An Intro to Human Design | What exactly is conditioning?
If you’ve been studying Human Design or the Gene Keys for any length of time, you’ve probably come across the terms “conditioning” and “de-conditioning,” but not every resource takes the time to break these terms down and connect them clearly back to the Human Design experiment. So let’s rectify that, shall we?
Conditioning, in this context, can be defined as the thoughts, beliefs, mindsets, habits, and patterns (often set in childhood) that have a significant (subconscious or unconscious) influence on the way we view ourselves, others, and the world around us.
Most of our conditioning is set during the timespan of our infancy to our young adulthood (our early 20s). Before coming to work with Human Design, I spent the first 15-ish years of my professional life working in K-12 education, and when I was in the classroom I earned my Master of Science in Teaching with a focus in elementary education. One of the things we studied in my master’s program (and something I witnessed firsthand in the classroom) is just how impressionable and plastic our view of the world is, especially in early childhood. When we’re that age, between 4 and 10, our tiny growing brains are like little sponges, soaking up as much data as possible, trying to figure out the world around us, how it works, and our place in it. And as our neurological development continues as we grow into adolescence and then into adulthood, as our brains are creating and strengthening synaptic pathways, unfortunately, it’s most often what’s repeated to us/reinforced the most frequently or what we perceive will keep us safe that STICKS, whether or not those messages or beliefs are healthy or true. In fact, research posits that our brains aren’t fully developed until we’re about 25, which is a metric fuck ton of time to be subject to conditioning.
By the time we hit middle adulthood, most of us find that we have these thoughts/tendencies/destructive patterns/limiting beliefs/self-sabotaging habits/self-abandoning behaviors that we’ve repeated for literally YEARS that we sometimes don’t question until we hit a bottom and there’s no other choice. And when we’re ready to start getting real with how we’re standing in our own way, the task can be, well, DAUNTING AF b/c all that conditioning can live in our conscious awareness, in our subconscious mind, AND in our unconscious mind.
My Psychology 101 understanding of the brain…
The goal of de-conditioning is to take these conditioned thoughts/tendencies/destructive patterns/limiting beliefs/self-sabotaging habits/self-abandoning behaviors from the unconscious & the subconscious into conscious awareness where they can be understood and addressed, this time with our consent and agency. It’s the intentional reprogramming of our subconscious/unconscious mind. That said, our conscious awareness, which governs our willpower, critical thinking, rational & logical reasoning, planning, and judgment are the very places where the conditioning of our subconscious/unconscious minds manifests.
And it’s the conditioning that impacts the conscious awareness that most often disconnects us from our intuition. I love 20th-century minister and mystic Joseph Murphy’s definition of intuition: he defines intuition as “being taught from within” & our “inner hearing,” and frames the messages from our intuition as guidance from our Higher Self. In his work “This Is It: The Art of Metaphysical Demonstration,” one of the things he writes about is how our conditioning, disguised as “reason,” oftentimes tries to dissuade us from honoring our intuition’s guidance.
Remember: much of our conditioning was created under the false understanding that certain beliefs/mindsets/habits keep us safe, when they actually keep us trapped in fear, scared and small, and our intuition, that inner knowing from our Higher Self, is anchored in divine love and oneness, possibility and expansion.
This is why you’ve probably heard many Human Design practitioners talking about dropping out of your brain and into your body. The goal is to help normalize turning down the volume on our fear-based conditioned thoughts and turn the volume wayyyyyy up on the love-based guidance of our higher self via our intuition/authority.
This is also why creating a consistent de-conditioning practice is VITAL. The insidious part of conditioning is that it is usually normalized. We’ve been carrying a lot of it around since childhood, and we usually don’t recognize it’s there until IT GETS IN OUR WAY, and even then, we might not even realize that it’s the conditioning that is the problem.
Enter our Human Design BodyGraphs & Gene Keys Hologenetic Profiles. They make for AMAZING maps by showing us what our placements can look, feel, and behave like.
In Human Design, each of our placements exists along a spectrum of energy.
There is a FEAR-based expression of the placement, where we act from a place of putting others before ourselves to our own detriment, or putting ourselves above others to their detriment. Actions taken from this frequency are informed by our conditioning, feel awful in the body and usually are in direct opposition to the guidance from our Authority.
There is a COMPASSION-based expression of each placement as well, where we make decisions that balance consideration for ourselves and others, and aligns with the guidance from our Authority.
There is a DIVINE LOVE-based expression of each placement, where we know at a soul level that separation is an illusion and where making decisions in alignment with our Authority is our new baseline.
In the karmic studies | elevator, this is literally the work that we do.
We start by identifying your placements and doing the Birth Chart Alchemy required to determine how these energies have manifested in your life thus far.
Then we study what the placement looks/feels/behaves like when it’s in the fear-based frequency and identify concrete instances of when decisions were made or actions were taken from this conditioned place and how that situation played out (spoiler alert: it usually didn’t go so well).
We then study the compassion-based frequency and identify concrete times when decisions were made or actions were taken from this higher place of empathy and care and how that situation played out (spoiler alert: it usually went so much better!!).
We then study the divine-love frequency and identify concrete times when decisions were made or actions were taken from this higher place of interconnectedness and true higher self embodiment and how that situation played out (spoiler alert: it usually went AMAZINGLY!!)
Then, we start looking deeper into what conditioned beliefs informed the fear-based frequency and start actively working to re-program them so you can experience the compassion & divine love expressions of this placement far more frequently.
There’s ZERO SHAME and ZERO BLAME because to be conditioned is TO BE A HUMAN.
I firmly believe that we’re all doing the best we can in each moment based on what we believe to be true about ourselves and the world around us. And it’s precisely when we start shifting what those core beliefs are and doing that inner work that our outer reality begins to shift and change in response.
If you want to join us in the karmic studies | elevator, you absolutely should! It’s affordable, virtual, flexible, and customized to YOU!
This month, I have space and energy to welcome five folks into the Total Synthesis pathway of the elevator, and five more folks into any of the three other pathways (Immersion, Intensive, and Spacious Support). Click on the button below to learn all about this course/community/coaching container and discover which pathway is right for you.
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