Human Design & Intuition: What Your Chart Says About Trusting Yourself

Episode 112: Human Design & Intuition: What Your Chart Says About Trusting Yourself 

When most people think about intuition, they imagine a psychic lightning bolt, a dramatic sign from the universe, or a crystal-clear knowing that drops from the sky.

But what if intuition is much more ordinary than that?

In this episode, Caitlan explores how Human Design can help us understand the unique ways intuition naturally communicates through our bodies. From authority and decision-making to the wisdom hidden within each center of the chart, this conversation offers a practical roadmap for you to learn how to trust your intuition, step by step. 

You'll learn why intuition often sounds quieter than anxiety, how trauma can disconnect us from our inner knowing, and why Human Design isn't about giving your power away to another system it's a map to knowing and understanding your body based intuitive clues. 

What You'll Learn in This Episode:

• Why most people have been conditioned to distrust their intuition
• The difference between intuition, anxiety, urgency, and overthinking
• How each Human Design authority receives intuitive information
• What your centers reveal about your unique intuitive gifts
• The role of the Spleen, Sacral, Emotional Solar Plexus, G Center, Ajna, Root, and Throat in intuitive awareness
• How defined and undefined centers influence intuition differently
• Why nervous system healing strengthens intuitive connection
• Common ways trauma and protective parts interfere with self-trust
• Practical ways to start rebuilding your relationship with intuition today

Chapters:

00:00 Welcome back to the Intuition Series

04:02 What intuition actually looks like (and why it's usually not a lightning bolt)

09:45 Understanding Human Design authorities and intuitive decision-making

18:30 How the centers shape your intuition

35:30 Urgency, anxiety, and other things we mistake for intuition

43:30 Trauma, nervous systems, and losing touch with your inner knowing

50:20 Practical ways to strengthen intuition and rebuild self-trust

Links & Resources:

✨ Learn how you're uniquely designed to make decisions: Next Level Decisions (Free Audio Course)

⚡ Ready for clarity, momentum, and your next big move? Power Move Intensive

🌙 Explore more episodes, resources, and offerings: www.caitlansiegenthaler.com

Episode 1 (110) in the Intuitive Series

Episode 2 (111) in the Intuitive Series 

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Transcript

Caitlan Siegenthaler (00:00)
Hello, hello. Hi everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Return. This is episode three out of four in the Intuition series. And if you haven't listened to the previous two episodes in the series, Go Go Go Now, episode 110, Why Highly Intuitive People Stop Trusting Themselves. And episode 111, IFS Intuition and Reclaiming the Therapist's Intuitive Edge with Natalie Deering.

And this one is episode 112. We are talking about what does human design say about our intuition? It's gonna be so juicy. And there will be one more episode in this series, the fourth and final coming out next week, which we are gonna talk about the protective parts that get involved and run interference on our intuition, even though we know they have those, you know, best intentions, no bad parts. So

Are we excited? This is the episode I've most been looking forward to recording because I think human design is such an amazing tool and gateway to return. See what I did there? to ourselves and our intuition and our inner knowing. And I'm going to walk you through all of that. But first, hi. I've had some new faces around on my newsletter and

People signing up for next level decisions, my free audio course about how you're meant to make decisions according to human design, which pairs so well with this episode, honestly. And it also talks about the IFS parts involved. So, so many people signing up for that. So if you happen to have found your way here, thank you for being here. My name is Caitlin. I spent the last decade as a therapist here, there, and everywhere. I literally started my private practice abroad while I was living in Switzerland.

have been trained in IFS for the last six years, have studied and trained in human design since twenty sixteen, and have found the amazing portal of combining the two. And now I also get to mentor therapists in their businesses using all of that juicy knowledge. And before that I worked in the corporate world, corporate girly for six years and about died as a projector, but

That's a podcast episode for another day. I'm so thrilled you're here. And if you want to work with me right now, today, you can do two things. One, if you're like, yep, I want help with my business, I want to make a move in my life that I've been thinking about forever and ever and ever, go book Power Move right now. Spots are open through the end of June, maybe beginning of July.

So go grab your spot. That's my one week intensive that combines IFS and human design. It includes voice notes. It's so fun and lovely. And the stuff that's coming out of there, honestly, it's gonna be a whole episode soon. But like people are making the most amazing moves. And I've had the best clients come through. So if you've been through Power Move, you're probably listening to this podcast. But thank you. I've so enjoyed working with you and

You're just a lovely human, all of you. All of you that have been through. The other way to work with me is by subscribing to Return Plus and listening to the teachings, etc., over there, the essays, the hodgepodge. She's getting a makeover right now, but it's gonna be good. And that's it. And if you're like, well, none of that fits my needs, you can always book a discovery call and we can just chit chat because you never know what I have up my sleeve. All right.

Enough about that. Let's get into the episode. What does human design say about our intuition?

Caitlan Siegenthaler (04:02)
I think one of the biggest reasons people find human design so relieving is because most of us have spent our entire lives being taught not to trust ourselves. So that's when we've been growing up rewarded for logic or productivity or certainty.

The other thing I wanna say before we get into human design as a system of awareness is that I think most people imagine intuition as this magical psychic lightning bulb moment. And sometimes it is. Please reference the episode where I shhared about some of my story about what happened with my dad, but also

A lot of intuition is incredibly ordinary, like suddenly feeling exhausted around someone. This happens when I work with therapy clients. I'll suddenly pick up a feeling and then twenty minutes into the session they'll say, my gosh, I'm feeling so blank. And it was the feeling I was just feeling. And so like

Natalie Deering and I talked about on the last episode and the second episode in the series, we use our bodies as a tool, right? Another example is like knowing you shouldn't send the text. You just know you still do it from apart, and that's okay, but you know you shouldn't do it. Getting a weird feeling in your body. I actually talked about that on episode 110, where I talked about my crazy intuitive hits about my dad and his illness.

And just this weird feeling in my body I couldn't shake. It wasn't like, you know, a lightning bolt struck me. It's sort of like a little bit of ordinary information that you then have to translate and be like, this is what this is. it can even be like crying after making the logical choice and being like, wait a second, I don't think that was right.

So, human design gives language to how our intuition naturally communicates, not just through our authority, but through our entire energetic system. So that's what we're gonna look at today the system of awareness through human design. We're gonna talk briefly about your authority, but we're also gonna talk about the open, the centers and what kind of like little intuitive.

pieces come through each center because I think that's so fun. And then the last episode in the series is gonna be next week about the parts of us that get this all crisscrossed applesauce tangled up in ourselves. All right, so a quick review of the authority situation.

When you have emotional authority, you develop your clarity and your intuition over time. After the emotional wave settles, you are not meant to make impulsive decisions. And your intuition is sort of just like that ongoing relationship, like, faithful, you know? It's like.

Woo! I'm way up here at this dinner party. I said yes, we're going camping. It's gonna be so fun. And the next day you're like, no, that's not actually what I want to do. Just let the wave settle and don't make those impulsive choices. you have an emotional authority because your solar plexus is defined. And so just

If you're taking notes, just star that as we get down to the different centers. A splenic. Hello. You're my best friend. I am a spleenic authority. a spleenic projector. Spleenic authority. It's instinctive body knowing. Again, back to that. It was like my body just knew. That was my spleen baby. She was on fire. about the stuff with my dad. It's immediate, it's quiet, it's

Deeply tied to safety or survival awareness. And like that makes me really curious about what was going on for me with regard to my dad, like you know, survival. He was about to not be surviving. So very interesting. If you have a sacral authority, that means your sacral center is defined. It's that gut response that's how your intuition most commonly shows up.

It's life force expansion, not contraction. It's that intuitive energy response. It's like uh-huh or You really want to pay attention to those things. And again, as I'm going through your authority when we get to the centers, remember what center I said. I'm also gonna give you a little tip for starting to play with your intuition.

Later on, and we're gonna revisit these authorities. But for now, I just wanna remind you what your authority means. The other thing that I want to remind you of before I continue with the authorities is human design, remember, self-awareness map tool. And that means that we're

Not making a decision from anywhere from our logical parts, which we'll get into more next week. But human design is like, hey, this is the specific place in your body where your unique intuitive decision maker shows up. I think that's so cool. Okay, ego authority, yours is coming from the ego center, that little tiny triangle. It's a desire-based knowing.

And it's intuition through wants and motivation and devotion. Self-projected authority. Yours is coming from hearing truth through speaking, through that throat chakra. So paying attention to that as we get through it. And mental projectors, you I just worked with a mental projector, it was so amazing.

Because yours comes through environment and conversation. Power move was the perfect place for this person because they were able to like have a sounding board, have the right environment, use my projector gifts to see them deeply and amazing, like magic magic. And so mental projectors, you might be saying, Well, listen, that's still mental. It's like, no, because it's about getting out.

Of the mentalness and spe like getting things out of your body still and not in your head, if that makes sense. And then our dear reflectors, yours is intuition through time and energetic sampling and tapping into those rhythms becomes rhythms and rituals are really important for you, reflectors, because you're connected to that cyclical 28-day.

Moon cycle. And so we want to pay attention to that as you're tapping more into your intuition or lunar authority, right? But where human design gets really interesting is when we start looking at the centers because your intuition doesn't operate in isolation. So, yes, we have this decision-making piece, but a human design, as you may or may not know, is so

layered and now this is the next layer. So let's talk about the centers now and your intuition. So the spleenic center is traditionally the most intuitive center because it is what controls our intuition, our anxiety, our fight or flight. It's like they basically our instinct, it's like they took that like

little lizard part of our brain and put it in the body graph for human design. Because we have that primal instinct, that body awareness, that survival intuition. so people with s a defined spleen might have bodily knowing before logic. I don't mean to keep plugging this episode.

the one ten episode, but I give you like a real life example of exactly what happened for me. And I want to help you kind of understand all of it,

I also want to make sure that there's a really fine line between spleenic awareness and anxiety. And wow, boy, boy, is this true. And I'm still almost 40 years into this lifetime trying to learn this. But something that helps is like anxiety repeats loudly, like it's really amplified.

And the intuition is fast and quiet and it's like floop. And I had that experience with the stuff with my dad. It was like it came once and then it was gone. It was kind of this anxious urge almost, but I knew that I was not feeling specifically anxious in that moment. But b like, hey, cool. Could we not have made this any easier? So if you have a defined spleen.

you may not have a spleenic authority, but just knowing all of that. And then if your spleen, if any of your centers are open when I'm talking about the centers, then it means that you amplify and magnetize the energy of that center. So if you have an open spleen, you might be magnifying, amplifying survival, anxiety, but also instinct.

Depending on who you're around, just for funsies. Modern life definitely disconnects us from body instincts. And this has very much been part of my own personal journey is finding a way to reconnect with my body instincts so that I can come back home to my intuition. The next center we're gonna look at is the sacral center, that's that middle square.

In your chart, it's right above the root center. And so this is intuition through energy. You get those sacral responses, that energy, yes, no, that aliveness, that creative life force intuition, excitement is coming from here in an intuitive way, full body expansion, sometimes dread, sometimes fatigue after incorrectly saying yes. And the

Thing I want you to remember about this center is that it's not a whisper here. It's sometimes it's your body like losing energy like a balloon. It's like okay, something's off. Like pay attention. If you have the center undefined, so if you are a manifester, projector, or reflector, you will override, you can have a part that overrides the exhaustion trying to keep up.

And then there is a true confusion between pressure and true energy. I think I ran on pressure from 12 years old to 32. A good 20 years on coffee and pressure. So just getting that distinct kind of feeling. If you're noticing a theme.

Human design is like your intuition is pay attention to your body. Pay attention to your body. It's almost like you have to learn the language of your body and then translate that with your chart and your human design.

Anyways, emotional solar plexus. That's the little triangle to the right of the sacral center. This is intuitioned through emotional wisdom. Sometimes emotional waves will create clarity. And then you're like, but Caitlin, you just told me if I have this as an authority, not to make a decision until I've slept on it and the emotional wave is over. Yes.

But riding that wave is gonna give you clarity. Just don't make it when you're at the peak of the wave or the bottom of the wave. Like you know what I'm saying? There is a sensitivity to this center. There is an emotional intelligence in this center.

Emotional beings, this is where you absorb so much. And what we really want to look at here is like the fact that you have a part that's holding anger for you in the center, that's not the enemy. And emotional authority people, you are not too much. I live with two of them, love them. It can be it's can be a ride for all of us, everybody involved.

Just remember that clarity comes after emotional processing. The other thing I want you to be aware of if you have this center defined is that you are spreading emotional contagion. So be conscious of that. Those of us that are amplifying the emotions of the people around us, if it's open,

My emotional solar plexus is open. Makes me a freaking amazing therapist and guide. Makes me a really tired person. Like after my dad's celebration of life, okay, think about this. If I'm amplify there was like almost 300 people there. If I'm amplifying.

the emotions of the people around me. Like I think I'm still physically recovering from just that situation. Also notice the urgency that modern day society has created for us to make decisions. I want you to really feel stand in your power around taking your time.

G center or your heart center, this is where you have intuition around identity, direction, and love. These themes intuitively come to you. Who am I? Where do I belong? What's the alignment? What's the direction? When you have your G center defined, you intuitively know when you're out of alignment. You intuitively know when you're forcing something that doesn't fit.

I don't have this center defined. And my son does. And obviously I spend a lot of time with him. And it's really fascinating to watch him intuitively operate from the center. That for me looks like just he knows the direction he wants to go in. And I think some people would be like, well, Caitlin, that's a two and a half year old.

And I would argue against that. Like I think if we interviewed my mom and had her on the podcast and I was like, mom, was I like my son when I was a child in terms of, you know, the specificity of the direction and the headstrong commitment to that, I'm 99% sure she would say no. And for me, this is that defined G center of like.

He's two and a half. He hasn't been conditioned a lot yet. And I think that's he no he knows where he's going. And then all of the conditioning comes in and like piles on top of it. If you have an undefined G Center like me, undefined heart, that's that

Square that's tilted to the side under your throat center, the little box on your throat. Just be really aware that you are highly sensitive to your environment and to people. most HSPs that come through my work do not have a defined G center.

And again, we amplify what's open, right? So if you have this open, you're amplifying belonging, you're amplifying direction, you're amplifying all of it. So just being aware of that. A lot of people don't need a better strategy though. You just need to admit that you're living a life that doesn't actually fit you. And this is like the crux of the G Center, because then you get you.

If you have this defined, you're like, I know where I'm going, what I'm doing, who I want to be, who I am in this world. If you have it undefined, you're amplifying people that know that. But then we throw in like conditioning, and it's like, well, this is who you all should be. And so if you have it defined, you're like miserable because you had something different set out. And if we have it undefined, you're like,

This box, you're like Goldilocks, this box doesn't fit. This is too big. This is too small. So both defined and undefined, your intuition is gonna tell you that you're living a life that doesn't fit you, and then you have to have the courage to actually admit it. So Ajna Center, that's the upside down triangle that is the second one. And

If you have this defined, you have a fixed way of processing and a mental consistency, and you can really trust your internal framework when you're not blended with parts. But if you have this open, you're open minded, you have flexible thinking, you are vulnerable a bit to needing that certainty. So mental certainty though is not your intuition.

Remember, intuition is body, body, body, body. Mental certainty is mind. But the gift of the Ajana Center is like teaching us to trust ourselves through that internal framework.

Overthinking shows up here, that obsession with finding the right answer, consuming endless content instead of just doing a U-turn as they say in the IFS world and listening inward. And then open head center or closed head center. We're gonna talk about the head center. This is mental pressure, this is inspiration, this is.

If it's defined, a pressure to answer, a pressure to figure it all out. And if it's undefined, it's amplifying that external pressure. It's trying to solve everyone's questions. So a great way to parse this out is am I actually curious or am I just anxious? All right, we have the root center and the throat center, and then we're gonna bring it all together.

This has been a lot, but I think the centers are so important, so underutilized, honestly. yeah. Okay, root center, the bottom square at the bottom of your body graph. This is for stress and urgency. This is huge for all of us right now. This is where adrenal pressure can be. This is when urgency can be mistaken for intuition.

This is a rushing, rushing

I was just thinking about, I have a defined route and I am very prone to rushing. And when you have a toddler who doesn't subscribe to time in the same way that we as adults do, I took him to the aquarium yesterday afternoon. It was so lovely. And we were walking outside our aquarium as like in between the buildings has this really nice.

outdoor park and these beautiful trees and he and I were just beboping around and so present. It actually moved me emotionally because he wanted us to pretend like we were superman. And so he was like, Mommy, you're Superman and I'm Superman. And we were running through the people like flying and pretending we are Superman. And it just moved me because of how present I was and then I quickly

On the way back, got blended with my defined root center because I had to get him home so I could go to sewing class. And as you know, toddlers move at their own pace, especially one with a defined G center. And so I was like, come on, come on, we gotta go. also the not for anything, the aquarium was also closing. And then they closed the path. And

I was rushing him. I was rushing us. It just so it was so jarring and took me out of you know, the beautiful moment that we'd had like 30 minutes earlier. And so watch the rushing. Watch the I need to decide now. Watch the mistaken, like that urgency for intuition. I also did this with something that came through during immorting pages.

And I sent a text to my business besties and they were like, I don't think that's the thing you need to be following. And I do think it was a different level of intuition, but the urgency that came with it was I thought that was like, this is my intuition, but it is not. Urgency is really one of the easiest things to mistake for intuition. So if you have a defined route, you're gonna experience consistent stress pressure.

So you really have to work through, and this is me to me, okay? Caitlin, you have to work through releasing a lot of that stress pressure. If you have an undefined route, you're absorbing it, absorbing that pressure and amplifying it. So you have to really work through discernment and making sure urgency, you're not mistaking other people's urgency, your own urgency for your intuition. Last but suddenly not least.

Is the throat center. This is our intuition through expression. The themes of the throat are speaking, manifestation, visibility. And we can sometimes speak things before we understand them. It shows up intuitively when you know something once you say it out loud and you like verbalized it. You're like, yes.

If you have an undefined throat here, there can be a pressure to be seen or heard. And there can be parts that want to perform instead of expressing your own truth. And so that's gonna be part of your intuitive practice according to human design is to understand and express your truth in the way that you're meant to do it.

Those are all the centers. We did it. We made it. We made it through them. Hooray.

So we need to talk about the spleen and our nervous system because when we experience trauma, that changes the awareness of our body. We are going to dive deep, deep, deep into this next week, but I want to bring it in here as we're looking at the human design map to our body and that coming back to our intuition.

Hypervigilance is not always intuition. Dissociation disconnects us from our intuition. Listen, I have a whole team of dissociative parts, honey. I put, every week in my weekly emails, what you said sign up for because they're fun. I put

A meme in the bottom in last week's was quote, you need to relax. And then the response is best I can do is dissociate. That was me to a T. Anyways, that's disconnecting us from our intuition. So when you work on your nervous system and you're repairing that and you're slowing down and doing all the things that the nervous system

girlies say on the internet and squirrilies and boys and all the things that people are saying about that. That's when our intuition gets like louder and louder. And a lot of healing is not becoming intuitive. It's that return, recovering the intuition that survival required you to disconnect from. More on that next week for installment episode four of this series.

Again, just to wrap up the defined and undefined centers and intuition, defined centers that you have in your chart, the ones, the squares and the triangles that are colored in, is a consistent internal signal. These are reliable themes. I went through all of the themes earlier. It's where you're broadcasting your energy. Your undefined or open centers are where you absorb energy. It's where conditioning happens. It's where wisdom develops.

So undefined centers are like the best way to get to know where your conditioning lives, where your parts are. For example, undefined emotional center, like sensing other people's feelings, undefined spleen, sensing danger in environments, so on and so forth. You you get it. All right. So how are we going to build this bridge between you and your intuition?

You wanna reduce the noise. I like duh. But you really need to spend a lot of time alone because remember, we're going back into our body, and every single decision-making authority I told you about requires a certain level of of discernment and being in your own energy. Definitely stop crowdsourcing your decisions and experiment with your design. At the end of the day, human design is an experiment, so play with it.

Notice the urgency. Notice the parts that are coming in, the societal urgency, the conditioning urgency. Learn your body's language. Human design gives you the map to your body. We need to put language and translate that. Listen to episode 110, where I talk about the language of my body and how that showed up. Please stop forcing clarity. This is me to me too. It will come.

It will come in the time it's meant to come. And human design should increase your self-trust and not become another authority outside of yourself.

When you stop outsourcing your decisions, also please stop like working with AI on them because AI is more of that mental circulating. Like you really have to come back into your body. And I just want to remind you that your intuition may not look mystical. It may look like getting tired around the wrong people.

Crying after you abandon yourself in one decision, feeling relief after saying no, knowing something in your body before your mind catches up. And the goal isn't becoming someone who never doubts themselves. It's just learning how to return to yourself faster. I hope you loved this episode. Thank you for listening and for being here. You're the best. And if you thought this episode

was helpful, please leave a review on Apple iTunes or a comment on Spotify or a comment on Substack. I love, love, love hearing from you. It is the best. And send this to a friend who's also returning to their own intuition and who hasn't heard about the ways that human design can help them do that. Stay tuned for the last episode in this installment next week.

Where we'll be talking about parts and trauma and the way that those things protect us but also disconnect us from our intuition. Until then, take care. Ciao.