Episode 299: Navigating Adversity with Human Design
In this episode, I get real about navigating grief, anger, and the rollercoaster of emotions that come with adversity. After experiencing the heartbreak of losing a close friend and the emotional weight of external chaos, I stepped away from social media and the constant noise of the news to protect my energy.
Through this process, my Human Design became my guide. By understanding my open centers—Solar Plexus, Head, Ajna, etc.—I found tools to process my emotions, manage overwhelm, and reconnect with clarity.
Feeling stuck or weighed down by your own emotions? This episode dives into how Human Design can help you build resilience and navigate tough times with greater self-awareness and grace. Tune in for practical tips, personal insights, and a reminder: there’s strength in understanding yourself.
Listen to the Episode:
“Creating a space for stillness, reflection and self-observation helped me sort out my intense emotions and reactions, but most importantly, it helped me truthfully answer the question of, “What do I stand for?” To be able to answer it in a way that’s truly free from external influence – not what others stand for, what I think others expect me to say, but what I know to be true, from deep within me.”
Read the Transcript:
Hello there. Welcome to The Live FAB Life Podcast.
Today I’m going to be pretty open and share a personal experience that I’ve been going through. I’ve been leaning on my Human Design during this time, and I thought that you might be curious to hear how its supported me through this phase of adversity. My hope is that by hearing my story of this moment in time, you might find some relatable takeaways on how you can lean on your Human Design to get you through challenging times.
Recently, I had a friend find out about a very serious illness. This friend had been having terrible symptoms for a while that only seemed to get worse, but doctors kept attributing it to past conditions – like GERD. My friend finally convinced the doctors to run more tests and unfortunately, in mid-September, learned of an advanced, incurable condition.
After that I started to hear from my friend less frequently. About three weeks ago I sent my friend a text message to check in. I saw that it’d been read but didn’t receive a response and figured my friend was having a low day.
Three days after that I received a text message from my friend – except it was from my friend, it was a message sent from her phone letting me know that my friend had passed away the previous evening.
I’d met this friend a decade earlier when she moved into my neighborhood. Our friendship was unique. She was much older than I am – in fact older than my parents. But we bonded over having lived in Hawai’i and Giants baseball. Then, six years ago my friend had moved about an hour and a half away and I hadn’t seen her in person since, with the pandemic and all.
But over the years we kept in touch – daily during the baseball season as we’d text each other during every Giants baseball game – all 162 games – more if you count spring training and the post season.
She was someone I was in contact with every single day, even though we hadn’t met in person in six years. So, when I learned she’d passed, just 44 days after learning about her ultimately fatal condition, I was heartbroken; devastated even.
I'm not new to loss. Unfortunately, I first experienced tragedy at a very young age as a teenager, but this was different and the grief I felt – still feel – is deep.
In addition, well first, let me acknowledge that there’s certain topics I choose not to speak about publicly – on the podcast, on social media – not because I don’t think that my voice matters, but because there hasn’t been an invitation for me to share my points on view in this arena but to be honest there was an invitation were extended, I doubt I’d accept it to protect my mental health and well-being because hate, bots and trolls come out of the woodwork when these sorts of topics are brought up.
That being said, in addition to the grief I was in about my friend's passing, just days later deep anger and resentment was piled on to it due to current events. I'm sure you can connect the dots there.
But it didn’t stop there - close friends were hit with their own adversities that are deeply affecting their lives and I’m trying to be supportive of them.
But the hits just keep coming.
So today I'm going to share how I’ve been navigating these adversities and the intense reactions and emotions I’ve had to them that, quite frankly, surprised me -- the depth and intensity of grief, anger, resentment – all of it – it took me by surprise.
I didn’t anticipate my strong reactions but when I did, I knew that I needed support to process them, because I could quickly feel myself falling back into old patterns and shadow behavior that I’d work so hard on and put so much time, energy and effort into overcoming.
I didn’t want to regress so first, I had an unplanned session with my therapist – more on that in a minute, and I also turned to MY Human Design for clarity and perspective.
With regard to the profound grief of losing my friend – when you lose a family member or a friend, you usually have other family members and friends that you can lean on for support and to grieve with. I didn’t have that with this friend.
While we were neighbors and shared mutual neighbors, we didn’t share any other friends. There wasn’t anyone else in my life that I could share this grief with. I mean, I couldn’t even find a photo of my friend. I was haunted by the thoughts of, “Will she just fade away? Will my memories of her just fade away and she becomes a figment of my imagination?”
It bothered me so much that I reached out to the person who notified me of my friend’s passing. She was also mourning our friend. So, although I didn’t know this person and she didn’t know me, we shared memories of our friend together and she was even able to send me some photos of our friend so that I can remember her by.
But all the while that was happening, I kept asking myself, over and over again, in self-observation, “Why do I have such strong reactions?”
Then, as the current events unfolded, I continued to ask myself, “Why are my reactions so intense? Are these MY emotions that I’m experiencing? Are these MY points of view? Am I taking on / absorbing / amplifying / being influenced by external energies?
So, I turned to the Undefined centers in my Human Design. I have seven of them, having only the Throat and Spleen centers defined – a lot of openness in my design –and knew that I needed to spend a lot of time in reflection on this.
Earlier I mentioned I had an unplanned session with my therapist. Well, I’ve had more since then but in that initial session we agreed that the best thing for me to do in that moment was to disconnect – from media which included mass media and social media.
Because, as I also coach my clients, when deep self-observation and reflection is needed, create space for alone time. Alone time limits the opportunity for external influence and conditioning.
In order for me to understand if I was taking on / absorbing / amplifying / being influenced by external energies. I needed to first understand MY emotions, thoughts, opinions, ego, drive and what these things felt like in my body so I could differentiate and recognize what was mine and what was coming from external sources.
Being influenced and taking on external energies isn’t limited to physical presence. You can absorb and amplify what you read, hear, watch – what you consume.
So, focusing on my undefined centers, the areas where we’re vulnerable to influence, I made the immediate decision to go inward.
I deleted all of the news apps from my phone except for the apps for my local newspaper and local television station. I stopped watching the news and also imposed a social media break, meaning I also deleted the social media apps from my phones.
I took a true break in order to practice self-observation with my emotions (Undefined Solar Plexus center), my ideas and opinions (Undefined Head and Ajna centers), who I am and what I stand for (Undefined G-center), my willfulness and ego (Undefined Heart center), and the heavy pressure I felt from it all (again, Undefined Head center but also Undefined Root center).
The Solar Plexus center is the center of emotional energy. Was I absorbing and amplifying other people’s emotions? What emotional boundaries did I need to put in place and/or reinforce and uphold?
The Head center is the center of ideas, and the Ajna is the center of opinions and points of view. Was I in misalignment with these undefined centers in my design and willfully (Heart center energy) refusing to see things from other people’s perspectives?
The G-Center is the center of self-identification and direction. Am I in touch with who I am, or am I following the crowd and taking on the identities and direction of others?
The Heart center is willful, competitive, and ego energy. Am I being influenced by someone’s defined Heart center energy and allowing my ego to be expressed in a not-so-healthy and productive way?
The Head and Root centers are pressure centers. Why am I feeling the weight of such pressure? Where is this coming from? Are my reactions so intense because I just want this external pressure to go away, however it takes?
These are the questions I asked myself in self-observation. I focused on the Undefined energy centers in my design to see if the intensities of what I was experiencing were based on conditioning – and in order for me to do that, I had to be free of external energy – to be within myself and have alone time to re-observe the differentiation – what each feels like.
I also spent time in self-observation of my two Defined centers to see how I might have been an influence on others and if so, did I do so in a respectful and responsible way?
There’s always two ways of expressing your energy – in a way that’s aligned and the best expression of yourself, and in a “shadowy” way which looks like hate, dishonesty and causes harm.
Disconnecting from all the noise was one of the best things I could have given myself. In all transparency, I watched the local evening news for 30-min because I wanted to be aware of what was going on in my local community but that was it. No other noise, no other apps so that I could be in my process – in a safe and quiet space for stillness, calm and reflection.
Initially, my therapist and I set a goal for a week. But at the time of this recording, it’s been two weeks which has been my longest social media break since I first joined MySpace in – what was it, 2004 or 2005? So, almost 20 years?
I always felt that I was pretty responsible about my use of social media but I didn’t fully realize the impact it has on me; the impact that the endless scrolling of reading other people’s opinions had on me.
Taking a true break from all of it did wonders for my nervous system. I noticeably feel less tension in my body. The quality of my sleep was better. You know that I use an Oura Ring – well during my media break the amount of REM sleep I got shot up to two hours a night and I was getting about 90 min of deep sleep a night. Not every night but most nights and my Oura Ring sleep scores have been consistently in the 80’s and 90’s. I’ve been using the Oura Ring for almost four years now and I can’t remember ever having a period of getting this kind of quality of sleep consistently.
This is the kind of thing that intellectually we’d expect to happen, so you probably aren’t surprised to hear it, but until you actually experience it – it's like that differentiation I talked about earlier. Until you actually give yourself the space to feel how good something actually is, you don’t fully understand it.
This was a 3rd Line learning experiment and experience that reminded me in a visceral way that what I allow myself to consume, even simply just through constantly scrolling has an impact – mentally but also within my body. And if this was the longest break I’ve taken from social media in 20 years, that’s 20 years of tension that I’d been holding on to.
Twenty years of motivating messages, of funny memes but also hateful and contentious things. And subconsciously holding on to tension for 20 years does take a toll that, if we don’t give ourselves the space to be free from, we don’t even realize it.
And the differentiation we gain from an exercise like this is freedom because we now have the ability to recognize and differentiate what that tension feels like and what it feels like to be free of it.
You’re probably wondering, so what now?
Creating a space for stillness, reflection and self-observation helped me sort out my intense emotions and reactions, but most importantly, it helped me truthfully answer the question of, “What do I stand for?” To be able to answer it in a way that’s truly free from external influence – not what others stand for, what I think others expect me to say, but what I know to be true, from deep within me.
So that I can see the work that I still have to do, but also what I already knew to be true – a reiteration of what was already from within me.
The process reminded me that emotions are energy-in-motion and not to judge them but accept them for what they are. Don’t fight the feelings, just be “in them” – “feel the feels.”
And similarly with my other Undefined centers too, particularly with the pressure centers; release the tension and pressure.
Had I not given myself the space for this process to happen, I guarantee that I would have reverted back to my past self, past behaviors and would have said and done things I would have regretted.
But relying on my Human Design to guide me left me with clarity, more self-understanding and especially self-compassion – clarity to understand what boundaries are essential for my benefit, what boundaries I need to do a better job of upholding and respecting, better mindfulness of where I spend my time, what I spend my time doing, what I allow myself to consume and even, what I spend my dollars on.
All of this has been reaffirming the question I asked myself, “What do I stand for?” And then, “Will I stand for it?”
There will always be adversities that we’ll face – personally and collectively in communities and as a society, but we do have agency. We get to choose how we react and respond to them.
I suspect that by the time you hear this episode, my social media break will have ended but I promise that how I use it will have shifted.
So, as you face adversities that will inevitably come your way, lean on your Human Design and leverage your understanding of it; it can be a powerful tool to help you build resilience as you navigate through adversity.
If you’re not yet so familiar with your design, I can help!
Start with one of my self-study programs. I don’t just tell you about Human Design, but I show you how you can apply it to your daily life in support of your health and well-being.
Or, order a Human Design playbook, which is how I do Human Design readings. My schedule is filling up, as people are placing orders to give them as holiday gifts (great idea!).
In fact, it’s one of the things I’ve been filling my time doing during my media break. Besides client work, I’ve been reading for fun, binging shows from my Watch List (an Apple Note on my phone of all the shows I want to watch), I’ve been spending time with real-life friends I hadn’t seen in years who have been so lovely to catch up with, spending time outdoors going on long walks, being in community, trying new restaurants, oh and I even started a new way of working out which I’m completely in love with -- I’ll share about later!
So again, your takeaway from this episode is to use your Human Design as your personal GPS as you navigate adversity – I mean that’s what it is, your personal roadmap to guide you through life!
Thank you for letting me share personal experience with you. If you haven’t noticed, this is Episode 299. The next episode will be Episode 300 which is when I had planned to share a personal update (which I still will).
This episode was not planned, was supposed to be on another topic, but I just know that I’m not alone in experiencing heaviness right now so I hope that by hearing my story that you don’t feel alone and maybe draw some insight into how you can use your Human. Design to help you through tough times too.
My friend, thank you so much for the time, energy and attention that you share with me. I'm always very mindful of it, I'm always very appreciative of it and I always try to serve you to the best of my ability.
So, once again, thank you and I will see you right back here again next time. Bye.
Naomi Nakamura is a Health x Human Design coach who’s creating a healthier society through aligned energy.
She blends a bespoke mix of Functional Nutrition and Human Design to help others shift into alignment to leverage and correctly manage their energy to support their body, mind, and spirit.
She believes that when we embrace our authenticity and lean into our bio-individuality, we naturally live a life of freedom, empowerment, and optimal health.
Naomi resides in the San Francisco Bay Area and can often be found exploring the area with her puppy girl, Coco Pop!
Connect with Naomi on: Instagram
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