The official name for Human Design Gate 12 is The Gate of Caution. But I call it The Fine Artist because its primary action is to express your emotions through poetry and art.
About Human Design Gate 12 – Gene Key 12
Archetype Name: The Fine Artist
In Action: express emotion through poetry and art
Keywords: being poetic, artistic expression, and discernment
Download All 64 Human Design Gates Cheatsheet (for free!)
Official Gate Name: Caution
Human Design Definition: The quality of restraint and the importance of meditation and inaction in confronting temptation.
Core Theme: Discriminating taste.
Bodygraph Center: Throat center and connects to the Solar Plexus center via human design gate 22.
Tropical Sign: Gemini
(Want all of the correspondences and keynotes for the gates of your incarnation cross? The Human Design Map is for you.)
The Energy Spectrum of Human Design Gate 12
All energy in the Human Design chart exists on a spectrum of potential.
On the “positive” end of the spectrum, Human Design Gate 12 is the energy for expressing emotions through art, especially the art of language, in a highly refined way. Gate 12 wants nothing more than to pour everything it has into art and share it with the world. It has “good taste” and idealistic visions of beauty, art, and Grace.
On the “negative” end of the spectrum, Human Design Gate 12 is the energy for holding people, organizations, and art to impossible standards of perfection. It can easily push other people’s buttons with its words and can even have a bit of a superiority complex because of its highly refined “palate” in life.
If you don’t like the results that the “negative” side of the spectrum is creating in your life, you can raise the frequency of Gate 12 with a number of boundaries, practices, and tools.
(I cover the practices for the gates of your incarnation cross in the Human Design Map.)
The most important thing to raise the frequency of gate 12 is to use your poetry and art as a way to channel your emotions and gain emotional clarity. This is even more important if you have a defined solar plexus but will be useful either way.
My personal contemplation of Human Design Gate 12 (Gene Key 12)
Gate 12 is undefined in my chart but, as I mentioned in my post on Human Design Gate 22, my husband has the full channel.
He has taught me so much about expression and Grace.
In the beginning of our relationship, it would have been an understatement to say that I didn’t really know how to express uncomfortable emotions. And I absolutely had no clue that getting clarity on my emotions was possible with art.
My main go-to’s were sobbing, screaming, and slamming doors.
And, with a profound amount of Grace, my husband let me know pretty quickly that those things were not going to work for him.
I eventually learned how to feel my feelings and that started to shift things almost instantly. I learned that all feelings don’t actually need to be expressed.
Sometimes, they just need to be felt. And oftentimes, with my undefined emotional solar plexus, they weren’t even mine to start with.
True to my design, I started to become much wiser about working with my emotions and how to let go of others emotions. (You’ll learn how to make these kinds of emotional discernments – whether your solar plexus is defined or not – inside the Human Design Map portal.)
As I deepened into my practices, I started to notice something really interesting unfolding.
I discovered that the hardest part for me was understanding what I was feeling in the first place. And if I didn’t understand what was happening inside, I would try to force that energy out with the sobbing, screaming, and slamming doors.
I didn’t know a thing about Human Design back then but I can see now that my husband’s 12-22 was rubbing off on me. He was energetically showing me how emotionally unhealthy I was.
As time passed, I started to experiment with making art. In particular, I did art journaling and expressive mixed media. I’d layer in intentions and anytime I felt emotionally “lost” I’d go make something.
The miraculous thing was that each time, it led to an immense amount of emotional understanding. When I focused on making a piece of art, it was like all of the confusion in my head poured out onto the paper or canvas.
Making art even became a magickal act of gaining insight and communicating with the Divine.
We’ve been married for over 15 years now. And with his graceful support and energetic blueprint, I have many more tools in my belt for understanding what is going on inside of me. (There is a guide inside the Human Design Map portal for using Human Design to understand relationship dynamics.)
I have much clearer energy boundaries and am much less likely to absorb and amplify other people’s solar plexus energy. I spend plenty of time in my own pure aura. And unless something specific is happening in my life or my nervous system is jacked up, I tend to be pretty emotionally calm.
But when the emotional waters rise up, I do have art in my back pocket. I can go into my art space, pull out my art supplies, feel my feelings, and gain much-needed emotional understanding.
Art, of course, isn’t my only way of working through emotions these days. But, even when I’m using other tools, the infusion of Grace seems to be the real secret sauce.
Now it’s your turn to contemplate Gate 12
When you stand in the truth that the gifts of Gate 12 are always available to you (whether it’s defined in your chart or not)…
Are you a poet or artist?
Have you ever experimented with using art and poetry as a way of emotional understanding and expression?
How might you begin to make space in your life for expressing your emotions with Grace?
I encourage you to take some time with these questions. Take them out into your world and let their answers reveal themselves to you. Intend for deeper levels of clarity about gate 12.
And, if you have gate 12 in your Human Design Incarnation Cross, be sure to check out the Human Design Map where I go super deep into each gate of your cross.