Gate 29: The fuel to discover yourself through experience
You’ve felt it in your body, that feeling of YES! Yes, I want to do this thing. Yes, I want to go to that place. Yes, I want to be with this person. It is as if your soul is urgently telling you that you are all in.
This embodied affirmation acts like an ignition switch. It releases powerful fuel to act and to persevere, and promises the stamina you need to engage. Not only that, this response will reveal to you who you really, truly are as a human being. Because when you feel your body say yes to an experience and commit to it, you are sure to discover something priceless about your essence.
Gate 29, or the Gate of Saying Yes, is the hub of this process. This potent aspect of our design is found in the Sacral Center, on the Sensing (or Abstract) side of the Collective Circuit. It points up to the G Center, which is our place of identity, direction, and love in all of its expressions. This means that what you devote yourself to will reflect what you love, where you’re going, and who you are.
The Tantric Channels
The Gate of Saying Yes connects to Gate 46 to form the Channel of Discovery, one of three channels that connect the Sacral to the G Center. These are referred to as the Tantric Channels – forming our “energetic identity.”
Tantra is a Sanskrit word meaning “woven together,” and so in Human Design we see the potency of the Sacral Center intertwined with and fueling our very Self.
It’s the journey, not the destination
We can trust this Sacral, this sacred Sacral response in that if it says yes, we will have the energy to follow through. This is a design of “succeeding where others fail.” Such is the power of our devotion – when we fully commit to something, we will be able to dig deep and call upon our personal power plant, even when getting to the finish line seems impossible.
It’s important to note that completing what we start is an essential part of this process. It’s not about having a “good” experience, or quitting when an experience is “bad.” It is the experience itself that is the teacher, that will give us the gift of self-discovery as our reward for our resilience, for staying the course.
A primal response
This embodied response is sacred, because it reveals what our soul needs to do. Our minds are often the last to know. In the I Ching Gate 29 is called the Abysmal. The deep abyss. Who am I? From somewhere deep within, our highest self knows it must commit. It must venture into the deep unknown, persevere through the ups and downs of the experience at hand.
When you think about it, this response literally powers civilization. Remember that seventy percent of us are sacral beings with abundant, vital energy and a mechanism to regulate its usage. When we respond correctly, we offer up our life force to the world.
As with everything in this plane of reality, the qualities of Gate 29 express on an axis of polarity. This can also be the gate of saying no. Indeed saying no correctly, to the things that aren’t for you, is just as valuable as saying yes. These are the things that will wear you down, burn you out, leave you frustrated and maybe even sick.
And yet we are conditioned to say yes, aren’t we? This is Collective circuitry, its entire purpose is to share with others. It’s all too easy to pile on the commitments, when you are acting from fear, from scarcity, from the Not-Self. When you act from shoulds that the mind fabricates.
When we share our energy, we share our body. The harmonic Gate 46 represents the love of the body, of the physical form itself. In our temple of flesh we move through our experiences. In our dependable little vehicles we go through the school of life.
Gate 46, called Pushing Upward in the I Ching, enigmatically seeks Heaven while Gate 29 seeks Depth. What connects the two is our lived experience in this precious life, our wondrous, complicated, inspiring, heartbreaking experience here on this planet.
