The day I learned to stop overriding what I already knew

I talk about Human Design a lot. There’s a reason for this.

When I discovered the system 15 years ago, I had been searching for answers for a long time. And it met me in a way nothing else ever had.

I had been a psychology junkie for over a decade, earned a Bachelor’s degree, and had my sights on a Master’s. Then life took some hard turns without using turn signals in 2009, and I found myself going through some experiences that neither I nor my therapist could fully make sense of.

And I wasn’t ok. 

I had made it through River’s first 3-year battle with leukemia and none of us had any idea yet that there was another one coming. The kids were navigating heavy PTSD symptoms and I was trying to figure out how to make ends meet as a single mom. I was burned out and lost and I had to rebuild my career. Or maybe a new one?

I had no idea how to figure out what was next and at the time my Inner Critic was still pretty much running the show. Every day was a constant war with myself of planning and second-guessing and re-planning and hustling and masking and pushing, while relentlessly berating myself for not doing more, going faster, and conforming better. 

I had run out of solutions to try. So despite being a lifelong scientist and cynic, I went exploring off the map and by 2011, I was enrolled in a 3-year advanced energy healing program at the Lionheart Institute of Transpersonal Energy Healing.

I know. I thought they were nuts at first too. 

But it took very little time for the amazing teachers I met there to show me that they had some very useful tools to offer me – tools I would not get from most Master’s programs in psychology.

It was in the car on the way to these classes that Human Design first found me. Carpooling with a classmate, she told me about this system she had been reading about. She looked me up and started telling me about projectors. I remember it so well – her reading from the passenger seat while we crawled through traffic on the 405.

The words cut straight through me.

Despite all my seeking, I had never found anything that explained my own experience of life this accurately.

This website she was reading from was talking about me. The real, underneath-it-all me.

Suddenly there was language for things I had never been able to explain – why sustained work felt impossible for me, why people couldn’t seem to hear me even when I was offering something useful, why I felt this quiet bitterness when my voice didn’t land.

I kept reading.

And the more I read, the more something in me started to settle.

Not because it gave me a better plan for my life – but because it gave me permission to stop planning at all. To stop fighting myself into any kind of conformity.

For the first time in years, there were moments where the constant analysis and self-correction went quiet. Moments where I could just… move. Decide. Trust. Without immediately second-guessing myself.

It felt like breathing fresh air after being underground for a long time.

So I did what I always do when something resonates – I went all in. I read everything I could find. I turned it over from every angle. I played with the concepts constantly. But for a long time it was always in a very philosophical way. Metaphorical. Theoretical.

It wasn’t until about a year later that it became real.

Everything had been arranged.

The Plan was in place and we were already in motion. The girls were 7 and 5, still in elementary school. I had dropped them off that morning and would be picking them up early, at lunch, to spend the afternoon at Disneyland. Arrangements had been made with their teachers and they had already completed their make-up assignments in advance. We had spent the drive to school negotiating the order of the first six rides they wanted to go on when we got there. 

I was back home now, packing up snacks and sunscreen and sweaters and band aids and trying to imagine what else we would need.

And then out of nowhere, I got the ‘No’.

I had been practicing tuning into my splenic authority for weeks and sometimes it felt very subtle to the point of being abstract.

But this was not abstract. 

It was as if my body herself was just saying ‘No’. 

Not freezing, not panicking, not contracting. 

Just buzzing with this sort of icky feeling about continuing to move forward in the direction my mind and plans were trying to go. 

Just a clear, unmistakable ‘No’.

I felt it. I understood it. And I refused to believe it.

I mean come on. This was real life. This was not some abstract thought experiment to explore while trying on the idea of living my design in my journal, after the chores were done and the kids were asleep. 

This was the waking hours! I had made a commitment to my daughters. They were excited and expecting to go to Disneyland. We only had three weeks left on our season passes and this was the last day that Nadia could see the Tower of Terror, her favorite ride, before it closed for a year to get made over from a Twilight Zone theme to a Guardians of the Galaxy one.

We were doing this. “Inner authority” be damned.

And it’s not like anyone died or anything. 

But I sure did get ample evidence that my body knew something I didn’t. 

The parking garage was closed and we had to spend 40 minutes being re-routed through some convention crowd to get to the Buzz Lightyear lot down the street. 

I somehow managed to drop my wallet when we were getting out of the car but didn’t realize it until we had ridden the bus to the park and were standing in line to get in. So we took the bus back, couldn’t find the wallet in or near the car, and had to spend the next 90 minutes retrieving it from Lost and Found (thank goddess for good samaritans!!)

River had twisted her ankle that morning in gym class and was pretty spent by the time we hit the entrance gate for real.

Nadia broke down sobbing after her Tower of Terror ride and said she wished we hadn’t come. (She was having an interesting bit of identity crisis around it…I’ll share that story someday).

We finally gave up two hours sooner than planned after learning that River’s favorite ride had closed for the rest of the day about 20 minutes before we got to it.

While carrying my Kindergartener back to the car with my 2nd grader sobbing into my sleeve, I thought 

“Hunh. That ‘No’ was right. 

My body knew something I didn’t. 

So like… in REAL LIFE I could be just trusting my instincts?

There’s no way that’s going to actually work.”

I certainly can’t say that I always listened to my body after that. But I have never again been able to completely ignore it either.

And when my mind thinks it knows better, and takes over, I can’t help but notice how that works out.

Over time, it has gotten much harder to ignore my inner knowing.

It’s been a living experiment. Not a structured, scientific one. More like a conversation. A relationship. It’s like my mind and my body have been in couple’s counseling since that day.

And my goodness has this body led me on some wild twists and turns.

Some of the outcomes have surprised me. Many have brought judgment from others. Sometimes it takes me a while to understand why things unfolded the way they did.

But we’re 15 years in now, and even as my path has wound through fire – trauma, loss, and repeated identity shifts – I can honestly say that trusting my body has not led me to choices I regret. Not once.

Over and over, this way of navigating has brought me experiences, connections, and moments of synchronicity that I would not trade for the world, and outcomes far beyond what I was aiming for with all my mind-led planning.

For me, Human Design is not just about the data. It’s not about memorizing the lore of every gate, channel, center, and line so that I can make a new-and-improved plan for my life from and then try to force my body to conform to it. 

It’s about letting the information change me.

It’s about remembering, again and again, that my body knows something about where I’m going and what matters, whether my mind understands yet or not.

It’s about noticing when I’ve slipped back into the old pattern of trying to get it right, predict the outcome, and stay in control. Noticing when my mind has grabbed the wheel from the back seat and is overcorrecting again so that I can gently relieve her of the burden of making decisions and allowing her to return to her real role: observer, interpreter, storyteller.

Every time I make that shift, I feel relief.

Every time I guide someone else through it, they can feel it too.

Every time I release the “should” and come back to what’s actually true for me, life gets simpler. And things work out better.

The shift was never in learning how to get it right.

It was in stopping the constant override.

In finally not pretending that I didn’t already know.

Once I saw it, I couldn’t unsee it.

And apparently, I can’t stop talking about it either.