How do you read your Human Design chart? Start in this order

Step 1: your Type and Strategy

Start with your Type. It tells you how your energy works and which Strategy suits you: responding, informing, waiting for an invitation or waiting through a lunar cycle.

Also look at your Not-Self theme. That emotion, frustration, anger, bitterness or disappointment, is your daily gauge of whether you are following your Strategy.

Step 2: your Authority

Your Authority tells you how to make decisions within that Strategy. Emotional means taking time, Sacral means listening to your gut, and Splenic means following that first knowing.

Together, Type and Authority are the practical heart of Human Design. If you use only these two, you already have most of it.

Step 3: your defined and open Centres

Next, look at which of the nine Centres are coloured and which are white. Coloured means consistent; white means you take in that theme from your surroundings.

Go through the corresponding Not-Self pattern for each open Centre. This is often the point at which people say they recognise themselves.

• Coloured Centre: this always works the same way for you.
• White Centre: this is where you take in and amplify.
• Each open Centre has one recognisable pattern.

Step 4: your Profile

Your Profile consists of two numbers, such as 1/3 or 6/2. They describe how you learn and engage with the world: through investigation, experience, invitation or being a role model.

The Profile often explains why people with the same Type can still be so different.

Step 5: Channels, Gates and the rest

Only after this do Gates and Channels become useful. They add detail and nuance, but without the first four steps, you lack the framework that gives those details meaning.

Take one Channel or Gate at a time. Read about it, see whether you recognise it, and leave the rest until you become curious.