#36: Unveiling the Power of Stillness, or What to Do When You're Feeling Stuck

Have you ever felt stuck or restless in your business, unable to decipher what to do or when to do it? In this episode, I connect some celestial dots together by digging into my own exploration of Gate 52 in Human Design, The Gate of Stillness, The Stillpoint.
I share my discovery of stillness not just a state of being but a conscious pathway to action and alignment. Dive into the depth of Gate 52, unraveling its Shadow, and its Gift to understand how these facets can break you free from the feelings of stuckness and restlessness.

We're all unique, every human being is different, and yet there are universal experiences and universal understandings and universal energies that impact us in ways that can be quantified and understood and shared in a way that can help us heal.

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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, solarpreneurs 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 36. So today I wanted to talk about what to do when you're feeling stuck and something that I learned about stillness and human design in Gate 52. And so today I want to start by talking about stillness and how being still maybe isn't something that is sought out for its own sake, and maybe being still can be purposeful. So recently, while I was working on my own human design studies and, you know, digging into the wisdom of the Yi Qing and the Jean Keys by Richard Rudd, there are 64 gates in the Yi Qing and each of them correspond to a place in the cosmos. If we break the sky up into 64 wedges, each of those is a different gate in the sky and they have a different energy. And you know the ancient Yi Qing, the Chinese prophecy book, is where that all comes from. But it also corresponds to our personal astrology, our needle chart, and of course that means it connects to our human design, because a human design comes from a compilation of all of those things. The energy that you and I experience in our everyday lives is informed by each of these gates, and the planets that were in these gates, much in the same way as the planets in our needle chart, are shown to be in certain houses at the moment of our birth. So my conscious sun is in gate 52, which means that that's a big part of the energy that I live every day. And in reading about the 52nd gate, I was struck by how much there is to contemplate here. In fact, every gate has this depth of information come up. But I've spent a lot of time on gate 52 because it's my conscious sun and it's made me realize that there's a pattern here that is available for all of us when we dig into learning about the gates that are defined and open in our own charts.

Speaker 1: 3:00

In the translation of the Eaching by Wilhelm Bains, he describes the 52nd gate as keeping still mountain and at its core, this gait's focus is on the problem of achieving a quiet heart, because it's difficult for a person to have a quiet heart. But he also talks about how attaining a quiet heart is not the destination. It's merely one side of a polarity, one side of a coin, with movement being the other side. Which makes sense, right, Stillness versus movement. Because in this case the 52nd gait really isn't about stillness so much as keeping still until it is time to move, and it's about the ability to understand when it is time to move, because you've been still long enough to feel into the world and into your body and into the energy of whatever situation you've been in. So the Yi Qing talks about the spine when it describes the energy of gait 52. It talks about a man lying on his back and keeping still, and it's using that image to illustrate the meaning, because that's where all of the nerve fibers are that make movement possible in our bodies, right, that's where all the nerves exist and when all the nerves are still, the restlessness of the mind disappears and whoever acts from this place of stillness makes no mistakes. So the purpose of stillness is not only to act, but it's to act with awareness.

Speaker 1: 4:42

When you read up on the Jean Keys by Richard Rudd, the 52nd Jean Key is called the still point. There are three facets, if you will, of each Jean Key. One is the city, one is the gift and then there's the shadow. And if you've heard me talk about human design before, you've heard me share that. I've discovered for myself that contemplating the energies of all the gates for me is easiest when I start by analyzing the shadow, because the shadow is the unbalanced expression of an energy and, as humans, most of us in our conditioned lives have more experience with the shadow of a gate. It's more relatable to us because when you start getting into the gift and the city, the language becomes more esoteric because it's an energetic. It's not a state of action, it's a state of contemplation and it's a state of being.

Speaker 1: 5:40

So in studying the shadow, what was interesting to me was that the shadow nature of someone who is struggling with the energy of the 52nd gate, so somebody who is existing in the 52nd gate shadow, that shows up in our adrenal system and that's where the fight or flight center is. It's our adrenaline source and it's the place we tap in for more and more and more and more to go, go, go. And when you're operating in the shadow, that's going to show up as stuckness, which is like collapsing under the pressure of all the stress of the world, or restlessness. And there was this one line in the Gene Key's book that I highlighted, and then I underlined it and then I put a star next to it, and it's the section that talks about the repressive nature of the shadow of 52, which is stuckness. And it says quote once one has sunk into these states, it can be very difficult to escape. One of the only means of lifting oneself free of such a state is to find a way to be of service to others.

Speaker 1: 6:55

Now, if you're new to my podcast and you haven't listened to any other episodes yet, this might not be an explosive thing for you to hear, but for me it was like the world cracked open and light shone in on something that I knew so deeply in my core, but I didn't know how I knew it. So, back a few years ago, when I was in the throes of a deep, deep burnout, I realized that the thing that was missing in my life was being of service to others, and I actually said those words out loud and I remembered that I needed to be of service. I didn't know where that thought came from. I didn't know where the understanding arrived from, because I hadn't discovered human design yet, or the gates or anything like that. All I knew was that I was desperate for a solution, because all I felt was stuck and hopeless and I couldn't see through beyond the next moment. It was really dark.

Speaker 1: 7:58

And so, reading this line in this book that talks about the universalness of the each thing, it felt so profound and it kind of solidified my ability to trust it as a source of contemplation and of learning about myself and, in turn, about all the other people in my life and in the world. And so, digging further into the shadow of gate 52, the other side of the shadow, next to the repressive side, which is stuckness, is the reactive side, which is restlessness, and this is literally people who are unable to sit still. They are reacting and again, like stuckness, it's driven by the adrenal system, but in the case of the restlessness, the consistency of it, the frequency of the movement, causes people to burn out and have physical damage to their bodies over time, and the remedy for restlessness is understanding the fear that is driving it. And I wonder who out there needs to hear that today, because I was the one who needed to hear the remedy of stuckness and I can't really articulate how moving it was to see those words speaking my truth in a way that nothing ever had. And it was really so simple and while I had already come to the need to be of service to other people on my own, discovering this in my learning about gate 52 was a profound validation. It was so potent and it allowed me to the confidence to stand firm in the changes that I was making in my life, because I was making a huge amount of change in my life in order to shift from that stuckness and that horrible feeling of being burned out, and I wasn't sure if what I was doing was correct for me. You know, now, more than a year later, I know, based on how I feel, that it was absolutely correct for me to make these changes, and I found a lot of steadfastness through learning about this gate, through my human design studies, and so that was all about the shadow of gate 52.

Speaker 1: 10:09

Now, remember that gate 52 as a whole is the mountain, which is the embodiment of stillness. And, like I said, we have the shadow and then we have the gift and they have the city. The gift of the 52nd gate is restraint, and when you're understanding the three facets of any gate, the shadow is the unbalanced expression and the city is like the super enlightenment. Most people can access the city, but we don't get to stay there. It's not something that's really sustainable for most of us. The gift is really where we can live if we really do embody and learn and grow through the shadow, but we're moving through it in a constant way. It's not like you graduate and you never go back. So I wanted to clarify that for you. But so the shadow of Gate 52 was the restlessness and the stuckness. Right, those are the two sides of the shadow. But the gift of the 52nd Gate is restraint, and that goes back to the original Yi Qing, which talks about the man laying on his back.

Speaker 1: 11:18

And, if you remember, that is not about stillness for stillness' sake, but it's about stillness for seeking clarity toward action. Right, it takes the fear out of the equation and brings in perspective, because when you're still and you're observing, you're being the witness, and I think that over time, this is something that we learn to trust and in trusting it we actually start to seek it when we feel uncertainty or a lack of clarity. Because once it starts to serve us, once we know that by getting still we actually have more success when we act, we will seek out that stillness more frequently as our daily source of clarity. Right, and when you're living in a place of stillness, you are not reacting, right, you're doing the opposite, so that means that fear is removed from the equation. And then the actions that you do take, you're taking them from a position of your own personal power.

Speaker 1: 12:17

I share a lot about my journey into human design on this show and on my blog and with my friends and in my mastermind, because it's been so all-encompassing for me and this journey that I'm on. I laugh sometimes when I talk about it, because I talk about it like I'm on some magical mystery tour, because that's what it feels like. Sometimes it feels like I found the cheat codes to unlock how I operate in the world, and it's brought with it a profound sense of peace and I feel like, in contemplating my purpose. Just the fact that I'm having this profound experience and I'm sharing it with you. It might inspire someone out there someone out there who's listening to dig into their own design and unlock their conscious sun gate and unlock their own purpose and see themselves in the descriptions of the gates, and not only that, but to find a path through the challenges that they're living. So if that's you, if you're hearing my voice and I'm sharing my experience about my conscious sun gate 52, the mountain and it's resonating with you, like maybe it's giving you a little bit of a tingle, right Go to my website and go to the free human design chart and if you don't already have your chart, you can run yours there and identify your conscious sun and start there, do some reading, get into some contemplations there, email me, reach out, because it's really it's just such powerful stuff and that's why I'm sharing this with you today.

Speaker 1: 13:58

So I've been studying the gates and human design and the gene keys for a year and a half or so now and I have yet to find anything that doesn't fit. And that's kind of mind blowing to me because it's such an old collection of these esoteric teachings that have been brought together in a way that is pretty exceptional, and when I started learning about gate 52 and I had this eye opening and kind of understanding. I continue to have that in every single one of my gates. So we're all unique, right? Every human being is different, and yet there are these universals, these universal experiences, these universal understandings and universal energies that impact us in ways that can be quantified, they can be described and they can be understood and shared in a way that can help us heal.

Speaker 1: 14:51

So if this has any resonance for you, if you're looking for a path through your own stuckness or through your own lack of clarity, or you're seeking something to drive you forward with more purpose, I urge you to check out your chart and see where that takes you. Okay, so that's all I have for you this week, and thank you so much for listening. I'll catch you next time and remember part of being a calm entrepreneur is developing the systems, habits and know-how that lets you know that you are the one in the driver's seat for your business. You get to choose how you think and you get to choose how you work. So you got this, my friends. Thank you for listening.