Getting to Know Our Blueprint

We are all unique. Cut from the same cloth but with different patterns. Our own blueprint. This is our personality, our constitution, our loves, our desires. Our journey of getting to know our blueprint. Our destiny of full self-expression.

What is the point of getting to know our blueprint?

Is it to be heard, acknowledged, understood, accepted, and loved? To beat the system, so to speak?

Is it self-acceptance, self-love, self-knowledge, and self-mastery?

Whether you believe in karma or reincarnation, the good, the bad, the ugly, and the beautiful frame and filter our lives.

We are here to experience, to learn, to grow, to transcend, to transmute… to break it wide open.

Where is the starting point?

The blueprint, our map of consciousness, seems like a good place. To know where we are going, we must know where we are. There are many ways getting to know our blueprint and it’s all very individual. For many people, it calls us to draw on and go beyond our ancestral heritage and lineage. In this article, we only suggest a few venues.

We are made of stardust. Literally. About 40% of our body or 2.8×10²⁷ atoms are made of stardust – that’s over 90% by mass.¹

The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.

Carl Sagan

At birth, the moment we emerge into the world, the stars are aligned in a specific constellation. These forces are fields of energy and specific patterns “endow the newborn with pure potentials, invisible and untried. These energies can be experienced internally, even though they are externally intangible.”

The time of our birth is no accident. We chose it. Our astrological blueprint contains within it our propensities, personality strengths, physical vulnerabilities, and emotionality. It speaks to our nature (Mutable, Fixed and Cardinal), elements (Fire, Earth, Air and Water), elemental body (Energy Body, Physical Body, Mental Body and Emotional Body), path (action, feeling, commitment, etc), and strengths (transform, harmonize, nurture, etc).

It is believed that the soul whispers its name (or vibrational signature) to the mother. The name we are given is no accident, though sometimes not a perfect earthly echo of our energetic imprints. Nonetheless, there is power in our name. We can full activate our vibrational signature, over space and time, with practiced inner work and continual opening to the cosmos.

“The name is our “tool box” at birth, indicating the strengths, aptitudes, and predisposition we have brought with us into this lifetime. The birthdate, on the other hand, indicates what we have come to master and to accomplish. The interaction of these two forces – who we are and who we are being challenged to become – result in what our life looks like and whether we are working harmoniously with our life or rejecting the opportunities that come our way”.²

Is it surprising that numbers can be insightful? When the whole universe is mathematical – fractals, golden ratio, sacred geometry…The nine number patterns or Archetypes seen in Numerology for example are fascinating. It tells of a journey, a hero’s journey, from individuality, singleness, and new beginnings, to companionship, foundation,  change, mastery, and the return of the Prodigal’s son. Into an awareness of the transpersonal. More or less the same storyline for everything that is number-based – Tarot, Jin Shin Jyutsu…

The 12 Common/Primary Archetypes as used by Carl Jung, or Caroline Myss’ 70+ Archetypes (as discussed in Sacred Contracts) are universal human motifs that we play out. Universal, even mythical. These were first recognized by Plato, who called them Forms.

Although Archetypes are impersonal patterns of influence that are both ancient and universal, they become personalized when they are a part of your individual psyche.

Caroline Myss.

While we are unique, “there exists a second psychic system of a collective, universal, and impersonal nature that is identical in all individuals.” (Jung) Getting to know our blueprint is using our access to a hyperindividual and impersonal levels of existence.

Each Archetype has its own traits, motivations, desires, fears, strategies, talents, and a motto by which to live. And also shadow sides. Like with all things, we are never one thing. Though one Archetype may be dominant, we are a mix, with several at play, different ones with different people – our family, our boss, our friends, and our foes.

Four cardinal directions – Freedom, Social, Order, and Ego – sub-divide the primary 12 Archetypes into three groups with their unique orientation. Even given different core drives – Ego, Soul, and Self – within each group, all Archetypes of the same group strive towards freedom, social, order, or ego desires.

According to Caroline Myss, everyone has the Archetypes of Child, Victim, Saboteur, and Prostitute, all of which relate to survival.

Our personality – a given set of attributes – is preset, or what we decided to be, to experience life as we designed it. What’s your personality type? Jung Typology Test, Myers Briggs Type Indicator, Keirsey Temperament Sorter instruments, MOTIV,  IPIPNEO Personality Test, Enneagram, Mesomorph-Ectomorph, and Introvert/Extrovert are just some examples of the library of personality tests available.

The Enneagram, with its nine personality types also talks about the three centers (Gut/Will, Heart/Feeling, and Head/Thinking), stress and security points, wings, subtypes, and levels of health. These “active character dynamics”³  are the Critic, The Lover, The Achiever, The Aesthete, The Analyst, The Pessimist, The Optimist, The Trail-Blazer, and The Connector.

Merely knowing which centre we operate from is tremendously helpful. Are you defensive of your autonomy, with anger particularly being an issue? Are you always seeking approval and focusing on how others feel? Do you cope with the world, buffering yourself, with knowledge?

These tests and theories are not meant to pigeon-hole us, but are a platform to catapult our inner knowing. Everyone has balanced/out-of-balanced, lived/unlived, conscious/shadow sides of personality. When we are healthy versions of our personalities, we are transcendent and can more freely express the scale of all human emotions.

To read about types other than your own is to delve into different worlds, different world-views.

Hopefully, it helps us be more accepting and even fascinated by the glitter and pitfalls of being other people. It is to learn that no one type, zodiac sign, or life path is superior. We all live on a spectrum.

Our “habitual focus of attention” as Helen Palmer called it makes “who we are”.

This is seen as the attitude in Jin Shin Jyutsu and the Meridian Family we usually live out.

We know so many things – trivia, fact, birthdates, celebrity news…but how well do we know ourselves?

The stage we set for ourselves includes props, costumes, other players, and other design elements that foil or bring out our characteristics. We are lucky to have so many tools – ancient, esoteric, reinvented, restructured – to explore the inner landscapes and dynamics. They not only highlight our strengths and difficulties but also why we react and behave the way we do, why we gravitate towards certain kinds of people. How we navigate through the world. Getting to know our blueprint is akin to getting the director’s script or brain melding with the playwright.

Human Design, which incorporates I Ching, Western Astrology, Kaballah, and the chakra system, shares how we are tapping more into body consciousness, and energetic of being, rather than living from the mind.

“Mental decision-making is rarely more than a 50/50 guess, and the mind is not a trustworthy personal guidance system.”⁴  The defined centers are where we live. The open centers are our “living classroom and the ultimate source of the wisdom that we share with others.” ⁵ In this system, we also have our own body-based ways to know what is right for ourselves, our inner authority.

Where we are more open is also where we have been more vulnerable to conditioning, where we un-learn the overculture.

Is that not what we are doing?  Going beyond structures and strictures? Moving beyond perceived limitations? Of what we have created or allowed to be created for us?

According to Human Design, we may also gravitate towards people, with whom together we define a whole channel. In this way, we activate a vital flow of energy between the centres connected by that channel, and tap into something more. Something not ordinarily accessible perhaps.

This is our blueprint – the potential and the possibility of our soul plan. Far from being a prison, our blueprint is our playground, a place we decided to hang out, explore, and have some fun. At the same time, we know it is not who we are and it is all completely transcend-able, and transmutable.

So after getting to know our blueprint, go be a code breaker! We always know more than we think we know. Self esteem, according to Caroline Myss, starts off as how well we live up to our tribe’s expectations of us but it is really about being fully responsible for all our creations.

Go back to the basics and have a fresh look at where you come from, and what you brought with you. The fun is the exploration. The unknown and the (re)discovery of the known, with new perspectives. Getting to know our blueprint definitely activates the detective, magician, alchemist, jester, heroine, and all our archetypal energies!