As we go through life, we learn all kinds of ways of judging and experiencing our reality. Schooling systems, television, and the advice of others offer us many viewpoints from which we can attempt to steer our lives. We are informed that certain choices are "right" and other choices are "wrong," and we are left grasping for an appreciation of our own way. What is our morality, and why are certain choices deemed "better" for us than others?

The Human Design system is an amoral system. It is completely aligned to life and the growth of consciousness. Design shows that there is no one direction more important than another, no one person more important than another. Design shows that each individual, and how that individual relates to their life, is what is important.

Each person is here to live their own life, to take their own responsibility, and, consequently, here to make their own decisions. We are not isolated entities abandoned here on earth, but rather, a symphony of many souls interacting together. When we are clear inside ourselves, in touch with our reality, and true to our nature in our decision-making, we interact in harmony with Existence. When we lose our clarity, feel estranged from our reality and make decisions randomly, there is chaos.

In this article, we look at the decision-making process as witnessed through the Human Design system. In the last section, we examine the Design of Julia Roberts, with particular reference to her authentic decision-making process.

How the arena of Decision making has been transformed

There was a time when most people knew "where they were" in life, in terms of what they could expect to achieve, and what they had to take responsibility for. Consequently, in general terms, decisions were likely to be less frequent and complicated. Women, if they went to school, were likely to become housewives and mothers and were given the parameters to make decisions for those eventualities. Men were expected to follow their father's example and make a living to support their wife and family, and were given the recommendations and expectations for the responsibilities involved.

Toward the end of 1931, the planet Uranus (the Awakener) transited and interacted with the North Node (Human Destiny) to define the channel 25 - 51, the channel of Initiation, and at that time a wholly new order was set in place in the world. Economic depressions in both the US and parts of Europe unsettled the status quo and changed the way in which wealth determines a person's standing in life. With the change in obvious responsibilities came a flood of new decision making situations for everyone. Suddenly, people were finding themselves responsible in situations that they had never faced before. They were responsible for using telephones, buying insurance, fixing travel arrangements, funding pension plans, and keeping abreast of news and technical innovations. More and more information was being released into the world and past knowledge was only partially helpful in dealing with new situations.

Since the 1930's, more and more information has become available, until now, when the "Information Age" is swamping us. In these times we are so completely surrounded with information that it is a wonder we can function at all. From the talking heads on TV, to the advertising bombardment in every area of our lives, from the twists and turns of a video game to the warnings printed on a paper coffee cup, we are inundated with information, most of which has nothing obvious to do with us. How can we cope, and not just cope, but make right and meaningful decisions? We are called on to make decisions in every part of our life in every part of our day. We need to know how to make decisions that are consistently correct for us, and Design shows us exactly how to do this.

Clarify Feelings

In Design there is a center related to the Solar Plexus in the body which ties in to our emotional nature.

The Solar Plexus is the nerve center for feelings related through touch, sound and sensuality; such as hunger, anger, pride, sexuality, anguish, joy, guilt, elation, fulfillment, passion, romance and moodiness. The Emotional Center is apparently complex, but there is a simple commonality, and that is, each feeling comes in a wave. If you can comprehend the movement of a wave, you can comprehend the movement of emotion. As a wave goes up, so it goes down. If, when the wave goes up, it carries you into delight, so it goes down, and carries you into despondency. The emotions take us up to great gratifications, then down to dismal doom, and back up again, and down again.

Life gets difficult when we attach ourselves to a particular part of the wave, with the mistaken belief that we can guarantee certain outcomes in our life's journey. The waves keep moving regardless of what we consider we want, and so our perspective of outcomes changes as well. Throughout time, people have been frozen energetically in moments of intense emotional feelings, and from the moment an emotion becomes frozen, we carry it like a wound. For instance, if we relate a feeling of great love to being fed and cherished, we identify our sense of feeling loved in our life with a full tummy. If, as a child, a parent or sibling disappears from our life, the anguish relating to that person's absence limits us in our emotional interactions later in life because we can always be expecting that we are going to be left. Much healing work is performed when the healer attunes their patient to emotional associations, and attuning to a single association can erase lifetimes of accumulated emotional residues. The moment something reaches the conscious level within us, it is like a light shining into us, and what was hidden or in the dark, dissipates and heals.

Personal Feeling Decisions

In Design, whenever the Emotional, Solar Plexus Center is defined, "turned on" and energized, there are one or more waves being generated. If you have a defined Emotional Center in your chart, you are an Emotional Being, a Feeling person, a "Spirited" person. It means that at any given moment in time, you are somewhere or other on an emotional wave.

If your wave happens to be rising at any particular time, you will generally have a good outlook towards your life and everything it brings in that time. When your wave is in decline mode, you will have a less rosier outlook on your life, and probably feel less inclined to engage with what life brings in that time. Life goes on regardless of where we are in our emotions, but the great understanding for us is to include ourselves in life from a space of inner clarity, and not solely according to the prevailing wave conditions.

With a defined Emotional Center, in the instant that life brings an opportunity, we have a certain perspective of it according to our wave pattern in that moment. If we are feeling "up" in our life, we will most likely have an exuberant "yes!" But, if we commit to the opportunity in that instant, we have forgone the possibility that by the time we fully engage with the new opportunity, our wave will have gone down, and we may feel less than interested in what we have just committed to. Our original "yes!' was conditional upon our feeling "up," and the implied expectations of results from the perspective of "up."

Anyone who has a defined Emotional Center in their Design will have observed the gyrations in their feelings, that sometimes they feel totally in love with life and everything in it, and at other times they feel the complete opposite. Just because one goes down in one's wave is no reason to reach for the ice-cream tub or start a fight, it is just a natural part of the cycle. With the wave gone down, this is not the time to tell everyone and everything to go away and leave you forever, even though you may feel like it! The mood will pass. It is important for you to be clear that the mood will pass. And it is precisely during the passage of the mood that great personal insights are available.

If you have a defined Emotional Center, the lifetime meditation is PATIENCE... Patience, first with yourself, to give yourself the space and time to ride the waves, and patience to allow moments of great excitement and despondency to move through you so you can feel if you have attachments and expectations in those moments. The defined Emotional Center requires that we learn DETACHMENT. Whenever we commit to something because of a sense of expectation, we are missing the point of the experience. Being attached to an outcome limits our experience and blocks us from our innermost truth. The moment we detach from our expectations, we are free to live out the experience to the maximum, through all its highs and lows, through all the intensities of the feelings, and to come through the whole experience fulfilled, complete, wise and connected with life and Spirit.

Imposed Feeling decisions

We live in an emotional world in which all sorts of sensations, some coming to us from our natural environment, and some imposed by other people seeking to get our attention and our energy, constantly bombard our nerves. There are many feelings to be experienced in the Emotional Center, and it is so important that we attune to the ones that concern us directly, and move away from the ones that do not.

If you have an undefined Emotional Solar Plexus Center in your Design, you pick up and amplify the wave patterns emanating from people with defined Emotional Solar Plexus Centers. If you take the waves on as your own, and accept the intensity of the feelings as your own, you start becoming conditioned in someone else's emotional field.

When you are in the company of someone who is very excited emotionally, high up on their emotional wave, and that person goes away from you, you are likely to stay on that emotional high until you meet someone else with defined emotions, in whose aura you are then going to adjust emotionally. If that second person is down in their emotions, you will move in a flash from one extreme of feeling very uplifted, to another of feeling completely downcast. By identifying personally with either of these feeling states, you are opening yourself up for emotional trauma. In decision making terms, if you are flying high on someone else's emotional waves and make your decisions according to that state, you are going to suffer when your reality returns.

But the emotions can be so seductive. "This is the perfect situation/ man /woman/car /house /candy bar/job!" And rush headlong into someone else's emotional projection. We are offered and grasp for desires and sensations and pleasures, and we fail to read the small print that mentions the unfulfillment, the boredom and the disasters.

If you have an undefined Emotional Center, you have another means of making decisions clearly according to you. Do not get swallowed up and spat out in someone else's emotional waves. Be aware of the sensations and guilt that have been exploited over the ages. All religions have known perfectly well that desire can never be appeased, but they have not been capable of telling us how to relate to these sensations appropriately. We are here to experience the range of all possible experiences as humans, but the greatest understanding is that we have these experiences on our own terms, in our own times, according to our own Designs! When we make our decisions according to our own personal Design, we are freely living our own life, and that, after all, is what we came here to do! In next month's article, we shall examine some of the other decision making Designs. But now...

Julia Roberts by Design

Born in Atlanta, Georgia on October 28, 1967, Julia is born into a remarkable lifetime of the unexpected. Not only will she find her own life taking dramatic turns, she also will find herself to be an inspiration to many others who seek to empower and fulfill unusual dreams, visions and concerns.

Doubtless, Julia will have felt a strong kinship to the life of Erin Brokovich, whose part she played to win an Oscar, in that, it appears everyone is against you until you carry and prove a point. Many times in Julia's life, she will find that she has not always been able to do this for herself, simply because she has not entered into a commitment according to her own nature.

In Design terms, Julia is a Triple Split, Emotional Generator, which in simple terms means that she is a strongly feeling, emotional person who is compelled in this lifetime to explore patience before acting on anything. Patience leads to a profound comprehension.

A born leader, with quite an authoritarian approach in her leadership but a clear sense of appropriate fun, she has a great mental capacity to search for her truth with her mind. Constantly, she will find her mental solutions fail to satisfy, but rather, leave her with a multiplicity of possibilities to choose from, and even an underlying sense of futility. She is very clever with her mind but particularly in resolving other people's situations, rather than her own.

In her Design chart, Julia has a connection between the Spleen Center through the Sacral to the Emotional, Solar Plexus Center. I call this particular configuration "the smile." Wherever I have found this configuration in someone's Design, it seems to indicate that person can win their way through life at any instant with a smile. The channel to the left, the 50 - 27, makes for a caring person, and, more and more, Julia realizes that she has to take care of Number One first, to be able to care for everyone and everything else in her world. The channel to the right is the 59 - 6, the channel of Intimacy, where a coy smile can win hearts, and a determination can resolve any conflict situations, simply. Conflict resolution can be a great asset for Julia, but it can also make her feel hesitant about committing to a relationship, because she becomes increasingly aware of all the pitfalls in an unconscious partnership.

An undefined Heart Center can give the sensation to Julia that she does not always have control over her life, but if she relaxes into her feelings and stays alert to the supporters in her life, she will find that she can always access whatever she really needs. An undefined Root Center can come under enormous pressure when everyone else is trying to meet deadlines. Julia is designed as a procrastinator and is well advised to move on something only when she feels she is ready to do so.

Anyone with a defined Sacral and a defined Emotional, Solar Plexus Center has a particular lesson in life of being much in demand but needing to be so completely clear in the area of commitments. All Sacral, "Generator" Designs carry a powerhouse of available energy. People with this Design constantly find themselves caught up in frustrating situations until they realize their whole journey depends on waiting to respond to what life offers, rather than trying to make things happen. Jumping into things on first glance will always bring regrets in Julia's life. Waiting patiently for her own, inner, clear, emotional, feeling response will carry her into a journey through a life she can call her own.

In conclusion

If you are a person with a defined Emotional, Solar Plexus Center in this life, you are going to be faced with decisions, just as everyone else is. The quality of your whole life depends on your relating to your own feeling nature, becoming less identified with the changing feelings and more and more identified with your journey through life. If you are offered an opportunity and you are not clear as to whether it feels right, the decision is plain: do not commit. Waiting until you are 100% clear, without attachment to any outcomes, assures you of an unbounded journey through your life. When in doubt, wait, sleep on it, and see what a new day and a new perspective bring.

If you are a person with an undefined Emotional, Solar Plexus Center, be clear for yourself that you don't get caught up in making decisions in your life according to someone else's emotional waves.

Next month, we shall look at some of the other decision making processes.

© Chetan Parkyn, November 2001