How I use Human Design to Regulate My Nervous System, Part 3

Why the most intuitive women can be the most dysregulated

If you have already read How I use Human Design to Regulate My Nervous System, Part 1 and Part 2, check those out first.

My Spleen is my best friend

My Spleen Center feels like the amalgamation of all of my closest friends combined. My ride or die. My help hide the body and ask questions later. My you got this girl.

I’ll stop right there and fully admit this probably sounds weird to anyone who knows a thing or two about HD. None of these are really typical Spleen traits. But with only two defined centers (Spleen and Sacral), it’s one of only two sources of steady energy that’s mine. Everything else is porous and transitory. Not like I’m nothing, but I know what I can rely on for the absolute truth, and it ain’t my G Center. What’s truly mine, that I can always draw upon at any given moment, is my sacral life-force energy and my intuition. Again, that’s not to say I’ve got nothing else. But when I’m feeling something coming through my G Center, or Ajna, etc., I need to run it through my Sacral and Spleen to fact check it.

So what I really mean is intuition is my best friend. Put it that way, it makes more sense.

What a healthy Spleen actually does

When a defined Spleen Center is in alignment, intuitive hits come fast and hard. You listen to them, stay safe, rinse and repeat. Because at its core, the Spleen is really about keeping you safe. And it’s intuition that does that, not your brain. You get a gut feeling about someone or something and you immediately reverse course. You find out later you just missed something bad happening by a hair. That’s a healthy Spleen.

A few things to unpack there. One is that we are often talking ourselves out of following our gut and bad things do happen. We don’t want to come off as rude so we answer the door and talk to the sketchy guy asking for a car battery jump, or we stay for the whole date, or get in the weird-feeling rideshare car, or walk to our car alone. Etc. etc. etc.

Fortunately for me, I don’t seem to carry the fear of rudeness gene.

The office lady

When I was 6 I was walking home from school (times were different in the late 1900’s) and as I was waiting to cross the street a pickup truck pulled up next to me. The driver rolled down the window and I recognized her. It was the fucking office lady. I didn’t know her name, but she had already been talking me up at school. She kept telling me about her pool and how fun it was to go swimming at her house.

I already had a bad feeling about this bitch.

So she rolled down the window and asked me if I was walking home. I nodded yes (I was pathologically shy, and I don’t use the term pathologically lightly. I was diagnosed the year before as selectively mute, but I had been recently traumatized into talking when I needed to, but that’s a story for another day).

Then she asked me if I wanted to come over. She brought up her fucking pool again. Apparently, she even had a swimsuit I could borrow.

I shook my head no.

She was relentless. She tried convincing me to come over and when that didn’t work she asked if I wanted a ride home.

I still get nauseous thinking about what could have happened if I got in that truck.

I just kept shaking my head no.

(In hindsight, I should have run right? I hate the idea that if she had tried to get out and physically put me in the truck, it might have worked. I’d like to think that if she stepped out of the car I would have run, but it’s a haunting question that doesn’t have an answer so ofc I need to let it go.)

What that day taught me

Listening to your gut keeps you alive. Keeps you safe. Which regulates your nervous system. This is what I mean by my Spleen is my best friend.

I’m not going to sugar coat it: this event was Trauma with a capital T. It left scars that I’m still working through. It caused a level of hypervigilance re: potential abduction scenarios that borderlines paranoid, and I carried that with me from that day forward to raising two girls that I pray never come close to that kind of danger. The fact that I can talk about it now though demonstrates a pretty decent amount of healing around it. I hate that I never told anyone about it then because she got to just keep on being a predator for god knows how long. But I’d like to think she got her karma eventually, either in this life or what followed.

And I also take comfort in what I learned about myself that day. Even before that bitch entered my life I was scared of pretty much everyone I came into contact with. I was already hypervigilant. My nervous system was already pretty dysregulated.

But that day, I was tested. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy, but actually facing a potentially life or death decision (or maybe just “innocent or subjected to abuse” decision - who knows, right?!), I chose correctly. I had a gut reaction, and I followed it. Although I didn’t identify it as a Spleen Center moment at the time (obvs), that moment gave me a sort of confidence in myself when it comes to survival and intuition. I know, without a shadow of a doubt, that I’m going to make it out alive (if I have any say in the matter). That confidence has always been a rock for me.

The Channel of Power

Turns out, not only was it a defined Spleen at play, but it was Gate 57 (the literal Gate of Intuition, where the other gates in the Spleen are about specific situations, 57 is just a general inner knowing) coupled with Gate 34 of the Sacral, the Gate of Power. It is an inner strength, the power to move mountains to take care of yourself, survive, or just do what you want. Together they make the Channel of Power, which is the intuitive power to survive. It’s also known as the “Apocalypse Channel,” meaning when shit hits the fan, this channel is the one that’s still standing by the end of the movie.

Maybe because it’s only one of two channels in my entire chart, with the other one also being a Spleen-Sacral (27-50), I was not at all surprised to find out about this one. I’ve felt it, the whole time, on a visceral level. This is always something I can draw on and feel pretty confident about.

So how was I such a mess?

Here’s the part that confused me for years.

I have intuition for days. Two defined centers, and both of them feed straight into my gut. And I still spent three decades with a nervous system in shambles.

If intuition is the most powerful regulation tool we’ve got (and I will die on that hill), how does someone this intuitive end up this dysregulated?

The first answer is the obvious one. Following your intuition is hard. Especially when you’re a child and you’re forced to do things that don’t feel right for you all day long. And when your nervous system is already dysregulated, it gets even harder to actually hear your intuition, because the stress signals are so much louder.

It didn’t help that the rest of my chart is stacked toward dysregulation to begin with. An undefined Root, an undefined Solar Plexus, an undefined Ajna (I’ve broken all of those down in the earlier parts of this series). Oh, and trauma.

But that’s not the whole answer.

Every gate of intuition is also a gate of fear

All of the gates of the Spleen are gates of intuition. But they’re also all gates of fear. Each one carries a shadow side that you might find yourself wallowing in if you’re out of alignment with the gate. The fear is always the intuition kind of flipped on its head.

Take Gate 28, the Gate of the Game Player. I have this gate in my Unconscious Sun, so it’s actually part of my whole purpose in life. Gate 28 is all about intuitive timing. It’s a gift of knowing the exact right time to do something, and it’s a gift for knowing exactly where you are in time. I mean that in both a literal sense (like knowing it’s 2:32 before you look at the clock) and also in an esoteric sense, having a deep connection with the wheel of fortune (if that doesn’t sound fucking weird to you, you might have Gate 28 somewhere on your chart). It’s known as a risk taker, but to Gate 28 it doesn’t actually feel like risk: it knows the exact moment to jump out of the train, so it’s not really a risk. (Please don’t actually try that one, even if it’s in your Conscious Sun).There’s another component to this Gate related to time but more like the consequence of understanding the limitations of time: it comes with the deep seated need to squeeze the most out of everything. Out of life as a whole and out of every minute of everyday. In alignment, it connects deeply with having a sense of purpose. This can go sideways a lot of different ways: becoming obsessed with productivity to the point of burnout (oopsies), becoming a risk-taking adrenaline junkie (in a bad way) to “make the most out of life.”

Gate 28’s biggest Fear is the fear of death.

And man did she hit the nail on the head with that one.

My discomfort with death is, honestly, absurd. There are literally certain songs I can’t listen to (usually country) because they involve stories about someone dying that hit too close to home for me. When the girls joke about their death in a very silly way (as kids do, apparently), I will actually start crying. Whenever anyone is more than 15 minutes late to come home or come over, my very first thought is that they’re dead.

What I finally understand

Here’s what took me years to see.

The Spleen doesn’t hand you intuition and fear as two separate things. It’s one signal. Fear is just the intuition flipped, pointed at everything instead of the one thing that actually matters.

A healthy Spleen says no to the truck. A dysregulated one says no to the truck, and the country song, and the 15 minutes someone is late, and the thought of my kids growing up and leaving and dying someday.

Same gift. Same wiring. Just turned all the way up with nothing to filter it.

So when I say my Spleen is my best friend, that’s only half true. It’s also the source of my oldest fear. I don’t get one without the other. Nobody does.

Which is why “just trust your intuition” was never enough for me, and probably isn’t enough for you either. You can’t hear a quiet gut feeling over a nervous system screaming that everything is a threat.

That’s the actual work. Not getting rid of the fear (not happening, and I’ve made my peace with that). Getting regulated enough that the intuition can be louder than the fear. Regulated enough to tell the difference between a real hit and an old alarm.

That’s the whole point of this series. Human Design didn’t fix my nervous system. It showed me what I was working with, so I could stop treating my own wiring like a malfunction.

My fear of death isn’t a bug. It’s the shadow of the exact gift that got me home safe when I was six.

I’d rather understand that than spend another 30 years trying to fix it.

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A little about me….

I’m Niki — a holistic health and Human Design coach. Recovering lawyer turned SAHM turned health obsessed turned questioning midlifer. I spent years being told my labs were “fine” while my body fell apart, until I finally connected the dots between stress, the nervous system, and physical symptoms. I realized the stress about the cookie was worse than the cookie. Human Design gave me the missing piece: a way to understand my own wiring instead of fighting it.

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