Centres

Meaning

The centres are the nine shapes of the bodygraph, the outline of a body that every Human Design chart draws. Each centre stands for one kind of energy or awareness: thinking, speaking, identity, will, life force, emotion, instinct, pressure. Between them they hold all 64 gates, and the 36 channels join them in pairs.

From top to bottom they are the Head, the Ajna, the Throat, the G centre, the Heart, the Sacral, the Solar Plexus, the Spleen and the Root.

Human Design sorts them by what they do. Four are motors, sources of energy: the Heart, the Sacral, the Solar Plexus and the Root. Three are awareness centres: the Spleen, the Ajna and the Solar Plexus, which is therefore both. Two are pressure centres, the Head and the Root, which is likewise both. The Throat turns energy into speech and action. The G is the centre of identity and direction.

A centre is defined when a defined channel reaches it, and the chart then colours it in. The tradition reads a defined centre as a consistent, reliable way of working, the same in any company. A centre that no defined channel reaches is undefined: it takes in what other people bring and amplifies it. That openness is where Human Design locates both learning and conditioning, and it has its own page, undefined and open centres.

In practice

• Type is read from the centres first. No defined centre makes a Reflector. A defined Sacral makes a Generator, or a Manifesting Generator when a motor also reaches the Throat. A motor reaching the Throat without the Sacral makes a Manifestor. Everyone else is a Projector.
• Authority follows a fixed order of centres: the Solar Plexus first, then the Sacral, the Spleen, the Heart, and the G joined to the Throat. A chart with none of these has mental authority, or lunar authority for a Reflector.
• Definition describes how the defined centres join: in one group, or in two to four separate ones, as the page on definition explains.
• Reading a centre usually starts with its state, defined or not, then the gates and channels that touch it.

Across traditions

• The chakras: Human Design presents its nine centres as a development of the seven chakras of yoga. The crown, the brow, the throat, the sacral and the root chakras each became one centre. The usual account says the heart chakra split into the G and the Heart. The solar plexus chakra split into the Solar Plexus and the Spleen.
• The Kabbalah: Ra Uru Hu also drew on the Tree of Life, whose spheres are joined by paths as the centres are joined by channels.
• Astrology supplies the positions. The planets at birth and about three months before choose the coloured gates, as told in Personality and Design.

Origin and history

Ra Uru Hu, born Alan Robert Krakower, presented the Human Design system after an experience on Ibiza in 1987. He taught that humans had changed from seven-centred to nine-centred beings, and dated the change to 1781, the year William Herschel discovered Uranus. This is a teaching of the system, not a historical or biological finding. Each centre also received a correspondence with a gland or organ, listed below as the tradition gives it, never as medical knowledge.

How Ulune calculates it

Ulune casts the 13 bodies at birth and at the Design moment, 26 activations in all, and colours each gate one of them stands in. A channel is defined when both of its gates are coloured, from either layer. A centre is defined when a defined channel touches it, and only then: one coloured gate is never enough.

Defined centres are filled in gold on the bodygraph. The others stay in the page’s colour, and Ulune calls them undefined when some of their gates are coloured, open when none is. Type, authority and definition are all read from the defined centres and channels of both layers together.

Correspondences