Everything about Human Design can get distilled down to a number of things. The first thing is to understand that all of this is about being able to deal with your mind. It’s about being able to replace your decision-making mind with another mechanism that you can use and trust.

That does something special, something really extraordinary, because we’ve never had that in the history of our development on this plane, which is an opportunity to develop and use our minds for what they were intended, which is for awareness. You cannot be aware if you’re trying to decide how to pay your bills tomorrow. It’s not possible.

You can be aware of watching yourself pay your bills tomorrow, but you cannot be aware of deciding you’ve got to do this or that because in the end it’s always going to lead you back to the same mess. You’re never going to get out of it.

So, the first thing to understand about Human Design and your Type, Strategy and Authority, is that it gives you a mechanism to bypass your mind, to take away from your mind the responsibility that it has to spend 24/7 being concerned about what you’re going to do or not do, what you have to say to this person, what you have to ask this person, and so on.

Meeting Your Shadow

What that opens up is an opportunity to give your mind something else to think about, which is really nice, by the way. You’ll find it quite relaxing and relieving not to have your mind constantly putting you in a state of being afraid, concerned, driving you to worry about this thing and that thing and the other thing. You can give it something else to do. What you can give it to do is watch how you lost your way, and it’s an incredible journey. It’s called meeting your shadow. It’s something really incredible.

I’m just like you; I started this life deeply conditioned. I was conditioned for nearly 40 years of my life. I was really unaware and quite ignorant. And I’m an Ego Manifestor, so I did a lot of damage along the way. I had no idea how any of these things worked.

— Excerpt from You and the Shadow

Ra Uru Hu was the Human Design System’s founder and messenger. Ra dedicated 25 years of his life to the development and teaching of the System around the world until he passed away in 2011.