Human Design Reflector's Reflections with Dirk Nellens cover art

Human Design Reflector's Reflections with Dirk Nellens

Human Design Reflector's Reflections with Dirk Nellens

By: Dirk Nellens
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Personal Reflections of Dirk Nellens. This space is dedicated to sharing Human Design insights on our unique way of being, navigating life's energies, and finding harmony in the cosmic dance.

reflectorsreflections.substack.comDirk Nellens Philosophy Social Sciences
Episodes
  • Reflection of the Week: Falling Out of Eden

    Reflection of the Week: Falling Out of Eden
    Jun 15 2026
    This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit reflectorsreflections.substack.comEspecially during the beginning of this week, we are under the Cross of Eden. I have my Personality Nodes in the first lines of the 11 and 12 which makes it a psychological theme that deeply colours my life. There are moments in life when something we long for begins to feel real before it is actually ours.In my case, it was a house that caught my imagination over the past month. But is can be a relationship that starts to take shape, a new career path that opens before us. We begin to inhabit a future that has not yet arrived. We furnish the rooms in our minds, walk the halls of possibility, and quietly rearrange our lives around what might be.Then something changes.A door closes. New information emerges. Circumstances shift. What seemed certain becomes uncertain, or disappears altogether.The loss can feel surprisingly intense. Not because we have lost something we possessed, but because we have lost something we had already begun to live inside.This is the psychological experience I think of as “falling out of Eden.” And under the actual Nodal Perspective in Gates 59 and 55, it can feel particularly intensified. The biblical story of Eden is not only a religious myth; it is also a profound description of a recurring human experience. Eden represents a state of harmony in which life appears coherent, meaningful, and aligned. There is little tension between desire and reality. We feel we know where we are going.The Fall occurs when that certainty is broken and the actual nodal environment brings forward uncertainty through the 55th Gate in the North Node.What makes this experience so painful is that we are rarely mourning only the object itself. We are mourning an entire future. We grieve the life we imagined, the identity we were growing into, the story we had already begun to tell ourselves.When this happens, the mind often enters a familiar sequence.First comes disbelief. There must be a mistake. Surely things are not as they seem.Then comes investigation. We replay conversations, search for missing information, and try to understand what happened. We look for the moment where the story changed.Next comes idealisation. The lost possibility becomes even more beautiful in hindsight. The house becomes perfect. The relationship becomes extraordinary. The path not taken begins to glow with a special kind of light.What we are really trying to recover is not the thing itself but the feeling of certainty it provided.At a deeper level, every experience of disappointment reawakens a very old human truth: life is uncertain and transitory at all level. We cannot possess the future in advance. We can imagine it, hope for it, and move toward it, but we cannot guarantee it.Yet there is another side to the story.The goal is not necessarily to return to Eden.Most myths of transformation do not end with a return to paradise. They end with greater consciousness. The protagonist learns that certainty is fragile, that loss is inevitable, and that meaning must be found not in guarantees but in engagement with life itself.The paradox is that the loss of an imagined future often returns us to the present.We stop living inside a possibility and begin living inside reality again.This does not mean abandoning hope. It means holding hope differently. Less as a promise and more as an invitation. Less as a certainty and more as a path.Perhaps maturity is not learning how to avoid falling out of Eden. Perhaps it is learning that every paradise we lose makes room for a deeper relationship with what is real.And sometimes, what is real has possibilities we could not yet imagine while we were busy dreaming of only one.__________________________________________________________________________________________Curious to learn more about the Channels and Gates of the Bodygraph, Section II of my book is dedicated to exploring them in depth!The Neutrino Weather for this week is available to the Inner Circle.This week, the Neutrino Weather seems to be inviting us to look deeper into our opinionated and ideological stances in life so that we can awaken to something larger than our confined sense of self [See the Neutrino Weather full video in the inner circle bellow]* Instant access to the full archive of previous posts* Two live Zoom gatherings per month (bring your Bodygraph for live commentary + Q&A this coming Sunday at 10 am Madrid time)For anyone subscribing to my newsletter (inner circle), I would like to inform you that you are invited to assist and bring your own Bodygraph and questions LIVE, every two weeks.
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    5 mins
  • Reflection of the Week: Pedro Almodovar's "Amarga Navidad", a great opportunity to delve into today's Nodal environment .

    Reflection of the Week: Pedro Almodovar's "Amarga Navidad", a great opportunity to delve into today's Nodal environment .
    Jun 8 2026
    This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit reflectorsreflections.substack.comOne of the fascinating - and at times amusing - aspects of Human Design is that it offers us a way to actively participate in the unfoldment of life. It invites us to observe the mechanics at play around us and to recognize how larger forces express themselves through everyday experiences.Ra Uru Hu once shared a rather eccentric story to illustrate this. Sitting with a group of students having a drink on one of the main squares of Ibiza Town, he noticed the conversations taking place around him shifting as the lunar nodes changed. Whether one takes such observations literally or not, the story points to something important: the nodal environment is not merely an abstract concept. It can be observed in the world around us.This past weekend, I had an experience that felt deeply connected to the current nodal configuration.As a general reminder, the lunar nodes describe our perspective on life - how we are designed to look out upon the world. At the moment, all children born between mid-May and the end of July 2026 carry a nodal perspective through Gates 55 and 59.Gate 55 carries an awareness that abundance is ultimately a matter of Spirit. Gate 59 is about intimacy, bonding, and our capacity to dissolve barriers between ourselves and others. Together, these gates create a perspective deeply attuned to themes of passion, love, emotional openness, longing, and the ways in which we can lose ourselves in another human being.I do not pretend to fully understand all the intricacies of this nodal perspective. Yet I do recognize some of its dynamics when they appear, and this weekend offered a striking example.I went to see Pedro Almodóvar’s latest film, Amarga Navidad, which has just been released in cinemas. What fascinated me was Almodóvar’s extraordinary ability to give cinematic expression to so many dimensions contained within the song La Llorona (”The Weeping Woman”), famously interpreted by Chavela Vargas throughout different periods of her life.The film explores countless shades of love, loss, desire, yearning, identity, LGBTQ+ experience, heartbreak, devotion, and even the impulse to die for love. Watching it, I was struck by how Almodóvar managed to bring to life so many emotional layers hidden within this old Mexican ranchera song.Chavela Vargas herself was a remarkable figure: an artist ahead of her time, a close friend of Frida Kahlo, and a cultural icon whose life embodied many of the themes expressed in her music. Through her interpretation, La Llorona becomes much more than a song - it becomes an archetypal expression of longing, grief, passion, and surrender.What feels especially beautiful is that this film arrives during the current nodal environment. It offers us a living illustration of themes associated with Gates 55 and 59, helping us feel and understand dimensions that are often difficult to capture with concepts alone.If you would like to consciously participate in the unfoldment of consciousness in form, I encourage you to begin by listening to La Llorona as sung by Chavela Vargas. Explore the folklore surrounding La Llorona, the ghostly figure of the weeping woman, and the many symbolic layers associated with her story. Then, if you have the opportunity, go and see Amarga Navidad.You may find that the experience offers not only a beautiful artistic encounter, but also a deeper appreciation of the nodal perspective currently moving through the world.__________________________________________________________________________________________Curious to learn more about the Human Design of Pedro Almodóvar? Turn to page 474 of my book, where you'll find his BodyGraph and an exploration of how his design supports the unique creative genius, independence, and commitment to individual freedom that shine through his remarkable body of work...The Neutrino Weather for this week is available to the Inner Circle.This week, I’m bringing the neutrino weather to you in an interactive way. We’re looking at a week where logic thought and materialisation contrast with emotional weather. [See the Neutrino Weather full video in the inner circle bellow]* Instant access to the full archive of previous posts* Two live Zoom gatherings per month (bring your Bodygraph for live commentary + Q&A)For anyone subscribing to my newsletter (inner circle), I would like to inform you that you are invited to assist and bring your own Bodygraph and questions LIVE, every two weeks.
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    15 mins
  • Reflection of the Week: Human Design and Therapy: A Meeting of Two Arts of Living

    Reflection of the Week: Human Design and Therapy: A Meeting of Two Arts of Living
    Jun 2 2026
    This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit reflectorsreflections.substack.com

    Over the more than twenty years that I have been involved with Human Design, one question has repeatedly returned to me:

    What do we actually do with the information?

    Many people receive a Human Design reading and immediately recognize themselves in it. Something resonates. Something feels true. They can see aspects of their Essence reflected in the Bodygraph. Yet often, after the initial excitement, another question emerges:

    How do I live this?

    This question has accompanied me for years and eventually led me into the world of therapy, bodywork, meditation, and transformational processes.

    Human Design offers us a remarkable map of our energetic architecture. It reveals something about our individuality, our unique way of being, and the intelligence that is already operating within us. But a map alone is not the journey. Information alone does not transform us.

    Transformation requires experience. That transformation process has always been presented as two-fold: honour your Strategy and Inner Authority and observe the not-Self strategies of the mind. For me, they go hand in hand as it is challenging to honor the intelligence of the body when we’re caught in the mind.

    It requires a willingness to encounter the layers of conditioning, adaptation, fear, and defense that have accumulated around our original nature.

    This is where therapy enters the picture.

    One of my favorite definitions of healing comes from Gabor Maté, who describes healing as the process of stepping back from the false self that was created to survive and reconnecting with our authentic self. In many ways, this is also what Human Design points toward.

    Both Human Design and therapy are concerned with differentiation.

    Both invite us to ask:

    Who am I beneath what I learned to become?

    Who am I beneath my coping strategies, defenses, roles, and self-images?

    Who am I when I stop trying to be who I think I should be?

    Over the years I have come to see Human Design and therapy as deeply complementary. Psychotherapy has developed extraordinary insight into trauma, conditioning, character formation, attachment, emotional wounds, and the many ways we protect ourselves from pain. Human Design, on the other hand, offers a unique lens through which we can observe both our inherent nature and the places where conditioning tends to take hold.

    The Bodygraph does something fascinating. It not only points toward our Essence, it also illuminates the architecture through which we become conditioned.

    In this sense, Human Design does not tell us who we are.

    Rather, it helps us distinguish between who we are, how we adapted, and what happened along the way.

    For therapists, this distinction can be profoundly valuable.

    For Human Design practitioners, therapy can be equally valuable because it offers practical pathways for exploring, integrating, and healing the very patterns that Human Design reveals.

    Increasingly, I see Human Design not simply as a system of knowledge but as an inner GPS for awareness - such as the title of my book suggests. It does not ask us to become someone else. It invites us to recognize who we already are.

    Our task is not to improve our Essence.

    Our task is to remove what obscures it.

    Perhaps this is where Human Design and therapy meet most beautifully: both support a process of peeling away what is not truly ours so that what has always been present can finally be lived.

    Not as a concept.

    Not as an idea.

    But as a direct experience of Being.

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    The Neutrino Weather for this week is available to the Inner Circle.

    We are starting this week with the Sun in a Gate that expresses “I feel like a change” and the Earth in a position that says “you can’t push change” which makes things clear: change comes when the time is ripe. [See the Neutrino Weather full video in the inner circle bellow]

    * Instant access to the full archive of previous posts

    * Two live Zoom gatherings per month (bring your Bodygraph for live commentary + Q&A)

    For anyone subscribing to my newsletter (inner circle), I would like to inform you that you are invited to assist and bring your own Bodygraph and questions LIVE, every two weeks.

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    4 mins
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