The True Nature of Us

A dear friend of mine just discovered he's been living a lie for twenty years.

He's spent two decades charting his astrology and studying his Human Design. It's been central to how he understands himself. But there was always something off — something that didn't quite fit.

It wasn't until recently, when he got his passport to go on a cruise, that he finally saw it: his birth time was wrong. AM instead of PM. One tiny detail that changed his entire chart.

He'd been living as the wrong design for almost half his life. And the moment he saw the correct one, everything clicked. He started practicing what it actually meant to be who he'd been all along — the person who was always there, just buried under someone else's blueprint.

Something that simple. Something that small. And it shifted the way he saw himself entirely.

Isn't that true for most of us?

When Difference = Sameness

For much of my career, I told you I was a rebel. That I did things differently. That I walked to the beat of my own drum.

And I did — for parts of it. But for much of it, I was going against the grain only to fall into the trap of sameness. I hated following trends but I wore deep grooves into my own patterns without realizing they were just as confining as the systems I was bucking.

Because here's what I've learned: oftentimes, bucking a system is really just going with the system. You're still defined by it. Still trapped in its cycles. Still reacting to it instead of moving from your own center.

As I've walked through this season of Reclamation, I've been watching my patterns. Noticing what's kept me safe versus what's kept me stuck. I've had a lot of experience moving through anxiety and grief, working through disconnection — but it wasn't until the Universe dropped something in my lap that I realized I needed to burn everything to the ground to step into this new phase.

And even in the slowing down, even in the rebuilding, my old patterns are still running. Because unhooking from them takes more than awareness. It takes action.

I Am the Medicine

This past weekend, I attended an Ayahuasca retreat with a group of women who were stepping into their own higher consciousness and awareness.

The medicine helped. I won't pretend it didn't. But the real shift didn't come from the Grandmother. It came from the company of other women. From seeing myself in them. From sitting in a circle where nobody was trying to be someone they aren't and everyone was willing to be seen.

Because at the end of the day, it doesn't matter whether you take plant medicine, go on a silent retreat, or have someone mentor you. The deepest awareness we can access comes from the company of others — when we're willing to see ourselves reflected in them.

And this retreat showed me that as much as I've been looking for answers outside of myself, I am the medicine. I am the one with the gifts, the talents, and the experience to help myself. Looking outside of myself for answers gets me nowhere. It gets me stuck. It keeps me in a loop.

I've known this intellectually. But feeling it in my body — truly landing in it — was different.

Living Outside Of My Own Design

For most of my entire career, I've been living outside of my design. It's only in the last six years that I've begun to understand who I really am.

I'm really good at working. I've proven that over and over. Long hours. Hard work. Pushing through. Making things happen. Initiating and starting revolutions. But the one thing that was missing was that I wasn't moving the way my system actually moves. I was moving against the world or with the world — never from my own center.

Mark Nepo writes that birds can't fall out of the sky and fish can't drown. But when we try to live in an environment that isn't ours, it can crush us. It's about finding the places where we can thrive. Living by the design we're meant to live.

You don't have to believe in Human Design or astrology to know this. There's an intrinsic knowing of whether you're in alignment or not. You can feel it. In your body. In your energy. In how easy or hard everything feels.

Like me trying to work Monday through Friday, 9 to 5. It has never worked for me. And I keep forcing it. Just last Friday, I had a whole day to be creative and I fell into an old pattern of wondering what I was supposed to be doing — because I hadn't given myself enough space to integrate. To find my creativity. To practice what slowing down actually means instead of just talking about it.