Being Seen: How Human Design Recognizes the Nature of Us | with Amy Lee

Growing up, Amy Lee saw the way her father moved through life. He was an immigrant from Thailand who came to the U.S. with nothing, without even speaking the language, and he just figured things out along the way.

So her early was informed by a history of movement, adaptation, and coming into new cultures and environments. Her household was independent and allowed her to be self-sufficient. She didn’t get a lot of attention or support or guidance, but she had a lot of room and space to find her own way.

As she moved through high school and college, that freedom allowed her school life to shape her quite a bit. She went to engineering school, partly picking up on her father’s unfulfilled dreams and partly from growing up with a focus on women pursuing atypical fields of study. In a lot of ways, she had been able to get through school without really trying, and it wasn’t until college where she confronted that limitation. That’s when she started to see that she didn’t have the energy or passion to pursue that field.

What she did love about college were the late-night conversations with friends — about what was going on in the world, what different people’s experiences and upbringings were, what their values were — that was where the magic was.

At that point, she had a breakdown. She had been very busy her whole life trying to meet expectations that weren’t explicitly put on her. If she didn’t do something, she was going to end up working in corporate America, continuing to chip away at her father’s dreams. Instead, she moved to Hawaii with a friend to manage a bed and breakfast. That was her ticket out.

Amy spent a lot of time just staring at the ocean and crying, and it was incredibly releasing. She was studying psychotherapy modalities, working on herself, and counseling other people. Then, right after her daughter was born, she was introduced to human design. 

Human design is a relatively new system that provides a map for life, if you will, based on the exact time you were born. It’s not about manifesting things in your life but recognizing your inherent nature and learning to move with it.

Knowing more about our nature can free us up to not be wrestling with ourselves or trying to turn us into something different. When there’s that recognition of what you are built for, you can learn to follow that and see where it takes you. Our bodies have a certain intelligence that is here to show us something, and Human Design offers a guide to help us align with it.

What Brett asks:

• [01:16] Tell me about the early days of your life
• [07:20] How did you have the experience of noticing what was going on around you in the world?
• [10:013] What were the things you loved that you got away from?
• [13:01] Was your desire to sing and perform taking you down a path that wasn’t really your essence?
• [21:05] How does your freedom end up serving you in life?
• [25:59] How are you seeing yourself in the curiosity of the human experience?
• [29:07] What was it like making the decision to not go down the path you had been preparing for your whole life?
• [35:28] When did therapy come into your life?
• [42:22] At what point do you feel like you landed somewhere that you are conscious and know what you’re going to do?
• [44:20] Where does human design show up in your life?
• [49:01] Can you give a description of what human design is? 
• [51:40] What is the experience for people as they receive this information?
• [58:00] How effective is this in relationships and in understanding a partner?
• [01:01:41] How do you work with people? One on one?
• [01:04:46] What other practices do you find to be helpful?

Lessons for intentional living:

• Many of us try to fit into the boxes we are placed in our life. What human design teaches us is that we each have a nature that we carry into this world, and that has a strong indication of how we are meant to move through it. Our environment and upbringing do play a role, more or less so depending on your nature, but there are personality traits that are innately ours, and by learning what those are we can stop fighting against them.

Resources:

• holohumandesign.com
• humandesigncollective.com
• mybodygraph.com