Reflection of the week: When Meaning Becomes a Defense
Originally published on Substack
This article is part of Dirk’s ongoing newsletter Reflector’s Reflections. You can read, comment and engage with the original post on Substack.
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Every week I enjoy reflecting on the quality of the current neutrino weather and how it may invite us into a particular aspect of our human experience with a little more awareness.
This week, the Channel of Abstraction (64–47) comes into the foreground.
It is one of the most remarkable capacities of the human mind: our ability to gather experiences and gradually distil them into meaning. It is through this capacity that we tell stories, construct cultures, write history and create narratives that help us understand both ourselves and the world around us.
Anthropologist and historian Yuval Noah Harari has beautifully illustrated how much of human civilisation rests upon this uniquely human ability. We are, perhaps more than anything else, meaning-making beings.
Without this capacity, there would be no religions, no science, no philosophy, no psychotherapy and no Human Design.
Meaning is one of humanity’s greatest gifts.
Yet every gift casts a shadow.
As Osho often reminded us, Existence itself requires no explanation. A flower does not bloom because it has found the meaning of life. A river does not ask where it is going. Life simply expresses itself or as he stated it “Life is enough unto itself!”
It is only the human mind that insists on making sense of everything.
Over the past twenty-five years of working with Human Design, I’ve become increasingly fascinated by this paradox.
Human Design offers us an extraordinarily rich language through which we can understand ourselves. It gives us concepts, structures and maps that often illuminate aspects of our lives with remarkable precision.
But I have also witnessed another movement.
Sometimes the mind quietly appropriates this language.
Instead of becoming more present to our experience, we become increasingly skilled at explaining it.
We explain our resistance.
We explain our relationships.
We explain our fears.
We explain our suffering.
We explain why we are stuck.
And before we know it, explanation has become another way of remaining safely inside the mind.
This isn’t a limitation of Human Design.
It is simply the brilliance of the mind itself.
One sentence has stayed with me ever since I studied with Ra Uru Hu in Ibiza more than twenty-five years ago. He repeated it to us again and again:
“Don’t believe anything I say. Experiment.”
At the time, I understood those words as an invitation to verify the mechanics of Human Design for myself.
Today I hear something much deeper.
Don’t replace your experience with an explanation of your experience.
Observe first.
Remain present.
Allow life to reveal itself before the mind rushes in to interpret it.
Ra also encouraged us not merely to repeat his understanding, but to allow our own experiment to mature into our own seeing. My recently completed book, Understanding Our Energetic Architecture – Human Design as Your Inner GPS for Awareness, and the online training I am currently preparing are both expressions of that invitation. They are here to share how I have gradually come to understand it through more than two decades of living, practising, accompanying others, and allowing Human Design to enter into dialogue with psychotherapy, meditation and anthropology.
Perhaps that is one of the deepest interests I now carry:
Moving from knowledge to embodied knowing.
Not how do we accumulate more information.
But how does understanding become something we live?
This has gradually become the heart of the course I will be launching this autumn:
Embody Your Design – An Embodied Framework for Integrating Human Design into Therapeutic Practice.
As I continue preparing the first cohort, I’m having individual conversations with prospective participants. These conversations are not interviews in the conventional sense. They are simply an opportunity for us to explore together whether the training is aligned with where you are in your own journey and with the way I approach Human Design.
If this reflection resonates with you, or if you are curious about the training, you’re warmly invited to reply to contact me (atashdirk@gmail.com).
Warmly,
Dirk
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If you want to explore how I see Human Design as a lens at service of therapy, don’t hesitate to consult my book, it’s on Amazon for you!
The Neutrino Weather for this week is available to the Inner Circle.
This week, the Neutrino Weather is bringing our attention to a potential to see the life affirmative frequencies that are there if we find the strength inside to eliminate negative feelings and oppressive thought patterns. [See the Neutrino Weather full video in the inner circle bellow]
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