In this liminal space, I’ve been pondering timelines, alignment, North Node, and putting the conceptual into practice. Without concretizing anything. With small adjustments. Even a change in direction of a small degree makes a tremendous difference in trajectory.
Playing My Role
As I delve deeper into Human Design, I can see with increasing awareness how my definition, profile, channels, etc play out. Part of my profile is line 3. Traditionally named the “Martyr”, role 3 is the Warrior and Discoverer. Through trial and error, bumping into things, people bumping into me, those with a third line in their profile discover what works and what doesn’t.
Discoveries and mistakes find them. People with a role 3 are here to make mistakes. It’s their job. They have to find what doesn’t work and to tell us about it. They can’t know anything without trying it. That’s their process.
Steve Rhodes, Bhan Tugh
They are called Martyrs because in a way they are sacrificing for society. In a society that values a particular brand of success, any type of mistake is seen as a failure. And failure as a personality defect. They get judged for their role and process, which have a transformational function. The Discoverer is testing the foundation of the house before role 4 (The Opportunist) builds the foundation of the second floor.
(So how line 3 plays out depends on whether it is on the Personality or Design side. The different profiles with a line 3 are 1/3, 3/5, 3/6, and 6/3.)
If we stop to think about it, a life of trial and error and physically or mentally bumping into things and people can be stressful. I have, for example, all these bruises from meeting table corners. Or I’d have paw-shaped bruises. I’ve also learned to check my clothes for food crumbs before leaving the house.
Here’s the thing – I’m built for this. This is my design. Resilience is embedded. Stress and suffering come when I am not aligned. When I believe the mind, distrust my inner wisdom, act through my conditioning to fulfill other people’s expectations of me. Or when I drink the kool-aid and buy into other people’s judgment of my natural being.
Perhaps this is one reason stress leaves different marks on us. We know we are all individual and Human Design may be one lens that can help unravel this difference.
Understanding this about the third line in our profile, for example, can help us not landslide into self-blame or judgment about being self-focused. Or see life as a series of mistakes. It is our process, our role. This is true for all of us.
Individual Circuitry & Melancholy
Another point of interest is that I have individual circuitry, which has a mutative role. These are changes that benefit the collective and are not predictable. Not their form nor their timing. People with individualistic design experience melancholy, this waiting and this void from which the new suddenly appears. So much creativity can be birthed from this melancholy.
Yet we often mislabel this as depression, as an existential crisis. What happens next? Some people unnecessarily get medicated or even institutionalized.
Again people with this design are built for it. So long as they don’t take on the projection and definition from the outer world. It’s powerful when they fully embrace it to channel their creativity.
We are Built for This
Resilience is on everyone’s mind and lips these days. I am myself a certified HeartMath Resilience trainer and self-care coach. We use certain parameters such as heart rate variability and ideas such as the Polyvagal Theory to improve our coherence and resilience. It is still somewhat a homogenized approach. What if we knew, as a starting point, that we are built for this. We are our designs, and our designs support our life force. So we start with discovering and understanding our design.
I’m built for trial and error, discovery through experience. And maybe you are a hermit and you are built for all that alone time. It doesn’t make you feel lonely; it’s essential for integration.
Human Design is a system, another lens and philosophy. It’s not the end all and while this “fresh perspective” as one of my friends called it can be seductive for the mind, it’s experiential and empirical. What is for me may not be for you; what is correct for you may not be for me. The biggest gift here is to remember we are all unique, and we can see that in our design. We all have a role and purpose and by virtue of that, we are all worthy and we are made for our life. Consciousness is evolving through us. Respect our own life force, energy, and frequency and that of all others.
I’m made for this and so are you. We are the answer to our questions.
