The official name for Human Design Gate 15 is The Gate of Extremes. But I call it The Wild Heart because its primary action is to march to the beat of your own drum.
About Human Design Gate 15 – Gene Key 15
Archetypal Name: The Wild Heart
In Action: to march to the beat of your own drum
Keywords: wild, personal rhythm, radical authenticity
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Official Gate Name: Extremes
Human Design Definition: The quality of behavior which expresses the proper balance between extremes.
Core Theme: Loving humanity, embracing different rhythms, and extremes of behavior.
Bodygraph Center: G center and connects to the Sacral center via human design gate 5.
Tropical Sign: Gemini/Cancer
(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 15
All energy in the Human Design chart exists on a spectrum of potential.
On the “positive” end of the spectrum, Human Design Gate 15 is the energy for wildness, marching to the beat of your own drum. Gate 15 believes every living being on the planet is worthy of love and acceptance and has the remarkable ability to unconditionally love the diverse nature of humans.
On the “negative” end of the spectrum, Human Design Gate 15 is the energy for seeking extremes to avoid the dullness of life. It has an inability to slow down and find a consistent rhythm. It may also shut down due to conventional rules or societal pressure to be like everyone else.
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 15 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 15 is to prioritize connecting with your heart space and explore what feels most alive for you.
My personal contemplation of Human Design Gate 15 (Gene Key 15)
As a writer who tells a lot of personal stories, I am often finding the balance between sharing what is true for me and the truth that all stories aren’t mine to tell.
Finding this balance seems the trickiest when I’ve had a profound revelation that involves someone who either cannot speak for themselves or who, for a variety of reasons, doesn’t want their side of the story told.
This particular story is a combination of all of those things.
It’s a story that symbolizes one of the most healing insights I’ve ever been blessed to receive. It is a story that I know must be told.
Let’s start at the beginning.
My life has been riddled with the existential fear that my life has no meaning or purpose and healing that is one of the key drivers in what I do inside the Human Deign Map. (see my posts on Human Design gate 28 and Human Design gate 51.)
A therapist once told me that people with stories like mine jump off of bridges. An astrologer told me that she’d need a stiff drink to read my chart. And an “intuitive” once told me that I should just give up, file for unemployment, and play video games for the rest of my life.
So, to say that I’ve experienced a lot of trauma would be an understatement. I’ve been shocked and shaken to my core more times than I can count. And I’ve wallowed in seemingly needless suffering for as long as I can remember.
I often look back on my life and cannot believe that it’s only been one lifetime. And I’m no stranger to wondering how I will ever keep going.
All along the way, I’ve searched for my purpose and I have deeply doubted my ability to make a difference in the world (Human Design Gate 8).
Even after a decade of receiving mind-blowing praise — clients who’ve said I’m a miracle worker, or that I’ve made lifetimes of self-doubt disappear into thin air, or that they finally know what it feels like to experience their innate wholeness — I never really believed that I had anything to offer.
And then, at the end of April 2020, I got one of the coveted Projector Invitations.
At that point, I was deep into my personal experiment with Human Design. I had been having a lot of behind-the-scenes conversations about it with my colleagues, friends, and private clients but, I had zero intentions of doing anything “official” with it in my business. And I definitely had no idea of the wild success I’d experience with the Human Design Map.
At that time, I did private coaching for creatives who struggled with shame, self-worth, and feeling “not good enough.”
But, true to my projector aura, people started asking me if they could pay me to interpret their Human Design.
And I kept saying no.
A part of me still believed that making money had to be much harder than explaining something that felt really natural and easy to me.
But on a fateful Thursday, someone that I love and deeply respect metaphorically knocked me upside the head and insisted that I let her give me money to make her Human Design Map.
I sent her an invoice, she paid it instantly, and on Saturday, I got to work on her map.
As I sat there, surrounded by my Human Design and Gene Keys books, highlighters, pencils, and my trusty notebook, I began writing about her incarnation cross and tears were streaming down my face.
I was taking the harsh and often disempowering language of Human Design and I was translating it into pure magic.
And, with no exaggeration, I say that for the first time in my life, I KNEW that I had something to offer the world. I believed that my work meant something and that everyone on the planet deserved to see themselves in this light.
A fire was lit inside of me. And I could not wait for Monday to come. This feeling changed everything for me.
The next morning, May 3, 2020, I woke up to missed calls from my sister and a text message telling me to call her ASAP.
My heart sank.
She picked up the phone and she said:
Bryan passed away last night.
I said:
Wait, is this really happening?
I was having a hard time wrapping my brain around the fact that I’d lost not one but, now, two brothers. My brother Ronnie had also unexpectedly died, at the age of 25, many years before.
But, it was true. I wasn’t dreaming. Bryan was gone.
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He was 37 years old and left behind a wife and two daughters.
I immediately began packing my things and headed to North Carolina to be with my family.
Just over a week later, we held Bryan’s funeral right next to Ronnie’s grave.
There were a couple of hundred people there, many I had never met before. I listened closely as so many of them honored him by sharing the impact that he’d made on their lives.
Time and time again, they said the same thing about him. They said:
Bryan was full of heart.
And he was.
Bryan had gate 15 in his conscious sun.
His energy was big. And bold. And you could hear him coming from a mile away. He gave zero fucks about what other people thought he should do with his life and he loved hard.
On that day, it was palpable. He left the mark of Love on this world.
But there was also a sharp contrast between what was being said in those mini-eulogies and the whispers among the crowd.
Just as people shared that Bryan had had a profound and healing impact on their lives, there were also many well-meaning people wondering if Bryan was in Hell. As in, burning for eternity with the “devil.”
See, on the outside, Bryan lived the kind of life that many people would not (and did not) approve of. In many cases, he was seen as someone who was doing life wrong.
And while I don’t believe in Hell or eternal damnation, I too had been guilty of judging the way that Bryan lived his life. I would have never looked at his life and said that he was someone who was living his purpose. I absolutely believed that he should be doing things differently.
But, I also knew that all of those people who shared his loving nature were right. His life was kind of a mess and he was love. He was both and.
When I came back home, I ran his Human Design chart for the first time.
And, I was stunned when I saw it.
His G center and his Will center are both defined in his chart. Those two centers make up the heart chakra in the Hindu chakra system.
And his incarnation cross was the Vessel of Love, Gate 15 in his conscious sun.
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Bryan was in fact full of heart.
And at that moment, a deep place inside of me, that had longed for purpose and meaning my whole life, surrendered into this knowing:
Bryan was living his purpose.
Maybe it didn’t look like it on the outside.
But he was. And he always was. There was never a time he wasn’t.
Even when he was doing things we often believed he shouldn’t.
What I knew at that moment was that purpose wasn’t something we find. It isn’t something that happens to a select few. It isn’t something we have to strive for, or achieve, or prove in an attempt to earn worthiness on this Earth.
Our purpose is to live life — as ourselves — and our real work is to recognize it (and its full “positive” and “negative” spectrum of expression). It is to open our hearts and minds to receiving those gifts. To allow ourselves to revel in the magic that flows through each and every one of us. To know that there is nothing to prove, or earn, or be in order to be worthy of Love (Human Design Gate 25) and Grace (Human Design Gate 22).
And in that moment, I also knew that I needed to tell everyone that would listen that you can end your quest to “find” your life purpose with a decision.
You must decide that your purpose is already alive and well. You must decide that you’ll allow yourself to experience it. You must decide to recognize it and receive it.
You must decide that living your life — as yourself — is the purpose. You must decide to love yourself through the times that you forget how beautifully powerful and on purpose you are.
These decisions will free you from the despair of purposelessness.
They will empower you to alchemize your darkest moments into a rare jewel encased in 24K Gold.
I made that decision for myself.
And, in time, I returned to working on that very first Human Design Map with more devotion than I ever knew was possible. There is zero doubt in my mind that people need this work and they need it in a way that only I can deliver it.
Because everyone deserves to see, feel, and experience the purpose that is simmering under the surface in every single thought, feeling, and action that plays out in their world.
Bryan has been by my side the whole time and his wild heart is cheering me on in sharing the legacy he left behind.
We are all Love. We are all the stuff of stars. We are all under the blanket of Grace.
We just have to allow ourselves to receive it.
Now it’s your turn to contemplate Gate 15
When you stand in the truth that the gifts of gate 15 are always available to you (whether it’s defined in your chart or not)…
Are you willing to march to the beat of your own drum?
Have you opened your heart to love everyone, especially people who aren’t like you? Why or why not?
What does your wild heart want?
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 15.
And, if you have gate 15 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.