Noticing Your Life September 6, 2016

Living my 4/6 Role

(By Leela Swann-Herbert)
I began my experiment of Human Design in a deep identification with the Personality;
with who I think I am. It’s been a process to recognize that it’s the body that lives the
life, the Design side with its unique Inner Authority and its own intelligence, with its
own consciousness.

The dilemma is that the body’s consciousness is unconscious to the Personality. It is

not unconscious to the body – just to that who I think I am which is used to running
the life. Slowly, over the 7 years of deconditioning the body, the Personality, through
the development of observation, becomes aware of the body’s consciousness, the
body’s path that arises through the Inner Authority, step by step, decision by decision.

At the beginning of my experiment, it took a great amount of trust to begin to allow

the body its life, to trust in the decisions of my body’s Inner Authority. And, it
continues to require a greater amount of trust to recognize that the Personality, that
who I think I am, is not for my own life. Personality is for everyone else – when asked,
when invited, when initiated – and when it is correct to express it, to communicate
through it.

I was so deeply identified with my 4th line personality at the beginning of my

experiment, that I really believed it was Me. I believed that the body was simply
something that came along for the ride, that it was a necessary part of being alive; but,
that the body belonged to the personality, to the mind – that the body was a
possession.

My 4th line personality, when I was not operating correctly, when it was not observing
the life experiences that the body was actually having, provided a difficult, illusory life.
As a 4/6, I’m a personal destiny being, but when the 4th line personality was running
the life, it was all about the other.

Will they be friends with me? Will they bring me opportunities to get what I think I
want? Will they support me? Can I confide in them? Can I trust them? I had constant
mental stories about wanting friendship, wanting a benefactor, wanting support,
wanting life to be the way I think it should be, wanting to get beyond mental judgment
of myself (and projecting it on others), wanting people to treat me a particular way,
taking life personally... And, none of it was actually taking place in my experience. The
mind’s story was simply a mental formula that wanted life to be a particular way: If
(this) then I'll have, be or do (that).

Part of my dilemma at the start of my experiment was that I held a deep distrust of my
physical experiences of life. My first phase as a 6th line being was physically chaotic,
especially after I left home at 17. By the time I reached my Saturn return, I had been
married and divorced twice (once with a drug addict and the other with a physical
abuser), and had a 7 year old son.
My Saturn return was a major shift in my life – my mother died, I went to live in an
ashram for 6 months, moved to Hawaii, and met my partner Dharmen – all in one
year.

I met Human Design during my 6th Line body’s second phase – the roof phase. I’ve
never been as healthy before or after – as in my roof phase. My body was strong,
capable, and resilient. I could burn the candle at both ends, and never skip a beat. I
worked full time, had a relationship, home, and family with 3 children. I was also still
driven by my 4th line personality to be deeply involved in my social networks. I was
superwoman – trying to be all things to all people.

And of course, it all came crashing down when I came down from the roof at my Kiron
return; I literally came off the roof head first. At my Kiron I had a physical accident
and the discovery of skeletal damage that will be with me the rest of my life. After my
Kiron I could no longer live the way I had been living, my body would not support the
level of physical work, stress, and being on the go all the time. This mutative body
continues to be my teacher: it’s the body that lives the life; it’s the personality through
the mind that observes the body’s experience, and wisdom grows out of those
observations.

The first years of my experiment weren’t very satisfying. I was so caught up in my

busy, busy, life that it took me a long time to slow down enough to be aware of my
emotional wave. I experimented with sleeping alone and my strategy and authority
from the day I had my reading with Ra; but it took me three years before I recognized
a felt-sense of emotional clarity with a decision. Three years to experience what clarity
actually felt like in the vehicle.

At 7 years in my experiment I began practicing my PHS. I started to recognize my 6th

line body experience: aloof, on the roof, sometimes empathetic, sometimes apathetic. I
realized that much of the time my body has no energy for being around people. When
there is energy for being around people, 40 minutes is about my limit. Then, I need to
take a breather and be in my own aura space. I observed that my body is not nearly as
social as my mind thinks it should be. And I'm fine with that lack of social contact. I
enjoy the contacts that I do have, but they are not a condition of my
happiness/unhappiness. I've begun to recognize the depth of self-loathing that exists
in my melancholic mind story - and that being present to my life as it is brings me
back to my balance.

At 17 years in my experiment I realize that I enjoy my own experience of life...there is a

felt sense of being present in this body with its constant movement of the breath, its
aches and pains as a part of life, it’s ever changing emotional flavors – and observing
all of that from my personality perspective. I recognize the body’s experience; while at
the same time recognize the personality’s interpretation of that experience. I see both,
simultaneously without judgment, without thought, with a felt sense of wonder and
grace of being in this moment.