ups and downs.

In the Human Design system, people with defined emotional centers need emotions to make decisions. Our ups and our downs are clues about what’s right for us. You know how The Alchemist says, “And, when you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it”?

That’s what Human Design authority systems help us get in touch with. Each of us has a unique way of connecting with nudges from the Universe. When the Universe conspires on my behalf, I know it because of my emotional waves. I feel the ups. I feel the downs. Then, as an emotional authority, I ONLY make decisions once I return to a place of neutrality, when I’m feeling calm, cool and collected. Centered. Equanimous. (That’s why feeling scattered is especially disorienting for me – without access to feeling centered, I struggle to make aligned decisions).

Sam, alternatively, arrived on this planet calm, cool and collected. His resting state (when he’s alone and picky about the media he consumes) is even-keeled. He doesn’t naturally have emotional waves because he has an undefined emotional center.

However, his undefined emotional center, interestingly, means that he actually feels emotions far more acutely than I do. An undefined center in the Human Design system is an amplifier. The people around you, the media you consume, the environment you live in – it enters your undefined center and then gets bigger.

When Sam’s in the presence of gratitude, awe, delight, they multiply in his system.

When he’s in the presence of rage, despair, frustration, those also multiply in his system.

So he needs to be around people who know how to take responsibility for their emotional states. (He doesn’t believe that, naturally. That’s a wifey prescription that he rolls his eyes at, but I suspect in 15 to 40 years, he’ll tell me that I was right.)

But the real reason I’m writing about all of this (besides believing that Human Design is a gift to the world that everyone should know about) is because of a conversation Sam and I had in the car the other day.

“Guess what I learned on my Human Design podcast?” I asked Sam.

He politely put on his “so I can hear Keely better” headphones (which, oddly, look like noise cancelling headphones to me?) and said, “What did you learn?”

“You know how, for years, I would walk into a room and you’d say, ‘What’s wrong?’ then I would become enraged because I didn’t think anything was wrong and I didn’t know why you always asked that?”

“Of course,” he said. It happened so often that we even developed a code for it. He’d tug on his ear instead of asking because I’d become so agitated. I felt like I was fine. Why was he asking me what was wrong?!

“That’s classic ‘defined emotional center and undefined emotional center’ relationship dynamics,” I responded, beaming.

“If I’m at a 2 on the ‘feeling down’ scale, you might feel that down as a 6. It hits you right in the face when you get close to me, because your system, which wasn’t feeling any emotions at all when you were in your own bubble, all of a sudden amplifies my feeling. Then it feels way bigger to you than it does to me.”

“People with undefined emotional centers, like you, can often tell someone with a defined emotional center, like me, where I’m at emotionally before I even register that I’m having feelings.”

Then I grinned and grinned, looking perhaps a touch Jack-Nicholson-in-The-Shining as my eyes widened, waiting for Sam to express his awe.

“Wow, darling,” I was sure he was about to say. “Human Design really IS exactly as real as you believe. I can’t believe I had any doubt! It’s all gone now, as that’s clearly the only appropriate reaction to this tidbit.”

But he didn’t. So I’ll try again next week. Like Urkel, I’m wearing him down. Wearing. Him. Down.

If you want to know your Human Design authority (how to listen to nudges from the Universe/make decisions, you can look up your chart here. I have the paid version so I can tell you what your type means, or you can read a detailed description of all the types here.

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