Reflector

Meaning

The Reflector is the rarest of the five types of Human Design. Its bodygraph has no defined centre at all: no channel is complete, so all nine centres are white. Gates can still be coloured, alone, but none meets its partner across a channel.

Human Design teaches that the undefined centres take in the energy of other people and amplify it. In a Reflector, every centre does this. The tradition describes Reflectors as mirrors of their surroundings. How they feel from day to day says much about the people and places around them. For the same reason, it sees them as sensitive barometers of a community’s well-being.

With nothing fixed inside, Reflectors are said to change more than anyone, and to need time before committing. The strategy of the type is to wait a lunar cycle before an important decision. Over about a month the Moon passes through every gate of the bodygraph in turn, and each day it completes different channels for the Reflector. Living with a choice through that whole cycle, and talking it over with different people, lets the Reflector feel it from every side. What stays constant through the month is taken as the answer.

Human Design names surprise as the Reflector’s signature: the delight of finding life, and people, unexpectedly wonderful. Its not-self theme is disappointment, read kindly as a sign of the wrong surroundings or of decisions made in haste.

The tradition describes the Reflector’s aura as sampling. It tastes the energy of others without holding on to it, a quality sometimes called resistant. The Reflector can take in a place and stay itself.

In practice

• The environment matters more for Reflectors than for any other type. The tradition suggests that finding the right home, town and company is among their most important choices.
• Waiting a month applies to big decisions: a move, a partnership, a new job. Everyday choices need no such delay.
• Talking things over with several trusted people during that month is part of the process. The point is not their advice, but to hear how the question sounds in different company.
• Feeling different from week to week is described as natural, not as inconsistency.
• Disappointment is a useful signal. It often points back to a place or a circle that does not suit, rather than to anything wrong in the person.

The authority of every Reflector is lunar: no centre inside is steady enough to decide on its own, so clarity comes with the Moon’s cycle. Their definition is none.

Across traditions

Astrology also follows the Moon’s month, through its phases from one new Moon to the next, about 29½ days. The Moon goes round the whole zodiac, and so round all 64 gates, a little faster, in a little over 27 days. Ulune’s texts give the Reflector’s wait as about four weeks, the Moon’s full round of the gates.

Origin and history

The type belongs to the system Ra Uru Hu said he received on Ibiza in 1987. He set it out with Lynda Bunnell in The Definitive Book of Human Design (2011). The Reflector is one of the four types that book describes. Chetan Parkyn’s Human Design (2009) gives a similar account for general readers.

Jovian Archive, the company that publishes Ra Uru Hu’s work, puts Reflectors at around 1.3 to 1.4% of people.

How Ulune calculates it

Ulune casts the Personality and the Design, colours their gates and defines every channel whose two gates are both coloured, with the centres it joins. When no channel is defined, no centre is defined, and the type is Reflector. It is the first test Ulune makes, before any other type is considered.

The strategy shown is “Wait a lunar cycle”, the authority Lunar, the definition None, and the Keys table adds “Surprise · Disappointment”. Without a birth time, the chart is cast at noon and at every hour of the day. A single channel completed at another hour, often by the fast Moon, would make another type, and the type is then marked ~.

Correspondences