A few short years ago, I learned I wasn’t broken.
I was working with a life coach to help me move through the stuck I was in. I’ve gone through a lot of my life feeling different than what my family or society told me I was supposed to be like. I often felt like a quitter; I couldn’t keep any one interest for a long period of time. Even went through a lot of boyfriends because I’d get bored of the situation and want something new and exciting (I know - my husband loves it when I remind him of that).
Let me give you a little background.
I went to school for veterinary because I freaking love animals, but the student loan debt was crippling, so I moved on to working on the lab side of things. I found that boring as all hell, not to mention I was still struggling to get by financially. So I took on the big, bad world of real estate. It was great for a while. I was winning awards in my first year alone and was able to support my daughter after becoming a single mom.
I never LOVED it…it simply felt like a decent way to make a good living. But you know what wasn’t good about it? The crippling anxiety it caused me. The late nights talking to clients, inability to sleep after every little thing that went wrong (and trust me, a lot can go wrong in real estate), the constant need of getting out there and pounding the pavement to make a living.
I burnt out. Literally crashed and burned. After marrying my now husband and being pregnant with my second child, I became depressed. My anxiety was through the roof, I was eating my feelings away, and feeling like a total failure because I had no f*cking clue what I wanted to do with my life (spoiler - MOST people don’t know what they’re doing with their lives at the age of 27). I didn’t feel connected to my work or to being a mother and had lost all sense of direction in my life.
Until I started working with life coaches. It took 3 tries to find the one who really made an impact, and she was the one who introduced me to this thing called Human Design. She inserted my birth data into a website, and BOOM - literally every negative thought I’d been having was validated as who I was…and in a positive way.
It said I was a Manifesting Generator - someone who is multi-passionate, multi-hyphenate, and needs a lot of new challenges to grow and expand. #I’mNotBroken!
This system is similar to astrology, but also has components of the Chakra system, I-Ching, Kabbalah, quantum mechanics, and genetics. Human Design teaches you how to access your body’s consciousness as a decision-making tool, and ultimately, how to live in alignment by your unique energy.
A few years and a lot of studying later, I’m living my life the way I was designed to live, and teaching others how to do the same. I show people what their charts say is their energetic design or way of being, and how their environment may have conditioned them to act otherwise. It brings such a feeling of validation, resonance, and approval in the self that nothing else I’ve ever found has.
And it goes even deeper than that! Within your Human Design is what’s called your Primary Health System. You see, living by design is more than just your personality - it’s how you’re designed on the inside as well. Your Primary Health System (PHS) provides you with the map of the correct way to take sustenance into your body. I’m sure you took a health class at some point in school that taught you about digestion, but if not, it’s important for your body to actually absorb and convert nutrients from the food you eat for your body parts to use.
AND! The bonus side of digesting properly for your energy, is when you’re digesting food in the way you’re designed to, the rest of your senses are clearer, and you have more connection to your body consciousness to help guide you through life.
The different themes of digestion within the Primary Health System are called your Color: You will have either Appetite, Taste, Thirst, Touch, Sound, or Light, with a unique “Determination”, meaning your way of taking in the food and experience optimally for your body. I’ve included a chart here for you to take a look at. (Note that the chart also includes info on your Cognition, which we’ll save for another article ;) )
Let’s take a look at my body graph chart to give you an idea of how the PHS works. (Yes, I’m showing you my insides)
There are four arrows at the top of my chart. The top left arrow is the Primary Health System. The larger number next to the arrow is my Color, or my theme of digestion. I have a 4, so my digestion theme is Touch, and my arrow points left, so my Touch Determination is Calm. (If you download your body graph chart on my website, you don’t need to read the arrows - it’s written in word at the bottom of the description).
Calm digestion means I take in nutrition best when the atmosphere is calm and without much stimulation (which is real fun when you have 3 young kids at the dinner table). This resonated with me immediately - I feel so stressed out when there’s chaos around the dinner table. I just want to eat in a chill, talking about our day kind of environment. My body has been telling me to eat in a calm environment all along!
Now if you’re a mom and you just downloaded your body graph chart to also see that your digestion is “Calm”, you’re probably screaming in your head, “BUT HOW!?”, and I get that! It’s a learning process, but what works well for me is eating while I’m cooking or eating while the kids’ meals are cooling, so when the time comes to sit down with the rest of the fam, I can simply be in the moment with them. During the day, I like to bring my lunch to my office to sit in the quiet, maybe listening to music or something that doesn’t require much brain activity. There are ways to find your calm when you start experimenting with it.
When you’re eating in alignment with your digestion, you may find you have less heartburn, reflux, bloating, gas, and so on. Hitting your health goals may seem easier, and your brain will be less foggy. This simple switch can literally activate every other part of your body to be in its optimal state.
It’s important to note that working with your energetics is an experiment. Everyone is unique - that’s the point of Human Design. You need to find what works for you, and my job is to guide you in your experiment. I always recommend keeping a journal and noting what you ate, what the environment was like, what time it was, etc. so you can continue to reassess changes or symptoms and tweak along the way.
Your body is one of a kind. You deserve to have things custom-tailored to YOU, not to have to fit into everyone else’s diet culture or nutrition plans. Go download your chart and start having fun with it!
And if you’d like to continued support living by design, come join us in Human Design Society, where I teach new workshops and offer Q&A sessions, hot seat coaching calls, and guest experts every month!
To living by design,
Adriana
xo
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