Human Design
Human Design Chart Guide — Read Your Bodygraph
A Human Design chart is built from two moments: your birth, and a point roughly 88 days earlier when the sun had moved 88 degrees. Planetary positions at both moments activate gates, gates join into channels, and channels define centres. A defined centre works in a consistent way; an open centre is more variable and picks up the room around it.
The two calculations behind the chart
The black side of a chart is your personality: the planetary positions at your exact time of birth, which correspond to what you are conscious of about yourself.
The red side is your design: the same calculation run at the moment the sun sat 88 degrees earlier, around three months before birth. This side describes the part other people often see in you before you do.
Accurate birth time matters. A shift of a few minutes rarely changes the shape of the chart, but a shift of hours can change which centres are defined.
Centres in plain English
Nine centres sit in the bodygraph. A centre is defined — coloured in — when a complete channel connects it to another centre. Defined centres are consistent: they behave broadly the same way whoever you are with. Open centres are the opposite, and often the place where you are most sensitive to other people.
Head and Ajna
Where questions arrive and where they get turned into ideas and opinions.
Throat
The part of you that turns everything else into words and action.
G Centre and Will
Sense of direction and identity, and the capacity to commit and follow through.
Sacral and Root
Available working energy, and the pressure that gets things started.
Spleen, Solar Plexus
Immediate instinct about safety, and the emotional weather that moves in waves.
Channels, gates and hanging gates
Each centre has numbered gates on its edges. When you carry both gates of a pair, the channel between them completes and both centres become defined. When you carry only one, it is a hanging gate: a theme that is present but looking for the other half, often from another person.
This is why charts change character in company. A hanging gate meeting its partner gate in someone else temporarily completes the channel, and people describe feeling different around that person.
Reading two charts together
Comparing two bodygraphs shows three things: channels each person carries alone, channels that only exist when the two are together, and centres one person consistently colours in for the other.
The last of these is worth naming carefully. A defined centre meeting an open one is a description of influence in one direction, and it is far easier to handle when both people can see it drawn.
How to hold it
Human Design is a modern synthesis of several traditions. It is not scientifically established and it is not a diagnostic system.
Read the chart as a set of descriptions to test against your own experience. Keep what matches; leave the rest.
How this helps day to day
In practiceNotice your open centres
In practiceUse your defined strengths
In practiceManage energy honestly
In practiceName a hanging gate
Looking further ahead
AheadPlan collaborations
AheadDesign your environment
AheadRevisit as you change
AheadExport and keep it
Questions people ask
- What is a Human Design chart?
- A bodygraph built from planetary positions at your birth and at a second point about 88 days earlier, showing nine centres, 64 gates and the channels connecting them.
- What do defined and open centres mean?
- A defined centre is connected by a complete channel and behaves consistently. An open centre has no complete channel and is more variable, often amplifying what is around you.
- Do I need my exact birth time for Human Design?
- Ideally yes. Minutes rarely matter, but an error of a few hours can change which gates and centres are active.
- What is a hanging gate?
- A gate you carry where the matching gate of the channel is missing. The theme is present but incomplete, and it can be completed temporarily by another person's chart.
Keep reading
Biorhythm theory, astrology, numerology and Human Design are not scientifically established. Everything here is offered for reflection and entertainment, not as medical, psychological, financial or safety advice.