The Four Arrows: How You're Designed to Digest, Settle, See, and Act

Most people who've seen their Human Design chart have never paid that much attention to the four small arrows at the top and bottom of the bodygraph. The chart is new, unfamiliar and overwhelming, so this is definitely not a knock on you and your understanding. They have become my favorite part of the chart to contemplate, but they're the least-taught part and the most visually overlooked. They also describe something surprisingly practical, how your body and mind are actually built to take in the world.

There are four of them, split into two sides.

The two arrows on the left come from the Design side of your chart — the body, the part that was developed in the depths of your mother's womb, generated by a chemical processes within her body that contribute to genetic inherited traits and running before you were born. The two on the right come from the Personality side — the mind, the part of which you are most aware and think of as "you."

Left facing arrows are active, strategic, narrow, and focused. They are here to survive by executing strategy. This is the system filtering for what it needs and watching for what it should defend against. 

Right is receptive. It takes everything in, stays relaxed, and is here to be a resource others draw from. Holding a dominance of arrows facing this direction is being designed to be guided and protected by your network and environment for the depth and value provided. Neither is a better system. They're simply two different ways of navigating life.

Here is each variable's domain:

Top left: Determination

How your brain digests life. Notice that I said life, not just food. Food is where it's easiest to notice, but it also takes in and metabolizes information, energy, people, places, experiences. You're not meant to digest the way everyone else does, and this arrow describes the conditions under which your mind is nourished, supportive and capable of its best cognitive functioning.

Bottom left: Environment

The places where you'll meet the least resistance and find the people who support your alignment. Not a specific location — a frequency. The right environment reduces resistance, draws the right relationships, and, as Ra put it, sets you "irreversibly on a collision course with consciousness."

Top right: Motivation

What causes you to act in the world— acting from the culmination of what you have digested, where you are and how you see will be in response to certain factors about environments and situations that trigger you into action. If your thought-world were a painting, motivation is what makes you pick up the brush that day to work on the painting.

Bottom right: Perspective

How you're designed to see and plan before you take any action. For some it's an overview of the forest and for others it is the intricate details in a cluster of trees. First, you see, and with that information you can act on how and what you are called to do (motivation). Depending on how you see, you form ideas very differently. Perspective is allowing how you see to lead the way, without grabbing onto another's lens. It probably isn't the correct one for you.

Holding the four together

Determination feeds the mind, Environment settles the body, Perspective shows the mind what's there, and Motivation decides what the mind does with it. Digest, settle, see, act.

The two left arrows are your body's business — they work whether or not you pay attention. The two right arrows are your mind's, and they're the ones conditioning most distorts. We'll go deep on each in its own piece. This is the map they all hang from.