#31: Exploring the Unique Role of Reflectors in Human Design

In this episode, we crack open the world of the rarest human design type - Reflectors. Making up just 1% of the population, Reflectors are absorbing and amplifying the energy around them, mirroring back the potential of all us. Listen in as we dissect the complex nuances of Reflectors, their interactions with others, and the instrumental role they play in our collective consciousness.

Human design is not just a tool, but a blueprint of our true selves that reveals our conditioning. I invite you to explore your own design and peel back the layers of you!

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Hey there, my name is Corinne Oflin and you're listening to the Calm Entrepreneur podcast. I am a USA Today bestselling author, non-profit executive and organizing nerd with over 20 years experience running my own small businesses. I teach entrepreneurs, telepreneurs and small business owners like you how to organize your business, find more time and deepen your alignment practice to experience more calm and confidence every single day. If you're looking for that intersection between practical business advice and spiritual goodness, then you're in the right place. So sit back, relax and let's dive into this week's episode of the Calm Entrepreneur podcast. Welcome, welcome to the Calm Entrepreneur podcast. I'm your host, corinne Oflin, and this is episode 31.

Speaker 1: 0:49

Before we dive into this week's specific energy type, I wanted to touch base briefly on some general concepts of human design, especially for those of you who may not have caught the previous episodes in this series, or even if you are a regular listener. I invite you to stick with this overview, because repetition is crucial when it comes to learning, and the more you hear stuff, the more readily it drops in right. For me, human design is arguably the most detailed self-discovery tool I've ever come across. Its primary purpose is to guide us in harnessing our energy and steering our lives toward authenticity, making decisions in tune with our true selves and following our life's purpose. It's highly personal and it underscores our unique individuality in ways that I continue to find so profound and so powerful, and for entrepreneurs, this couldn't be more critical. It's a call to blaze our own trails and break away from that hurt mentality and reclaim our power. It's a call to peel back the layers of our unique design, because that is what, inevitably, is going to distance us from the collective in all the ways that we're supposed to be distancing ourselves Like. This is a good thing.

Speaker 1: 2:11

In human design, we identify everybody by five different types. Your type is your energy signature, it's your aura. And despite only having five types in the system, the rest of the method diligently unravels our distinct identities. We can discern our type, our strategy, our definition, our profile, our inner authority, our not self-themes and our incarnation cross, and these are the primary elements present in everybody's chart or the body graph in human design, and they are influenced by the 64 gates, which are then influenced by the celestial bodies. This system offers a rich and profound tool for introspection. It's a means to delve deep into your inner self and, from my experience, coaching others based on their design. It is apparent that there is so much enlightenment and discovery waiting for all of us, and if you have a curiosity about self-exploration and deep understanding and mastering your energy, then human design is worth entering into.

Speaker 1: 3:21

In this series of episodes, we've been digging into the different aspects of human design, starting with type strategy and authority. And if you're eager to know your type, visit my website at Karinoflincom and click on the free human design chart in the menu, and remember to have your birth information handy, because you will need that place and time of birth in order to get an accurate chart. So in human design, we have five energy types and we have now reviewed all of them. In previous episodes We've gone over the manifester, the generator, the manifesting generator, the projector, and this episode is all about the reflector. The differentiation between these types lies in how they exchange energy, how they make decisions and how they use energy in their daily life. Each type contributes unique gifts and strengths to humanity as a whole, and I'd like to clarify that no type is superior or more desirable than another type. Each type possesses qualities that make them distinct, and as we explore the different types and how they interact, it'll become evident that we can tap into the energies of those around us.

Speaker 1: 4:29

Right, and this perspective, emphasized by my quantum human design coach, karen Curry Parker, reveals that everyone has access to the entire human design chart, and I'm going to say that a couple more times. We all have all the chart. The differences emerge in the areas of definition versus openness, and with the BodyGraphs, 9 centers and the 64 gates, the 36 channels, all of these things will be either defined or open for all of us. So, when examining your chart, it is incorrect to say that you do or don't have certain areas of the chart. You have all of the chart, but the way that you experience the energies of certain areas of the chart will either be consistent if they are defined, or variable if they're open. And that's really all that that means. So, to reiterate, we all have all of the chart.

Speaker 1: 5:26

And with that said, let's dive into the final type in this series the reflectors. So reflectors are the rarest type in human design, representing only 1% of the population, and what makes them unique is that they have no centers defined in their chart. They will have some gates defined, but they will have no complete channels and therefore no centers with definition and because the reflector has all nine centers, open or undefined, they are what's considered a non-energy being. They are here to take in the energy of those around them and they experience that energy in an amplified way themselves. And that is the nature of all of our open centers. Incidentally, whenever we have openness in our charts, we take that energy in from others around us and we experience that energy in an amplified way.

Speaker 1: 6:20

But because reflectors have all of their centers open, this is something that they experience all the time, and the purpose of the reflector is to be the mirror for humanity. It is their job to experience the potential of what's possible for the rest of us and then they reflect that potential back to us so that we can do those things in the world. And because of this, the reflector energy is described as sampling and resistant. And it really does make sense when you think about it, because, as a reflector, they are tapping into all the energy around them. They're sampling all the energy in the room at all times and they're reading everything and they are feeling everything, and that's sampling right. But this also allows them to identify the energies that they don't want and they can resist taking those in keeping them from coming on board because they know what doesn't feel good to them. So this mix for reflectors makes them incredibly empathetic, right, but with that comes deep wisdom.

Speaker 1: 7:24

The reflectors' emotional theme is disappointment, and that can come from a couple of different directions. And first, because the reflector can see the potential in everyone around them. They might find themselves struggling to stand by and observe somebody who is not fulfilling their potential, or a team that is not fulfilling their potential, or their coworkers that are not fulfilling their potential, right, and the reflector can see this potential clearly in everyone, and this can lead to deep disappointment for the reflector. And the reflector might also not understand the way that their energy works and they might become overwhelmed by the energy around them and merge with that energy and lose themselves in the process and lose touch with their own purpose and their own potential, and they might not even know that that is happening and that will cause them to have a deep sense of personal disappointment. And the third source for the reflector to feel disappointment has to do with their strategy, and it's about not understanding that they need a lot of time to make the big decisions.

Speaker 1: 8:28

The reflector's strategy is to wait for an entire lunar cycle, that's 28 days for the moon to transit through all 64 gates in the body graph. And this is so that the reflector can experience all those different energies within themselves which will temporarily give them definition in all the places that they don't have definition on a consistent basis. And it's important for a reflector to pay attention to the moon transits and how each of those transits makes them feel over the course of a 28-day cycle, because once they learn that pattern and it is a pattern right every 28 days that the moon will move through each of the 64 gates. Once the reflector learns that pattern, they will learn more about how they are meant to find what is right for them with confidence. They will be able to seek alignment for themselves. And, unlike other types in human design, all reflectors have the same authority, and that is lunar authority.

Speaker 1: 9:30

When studying human design and learning about the gates and the centers, we learn that each has a high expression and a shadow expression or an unbalanced expression, and I find that studying the shadow is the quickest path toward really understanding each aspect of our design. And I think that that's because the shadow is something that more of us experience on a regular basis and it's something that we can relate to more readily than the highest expression, because the highest expression is the ideal and it's not something that we can, you know, hang on to on a regular basis. And that is really true in the case of reflectors, because when they are experiencing their unbalanced expression, the reflector is feeling everything and taking in everything in the world around them, and they feel like they need to be the fixer of all the things. They need to be the one who does the work of solving all these problems. But that is not what they're here to do. They are not here to do the work, to fix the things that they observe right, and so the challenge of the reflector is to let go of what needs fixing and instead reflect to others in the world the things that they see, and then trust that the rest of us will see this and tend to the things that need solving right, that we will do the doing, because it is not the job of the reflector to actually do that work that they see needs doing. In their highest expression, the reflector is here to be the mirror. They're here to show the rest of us our potential and the places where we are not aligned, and then they need to embody patience and trust that, by doing their job of reflecting everything back to us, that we will see the places that need things righted.

Speaker 1: 11:21

So if you are a reflector and you run your body graph, it may tell you that you have no inner authority. Right, it might actually say none in the place where you have inner authority. And that's because your authority comes from experience in the lunar cycle and when you think about it, you know after what I've just explained. It makes sense because in order to make decisions, you have to be able to feel it in your body. But the only place where you're going to be able to feel it is where you have definition. And the one thing that gives reflectors definitions on a consistent basis is the moon as it moves through all 64 gates. And this is not to say that our reflector can't make decisions on day to day things. That isn't the case. But when it comes to making the big life choices, the big changes, the big decisions, it behooves the reflector to track how they're feeling every day, to pay attention to where the moon is, what gates is that, what phase is the moon is at, and wait until they come back to that spot in 28 days to see where they stand on that decision over the course of that window of time. And it really is important for the reflector to follow that lunar authority, because rushing a decision and choosing something that is actually not in alignment will cost the reflector precious energy and, as a non-energy being, the reflector doesn't really have that energy to spare. So, again, the challenge for reflectors is patience, patience and trusting themselves. And of all of the types, the reflectors will benefit the most from daily journaling, right, a check-in with themselves on how they feel with their alignment relative to whatever it is they're thinking about doing and, when it comes to the big stuff, tracking that for a full 28 days. Okay.

Speaker 1: 13:08

So now that we've concluded the reflectors type, I wanted to kind of revisit the whole reason for diving into human design in the first place. I think, as entrepreneurs, the most valuable thing that we can do is to really figure out and follow our own path, and I think that that might be the hardest thing for all of us, entrepreneurs or not. Just people Like what am I supposed to be doing? Where am I supposed to be showing up? How am I supposed to be showing up? How do I know what's in alignment, how do I know that I'm not going to be left behind, how do I know?

Speaker 1: 13:53

And it's really important also to understand that, while you can learn so much about yourself through discovering your own human design, the other really important aspect when learning about human design is that human design is not a box that you get locked into. It's not here to tell you what you can't do. It's here to show you different paths that are accessible to you in a way that you might not have seen before, and I think it's so valuable to really understand that. And very often, when hopping around in human design discussions and forums and different groups, every once in a while, somebody will say something like yeah, no, I'm not interested in anything like that. That's going to box me in, and it's like wait, no, human design is not a box. It's not something that you get locked into at all.

Speaker 1: 14:52

It's an exploration tool and, as Karen Curry Parker, who created Quantum Human Design, which is where I am, a certified coach or a specialist, I guess she talks about the body graph being a curriculum. It is a blueprint, it is an energy blueprint for us to unpack our true selves. Because we're born in the world. We come to the world and we are this one time cosmic event and we came here for a purpose. And again, purpose is not what you do. Purpose is who you are, and our jobs, or I guess our goals, should be to figure out what that is, and human design can help us find that.

Speaker 1: 15:48

And one of the main things that we learn as we start to explore our human design is our conditioning. When you are born as a human on this earth, you are born into a world that is going to place conditioning on top of you, and then it is the work of us, as we start uncovering that, to peel those things away, identify the places where we have conditioning, and the chart is our map to that. It's really something else. So it's kind of like one of those things where you know, what if I told you that you know there was a key to figuring a lot of stuff out about yourself and about the world and about the people in your life? What if I told you that there was a key? Well, there is a key, and human design provides so much of that.

Speaker 1: 16:45

And it's again, it's not a framework, it's not a dividing tool, it's not fortune telling, it's self-discovery. It's a framework to help you unravel your conditioning and embody who you came here to be. Because we all came here to be our truest self and I really do I invite you to run your chart and see what you see and find out things about yourself that maybe you didn't know, and start to unpack all these different things and see what resonates for you. There's just so much available to us through human design and I'm just I can't. I don't know if you can tell, but I am so completely lit up by it because it has. It has resonated every day, every single day. It's part of my daily practice to crack open my chart and to do some reading and learning about one gate or two gates and figure out where the transits are for myself, and every single day I come away with something new, something expansive and something beautiful and something so empowering that I want to share it with every single human being out there. So if you're listening and you are at all inclined to run your chart, please do so and let me know. Let me know what you find out. Give me an email, find me in our community, share your chart and let's see what we see. So again, thank you so much for listening. This is all I have for you this week.

Speaker 1: 18:30

This concludes my series on the human design types. I'll be going into more different things on human design over the course of the coming weeks and months different episodes but I just wanted to thank you all so much for listening and for all the emails that you've sent. I've heard from so many of you and it's been really cool to answer your questions and kind of invite you in and demystify some of the language surrounding human design Because, as I've said many times over the course of this series, in particular, when we start digging into human design, the language that is used, the vocabulary of human design, can be triggering, for lack of a better word, because there's so much black and white, there's so much that sounds negative, that actually isn't and it's really just a way of describing archetypes. So, anyway, your emails have been fabulous, I've loved the conversations and I welcome you to continue to reach out again. So thanks for listening and I will see you again next week.