The official name for Human Design Gate 40 is The Gate of Aloneness. But I call it The Liberated Altruist because its primary action is to balance your heart of service with your need for alone time, rest, and relaxation.
About Human Design Gate 40 – Gene Key 40
Archetype Name: The Liberated Altruist
In Action: balance your heart of service with your personal needs
Keywords: service, community, boundaries, balance, work and rest
Download All 64 Human Design Gates Cheatsheet (for free!)
Official Gate Name: Aloneness
Human Design Definition: The point of transition between struggle and liberation.
Core Theme: The will to provide.
Bodygraph Center: Will center and connects to the solar plexus center via human design gate 37.
Tropical Sign: Virgo
(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 40
All energy in the Human Design chart exists on a spectrum of potential.
On the “positive” end of the spectrum, Human Design Gate 40 is the energy for balancing your heart of service with your need for alone time, rest and relaxation. To gate 40 boundaries are beautiful. With its proper boundaries in place, it is empowered to dedicate vast amounts of energy in service to its community.
On the “negative” end of the spectrum, Human Design Gate 40 is the energy for using force, rather than natural energy, to get things done — especially for others. It may believe that “serving others” is how one proves its worth in society and therefore, have weak or porous boundaries. This can quickly lead to becoming burn-out from over-giving.
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 40 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 40 is to challenge and re-write any beliefs that say that taking care of yourself is selfish. These types of beliefs are a recipe for burnout. And, of course, know and honor your boundaries.
My personal contemplation of Human Design Gate 40 (Gene Key 40)
In the book Chants of Lifetime by Krishna Das, he starts the book by sharing the story of Neem Karoli Baba (his Guru and my Baba) sending him back to America to work through attachments.
Krishna Das didn’t want to go back to America; he had planned to live out the remainder of his life in India.
As he leaves the ashram, he shouts to Baba,
“How can I serve you in America?”
Baba shouts back:
“If you have to ask how to serve, it isn’t service.”
True to form, this one sentence struck me like a lightning bolt (human design gate 51).
With my undefined will, undefined gate 40, and surrounded by an astounding number of people with the full 40/37, I have held deep conditioning around being of service and worthiness.
I spent most of my life trying to figure out what exactly I needed to do to be good enough and worthy of love.
But what this story, and Baba, have shown me, time and time again is that worthiness is a construct of the mind. In the eyes of the Divine, it isn’t a real thing.
“True” service is just a natural process for a healthy will center.
But when we “serve” others to prove that we are enough, good, or worthy, we only serve a limited identity of the ego.
With this awareness, I have made it a conscious practice to notice when I’m giving in an attempt to be seen as good and when it is a natural expression of authenticity.
When I am doing something for others because I believe I have to, it is exhausting. It depletes everything I have to keep that up.
But when service comes from an authentic place, it is a completely different experience for everyone. It expands rather than collapses.
When it is authentic, rather than performative, I have this deep knowing that my next step is one of service. It is the natural state of receiving and the final stage of alchemy.
(You’ll learn all of the stages of alchemical transformation inside the Human Design Map portal.)
When we have gone through our alchemical process and fully stepped into a “higher” state of consciousness, the service to others literally just pours out.
When we are showing up for ourselves, honoring our boundaries, and expanding our consciousness, it can only work that way. You literally cannot stop that kind of flow. And there is no questioning whatsoever.
And, while I can’t know for sure, I think this is exactly what Baba was getting at in that conversation with Krishna Das.
Service isn’t something we have to try to do. It isn’t something that is expected from some mysterious bearded dude in the sky. It isn’t a performance for egoic eyes.
Service is expansive. It creates a ripple effect of expanded consciousness all around it.
The form doesn’t matter. There is no right or wrong way.
And when we are questioning whether or not we are doing it the right, that is a signal that we’ve lost the plot. We’ve become wrapped up in the story that we need to prove ourselves to be worthy of love.
Those moments are not a time to double down, grit your teeth, and push through. They are moments to reconnect with yourself and to ask yourself what you would be doing if you weren’t trying to prove your goodness.
The real trick is letting that be enough.
Now it’s your turn to contemplate Gate 40
When you stand in the truth that the gifts of gate 40 are always available to you (whether it’s defined in your chart or not)…
What is your relationship to being of service to others?
In what ways does your heart want to give to others?
In what ways do you give to others in an attempt to prove worthiness?
What boundaries are important for you to be able to give from a place of overflow?
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 40.
And, if you have gate 40 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.