Human Design encourages us to explore our true selves versus our conditioned selves and embrace our natural gifts. Your Human Design Type is how our energy functions in the world, our Authority is how we’re meant to make decisions, and our Profile Lines are our personalities. It adds another “flavor” that, in combination with other parts of our design, makes us unique!

In this episode, we explore the six Profile lines and I share how learning about my Profile Lines 1 and 3 resonated with me.

Listen to the Episode:

Mentioned in the Episode:

• Episode 182: Human Design Non-Sacral Types and Their Strategies

• Episode 183: Human Design Sacral Types and Their Strategies

• Episode 184: Your Human Design Authority - How Do You Best Make Decisions?

• Episode 190: Subconscious Capacity & Listening to My Splenic Authority

• FREE GUIDE: Get to Know Your Human Design + 15% off a Human Design Reading

• Book A Human Design Reading with Naomi

Connect with Naomi:

• Ask a question

• Connect on social media: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter

• Send an email

Share the Episode:

Read the Transcript:

Hello there and welcome to The Life FAB Life Podcast. I'm your host, Naomi Nakamura.

In recent episodes, we’ve covered the foundational elements of Human Design; Types and Strategies in Episodes 182 and 183, Authority in Episode 184, then, from Episodes 185-188, the nine energy centers.

These are the things covered when you have a Human Design reading with me. But there is one additional thing that we look at in my foundational readings that I haven’t dedicated an episode to yet - and that’s the profile lines - and that's what we're talking about today!

If you’ve seen my Instagram bio, I list that I’m a “1 /3 Splenic Projector. My Type is a Projector, and since I'm a Projector, we know that my Strategy is to “Wait for the invitation.”

I have a Splenic Authority which is why I say I’m a “Splenic Projector, but the “1 / 3” – these are my Profile Lines.

So, what are Profile Lines? In Human Design, the profile lines are your personality!

Your Type is how you’re meant to function and how your energy works, your Authority is how you’re meant to make decisions, but your Profile Lines adds another layer to your design.

You and I can both be Projectors, or we can have the same Authority, but our Profile Lines add another “flavor” if you will, on top of that. It’s another layer that, in combination with other parts of our design, makes us unique!

Learning that I was a “1 / 3” and what that meant was a large part of Human Design helping me to feel validated in who I am. Sometimes we might have been made to feel shy, embarrassed, or ashamed about who we are or how we behave, but a large part of that is our personality and I think we need to brace those aspects of ourselves.

Perceptions around how we should or shouldn't become about because of societal and cultural norms and perceptions, i.e., conditioning.

But Human Design is here to encourage us to explore our true selves versus our conditioned selves and that our true selves are our gifts and it’s nothing to feel embarrassed about or hideaway. Those are the parts of us that make us unique and when we lean into our true selves and follow our design, that’s how we can live with more flow and ease, and less angst and friction.

So, getting back to my profile lines, what does it mean to be a “1 /3?”

Well, let’s start with the order of the numbers. The first number in your profile lines is how you see yourself. The second number is how the world sees you.

So, in my profile lines, the “1” is how I see myself, and the “3” is how the world sees me. When the numbers come together, that's what completes your personality.

There are six different profile lines so the lines will only range from 1-6. There is no 7, 8, 9, etc. So, you can see the number of different combinations that are possible.

Let's get through the different Profile Lines, start with the One-line, of course!

One’s:

Ones are known as “investigators” because we need to get to the bottom of things. When we have an interest in something, we will dive in and research it until we feel that we have a solid understanding of it. We find safety in knowledge and information.

So, it’s perfectly normal for me, having a One-line to be piqued while watching something on tv and pull up Wikipedia or Google and read everything I can about it.

Some might call One’s “know-it-alls” but it’s not that we have to know everything, we just want to know everything about what we’re interested in.

And when we don’t feel that we know enough, that’s when we feel insecure. We don’t feel prepared, qualified, or that we measure up.

For example, after having my first Human Design reading at the start of the pandemic, I began studying Human Design on my own for about, I don't know, six months?

I still didn’t feel that I knew enough, so I took a certification program to dive in deeper. At the time, I wasn’t sure how or if I even wanted to incorporate it into my coaching work; my main motivation was that I needed to know more.

As I did, I knew I was going to bring it into my health coaching. So last December, I started doing readings for friends and family, and then early in the year, quietly taking on clients.

And then as the year progressed, I slowly talked about it in bits and pieces here on the podcast and on Instagram, but I didn’t feel adequately prepared until just recently, in Episode 190, when I shared how I was pivoting my coaching approach and centering it around Human Design.

Everyone involved in my Human Design community, and in my personal sphere of influence told me that I was more than ready to really dive into and give it a go, much earlier than I actually did, but I had to wait until I reached a preparedness level where I felt confident, I could do good work and provide value to my clients.

So, if you know someone who’s a “1”, trust that they know their stuff because if they didn’t feel competent, they wouldn’t be talking about it.

And if you have a “1” profile line, give yourself permission to go down rabbit holes to research and investigate. It’s who you are, it’s what you do. And if you’re called a “know-it-all” wear that badge with pride because you likely DO know it all – or at least you know more than most!

Two’s:

Twos are sometimes called “hermits” and that is because those who have a “2” in their Profile Lines thrive with alone time.

They have shyness and are oblivious to their natural gifts, but those gifts are honed, developed, and refined when they have alone time. Alone time is how a 2-line rejuvenates. It's how they're able to nourish themselves. Hermit time is very healthy and necessary for these people.

So, if you have a “2” Profile Line, carve out time for yourself. And if you don’t have a “2” line yourself, but know someone who does, support this need that they have and give them the space so they can hermit. You’ll all benefit from it!

Three’s:

If you have a “3” in your Profile Lines, as I do, you are an experimenter. You learn best through trial and error; you need to experience things for yourself.

And because we’re experiential people, it’s important to understand that there’s no such thing as failure – because our wisdom comes from our trial-and-error process, from our learned experiences.

So, if you have a “3-line” and you have a fear of failure, or a need for perfection, as I did at one point, let it go. Reframe how you think about failure. We all learn through experiences, whether you have a 3-line or not, but especially for those with a 3-line, it’s who you are.

And with that comes resiliency because we’re doing things for ourselves and not taking anyone’s word for it. And if something doesn’t work out, we pick ourselves up, learn from it, and gain wisdom from the experience. If you know someone with a 3-line, be supportive of their need for exploration, for their need to go out and try and experience things.

And if you have a 3-line, not only do you gain wisdom from your experiences, it’s also important to share your wisdom. This is how you can help and serve others.

Four’s:

Fourth line people are relationship builders. They’re all about communities and networking.

They have a gift for building relationships and cultivating community, and when they're with the right community, they can share their message and be deeply influential.

If you have a 4 in your Profile Lines your best opportunities are going to come to you from people that you already know, from people that you have an established relationship.

So, it's really important for you to nurture your relationships because that’s how you thrive and that's how you best contribute to the world - through your relationships.

So, get clear on what kind of communities you want to be a part of, and what kind of communities you want to cultivate.

Five’s:

Interestingly enough, of all the readings I’ve done so far, I haven’t done very many with those who have a five in their Profile Lines – just a handful, but boy did it resonate!

Those with a 5-line have leadership qualities about them. They have a message that’s meant to be shared and when it is, they’re looked to as leaders.

Others view 5-lines as someone they can learn from, who can support them through whatever journey that they’re currently on because 5-lines somehow show others what potential they have, what they’re capable of.

The thing about 5-lines, however, is to know when their purpose has been served, and then remove themselves when that happens. Let the person’s journey continue but your time in is has concluded.

When they withdraw themselves, they can recuperate and rejuvenate from that experience to gear up for the next that’ll inevitably come their way.

Again, I haven’t done a lot of readings with 5th line Profiles, but for those who I have, this really described them to a tee!

Six’s: The sixth Profile Line is about Role Models. So, a lot of the 6-line is based upon the 3-line, which you’ll recall is all about trial and error and learning through experiences.

So, the 6-line is really about the timing of your life.

If you have a 6-Line, the first 30 years of your life might have felt unstable, rocky, maybe even traumatic.

But when you hit the age of 30, you move through the next phase of your life where life experiences don’t feel so traumatic anymore, and gradually, what you experienced in your first 30 years because of your wisdom.

As you know, some parts of Human Design is based on Astrology, and I think in Astrology when you turn 30, they call it your first “Saturn Return.”

I'm not an expert in Astrology, by any means, but with the 6-line, there is some correlation here.

As you move from age 30 to 50, as you get older, the wisdom that you acquired through your life experiences, molds you into becoming the role model that you wish you had.

This is really powerful for a 6-line to hear.

I’ve done a lot of readings for people with 6-lines, many of them in the mid-late ’30s. And when I share this part of their Human Design with them, they get very emotional. There have been many tears shed because they feel this so deeply.

Some have even commented that their first 30 years feel like a lifetime ago because it's so different from the life they're living now; energetically just feel so different for them, and they truly feel like they’re evolving to become the role model they wish they had.

So that, in a nutshell, at a very high level, are the 6 Profile Lines in Human Design.

As you get into different number combinations, and you can do the math and know that there are many possible number combinations but understand that each combination has a different flavor.

Remember, the order of the numbers matter – the first number being how you see yourself, and the second being how the world sees you. And the combination of both is your full personality.

And so, like the rest of your chart, when you aren't leaning into your Profile Lines, you aren't living into your full potential and embracing who you completely are.

Like I mentioned at the start of this show, in my foundational readings, I cover Type, Strategy, Authority, the nine energy centers, and Profile Lines. So when you book one, this is what we focus on.

But if you're not quite ready for reading yet, I really wanted to provide an affordable and creative way to help you, if you're brand new to Human Design, get to know your design.

So, I created the “Get to Know Your Human Design” guide. It's a free PDF that's about 27 or 28 pages and walks you through, first, where you can find your Human Design chart.

Once you look at it, you're going to know that it’s not intuitive to decipher and you’re gonna need some help understanding it, and that’s what this guide is meant to do.

However, if once you go through the guide and you’re feeling ready for the next level of understanding when you sign up for that guide, you're going to receive a code to get 15% off when you book a reading with me. And along with that, you’ll get a few emails that walk you through what to expect in that experience.

I have links to all those things in the show notes, that you’ll find at www.livefablife.com/193, for Episode 193, and I'm going to list all of the previous episodes mentioned earlier there as well.

That's it for this week! As a preview for the next few episodes, I’ll be joined by guests who will be sharing their Human Designs, which are different than mine, and how they lean into and experience it.

So, thank you for being here, for your time and attention and I’ll see you right back here again next week – bye for now!

Naomi Nakamura is a Functional Wellness & Human Design Coach. She helps women who struggle with stress, fatigue, and burnout find freedom and empowerment by optimizing their health, finding balance, and upgrading their energy so they can live life on their own terms. 



Combining her diverse professional background, and her unique approach integrates Functional Nutrition and Human Design she guides clients on a highly individualized journey of self-discovery, observation, and integration by removing physical, mental, and emotional confusion and overwhelm, simply taking them back to the very basics of health through their Human Design.

She believes that when our bodies function optimally, our personalities and souls can shine through everything that we think and do with empowering clarity and ease.

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 | Pinterest

As a health coach who has helped clients with energy management to reduce stress, fatigue, and burnout, the Sacral center is one aspect of Human Design that strongly resonates with me because those who defined Sacral centers know when “enough is enough.”

Continuing the conversation from Episode 191, in this episode, I reflect on how learning about my undefined Sacral center has further shifted my relationship with food, tracking, and the apps that I use to support this.

Listen to the Episode:

Mentioned in the Episode:

• Episode 182: Human Design Non-Sacral Types and Their Strategies

• Episode 183: Human Design Sacral Types and Their Strategies

• Episode 191: The Sacral Center and Shifting My Relationship with Exercise and Workouts

• How I Changed My Relationship with Food

• Episode 149: A Holistic Approach to Macros with Dr. Jacqueline Bouley Price

• Gretchen Rubin’s “Better Thank Before”

• Oura Ring

• Episode 180: Bioindividuality and Human Design

• FREE GUIDE: Get to Know Your Human Design + 15% off a Human Design Reading

• Book A Human Design Reading with Naomi

Connect with Naomi:

• Ask a question

• Connect on social media: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter

• Send an email

Share the Episode:

Read the Transcript:

Hey there and welcome back to The Live FAB Life Podcast. I'm your host Naomi Nakamura.

One of the most popular blog posts that I’ve had was something I published before I even had a podcast. And with this show just turning 4 years old last month, this tells you just how old the post is.

It’s a post titled, “How I Changed My Relationship with Food.” And gosh, isn't it so telling that five years later it's still one of the most popular blog posts that continues to get hits every single week.

I think it's because at some point in our lives, we've all struggled with our relationship with food, and it's a relationship that evolves over time, again and again.

So, what I want to talk about today was somewhat of a follow-up to last week's episode, Episode 191, where I talked about the Sacral center, and how with an undefined Sacral center I don’t know when “enough is enough.”

And learning this aspect of my Human Design helped me reframe my relationship with exercise, fitness and working out.

Today I want to expand upon that conversation and talk about how this aspect of my Human Design, having an undefined Sacral center also has shifted my relationship with food.

Now if you haven't listened to past episodes on the Sacral center, there has been quite a few recently, the Sacral center is one of the most important energy centers in Human Design. It governs our creativity, desires, and is the source of our lifeforce energy.

I’ve had a fascination with the Sacral center because those who have this center defined, know when “enough is enough” for them. This means that those of us who don't have the Sacral center defined, me as a Projector included, we don't know when we’ve had enough of something – when “enough is enough.”

As a health coach I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this and how it applies, in the context of our health.

Those with a defined Sacral center, Generators and Manifesting Generators, they know when they've had enough to sleep, when they've had enough exercise, when they've had enough to eat. They have this built-in self-moderation system.

Those of us who have it undefined, the Projectors, Manifestors and Reflectors, we don't have that internal moderating system. It’s not innate in us.

When I learned this is an element of my Human Design, it’s literally a part of who I am that has helped me reframe, find a new context with so many things.

As I shared last week, with exercise, and by further evolving my relationship with food, tracking what I eat, and the apps that I use to do that.

As I did in the last episode, here’s a brief synopsis of my history with food.

I was a very inactive person in childhood, teenage years, and early adulthood. Growing up, eating healthy wasn’t a thing in my family. I didn't know what it meant to eat healthily was and what I did know or what I thought I knew was basically the Standard American Diet, which we know if not the best source of information.

I also didn't understand that “healthy” is a relative term, that what's healthy for one person may not be healthy for another; what's healthy for me may be unhealthy for you, and what’s healthy for you maybe unhealthy for me. This is the concept of bio-individuality.

So, my story in learning what’s “healthy”, and I’m using air quotes around the world “healthy” started with counting calories.

In the last episode, I shared that when I was 29 years old, I joined a gym and started working with a personal trainer. He was the first person who started talking to me about how I was eating because as it turns out, I wasn’t eating enough to properly fuel my body given how often I was now working out.

He turned me on to a platform called Calorie King, something I haven't used in, gosh, well over 10 years, but at the time it beneficial. It helped me learn at a time where I had zero context, about how, what, and how much to eat fuel my body to support my level of activity.

This was important because I was reading all the “healthy” magazines, like Shape, Fitness, Self and their tools indicated that based on my BMI, I should have limited myself to 1200 calories/day. If you have any context around this, you know that that is a really, really small amount of food, especially for an active person.

So, I slowly had this whole new world open up to me that grew my awareness, not just about exercise but also about how food fuels my body.

Now back then, I lived and died by my caloric intake – how many calories I took in, and how many calories I burned out. This was before I went to nutrition school and before I learned about bio-individuality, but it was the start of my awareness, of even paying attention to this.

Since then, my relationship with food has shifted. It became all about fueling my workouts until I overtrained and depleted my body, and eventually, I became very sick. I had a lot of digestive problems and learned that I had a lot of gut issues.

I had gut dysbiosis, Leaky Gut syndrome, terrible irritable bowel syndrome. That's what ultimately led me to go to nutrition school where I learned about bio-individuality - that what’s healthy for me can be unhealthy for you, and what's healthy for you can be UNhealthy for me.

Then I went through a period of uncovering food sensitivities and intolerances and healing from them. And that led to another shift in my relationship with food.

I used the process of elimination diets to discover what I was intolerant of what I reacted to, and opposite to that - what made my body thrive.

Elimination diets are getting a bad rap these days, and I understand why because it can be used in a very unhealthy way, but I used in the context of healing and discovery and it was very helpful to me because it gave me a framework - a process - that I helped me to understand what was causing my digestive system to flare up, making me feel so unwell.

It was a vital tool in my healing journey, and as a byproduct, it contributed to my ever-evolving relationship with food.

It helped me to not only gain more awareness in how my body responded to certain foods, but also, naturally through the process of tracking, I began to recognize how I respond mentally and emotionally to what was putting on my plate – what I wasn’t putting on my plate.

And that was really the crux of that really popular blog post, I mentioned at the start of this episode.

And that helped me come to accept the current state of my body, the current state of my health, and understand why I had the health issues that I was struggling with. Health issues that the conventional medical world wouldn't necessarily consider critical, yet it critically impacted the quality of day-to-day life.

But, while the process of an elimination diet was a learning experience, it was equally a stressful experience. It can be overwhelming, especially when you have a lot of things that you're dealing with. But at the end of the day, it’s what helped me develop body, mind, and emotional awareness around how I responded to food I was eating and wasn’t eating.

All that being said, there was still a struggle with the ability to moderate me and to know when enough is enough.

Let me share some examples to help illustrate this.

I’m someone who can easily eat – insert any food in one sitting.

I don't have the ability to moderate myself and it drives me crazy. I’ve really beaten myself up about it.

And as a side note – this inability to self-moderate doesn’t just apply to food (as illustrated in Episode 191) but since we're talking about food in this episode, these are the examples I'm sharing today.

In the last episode, Episode 191, I referenced Gretchen Ruben’s book, “Better Than Before” when she talks about moderators vs abstainers. I'm definitely an abstainer, where I have to avoid things altogether.

Because when I indulge, it gets to the point where it’s not even enjoyable anymore. I’ve eaten an entire pie, or an entire pint of ice cream, half a tub of almond butter – that’s literally left me feeling so sick that wasn't enjoyable by any means. And yet I still couldn’t moderate myself.

As I said, I’d really beat myself up about it; I couldn't understand how some people could open a bag of chips take two bites, and then put it away. How someone could have a bag of chips in their kitchen and have it last 2, 3, or even 4 days when I can't even have it last 20 minutes in my house.

It was frustrating – why couldn’t I do that? Why couldn’t I be one of those Moderators?

Then I learned about Human Design, and how in MY Human Design, I have an undefined Sacral center where I don’t know when enough is enough.

This really, really reframed things for me. It really helped me come to an understanding – more awareness - of how I’m built. In turn, I’ve come to have more grace and acceptance for myself.

In my evolving relationship with food, I went through tracking with a lack of awareness and, in my opinion, an unhealthy way, to have it be a triggering thing as I went through my healing journey.

Now that I’m in a different place, with a different mindset, different level of awareness, different relationships, I’ve actually been tracking my food again.

In early 2020 I started working with Dr. Jacqueline Bouley Price, who I had on in Episode 149. Before we started working together, I explained my past experiences and relationships with tracking macros and calories, and in my experience, she approaches it in a way that feels very nurturing to me.

She sets my macros and calorie targets every week I check in with her, rarely about the numbers, but more about my habits and emotions around the past week.

There’s a couple of aspects of her approach that makes this a totally different experience for me:

1. I don’t track how many calories I burn from workouts. While I have a vague idea of what that number is because I do Apple Fitness workouts and my Apple watch naturally tracks that, along with my Oura ring, I don’t pay attention to it. At all. And I’m being very truthful about this.

Why is this important? Because I don’t have a “calories in vs calories out” mentality.

2. The other thing I do is to preload MyFitnessPal at the start of my day rather than as I eat throughout the day.

Doing this gives me an idea of what treats and snacks I can fit into my day. And ironically, this helps me not feel deprived. Although, again, very truthfully, I don’t feel deprived because if I really want to eat something, I’ll eat it – I’m just more mindful about it.

This time around I’m actually finding tracking to be eye-opening because it helps me see and put into context, how much I'm actually eating. I find myself asking, “Do I really want to eat this? Do I really want or need to eat this much of this? Is this bringing me joy?”

Because again remember, without a defined Sacral center, I don't have that innate ability to moderate myself.

So having this tool to guide me and give me insight and context, really, really helps me improve my relationship with food.

Dr. Jacqueline can tell you that I don't hit my macros on days. In fact, it’s a very, very rare day that it happens. I do try and stick within a reasonable number of my daily calorie target on either side, below or above, and I also take a weekly glance at it.

Another way this helps me is to correlate and be mindful of what are the foods that I'm eating, if I have too much of it will cause my body to have a reaction.

For example, grains. My body functions much better when it’s grain-free. There was a time when I couldn’t tolerate grains at all (I really missed sushi!), but through my healing process, I’m now able to tolerate it, but not in huge amounts and not all the time.

And I do enjoy grains, so I do allow myself to have granola, gluten-free bread, and treats, sushi, but having too much of it in a concentrated period wrecks my digestive system and my complexion.

So, tracking helps me keep track where, if my digestive system is acting up, and we all know what that means by really acting up - unhealthy poop, really bad bloating and gas, tracking helps me I can actually put into context like oh yeah, I've actually been eating a lot of grains lately so I probably should back off on that for a bit.

It’s helping me observe:

1. When how much I’m eating is too much
2. When I'm eating as an emotional or stress response, or when I’m mindlessly eating

Other than sleep, I’d say that the biggest influencer on how I feel every day is food. So now that I’m in a different place, tracking macros and calories feels less triggering, and in fact, is a helpful check and balance for me.

Like everything, it’s an experiment, and I do have a 3 Line in my Human Design, which means I learn best from experiences, trial and error processes, so it makes sense to me how I could have an unhealthy and healthy experience doing the same thing.

For me, it all comes down to my personal levels of body, mind, and emotional awareness, and in the context that my Human Design has come to lend me and less about what someone else’s opinions, reactions, experiences, and advice are.

It’s been an experience in developing not just awareness, but self-trust, and self-love – and isn’t this we want to hope for and want for ourselves?

As I shared in the last episode if you've been struggling in your relationship with exercise, fitness, food, tracking, your health, whatever it may be, perhaps looking at your Human Design might shed light on a new way to look at things, and what insights you glean from it that can help you gain some awareness with whatever it is you're struggling with.

Maybe it can help reframe some things and help you move toward whatever outcome you're searching for.

And if you're new to Human Design, I’ve created a guide called, “Get to Know Your Human Design.” It’ll walk you through where you can find your Human Design chart and then help you understand the very basics of it.

And if you want more than the very basics, when you sign up for this guide, you’ll also receive a code for 15% off a Human Design reading with me. You'll also receive a series of emails that’ll walk you through exactly what you can expect in that reading.

I hope this conversation has been helpful and insightful in how you might be able to rethink things and your relationship with them. Thank you so much for listening, and as always, and I'll see you right back here again next time. Bye for now!

Naomi Nakamura is a Functional Wellness & Human Design Coach. She helps women who struggle with stress, fatigue, and burnout find freedom and empowerment by optimizing their health, finding balance, and upgrading their energy so they can live life on their own terms. 



Combining her diverse professional background, and her unique approach integrates Functional Nutrition and Human Design she guides clients on a highly individualized journey of self-discovery, observation, and integration by removing physical, mental, and emotional confusion and overwhelm, simply taking them back to the very basics of health through their Human Design.

She believes that when our bodies function optimally, our personalities and souls can shine through everything that we think and do with empowering clarity and ease.

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 | Pinterest

As a health coach who has helped clients with energy management to reduce stress, fatigue, and burnout, the Sacral center is one aspect of Human Design that strongly resonates with me because those who defined Sacral centers know when “enough is enough.”

As someone with an undefined Sacral center, I’ve spent *a lot* of time thinking about how this shows up for me, as someone who struggled with adrenal depletion and overtraining.

So, in this episode, I share my reflections on how this presented in the past in my relationship with exercise, and how it’s helped me shift my relationship to workouts.

Listen to the Episode:

Mentioned in the Episode:

• Episode 182: Human Design Non-Sacral Types and Their Strategies

• Episode 183: Human Design Sacral Types and Their Strategies

• Episode 012: What Really Happens When You Overtrain

• Gretchen Rubin’s “Better Thank Before”

• Oura Ring

• Episode 180: Bioindividuality and Human Design

• FREE GUIDE: Get to Know Your Human Design + 15% off a Human Design Reading

• Book A Human Design Reading with Naomi

Connect with Naomi:

• Ask a question

• Connect on social media: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter

• Send an email

Share the Episode:

Read the Transcript:

Hi there, and welcome back to The Live FAB Life Podcast. I'm your host Naomi Nakamura. Today I'm going to be sharing some personal thoughts and some reflections on the Sacral center.

As you have probably guessed, I've been intrigued with the Sacral center for a while. I mean, if you listen to the episodes I did on the Human Design Types, Episodes 182 and 183, I grouped them by which Types have defined Sacral centers, Generators and Manifesting Generators, and which Types don’t, Projectors, Manifestors, and Reflectors.

One of the reasons for this is because as I started learning about the nine energy centers, one of the things I learned about those who have defined Sacral centers is that they have an innate gift of “knowing when enough is enough.”

Hmmm, what does that mean?

I’ve spent a lot of time - a lot of time - thinking about what exactly does that mean, and, in what ways do I, as someone who has an undefined Sacral center, NOT know when is enough is enough?

What came to mind were things like, not knowing when enough is enough – to eat, to sleep, to work to workout. All that has a direct impact on our well-being.

So, I gathered, what this essentially means is that for those of us who are non-Sacral beings - Manifestors, Projectors, and Reflectors - the ability to moderate ourselves doesn't come as naturally to us as it does for those who are Sacral beings.

So, today, I want to talk to you about how this has shown up for me over the years, specifically in my relationship with fitness and working out. And as a side note, I’ll be doing another episode on how the Sacral center has influenced my relationship with food.

You’re familiar with my early days of getting my health coach certification, then you know that fitness and exercise were a pivotal part of that. It was the catalyst for my active interest in functional and holistic. In fact, my interest initially in it initially stemmed because of overtraining versus diet and nutrition, as in the case for most people.

For the first 30 years of my life, I didn’t have a relationship to exercise. I was not an active person – at all.

Growing up, I hated PE -. I was always the last one selected when picking teams. Gosh, I did the bare minimum to satisfy the physical education requirements in college. It just wasn’t something that I enjoyed, in hindsight, because I was never well-educated in it.

But then I was on the brink of my 30th birthday and a switch was flipped. I decided that I was tired of being an extremely inactive person and I was going to do something about it. So, I joined a gym that was just opening in my neighborhood and started working with a personal trainer.

Soon I discovered that I could do more, physically, than I ever knew I could. There was a hidden inner athlete in me that was emerging for the very first time. I learned that I was able and capable to do things I never imagined. It was thrilling and motivating to want to push and do more. What else can I do? How much farther can I go?

It led to enduring training and long-distance running, starting with running a 5k, then a 10k, then half marathons, and soon enough, I found myself training for the full marathon distance.

Without any understanding or even acceptance of the concept and importance of rest, I went from someone who was literally an inactive couch potato to running dozens of miles a week, on top of doing strength training and yoga as part of my overall training regimen.

It was going from one end of the spectrum to another. I didn’t know when enough was enough. I didn't have the ability to moderate myself.

When thinking about this, I was reminded of Gretchen Rubin’s book, Better than Before where she talks about Moderators and Abstainers.

Moderators can self-moderate. They can live by the 80/20 rule. Abstainers aren’t able to do this, so they have to completely avoid things.

Doesn’t this have strong parallels to having a defined vs an undefined Sacral center? The ability to self-moderate and know when enough is enough?

Those with defined Sacral centers are like Moderators, and those who have undefined Sacral centers are like Abstainers.

Thinking about my design, and I’m only speaking for myself here, I had a total lack of awareness when it came to my experience overtraining.

A lot of it came from a lack of education. I had no idea that there was such a thing as doing TOO MUCH exercise. As someone who did so little of it, the notion of too much exercise is harmful simply didn’t cross my mind.

The lack of education of what happens to the mind and body when there’s too much exercise. The stress it causes, how it affects not just the muscular-skeletal system, but the endocrine system – your hormones, the digestive system, all of it.

It was a lack of awareness, especially a lack of self-awareness. I was IN my body but disconnected from it.

I didn’t connect the dots between the leg pain I was experiencing with the IBS, digestive issues, poor sleep – all those things happening at the same time and how it was possibly tied to the stress of overtraining.

It was a lack of body awareness and mental awareness.

Ironic isn’t it, when I was doing all these things that healthy people do, but it was done to the extreme where it became unhealthy for me.

As I shared, the whole experience with overtraining was the catalyst that led me to functional medicine, holistic health and ultimately getting my health coaching certification. It was a pivotal part of my life and it led me to look at and learn my body and how it functions as a full system in a way that I’d never been taught before.

That’s what helped me become more aware of my body, in my mind, and ultimately with my emotions, eventually leading to the work that I’m now doing today.

So how did this change come about?

A couple of ways, beyond my undefined Sacral Center…

First, learning and understanding the profile lines in my Human Design chart. We haven’t talked about profile lines on the show yet, but I plan to do so in an upcoming episode. But your profile lines on your Human Design chart are thought of as your personality.

My profile lines are a 1 / 3. This means that I’m someone who has a deep need for learning and knowledge but also learns best experientially. So, I gain wisdom through experience. I need to experiment with things to understand something. Like experimenting to understand what enough is enough feels like.

You know, when I was finally accepted that I was burnt out and overtrained and learned about adrenal depletion and that I had it, I scoured through article after article in Running magazines, through running blogs because I wanted someone to tell me what to expect and how long I could expect to be out with this; how long it takes to recover, just how much rest I needed.

But guess what? I didn’t really find anything helpful because no one else was me. We're all unique and my situation was unique to me. So, it took a lot of experimenting and going through the trial-and-error process of figuring out what the best way for me to address this was.

And through that, I started to understand and gain some awareness of what enough is enough feels like in my body.

But here's the thing even about that. Our bodies are constantly changing, right? Mine does. What I like to call the “variables” change any given day – how much sleep I got, what I ate, what and how much stress am I under. These are all moving parts so what enough is enough feels like, can also change.

So, here are some tactical and, hopefully practical, ways that helped me understand what enough is enough feels like, and maybe they might be helpful for you too.

One is my Oura ring. It’s a wearable – a ring with a chip in it that I wear on my finger. It measures the quality of my sleep, my resting heart rate, body temperature, activity level, and then based on these data points gives me context on how well my body is recovered.

If I didn’t sleep well and my resting heart rate and body temperature are high, perhaps it might be a day to do an easy workout or even take a complete rest day.

Or I did sleep well and I’m trending in a good direction, so a higher intensity workout would be ideal today.

I’ve been wearing this Oura ring since January and it’s been hugely insightful. I know sometimes wearables can give us TOO much information to the point of overwhelm. I’ve experienced that before.

But while I feel like I do a pretty good job of paying attention to the cues my body sends me, having this external source of validation has built up my confidence in my ability to recognize the signals.

I used to live by data from a wearable, specifically my Garmin watch that I used for running to the point where it almost mentally broke me. So, then I went through a period where any type of data point from a wearable felt triggering for me.

It’s not those wearables are wrong; it was my relationship to them.

When I was able to shift my mindset and relationship to it, did I appreciate how it helps me, particularly in understanding what enough is enough feels like for me?

Now, it helps me by giving me parameters or what ideal trends look like for me. It reminds me to check in with myself.

For example, I might wake up one morning feeling cruddy even though I slept a decent amount of sleep, for me would be about 7ish hours, but still feel not great. In the past, I’d push through the cruddy feeling because, “Hey, I got 7 hours so that means I’m rested and should be able to do my workout.”

But now, when I look at the data from my Oura ring, it breaks down my sleep into how much of it was deep sleep, how much was REM, how much was light sleep, and how much of it I was actually awake. And after 9 months of using this, I’ve come to learn that the key for me is the amount of deep sleep I get.

So, I can get say, only 6 hours of sleep, but if a lot of it was deep sleep, I actually feel pretty rested. And I’ve learned that that data point also affects my resting heart rate, body temperature, something called heart rate variability and all those things have input into my recommended activity level for the day.

So, if I got 7ish hours of sleep but less than an hour of deep sleep and my resting heart rate was higher than my normal trend, then perhaps instead of that HIIT workout I had planned, I might do a gentle yoga workout instead.

Why does this matter to me?

Because I still have the urge to write out a workout plan for the week and stick to it, no matter what. It’s a constant…I don’t want to say battle, but it takes ongoing awareness to check in with myself to see what feels good today.

And the ability to not be so attached to what I had planned to do versus what will feel good today is, I feel, a huge area of growth for me, as I come to learn what enough is enough feels like for me.

This awareness, this insight is what makes me have confidence in myself that I can avoid falling into the trap of overtraining again.

It help me reframe my attitude and approach to working out, and completely change my mindset and my relationship with it.

Whereas before it used to be about calories out, about achievement, now it’s about moving my body in a way that feels good for me.

So, if you are someone who struggles or has struggled with overtraining, or with your relationship with fitness and exercise, maybe take a look at your Human Design chart and see where it can help you gain some insight and help you get to whatever it is you want your outcome to be.

If you don’t know where to get started with your Human Design chart, I have a free resource for you on my website. It’s a PDF called, “Getting to Know Your Human Design” Guide, and it will walk you through where to find your Human Design chart, and what some of the elements of it mean.

And, when you sign-up for it, you’ll receive a code for 15% off a chart reading with me, and the accompanying emails will walk you through exactly what to expect for a reading.

Thanks so much for listening. I hope by my sharing my experiences, it can help you to think about how Human Design can be a tool for you too.

I’ll see you right back here again next week. Bye for now!

Naomi Nakamura is a Functional Wellness & Human Design Coach. She helps women who struggle with stress, fatigue, and burnout find freedom and empowerment by optimizing their health, finding balance, and upgrading their energy so they can live life on their own terms. 



Combining her diverse professional background, and her unique approach integrates Functional Nutrition and Human Design she guides clients on a highly individualized journey of self-discovery, observation, and integration by removing physical, mental, and emotional confusion and overwhelm, simply taking them back to the very basics of health through their Human Design.

She believes that when our bodies function optimally, our personalities and souls can shine through everything that we think and do with empowering clarity and ease.

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 | Pinterest

Back in Episode 179, I was joined by Nadia Gabrielle for a conversation on Subconscious Capacity building. Nadia shared how 5% of what we do is in our conscious, but 95% of what we do is from our subconscious. The episode had me observing what’s sitting in my subconscious and how can I expand its capacity to meet my conscious self.

This exercise in observation led me to recognize how my Splenic Authority had been nudging me for months to shift the scope of my work, and how I’d been ignoring it.

In this episode, I take you behind the scenes for a candid conversation on:

• How I’m shifting my work

• The backstory behind how it came about

• What happened when I ignored my Splenic Authority, then finally followed it

• What my service offerings are today

Listen to the Episode:

Mentioned in the Episode:

• Episode 179: Subconscious Capacity Building with Nadia Gabrielle

• Episode 153: Integrating My Human Design Type As A Projector

• Episode 177: Wardrobe as Wellness with Jenny Wirt of Sartorevi

• Episode 068: Keto Quick Start: A Beginner’s Guide to A Whole Foods Ketogenic Diet with Diane Sanfilippo

• FREE GUIDE: Get to Know Your Human Design + 15% off a Human Design Reading

• Book A Human Design Reading with Naomi

Connect with Naomi:

• Ask a question

• Connect on social media: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter

• Send an email

Share the Episode:

Read the Transcript:

Hello, my friend and welcome back to The Live Fab Life Podcast. I'm your host, Naomi Nakamura.

Today I’m going to peel back the curtain and share a bit of behind the scenes of some things that have come up for me over the past few months. And with that an update about some changes that are happening over here.

Back at the end of July, which, gosh, by the time this episode airs will be close to three months ago, I interviewed Nadia Gabrielle in Episode 179 for a conversation on Subconscious Capacity Building.

If you haven’t listened to it yet, I’ll link to the show notes because I highly recommend you do.

At a high level, subconscious capacity building is about ways in which we might be unknowingly limiting ourselves and holding us back from reaching our full potential or whatever it is we truly desire.

Nadia talked about how much of what we strategize and plan for happens in our conscious mind because the conscious mind is where we’re capable of entertaining the possibilities, comparing different possible outcomes, calculating, and planning. But our conscious minds only have about a 5% impact on our actual daily behavior.

We’re actually being driven by our subconscious and so it's really the subconscious that will get to wherever it is we want to be.

But if we’re not there yet, then to level up, we need to expand our capacity.

As I was having this conversation with Nadia, literally as we were recording the episode, my mind started to think about how I might be limiting my capacity. Was it in the stories that I’ve been telling myself? In ways that I’ve been conditioned? In adhering to cultural and societal norms?

Did I believe that I could actually get to where I wanted to be?

And then, as we were recording, I realized that I didn’t have a clear picture of where it was that I wanted to be. Where was I going?

Six years ago, back in 2015, I felt a strong call to help people, so I went back to nutrition school and got my health coaching certification. Did I want to do it as a side hustle, or full time? In truth, I didn’t see how it was possible to do it full time, that I wouldn’t be able to match or exceed the full compensation package that my full-time job provided.

But that was the mind talking. Did I want to do it full-time? I never allowed myself to even entertain that thought realistically.

So, my first takeaway from that interview was to get clear on what it is that I truly wanted? What do I want to do?

My second takeaway came in acknowledging how much I’ve grown in a number of ways over the past six years, but then realizing, “OMG, I’m still limiting myself, and there’s so much more growth to be made!”

When I first started my health coaching practice, I was SO AFRAID to put myself out there. I was so worried about what people would think of me, which I found a little odd because normally I really didn’t care what anyone thought of me. At least that’s what I told myself but thinking about what someone thinks about me doesn’t keep me up at night.

One of the ways I really struggled with putting myself out there was on social media. Using social media as a regular consumer is one thing. It actually felt really easy to me because there wasn’t any pressure. At least, I didn’t feel any.

But when using social media more purposefully, whether it be to attract clients, invite listeners to your podcast, or to read a blog post, whatever it is that you’re doing, there’s a different energy behind it.

It was really, really hard for me to make that mental shift. And while I feel like I’ve developed leaps and bounds, in some ways, I still struggle with it today. I’ve come to realize that despite the progress that I’ve made, I do have a subconscious capacity about being seen – about being visible.

Slowly I started seeing all the ways that I was subconsciously, holding myself back, or rather, wasn’t expanding my subconscious capacity to level up for the next step.

It felt like a bucket of ice-cold water was thrown on me because I realized that I have so much more growth work to do.

Listen, I know that it’s not like there’s a place that we reach where we can say, “I’ve reached my peak, all my growth work is done.” It’s a lifelong journey, but during that interview, I realized how much MORE work I had to do.

It was like I had plateaued in certain areas and in order to reach the next step, my capacity needs to be expanded.

Above all else, what I realized is that I needed to get clear on what that next step is. I had to have some really honest conversation about this with myself. What is it that I want to do? Where do I want to go?

I found myself reflecting back to the end of last year, early this year, so about the December-January timeframe when I was ramping up with Human Design.

During that time, I had a thought come to mind that it was time to shift from health coaching.

What that flash of inspiration was my Splenic Authority.

If you’re not yet familiar with Authorities in Human Design, listen to Episode 184. Your Human Design Authority is your intuitive guide of how you can best make decisions. It’s your inner guidance system and when you honor it, it directs you to make correct decisions according to the timing and direction of your current life experiences.

The Spleen “speaks” so to say, in quick and quiet moments. It whispers flashes of discernment and really needs to be paid attention to. As quickly as those moments come, they go.

So back in December/January, as I started ramping up my Human Design offerings, a thought came to my head that it was time to let go of health coaching, that it was time to move on from offering 21-Day Sugar Detoxes and Functional Nutrition coaching.

As you can probably guess, resistance set in and I quickly shut that idea down though it came through very, very clearly. I thought, “Gosh, there's no way that I could do that! I've spent six years doing this work that I'm so passionate about, four years of talking about it on this show! I’ve created programs and resources and put a lot of blood sweat and tears into this!

But the reality is that doing work in the way that I had been doing it doesn't light me up anymore. I'm in a different place mentally, emotionally, and physically, in my own health.

Now, I’m much more interested in taking my work to deeper levels of coaching. Yes, use nutrition and lifestyle to manage and reduce stress and burnout, but what’s at the deeper core of why you’re stressed and burnt out. This is what lights me up, what I'm passionate about now.

If we’re connected on social media, specifically Instagram because that’s pretty much the only place on social media where I spend any time, you probably have noticed I’ve been less vocal about my health coaching work, less vocal about my sugar detox programs, and just less active there.

That’s because it’s felt like a struggle to even try. I just haven’t felt excited to talk about those things.

I’m not one to pretend, I literally can’t do it. Just yesterday a friend told me, “Boy you sure tell it like it is.” And it’s true – I don’t know how to be any other way. And if I'm not excited about something, I can't show up and talk about it. And beyond that, if you’re part of my email community, I’m sorry. I haven't emailed you in probably well over a year, maybe even two years, consistently. I just couldn’t muster up the energy to show up and talk about these things. And if you notice, I haven’t here on the podcast for months.

Now I realize that I need to let go of doing that work because subconsciously it’s limiting my capacity to take the next step – whatever that may be.

I had to come to grasp that just because I’m good at something, and worked really hard at it, doesn’t mean I need to keep doing it.

What’s helped me come to terms with that is knowing that I don’t need to completely move on from talking about the topics that I did in a health coaching capacity. Now, I’ll just talk about them through the lens of Human Design.

It’s the same thing as Functional Nutrition, in a way, right? Looking at the big picture for the root cause.

Why does one struggle with stress? Why is someone suffering from fatigue?

When u take your shovel and start digging really deep, more often than not, at the root of those issues is low self-esteem, lack of self-trust, lack of awareness in the mind, body, and spirit, all of which are rooted in a lack of self-love. Not loving ourselves.

This is the deeply personal work I’ve been doing for the past year and a half. For me, this was the gift of the pandemic. It gave me the time and forced me to tackle those issues within myself, to take a hard look at where I was. How much did I love and appreciate myself?

And Human Design has been pivotal in helping me wrap my brain around a lot of this, in helping me understand myself, and giving me a framework to work in.

And this is where my passions now lie. is what lights me up. This is what I want to talk about. This is how I want to help people.

For the past nine months, I’ve been ignoring my Splenic Authority – the quiet voice in me pointing me to the decision that makes sense for me.

It’s no wonder I’ve felt like I’ve been stuck in this stagnant place, feeling a lot of angst, putting pressure on myself, and feeling guilty for showing up, and putting myself out there to help those that are seeking it.

I've come to realize that when I hold myself back, I'm actually holding myself back from helping someone who needs help, who needs to hear what I have to share.

It took this conversation with Nadia in Episode that gave me the courage, and really the permission to make this shift. Remember, I'm a Projector, and so my Strategy is to wait for invitations, and when I got external validation that this is the direction I should move it, it felt like that was the invitation that I needed. I'm very protective about who I seek advice from, but I'll share with you two people who helped me with this situation.

Back in Episode 177, I was joined by Jenny Wirt for a chat on Wardrobe As Wellness. I had been wanting a refresh of my visual brand, so while Jenny is a stylist, she's also a creative director and so I reached out to her to ask her if she could help me with a new color palette and ideas around refreshing my website and whatnot.

Energy work is a big part of the work that Jenny does, and without having any prior discussion, or her having any knowledge of this idea that had been floating around in my head for months, she brought up the subject and laid it open on the table so to speak.

I took it as a possible invitation that as crazy as it felt, it was the direction to go.

I also ran it by my friend Diane, who was a guest in Episode 068. She’s a true embodiment of a Human Design Manifestor. I value her opinion and shared with her what I’d been contemplating and confirmed my instincts that this is a good direction for me to shift to.

Once I made the definitive choice in my mind that I was going to restructure my services and retire my health coaching offerings and strictly focus on Human Design, well it was like the started energy flowing again.

The idea started coming - of topics to talk about on this show, of things to share on social media, that I want to start engaging with my email community again! The enthusiasm returned; things don’t feel forced anymore. I feel excited to start sharing again.

So, if we are connected on social media, and you've noticed that I've taken a bit of a hiatus, this is why. I needed time and space to clear my mind, to take the pressure off, to get to work revamping my service offerings, refreshing my website, putting together some ideas of things to talk about here on this podcast for future episodes.

And as I’ve made this energetic shift, clients have started coming - I don't even know how they found me. Past clients have been returning for more. And it feels good. My energy is flowing once again!

Now you might be wondering, “Well, what does this mean for this show?” It really doesn't mean anything different than what it's been for much of this year.

This show will have the same focus of helping all of us, including myself, manage stress, fatigue, and burnout. it’ll just be in the context of Human Design, which has pretty much been the case for a few months now because I really wanted to lay that groundwork.

And while this might seem like, “Well, you've been talking about this for ages now…” on the outside, it may appear that way but this internal shift of energetically letting go of offering the 21-Day Sugar Detox, of letting go of offering Functional Nutrition Coaching. It's a mindset release, an energetic release that I needed because this is a big shift for me.

So, hopefully, you're still with me and I hope you continue to stay with me on this journey!

And, if you are new to Human Design, one of the things I’ve been mulling on is, how can I help introduce Human Design to people who want to learn more.

So, I created a 27-ish page guide to help you discover your Human Design. It walks you through how to find your chart, how to find out the foundational pieces of it, what they mean, then helping you understand different parts of it - all at a very high level.

I cover much of the things in this guide in my readings, but if you aren’t quite ready for a reading yet, this guides a great precursor for it.

And then once you sign up for the guide, it’ll be emailed to you, and you'll also receive a code for 15% off of a reading with me.

So, wrapping things up here, I hope giving you this little peek into some of the goings-on behind the scenes has been insightful for you.

Maybe now you might be inspired to explore what things may be lurking subconsciously for you?

For me, the biggest thing was taking a pause and getting clear on what it was that I really wanted. It’s taken a while to really get honest and have that clear vision of what that is. In some ways, the vision is still coming together.

But the feelings of what I want are very clear, and now it feels like I’m moving in that direction.

So as always, thank you so much for listening. I appreciate your time and attention.

And if there's a topic that you’re interested in hearing more about through the lens of Human Design, please reach and I’ll definitely consider it for a future episode!

Have a great week and I’ll see you right back here again next time – bye for now!

Naomi Nakamura is a Functional Wellness & Human Design Coach. She helps women who struggle with stress, fatigue, and burnout find freedom and empowerment by optimizing their health, finding balance, and upgrading their energy so they can live life on their own terms. 



Combining her diverse professional background, and her unique approach integrates Functional Nutrition and Human Design she guides clients on a highly individualized journey of self-discovery, observation, and integration by removing physical, mental, and emotional confusion and overwhelm, simply taking them back to the very basics of health through their Human Design.

She believes that when our bodies function optimally, our personalities and souls can shine through everything that we think and do with empowering clarity and ease.

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 | Pinterest

Hindsight is 20/20. Join me in this retrospective episode as I take a trip down memory lane. 

Since learning that my Human Design Type is a Projector and everyone in my inner sphere, especially during my formative years, are Generators and Manifesting Generators, I’ve spent a lot of time reflecting on how all that Sacral energy influenced me.

I divulge mindsets and perspectives that were instilled in me from a young age and how ruminate on how they served and didn’t serve me.

And I share ways that I’ve been restructuring my routines and day-to-day life to lean into my design to find more ease and less friction.

Listen to the Episode:

Mentioned in this Episode:

• Episode 182: Human Design Non-Sacral Types and Their Strategies

• Episode 183: Human Design Sacral Types and Their Strategies

• FREE GUIDE: Get to Know Your Human Design

• Book A Human Design Reading with Naomi

Connect with Naomi:

• Ask a question

• Connect on social media: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter

• Send an email

Share the Episode:

Read the Transcript:

Hello, my friend and welcome back to The Live Fab Life Podcast. I'm your host Naomi Nakamura, and today I’m going to dive a little bit more into Human Design Types and Strategies sharing some personal reflections and “a-ha” moments I’ve had in learning my own Type and Strategy.

If you’re unfamiliar with Human Design Types and Strategies, pause this episode and go listen to Episodes 182 and 183, and then come back to this one, as it’ll give you context into what I’m sharing today.

These reflections you’re about to hear me share have shown me how I’ve been influenced by the Types and Strategies of those closest to me. You could even say, it’s shown me ways that I’ve been conditioned, particularly in how structured my day-to-day life, work, and approach to productivity.

I grew up in a very achievement-focused family. Every day before school I was told to “be the best.” And to be clear, there’s nothing wrong with wanting that, but for me, it felt like a lot of pressure. Pressure to do more than everyone else, and that there’s no rest for the weary.

Both my parents, one who is a Generator and another who’s a Manifesting Generator had their Franklin Planners and were very task-oriented to get as much done as possible. They both worked and were involved in a lot of church activities, in addition to family responsibilities – and they got a lot of things done on a fairly regular basis.

Seeing both of my parents operate that way taught me that I needed to multi-task and push through to get as much as possible done on a regular basis. That by working harder, I’d accomplish more.

I grew to develop the mentality to keep going and never let up.

In elementary school, that mentality drove me to win my 2nd-grade Read-a-thon – second place wasn’t even close to me.

In college, it drove me to take multiple 18-credit semesters.

In my first job out of college, I must’ve been 21 or 22 years old, there were many Friday nights that I was in the office at 8 am and worked until 10 or 11 pm - on a Friday night! I was still living with roommates back then and I remember coming home late on Friday nights when my roommates were watching a movie, and when I walked in the door they were like, “Where have you been?!” because back then, gosh, this was in the mid-’90s, so cell phones weren't a thing, and text messaging definitely wasn't a thing. My roommates thought that I was out, but I was at work - till late on a Friday night. Totally normal, no big deal, right?

I did it because felt pressured that I needed to get things done, that I needed to check things off my to-do list, no matter how long it took, no matter the cost.

That same mentality carried over into when I adopted a healthier lifestyle, especially when it came to working out.

Again, Friday afternoon I’d be in the office bathroom changing into workout clothes while my coworkers were getting ready to go to happy hour. I was getting ready to put in a 2-hour workout at the gym.

I remember my colleagues asking, “Are you really going to the gym on a Friday evening?!”

Then when I got into endurance training for long-distance events, the mentality of pushing through pain, exhaustion, doing more became more and more ingrained.

Doing 5K's wasn’t enough so I ran 10k’s. Then I needed to run half marathons. Then I needed to push for more, so I trained for marathons. And to be clear, doing those things isn’t bad – doing them as often and obsessively as I did wasn't appropriate for my Human Design as a Projector.

So, I was an energizer bunny in how I approached my studies, my work, my extracurricular activities, my hobbies, and in hindsight, there were some consistencies in the impact that it had, most predominantly when it came to how I slept.

Even as a kid, I was never a good sleeper, often having disrupted sleep. I was the kid that was up before 6 am every day, even on the weekends. In fact, I remember my parents telling me that I wasn’t allowed to bother them or wake them up before, like before 6 or 7 am. Come to think about it, I was the only one in my family who has had sleep problems – which will make sense in a bit.

So, I was the kid who watched Smurfs and Battlestar Galactica at 6 am on Saturday morning because I have never been able to sleep in. Don’t get me wrong, I felt tired quite a bit, but couldn’t feel rested.

As a result of that, among other things, I always felt like I was playing catch up.

As much as I tried to multi-task and put in long hours into whatever I did, it never quite felt like it was enough, that I was able to catch up to everyone else. I can see how that affected my confidence and self-esteem, particularly when comparing myself to others.

And while this is something I recognized in myself for several years now and have spent a lot of time working on it, it wasn’t until I learned about Human Design, and about my Human Design, was I able to understand why I was the way that I was.

Finding out that I’m a Projector and learning about Projectors validated a lot of my past experiences and put them into context where I could look back and think, “Oh, it's no wonder I was this way, or, it's no wonder I reacted or responded to this person or situation this way”, particularly when learning that Projectors are here to not necessarily work harder, but to work smarter and to show people there are different, more efficient ways of doing things. This is something that I’ve been recognized for doing by colleagues and managers, subconsciously I might add.

So, while it did validate a lot of things, especially that aspect, also learning that Projectors need to be cautious about energy management and protect our energy by embracing rest, well, I could see why I was always feeling tired. Why I always felt like I couldn’t keep up with other people, especially those closest to me.

But learning about Projectors also brought a fair amount of surprise to me. I was always led to believe that multitasking was a good thing. Admittedly, I haven’t written a resume in over 14 years, when I did, in the part where you describe yourself and your qualities, I always wrote something like, “Great at multi-tasking.” I mean, isn’t it one of the things that makes a candidate attractive on a resume? My friends who are hiring managers tell me it’s something that they look for, but seriously, is it meant for everyone?

Spoiler alert: no, it’s not meant for everyone, Projectors included. It’s one of the things that, as I learned about Projectors made me go, “Hmmm….” You know, it’s one of those things that, now when you look at everything through the lens of Human Design totally makes sense, but then you think, “Why did I think that multitasking was a great thing, to begin with? Where did that idea come to me from?”

Multitasking is fine for some people, like Manifesting Generators, but for others, especially those of us who need to be more cautious of energy management than others, not so much.

As I continued to dig more into being a Projector another thing that stuck out for me, and again, if you are curious about this go back and listen to Episode 182 where I talk specifically about Projectors and Reflectors, the one thing about being a Projector that stuck out at me was that we Projectors really need to welcome and embrace rest.

As you can imagine, when you’ve been taught your whole life to push, push, push like an energizer bunny, rest, as simple as it is, is a really hard thing to embrace, because it means slowing down. It means taking the time to rest and spending less time getting things done.

For someone who’s focused on productivity, I mean I can't tell you how much the Instagram ads for new planners, school supplies, journals make my heart skip a beat, going from trying to maximize every minute of my day productively to allowing for rest and relaxation – it’s a total mindset shift. And we know that mindset shifts aren’t easy. But I’ve welcomed the opportunity to try something new, and over the past year that I’ve experimented with this, it really has had a positive impact on my overall productivity and effectiveness.

By doing less, I'm actually doing more

In fact, I’d say the one thing that I've, I've taken away from this experiment of leaning into my Human Design Type as a Projector - by doing less, I do more.

Now, when you're new to Human Design, it's a natural inclination to find out the Human Designs of everyone that you know - especially those closest to you - your family, friends, colleagues – I mean that’s what I did!

I asked my parents, sibling, cousins, friends, “Hey, what’s your birthplace and birth time?”

Of course, I got, “Why are you asking me this?” but luckily, they decided to humor me, and I was able to get that information.

And what did I find? That every single person in my immediate family, my closest extended family members, and closest friends - they are ALL Generators and Manifesting Generators! I’d say about 11 out of 12 people who have been closest to me at various times in my life were all Sacral beings. And if you want to learn about more Generators, Manifesting Generators, and Sacral beings, listen to Episode 183.

And this is the crux, the point of this episode because I believe that being surrounded by Generators and Manifesting Generators for most of my life has been a significant factor in my conditioning around living life as an energizer bunny!

Generators and Manifesting Generators have so much sustainable energy than someone who is a non-Sacral being like a Projector, Reflector, or even a Manifester.

Imagine not having this sustainable Sacral energy but being surrounded by it and feeling the pressure to keep up with it. To try to multi-task and take on a lot of things – at once, but literally not having the energy to do so. It’s exhausting and keeping this up for a prolonged period of time – well no wonder I had adrenal burnout, which has had a cascading effect on other parts of my health.

Now, I can see how I was “programmed,” for lack of a better word, that sounds so terrible, but I was “programmed” to operate as a Manifesting Generator and Generator because that's all I was exposed to!

Beyond my immediate spheres of influence, much of the society that we live in is a very Generator / Manifesting Generator mindset, especially in the tech industry where I’ve worked for over 20 years.

In hindsight, now I can see how it really formulated my expectations of what I deemed to be acceptable in terms of productivity, how I work, and how I show up. To me, somehow, along the way, I equated resting to laziness.

So, can you see how we can unconsciously and unintentionally be influenced to behave and believe in ways that aren’t in line with our Human Design, in this case, Type and Strategy?

I haven’t even touched much on Strategy, but if you've listened to Episodes 182 and 183, then you know that the Strategy for Projectors is to “Wait for the Invitation” – wait to be invited, wait for opportunities to open themselves to me.

Whereas the Strategy for Manifesting Generators and Generators are to “Wait to Respond,” so they don't need to wait for an invitation, rather they need to wait for something to happen for them to then respond to it.

In hindsight, I can recall the situations in which I tried to will things to happen or acted without any invitations, which fell flat and left me feeling bitter.

Because action without invitations isn’t in alignment for Projectors.

Situations where I found success were when I was offered a job, or I was invited to participate in something, or I was invited to share something, as opposed to me cold-calling or giving unsolicited advice.

But being exposed to Generators and Manifesting Generators, where invitations aren’t necessary, I tried to do things like them, and they didn’t work out. They resulted in disappointment and bitterness.

Now, experimenting with my Strategy over the past year and a half, I've experimented and witnessed that the most fruitful, successful experiences were the ones where invitations were extended to me.

And when I gave unsolicited advice, the desired result did not come to fruition.

Now, understanding that I’m a Projector, understanding what that means, and experimenting with it, it’s changed how I approach my work, how I structure my day, how I communicate with and relate to others – family, friends, colleagues for the better.

I'm fortunate to work from home and because I work a lot with people on the East Coast or internationally, while my days do tend to start early, which works for me because as I’ve shared, I'm naturally an early riser, but that leaves my afternoons fairly quiet and with that comes the chance to steal a power nap here and there from time-to-time.

This alone has helped my energy levels and taught me that welcoming rest is a good thing – by doing less, I actually do more. I have more energy to do the things that I need to do with more enthusiasm, and in more effective ways that yield better results.

It’s taught me to be more strategic in what I take on and what I commit to.

Prior to this, I’d rarely say no to anyone or anyone, not because I didn’t know how to say “no,” but rather, the belief that I could do anything at any time, at any place.

Now I'm learning how to accept that I can't do anything and everything. I do have limitations, and I need to manage my energy.

So now, I'm learning to say, “No, that's not something I want to or can commit to,” even if it’s something that I'm really interested in.

I’m retraining my thought patterns to acknowledge the amount of time and energy, and not just physical but also mental energy, that I don’t have to give. I’m learning to say no – that, “While I really do want to take this on, it's just not the time for me right now.”

I’m learning how to be more strategic in what I take on and how I structure my day, and I literally schedule in rest.

I hate using words like, “flow” and “ease” because it can sound flimsy, and perhaps this is another conditioning on my end, but the reality is, life has felt like it’s flowing with more ease. Things have felt a lot easier.

There's less friction. I feel less like I'm fighting against something, and more like, I'm just moving along inflow.

And this is really how learning and leaning into not only my Type and Strategy but also those who have been most influential on me, has helped me learn how to better manage my stress, minimize fatigue and burnout.

I felt compelled to share this with you because it’s been a really huge “a-ha” learning for me. It’s been eye-opening.

And so I encourage you, that if you are able to, first of all, if you don't already know it, find out your Human Design Type and Strategy, and then of those closest to it and then observe and evaluate:

Are you interacting with them in a way that’s optimal for both of you according to your respective designs? How have their designs influenced you, and yours influenced them? What changes can you make in your day-to-day that can bring more ease and flow and less friction, and ultimately, better manage your energy more effectively? So that's it for this episode. I love sharing these personal insights and anecdotes that’s helped me redesign my life with intention, according to my Human Design.

As always, thank you so much for listening. I appreciate your time and your attention, and I'll see you right back here again next week. Bye for now!

Naomi Nakamura is a Functional Wellness & Human Design Coach. She helps women who struggle with stress, fatigue, and burnout find freedom and empowerment by optimizing their health, finding balance, and upgrading their energy so they can live life on their own terms. 



Combining her diverse professional background, and her unique approach integrates Functional Nutrition and Human Design she guides clients on a highly individualized journey of self-discovery, observation, and integration by removing physical, mental, and emotional confusion and overwhelm, simply taking them back to the very basics of health through their Human Design.

She believes that when our bodies function optimally, our personalities and souls can shine through everything that we think and do with empowering clarity and ease.

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 | Pinterest

What does manifestation mean to you?

Concluding with the 4-part mini-series on exploring the nine energy centers in the Human Design chart, in this episode, we explore the final two energy centers, the centers of manifestation - the Throat and G-Centers. 

You’ll hear me share:

• What the Throat and G-Centers represent and governs

• What it means for each center to be defined or undefined

• How each manifestation center brings about our truth

Listen to the Episode:

Mentioned in the Episode:

• Episode 182: Human Design Non-Sacral Types and Their Strategies

• Episode 183: Human Design Sacral Types and Their Strategies

• Episode 184: Your Human Design Authority - How Do You Best Make Decisions?

• Episode 185: Exploring Human Design Motor Centers: Root, Solar Plexus, Sacral, Heart

• Episode 186: Exploring Human Design Pressure Centers: Head and Root

• Episode 187: Exploring Human Design Awareness Centers: Ajna, Spleen, Solar Plexus

• Episode 166: A Foundational Breakdown of Your Human Design Chart

• Episode 001: My Story & What is Live FAB Life

• FREE GUIDE: Get to Know Your Human Design

• Book A Human Design Reading with Naomi

Connect with Naomi:

• Ask a question

• Connect on social media: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter

• Send an email

Share the Episode:

Read the Transcript:

Hello, my friend and welcome back to The Live Fab Life Podcast. If this is the first time you're listening, I'm your host Naomi Nakamura, and this episode is the final installment of a four-part mini-series that I've been doing on the Human Design energy centers.

So, for a brief recap, in Episode 185 I discussed the FOUR motor centers - the Root, Solar Plexus, Sacral, and Ego centers.

In Episode 186, I discussed the TWO pressure centers, again, the Root center, because it’s a motor and a pressure center, as well as the Head center.

Then in the last episode, Episode 187, I talked about the THREE awareness centers - the Ajna, which is the center for mind awareness, the Spleen, which is the center for body awareness, and the Solar Plexus which, in addition to being a motor center, is also an Awareness center and is the center for Emotional Awareness.

As I’ve mentioned, there are nine energy centers and we've talked about seven of them.

So today is the final installment on the last two centers - the Throat center and the G-Center, which are the manifestation centers.

With each center being embodied by an organ in the body, the Throat center is embodied by the throat and the thyroid.

Figuratively it's embodied by communicating and manifesting. It governs communication manifestation that happens through communication, self-expression, using your voice, and speaking your truth.

This is one of two energy centers that I have defined. I have a defined Spleen and a defined Throat.

For those of us who have a defined Throat center, we’re meant to express our truth consistently. We're meant to use our voice in a consistent manner.

And, depending on what other centers in our charts are connected to the Throat center, this communicative energy can be expressed in different ways – audibly or vocally, mentally through the Ajna, emotionally through the Solar Plexus, spontaneously through the Spleen – you get the idea.

So, you can look at the Throat center as the energetic hub for incoming messages from the other centers, that can be communicated through the Throat center.

So, it only makes sense that not honoring the energy of the Throat center, not honoring what it wants to express, not communicating or speaking our truth, what we want, and desire will create can create dysfunction in the organ it embodies – in this case – the throat and thyroid.

Let's think about this for a minute, particularly in relation to my Human Design.

For a long time, particularly in my youth and young adult years. I didn't know what my voice was. And what I did know, I didn't have the comfort level or felt empowered to express it - to express my voice speak my truth.

Learning Human Design all these years later really brought it perspective. In hindsight, I’m like, “Ohhhh, I see it now.” Because, for those of you who know my story, you’ll recall that I struggled with hypothyroidism aka a low functioning thyroid.

I first suspected that I had a thyroid dysfunction back in 2009. It's something that runs in my family, and I was showing typical symptoms, but it was dismissed by my general practitioner.

But, my instincts, my Splenic Authority, told me not to let this go, that there was something more there. So, I kept investigating, asking questions and seeking help. It turns out I did, I do have a thyroid dysfunction - hypothyroidism, a sluggish thyroid. I took medication to treat the immediate symptoms, while also using holistic treatments.

One of the holistic practices is learning to speak your truth. That requires confidence which I didn't have, particularly in my younger years. It took getting out of my comfort zone.

As I’ve talked about throughout this mini-series, on the other side of fear is freedom, and this is 100% true. When you get past your fears, you feel free. On the other side of fear, you feel empowered and that’s one of the ways that helped to build up my self-confidence to speak my truth.

Ultimately, it’s led to this podcast, in which I speak my truth. As much as I do this podcast to help others like you who listen in, to explore the topics that we talk about, selfishly, this podcast has also been just as much for me as it's been for you.

It's really helped me to hone in on my voice and take a stand for what I believe in, and really share my perspectives.

In full transparency, I haven’t done any lab work to measure my thyroid levels since the pandemic started, so I don’t know how my thyroid is performing now. But, as I’ve shared, while lab work provides critical information, results from snapshots in time.

I can tell you that I’m feeling, consistently, leaps and bounds better than when I was in the depths of my hypothyroidism. While some days are better than others, generally speaking, I feel so great.

I feel free and empowered. I've learned how to manage my energy, and I believe that it’s had a direct impact on my thyroid function.

This is just one way that Human Design has helped me take ownership, take a leadership role in my own health, in my self-healing journey.

Now, if you have an undefined Throat center, you can express yourself in different ways, it's not always consistently the same way or in the same tone.

I know when I’ve talked about undefined centers, I’ve used the word, “inconsistent” which can have negative connotations, but that's not how it's intended here. It just means that the energy of the centers is not expressed in a fixed way.

So, with an undefined Throat center, your voice can be expressed in a range of possibilities. And most of the time how it’s expressed is going to depend on the people that you're around and the environment that you're in.

Remember, when you have a defined energy center, and this applies to all energy centers, if a center is defined, it’s a center where you emanate and you give off, rather than absorb, the energy of the center.

Whereas if you have an undefined energy center, and again it doesn't matter which one, undefined centers are where you are open to picking up and absorbing the energy of the center from another.

So, let’s think about this. This means that your undefined centers are where your vulnerabilities lie. It's where we’re open to conditioning. But it's also where we have the potential to gain the most wisdom.

So, if your Throat center is undefined, your voice can come through in a multitude of different ways, many times based upon who you're around, and what situations you're in because you're prone to pick up the energy from those around you.

So, this is something to be mindful of. If you feel pressured to speak and it doesn’t feel right for you, then that may not necessarily be the best way for you to express yourself. There are other ways of communicating - mentally, emotionally, instinctually.

Another way to think of an undefined Throat center is that because you’re vulnerable to pick up on energy outside of yourself, you can sense when something needs to be expressed. So perhaps, you can also be a voice for others and those who aren't able to speak for themselves. I think that’s really special.

The last thing I want to say about the Throat center is that we all feel physical sensations in our throats. Clearing your throat, coughing, feeling a lump in your throat. So, think about that, when that happens, are you feeling something that needs to be expressed? What do you need to speak up about? I've felt that before, and when that energy is honored, that's how you feel free and empowered.

The other manifestation center is the G-Center. I find this center fascinating; there's something unique about it. When you look at the Human Design chart, the G-Center is just below the Throat center, right in the middle of the chart.

Literally, it's embodied by the liver and figuratively, the G-Center is about our sense of self and direction in life. It's also about love. The G-Center governs our self-identity, love, and what direction we're taking in life.

If you have a defined G-Center, you have a strong sense of self – to put it simply - you know who you are.

Where you can get out of alignment is when question this or try to be someone you’re not. So, if you change, or your idea of who you are changes, it can feel confusing and chaotic. But remember, this sense of self is innate to you, and deep down, you still know who you are.

Be wary of succumbing to expectations of who others think you should be. You do you because you know who you are.

Along with having a strong self-identity, you also have a strong sense of what direction in life to take, what your mission in life if. Not everyone has that surety about this, so with this fixed energy comes the ability, which you have, to help others find the clarity as to what direction is meant for them. Just don't expect everyone to go where you're going, because we all have our own different directions to take in life.

Now, if your G-Center is undefined for you, as it is for me, you’re adaptable! We’re adaptable people because we’re going to adapt to whoever we're around and whatever environments, we're in.

This can be fun because we can fit in and explore different places, or it can be overwhelming and confusing because we may not know where we're supposed to be, where we're meant to be.

We can also be adaptable with our identities. Remember, undefined centers are where we’re vulnerable to conditioning, and so there may be people who expect us to be certain things or behave in certain ways, but we may not always fit their expectations. Or maybe we’ve changed. We’re no longer who we were before because we’re adaptable and not everyone is able to adapt to change.

Just know that there’s no shame around this. Feeling like you aren’t living up to another person’s expectations of you can affect your self-esteem, especially if you’re going through a period where you're asking yourself, “Gosh, do I know who I even am?!” I can relate to this - I experienced times like this myself.

There was a time when I thought I was a weak person because someone pointed out to me, not in the most supportive way, that I was shady. Because they thought that I behaved one way with one person, and another way with another person.

In hindsight, I could see how they could think that, but I wasn't making conscious changes; it wasn't conscious at all. It wasn't intentional or malicious and I most certainly wasn't trying to be someone I’m not.

But being told that made me feel bad about myself, and it led me to question myself asking, “Who am I?”

In hindsight, now I understand that as an undefined G-Center, I pick up on the identities and adapt myself to others.

And that was my opportunity for self-growth – to explore who I was so that I can differentiate between my baseline and when I’m picking up on the energy of others.

And this is where we must be protective of our boundaries and in this case, who we allow in and whose energies we open ourselves up to.

I lean into my Splenic authority to get a sense of, who is safe for me to open myself up to, because with having an undefined G-Center and I'm want to make sure I’m not around someone who is unhealthy to be around.

Before I wrap things up on the G-Center, let’s talk about how it’s embodied by the liver. If I were to summarize my health journey, I can boil it down to these main challenges I had - digestive issues with SIBO and IBS, adrenal and thyroid dysfunction, and then non-alcoholics fatty liver disease.

Yes, I have (had?) a liver condition. It’s one of those things that was discovered by chance as a byproduct of doing other lab work.

Without going into too many details, there's nothing to be concerned with right now because I’m already doing the things that my doctors would have prescribed me to do – eat a nutrient-dense diet, avoid alcohol and sugary foods with high fructose corn syrup sugary foods which are really bad for liver disease, etc.

My doctors said to just continue to do what I was already doing, and it’d be something that we monitor. It hasn’t gotten any worse, nor it hasn't gotten any worse, but I just found it interesting as I’ve learned more about Human Design, and my Human Design specifically.

The more I learn, the more I can see correlations between my Human Design, and the health challenges I've had.

I find the whole thing so fascinating and it’s why I really think that Human Design is a powerful tool that can help us to take a leadership role in and use it in our self-healing journeys.

The last thing I want to say, at least for today, about the G-Center is that when it's so important for those of us who have this center undefined to be around people who are supportive in giving us the space and the freedom to explore this expansiveness that we have in our lives from being so adaptable to the changing environments around us.

So, this rounds out the basics of Human Design! We talked about the Types, and I broke it up into Sacral vs Non-Sacral Types in Episodes 182 and 183. Then we talked about Authorities in Episodes 184 - Type, Strategy, and Authority

Then we explore the nine Human Design energy centers, and that's the basics of Human Design.

I’ll get into this when I talk about Profile lines, but as a 1 / 3, it was so important for me to provide this foundational information for you before I get into other parts of Human Design, like the variables and primary healthcare system which I find so fascinating and can’t wait to explore with on a granular level.

So, if the past few episodes have left you feeling like, “Okay, get on with it already, we’re gonna get on with it!”

But don’t forget that Type, Strategy, Authority and the nine energy centers are critical to understand before getting into those more advanced topics.

And with that, I'm going to end here. I hope that you’ve found this as fascinating as I do, and I can't wait to share more.

As always thank you so much for listening, I always appreciate your time and attention, and we'll see you again here next week. Bye.

Naomi Nakamura is a Functional Wellness & Human Design Coach. She helps women who struggle with stress, fatigue, and burnout find freedom and empowerment by optimizing their health, finding balance, and upgrading their energy so they can live life on their own terms. 



Combining her diverse professional background, and her unique approach integrates Functional Nutrition and Human Design she guides clients on a highly individualized journey of self-discovery, observation, and integration by removing physical, mental, and emotional confusion and overwhelm, simply taking them back to the very basics of health through their Human Design.

She believes that when our bodies function optimally, our personalities and souls can shine through everything that we think and do with empowering clarity and ease.

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 | Pinterest

Awareness is essential to conscious living and self-development. So, how aware are you?

Continuing with the 4-part mini-series on exploring the nine energy centers in the Human Design chart, in this episode, we explore the three awareness centers: the Ajna, Spleen, and Solar Plexus centers.

You’ll hear me share:

• What the Ajna, Spleen, and Solar Plexus centers represents and governs

• What it means for each center to be defined or undefined

• How each awareness center brings mind-intelligence, body-intelligence, and emotional intelligence

Listen to the Episode:

Mentioned in the Episode:

• Episode 182: Human Design Non-Sacral Types and Their Strategies

• Episode 183: Human Design Sacral Types and Their Strategies

• Episode 184: Your Human Design Authority - How Do You Best Make Decisions?

• Episode 185: Exploring Human Design Motor Centers: Root, Solar Plexus, Sacral, Heart

• Episode 186: Exploring Human Design Pressure Centers: Head and Root

• Episode 166: A Foundational Breakdown of Your Human Design Chart

• Episode 001: My Story & What is Live FAB Life

• Human Design with Naomi

Connect with Naomi:

• Ask a question

• Connect on social media: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter

• Send an email

Share the Episode:

Read the Transcript:

Hello there, my friend and welcome back to The Live Lab Life Podcast. I’m your host Naomi Nakamura and we’re continuing on with our exploration of the Human Design energy centers, and this is Part 3 of our 4-part mini-series.

In Episode 185, Part 1 of this series, we explored the 4 Motor centers -- the Root, Solar Plexus, Sacral, and Ego centers.

In the last episode, Episode 186, Part 2 of this mini-series, we explored the Pressure centers -- the Root center, again, and the Head Center.

Today we're focusing on the Awareness centers -- the Spleen, Ajna, and Solar Plexus centers, and yes, like the Root center, the Solar Plexus is a Motor center but it’s also an Awareness center.

I'm going to be honest with you, the Awareness centers have been the most challenging for me to understand when I started studying Human Design. I think it’s because awareness happens in different stages and it took me a while to grasp it, then to understand where I was with it - how aware I was. And it’s still an ongoing process for me, as I'm sure it is for many of you as well.

So why don't we just jump right in.

We talked about the Spleen in Episode 184 when we talked about Human Design. If you listened to that episode then you know that the Spleen is my authority, I have a Splenic Authority, so I’ve spent a lot of time learning and observing the Spleen center.

As every Human Design energy center is embodied by an organ in the body, the Spleen is embodied by the Immune system and Lymphatic systems.

Figuratively, it's all about our fears and primal instincts.

The Spleen is all about survival. What do we need to survive? What do we need to do to keep ourselves safe and healthy?

It's no wonder that as I started to learn about my Splenic Authority, all of these things really started to resonate. As you know I’m so passionate about health and wellness, and have been for, gosh, almost the past 20 years. And I've spent the past six years as a Health Coach, so it really brought a lot of things into perspective. Isn’t that what Awareness is about? Gaining perspective?

So, in terms of awareness, the Spleen center is about body awareness. How aware are we of our bodies?

In observing my own personal awareness, and working as a health coach, I can tell you that, no one knows our own bodies as well as we do, right? We live in our bodies. It’s who we are, but in so many ways we’re unaware of so many things about it. We lack awareness of our own bodies.

If you’ve listened to the past few episodes, then you’ll recall that having a defined center means that the energy of its center is consistent. We emanate and give off the energies of defined centers.

If you have a defined Spleen, as I do, you have reliable instincts. You can trust your instincts. You have the gift of intuition; the gift of discernment is strong in you. Follow your hunches.

In Episode 184 on Authorities, I talked about the difference between the vibration gut feelings of the Sacral center versus the “can’t always be explained” knowing of the Spleen.

The Spleen is all about trusting your instincts. Splenic energy is intuitive, instinctual; that knowing? It’s spontaneous. As quickly as it comes, it goes.

So, when you hit with a moment of inspiration, a flash discernment, write it down!

These moments often come to me when I'm in the shower, or when I’m out walking my dog, Coco Pop, or when I’m driving, or even sometimes when I’m sleeping. I used to always keep a notebook with me to capture these flashes of inspiration that come, but of course, now with technology, I use a voice memo app or the Apple Notes app on my iPhone to capture these thoughts and ideas.

The Spleen is also about fear, survival, safety, and health.

If you’re struggling with immune or lymphatic system challenges, feeling fearful, and doubtful of yourself, perhaps you’re still learning how to trust your instincts; you’re still developing your intuition.

I didn’t have a lot of self-confidence during my childhood and young adult years. I didn't trust my instincts; I didn’t trust my decisions.

When I got to my 30’s, my doctors, and other practitioners that I worked with, both from conventional and functional medicine, all noted how my body doesn’t detox easily, that my lymphatic system seemed sluggish, and always recommended some sort of detox support whether through supplementation, doing seasonal detoxes, and any number of body support things that helps the body detox like dry skin brushing, contrast showering, castor oil packs, rebounding, etc.

When I learned about Human Design, the Spleen center, that I’m a Splenic Authority, and that it’s embodied by the immune and lymphatic systems, gosh, it all clicked.

In hindsight, recalling that time of my life where I lacked self-confidence and self-trust, and not yet tapping into my intuition and gift of discernment, well like I said, things started to come together for me.

I could see how clearing out and supporting my lymphatic system also cleared blockages that may have been blocking my intuition, my instincts.

I know that just hearing the word “detoxes” or “cleanses” has a negative connotation to it, that it’s diet culture. I think it depends on the intention behind them. In its simplest function, it removes things that aren’t meant to be in your system. And going through the process, the experience, helps you build and recognize an awareness in your body that was somehow blocked.

The Spleen is a center of body awareness.

Now if your Splenic center is undefined, you might pick up and take on the fears of others.

You could also have a heightened sense of danger, remember the spleen is about survival.

If you’re not in alignment, you might be someone who struggles with hypochondria – fears about health, safety, and survival.

So, when it comes to the Spleen center, think about how you view fear. How do you view discomfort?

Remember, on the other side of fear is freedom. On the other side of fear is courage. Primal instincts. Survival.

The second Awareness center is the Ajna. Ironically, it took me a bit to wrap my head around the Ajna center. Ironic because the Ajna is the center just under the Head center – it’s the second one from the very top of the Human Design chart.

The Ajna center is all about your mind. Literally, it’s embodied by the pituitary gland. Figuratively, it’s all about viewpoints and opinions. It governs analytical thinking. It governs your belief system.

It's all about mind awareness.

The Splenic center is about body awareness, and the Ajna is about mind awareness.

If you have a defined Ajna center you’re meant to have a point of view, to take a stance, to share your opinions. It’s a fixed way of thinking. Your mind is always thinking, always processing things.

If your Ajna center is undefined, as mine is, we're open minded, we don’t have a fixed way of thinking about things. Our gift is flexible thinking - we can see different viewpoints, we can see the possibilities of situations. When I learned what having an undefined Ajna meant, and that I had one, I really gained perspective and helped me understand myself a little more.

I don’t want to say that people with an undefined Ajna are more empathetic than those with defined Ajna’s, but in a way, I feel that we kind of are.

I can see varying viewpoints in different situations. I may not agree, but I can follow other people’s trains of thought of how they came to form the opinions they have – most of the time.

I can see different possibilities, outcomes and to be honest, it can sometimes feel overwhelming. But if there’s a decision to be made, that’s where we lean into our Authorities.

Now, the third center of awareness is the Solar Plexus center.

We talked about the Solar Plexus in Episodes 184 when talking about Emotional Authorities, and in Episode 185 when we talked about the Motor centers.

The Solar Plexus center is literally embodied by the kidneys. Figuratively, it's all about our emotions.

If you recall, if your Solar Plexus center is defined, it automatically makes you have an Emotional authority. So, the Solar Plexus governs our emotions and feelings.

So, it's about emotional awareness.

The Spleen is about body awareness, the Ajna is about mind awareness, and the Solar Plexus is about emotional awareness.

Over the past couple of years, more so than ever, I've come to understand how critical emotional awareness is, especially when it comes to personal growth and self-development, building self-confidence, how we relate to and how we interact with others.

If your Solar Plexus center is defined, you feel all the feelings and that's not a bad thing. The danger comes in having judgement on feelings; believing that negative feelings are bad.

Feelings are just feelings, they’re energy in motion.

People with defined Solar Plexus centers experience emotional waves – they feel the emotional highs and lows. It’s just how they are.

So, they need to wait for the in between moments of the emotional highs and emotional lows – that’s when they’ll have clarity to make decisions. Spontaneity is not those with defined Solar Plexus centers.

Emotional awareness also comes by not avoiding, discounting or bypassing feelings. You’re going to feel them all – just ride your waves.

For those of us who have undefined Solar Plexus centers, we pick up the feelings of others. We absorb and amplify those emotions.

So, we need to be aware of when this is happening. When are we influenced by someone else's emotions?

When we’re alone, feeling calm and collected, we want to observe that so we can recognize when we’re riding someone else’s emotional wave.

Whenever I’m feeling hot or ambivalent about something, I ask myself, “Is this how I feel, or am I picking up someone else’s emotions and amplifying it?

This is what emotional awareness is all about - not just reacting, but thinking about, deciding, and determining if something is valid for us. Is it our truth?

So, there you have it - three energy centers of awareness.

We have one more episode left on energy centers. Next week we’ll round out this 4- part series with the final episode on the manifestation centers.

There are nine centers in the Human Design chart, and we've talked about the seven of them – the Root center twice, the Solar Plexus center twice, the Sacral center, Heart center, Head center, Spleen, and Ajna.

So next week we're going to talk about the remaining two - the Throat center and the G-Center, which are the centers of manifestation.

If you have any questions, you can come over and leave them on the show notes for this episode at www.livefablife.com/187 for Episode 187, or you can come over and find me on Instagram at @livefablifewithnaomi. Drop me a message there I'd love to hear from you.

As always thank you so much for your time and attention. I still appreciate it and I'll see you right back here again next time. Bye for now.

Naomi Nakamura is a Functional Wellness & Human Design Coach. She helps women who struggle with stress, fatigue, and burnout find freedom and empowerment by optimizing their health, finding balance, and upgrading their energy so they can live life on their own terms. 



Combining her diverse professional background, and her unique approach integrates Functional Nutrition and Human Design she guides clients on a highly individualized journey of self-discovery, observation, and integration by removing physical, mental, and emotional confusion and overwhelm, simply taking them back to the very basics of health through their Human Design.

She believes that when our bodies function optimally, our personalities and souls can shine through everything that we think and do with empowering clarity and ease.

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 | Pinterest

Are you calm under pressure? Or are you one who wants to do anything you can to relieve pressure as quickly as possible? 

Continuing with the 4-part mini-series on exploring the nine energy centers in the Human Design chart, in this episode, we explore the two pressure centers: the Head and Root centers. You’ll hear me share:

• What the Head and Root centers represents and governs

• What it means for each center to be defined or undefined

• How it can impacts our resilience and ability to respond to stressful situations

Listen to the Episode:

Mentioned in the Episode:

• Episode 182: Human Design Non-Sacral Types and Their Strategies

• Episode 183: Human Design Sacral Types and Their Strategies

• Episode 185: Exploring Human Design Motor Centers: Root, Solar Plexus, Sacral, Heart

• FREE GUIDE: Get to Know Your Human Design + 15% off a Human Design Reading

• Book A Human Design Reading with Naomi

Connect with Naomi:

• Ask a question

• Connect on social media: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter

• Send an email

Share the Episode:

Read the Transcript:

Hello there and welcome back to The Live Fab Life Podcast. I'm your host Naomi Nakamura, and today we’re continuing our mini-series on the Human Design energy centers.

If you recall in the last episode, Episode 185, we talked about the four motor centers: the Root center, the Solar Plexus center, the Sacral center, and the Ego center.

Today we're continuing on and talking about the Pressure centers.

When it comes to pressure, there are two energy centers for it - the Root center, yes, the Root center is a motor center and a pressure center, and the Head center.

As you know every energy center of the nine Human Design energy centers is embodied by an organ in the human body.

The Root Center is literally embodied by the adrenal glands. Figuratively, it's embodied by our relationship with putting things into motion, taking action, getting things done.

The Root center not only governs our drive, momentum, our forward progress, what we talked about In Episode 185 as a motor center, but the Root center is also all about our ability to take initiative, our adaptability, to innovate.

And when it comes to pressure, if your Root center is defined, meaning that it’s shaded, this means that you're someone who does well under pressure; you function well under pressure.

You might even say that you thrive under pressure; you're calm under pressure. You handle it well.

However, if your Root center is undefined, meaning that it's white and not shaded in, as mine is, I’m also an undefined Root center, we are people who aren’t equipped to deal with pressure well.

We are easily overwhelmed under pressure. When pressure is put upon us, we might just crumble.

We don’t do well with things like deadlines or other people’s expectations. I certainly don't.

There was a time when I thought I did well working under the crunch of a deadline. But the reality is, that’s not how my best work comes out.

So, for those of us with undefined Root centers, when we feel pressure, our instinct is to rush through whatever it is we're doing - anything that will make the pressure go away, as soon as possible.

When I first learned about the Root center and connected that it’s undefined in my Human Design chart, the first thing that came to mind is a random story that I have to share again (even though I did so in the last episode).

When I was in elementary school, I can't remember what grade I was in - it might have been the 2nd or 3rd grade, I had a math assignment to do.

To this day, I’ve never been great at math; numbers just aren’t my thing. English and History? Yes, math and science? No.

So here I was, in the 2nd or 3rd grade, and I had this math assignment to do.

I remember getting it back, and the entire assignment was marked up with red ink and we all know what red ink means, right?

At the very top of the page, my teacher wrote, “Haste makes waste!” I’ve never forgotten this and it’s the first thing that came to mind when I learned how undefined Root centers will do anything to make the pressure go away as quickly as possible.

That's what I did! I rushed through my homework because even back then, as young as I was, math was not my strong point and I wanted to get it over and done with, as quickly as possible so that I don't have to think about it or deal with it anymore.

That's what an undefined Root center can feel like when under pressure which is why I think it's important to realize when we’re putting unnecessary pressure on ourselves.

For those of us with an undefined Root center, it’s not a badge of honor. Not everything is worth hurrying for.

In this world that we're in, where we glorify busyness, adopting the belief that procrastinating until the last minute produces better results – well, it’s not true for everyone. It’s not always the best thing for everybody and it won't always lead to better results.

So, my fellow undefined Root center friends, can we stop putting so much pressure on ourselves?

And if you have a defined Root center, it's important that you understand that not everyone is like you. Can you have grace for those who are around you who have undefined Root centers? Particularly if you’re a people manager or a parent, or in any type of authoritative role?

This is where Human Design can really, really be helpful when it comes to relationships, and how to communicate and collaborate with one another. When we understand what another person’s Human Design is and what makes them, well, then we can understand how we can best work with each other and hopefully have more compassion, empathy, tolerance, and grace.

Now, if you’re an undefined Root center, and you find yourself rushing, or feeling like you can't afford to slow down, that you can't take your time, well I think this is when it’s helpful to pause and ask yourself, “Why am I feeling this way? Where is this pressure that I’m feeling coming from? Is pressure that someone is putting on me, whether it be a friend, a family member, a colleague, a boss, anyone - is it an external source of pressure?

Or is it pressure that I’m putting upon myself?

I find myself putting pressure upon myself all the time - to get things done by some arbitrary date that I randomly picked, or to get things done by a certain standard that no one else expects of me but me.

It's important to understand where the sources of pressure are coming from.

And then, what kind of impact is that pressure having? What kind of impact does that pressure have on you physically?

Is it driving you to have anxiety? Maybe depression? To avoid facing things? What kind of impact is pressure having on you mentally? Emotionally? Do you become resentful and angry? Do you crumble under pressure because you just don't understand where it's coming from? What tools do you have to help you deal with it?

This is where knowing your Human Design can truly have an impact on your health. This is why I'm such an advocate, such a believer in it.

The other pressure center in Human Design is the Head center, which we haven't talked about yet.

The Head center, as you can guess, is at the very top of the Human Design chart. It’s the direct opposite of the Root center, which is at the very bottom of the Human Design chart.

As every center is embodied by an organ in the body, the Head center literally embodied by the Pineal gland. Figuratively, it’s our inspiration, it's our imagination.

The Head center fuels the analytical thinking and mind consciousness that happens in the Ajna center, which is right under the Head center.

The Head center, because it's all about our creativity and imagination, can also be our source of inspiration. It can equally be our source of anxiety.

So, if you have a defined Head center, meaning that it’s shaded in on your chart, then you’re someone who finds inspiration from within. You can be self-inspired. You inspire yourself.

In terms of pressure, you're able to withstand mental pressure. Just like with the defined Root center, you're calm under pressure. When you withstand mental pressure, you don't feel the need to release it or escape it or do anything to make it go away. You're okay with just being in it; you don't feel the need to do anything about it.

Whereas for those of us, myself included because I also have an undefined Head center, for those of us who have an undefined Head center, we find inspiration from external sources.

We look towards other people and other things outside of ourselves for inspiration. We're not self-inspired people.

I cannot tell you how much this resonated with me because I’m very visually inspired. I'm also very inspired audibly by other people, so, with that, we’re a never-ending source for ideas because we were stimulated through so many things external to us that our ideas are always flowing.

As cool as that is, I believe it's important for us undefined Head centers to understand that we don't have to act upon every idea that comes to us. We don't need to pursue every single one of them.

In my own personal experiences, I feel like I'm always coming up with ideas, not just for myself but for other people as well.

When I see someone starting a business, or having a unique talent, my mind is already working, thinking about how they can grow their business or expand on their talents, or monetize whatever the thing is that they’re good at.

The ideas come so clearly and easily to me, for other people, as well as for myself. This really speaks to my 3rd profile line in my Human Design chart. We haven't talked about profile lines yet, but I've mentioned it here and there, and the 3rd line is all about learning through personal experiences.

So, with all the ideas that come to me, I always want to try new things. But I have to temper that inclination and not pursue every idea or everything because that's how I get distracted and end up not getting anything done at all.

I have so many projects that I've started but have never actually seen through to completion because I get distracted by something else.

So, if you have an undefined Head center, this is something to be aware of.

We’re also susceptible to mental pressure. This makes sense, right, since those who have a defined Head center do well with mental pressure.

Think about what it can feel like to have all this mental pressure in your head, not just in your body, but in your head too. Imagine what it feels like and if you don't understand why you're this way? On top of that, layer on feeling the mental pressure but not being equipped with tools to manage it.

What that looks like for me was chronic stress, anxiety, constantly doubting myself, which translated to not having very high self-esteem, not feeling confident in myself.

It directly correlated to how well I took care of myself, and how much I loved myself.

So, here are some coaching tips around the Head center:

If you have a defined Head center, you may do well under pressure, but you don’t need to have everything figured out. Don't put yourself into that trap of thinking that everything needs to be figured out; you don't control the thought process. Have grace with yourself.

If you have an undefined Head center, you can be easily distracted and overwhelmed. Because you can lose focus, you want to narrow what you’re focused on and be very clear on what it is that you’re trying to accomplish.

I can easily have a to-do list that’s a mile long. When I look at it, I get easily flustered and overwhelmed, and then nothing gets done.

What I found to help me is to narrow my to-do list and be very realistic about it, to the point where there are only 1-3 things on it.

Some days, it’s literally only one thing especially if it's something that’s going to take a lot of mental energy because nothing exhausts me more than having to expend mental energy. It exhausts me more than expending physical energy. So, I try to keep my to-do list very narrowed and focused.

Another thing I do that helps me, as an undefined Head center, to stay focused is to write things down. We have so many ideas floating around from so many sources of inspiration.

It's very easy to feel the pressure of having to remember so many things at once or being afraid that I’m going to forget something important.

So, I use the Apple Notes app on my iPhone. I think I have close to 600 notes in it of stuff that I need to remember - personal information, ideas that come to me, things I want to try. It's never-ending but jotting it down is truly a helpful way to relieve some of the mental pressure I feel so deeply.

It’s one of the biggest things that helps with my productivity. When it comes to productivity, there's so much advice on how to do things but once I understood my Human Design, I began to understand what type of productivity advice is going to be helpful for me and what won’t.

Another thing that helps me relieve mental pressure is to minimize distractions. Nothing detracts us from being focused more than distractions.

I’ve turned off 99% of the notifications on my phone. I’ll also use a Pomodoro timer to stay focused for intermittent periods while allowing for breaks to welcome distractions. I’ve also limited who I interact within specific periods of time.

Whatever you need to do to minimize your distractions, so that you can manage your energy, productivity, and release mental pressure – do it!

But perhaps the most important tip I can share with you is to be a detached observer of yourself and others.

I've talked about this in past episodes when I’ve spoken about practicing observation with non-judgment. It’s one of the best tools that I use to help relieve mental pressure.

When I feel myself under pressure, especially in a situation that's out of my control, I can easily let myself spiral thoughts of all possibilities and outcomes of what can happen. But all that does is give me stress and anxiety.

So instead, I can work on focusing on the things that I can control, and I can observe the situation and myself in response to it non-judgment.

This is so critical because with judgment comes how we've been conditioned to think or what we've been conditioned to expect. If we’re able to make observations with nonjudgement, I think that's where clarity and grace can come in.

So that’s the two pressure centers in Human Design - the Head center and the Root center. These are such pivotal centers to understand, particularly when it comes to how it can impact our stress and anxiety, and how to manage and respond to it.

So that's it for this week. Next week, I'll be back with another episode, exploring three more Human Design centers, the centers of awareness.

As always, thank you so much for listening. If you have any questions, feel free to come over and drop a note to me over on the show notes for this episode at www.livefablife.com/186 for Episode 186, or come over and find me on Instagram at @livefablifewithNaomi. You can drop me a DM there or comment on a post.

And if you’re interested in booking a Human Design reading with me, I love helping people dive into their Human Design chart. You can find more info at www.livefablife.com/services and when you join my community you can get 15% off a foundational reading.

Thank you so much for listening. I hope you have a fantastic week and I look forward to being back here with you again next time. Bye for now!

Naomi Nakamura is a Functional Wellness & Human Design Coach. She helps women who struggle with stress, fatigue, and burnout find freedom and empowerment by optimizing their health, finding balance, and upgrading their energy so they can live life on their own terms. 



Combining her diverse professional background, and her unique approach integrates Functional Nutrition and Human Design she guides clients on a highly individualized journey of self-discovery, observation, and integration by removing physical, mental, and emotional confusion and overwhelm, simply taking them back to the very basics of health through their Human Design.

She believes that when our bodies function optimally, our personalities and souls can shine through everything that we think and do with empowering clarity and ease.

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 | Pinterest

In Human Design, your Type, Strategy, and Authority are the foundation of your design. But those things are determined by the nine energy centers in your chart and whether they’re defined or undefined.

This episode begins a 4-part mini-series on exploring the nine energy centers in the Human Design chart.

In this episode, we explore the four motor centers: Root, Solar Plexus, Sacral, and Heart centers. You’ll hear me share:

• What each center literally and figuratively represents

• What each center governs

• What it means for each center to be defined or undefined

Listen to the Episode:

Mentioned to this Episode:

• Episode 182: Human Design Non-Sacral Types and Their Strategies

• Episode 183: Human Design Sacral Types and Their Strategies

• Episode 184: Your Human Design Authority - How Do You Best Make Decisions?

• Episode 166: A Foundational Breakdown of Your Human Design Chart

• Episode 001: My Story & What is Live FAB Life

• Human Design with Naomi

Connect with Naomi:

• Ask a question

• Connect on social media: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter

• Send an email

Share the Episode:

Read the Transcript:

Hello and welcome back to The Live FAB Life Podcast. I'm your host Naomi Nakamura, and I’m so excited to kick off this next set of episodes with you.

We recently covered the core foundations of Human Design – Type, Strategy, and Authority, but all of those things are based upon and determined by the nine energy centers in our Human Design charts, and which of those centers are defined or undefined.

This makes understanding the energy centers necessary, so we're going to spend the next few episodes on them.

Now if you haven't listened to the past few episodes, go back and listen to them. Because today we're going to talk about what it means to have energy centers that are defined or undefined and those recent episodes will give you context as to what we’re talking about today.

So, when you look at your Human Design chart, there are nine energy centers. If an energy center is shaded, if it’s colored in, it means that it’s a defined center.

Having a center defined that means that the energy of that center is consistent within you. You’re constantly emanating, giving off the energy of that center.

Contrary to that, if an energy center is white, and not shaded in, it means it's either an undefined or opened center. What that means is that those are the areas in your chart where you're vulnerable to absorb, to pick up on that energy from someone else.

For example, in my chart, I have a defined throat center and a defined spleen center. These are the two centers where I’m consistently giving off energy. The other seven energy centers in my chart are undefined, where I’m vulnerable to pick up the energy of those centers from others.

So, say that we’re good friends and we spend a lot of time with each other. And you have a defined Sacral center. You’re consistently giving off Sacral energy. But because it’s a center that’s undefined for me when we're around each other. I'm likely to pick up your Sacral energy that you're emanating and absorb and amplify it. So, I may momentarily experience Sacral energy, it’s not consistent in me and I won’t have it all the time. It’s where I’m vulnerable for conditioning because it’s not a fixed energy in me. Does that make sense? So together, we’re going to go through the nine energy centers, but all of them today.

I thought about doing a laundry list and covering them all in this one episode, but like I did with Types and Strategies, I'm going to group them by the kinds of energy centers they are.

So, today, in the first episode of this series on Human Design energy centers, we're going to be talking about the four motor centers.

The motor centers are essentially where we create energy to sustain life. The four centers are the Root center, which is all about the energy of momentum and forward progress.

Then there’s the Solar Plexus center which is about emotions and the energy of intimacy, awareness, and connection.

The third motor center is the Sacral center where we create lifeforce energy. And that’s all about having the energy to create, build, and to give life to.

And then the fourth motor center is the Heart center. The Heart center is all about will – willpower and ego energy. It’s where our competitive spirit comes from, the will to achieve.

It’s important to know that each energy center is embodied by an organ in the human body. So, let's dive into each of these four motor centers starting the Root center.

The Root center is located at the very bottom of the Human Design chart. It governs our momentum, motivation, drive, ability to make forward progress, and it’s embodied by the adrenal glands.

If you're a longtime listener and familiar with my story, then you know that I’ve had my share of struggles with my adrenals.

I've suffered from massive adrenal dysfunction due to burnout. And with that came stress, tiredness, and fatigue that I’ve never felt before. And it's rooted, pun intended, in the adrenal glands.

So, if your Root center is defined this means that you have the consistent energy to withstand motivation, to move forward and create momentum.

In addition to being a motor center, the Root center is a pressure center, and we’ll cover this in an upcoming episode.

But, if you have a defined Root center, then you’re calm under pressure because you can withstand pressure.

And if your Root center is undefined, as it is for me, then we’re not equipped to hand pressure well. Our inclination is to do whatever we can to make the pressure we feel go away, as soon as possible.

Some of you may be thinking, “Hey, I have an undefined Root center and I do great under pressure!”

And that may be true – sometimes. Even though a center is undefined, that doesn’t mean we’re not able to sustain the energy of an undefined center, it just means it’s not fixed within it – we don’t experience it consistently – it’s not constant in us.

We're vulnerable to absorb the undefined energy from someone who has it defined, so we may pick up Root energy from someone else and feel great under pressure, but it’s not sustainable for the long-term which means that if we don’t manage the energy well, we’ll get tired and burn out.

So, if you’re like me, we're not meant to put a lot of pressure on ourselves, it won’t lead to better results. Not everything is worth “hurrying up” for. It’s okay to take our time doing things and it can yield better results.

So, my undefined Root centers, release the thought and belief that you can't slow down or can't take your time doing things.

And when you feel pressured, ask yourself:

Where is this pressure coming from? Am I around someone who has a defined Root center? How can I release pressure and unwind? How can I plan my day so that I don't feel pressure? How can I plan my week and my month to manage pressure that’s inevitably going to come?

So that’s the Root center. Learning about the Root center was huge for me in helping me understand how I can better manage my stress and avoid burnout, why I process stress the way I do, why I'm so susceptible to burnout, and it really made a lot of sense, especially when I looked at the Human Design charts of the people throughout my entire life who I've spent the most time with.

Most of them have defined Root centers so it's no wonder that I thought I worked well under pressure but in reality, I didn’t.

I don't; my best work doesn't come when I'm under pressure.

The second motor center is the Solar Plexus center. The Solar Plexus center governs our emotions, feelings, sensitivities, and awareness.

It’s embodied by the kidneys, pancreas, and bladder.

So, if your Solar Plexus center is shaded or colored in, it’s defined for you, making you someone who experiences emotional highs and emotional lows. In Human Design, we call those highs and lows emotional waves.

And clarity comes when you're in between the waves – in between feeling emotionally high or low. Essentially, this means spontaneity is not for you. You need to wait for when you feel calm and emotionally stable.

So don’t judge your feelings by thinking some feelings are good and some feelings are bad – it’s innate for you to feel all the things.

Remember that emotions are just energy in motion. They're neither bad, they're neither good. All feelings are legitimate and so you just want to wait for those feelings to bypass, wait for your emotional waves to pass and then that's when you're best suited to make decisions.

We talked about this in the last episode when we talked about Authorities, specifically on what it means to have an Emotional Authority.

Now, if your Solar Plexus center is undefined, as mine is for me, then we’re people who are susceptible and vulnerable to picking up the emotions of others.

We pick up on what others are feeling, and we amplify and magnify them.

And so, when I’m feeling particularly strongly about something, I've learned that I need to pause and ask myself, “Is this really how I'm feeling? Or am I picking up these emotions from someone else?

For those of us with undefined Solar Plexus centers, we’re calm, cool and collected people. We don't experience the emotional waves that those who have defined Solar Plexus centers do.

There have been periods in my life where I thought that I was emotionless, that I was incapable of responding to things “normally” whatever “normal” means, because I didn't feel worked up in certain situations in the way that society or other people expected me to.

I generally don’t bawl my eyes out or show panic when a crisis hits. I've always felt like I'm an even keeled person.

There have been times where I've even been accused of not having any feelings and being a cold person because of how I reacted to some situations.

But now that I understand that I have an undefined Solar Plexus center, it makes sense. I’m here to feel the full range of emotions.

They don't come in waves for me and I'm at my best when I’m cool, calm, and collected.

So, defined Solar Plexus people, remember that negative feelings aren't bad, and wait for your emotional wave to bypass.

And for those of us undefined Solar Plexus centers, be aware of when we might feel overwhelmed and overpowered by other people's feelings.

We tend to want to avoid confrontation because confrontations usually happen when somebody is going through an emotional wave, but what we need to understand is that when we have a confrontation, we're really confronting the truth.

And while it may feel painful, on the other side of pain is pleasure. And while it may feel scary, on the other side of fear is freedom.

I'm not a confrontational person by nature, and this is something I'm still trying to work through. It’s a process and takes time. Growth doesn’t happen overnight.

The third motor center is the Sacral center. We spent A LOT of time talking about the Sacral center in Episodes 183 and 184 so please listen to those if you haven’t done so already.

The Sacral center governs creativity, growth, and pleasure. It’s where we get our lifeforce energy, the energy to sustain life.

So, it makes sense that the Sacral center is embodied by the reproductive organs and the gut.

As discussed in Episode 183, if you have a defined Sacral center, you’re automatically a Generator or Manifesting Generator.

Your life-giving Sacral energy is sustainable, particularly when you're doing something that you love. In Human Design, we tend to talk a lot about this in the context of doing work that's enjoyable for you, but I think it just comes down to doing something that's enjoyable to you.

Because when you do that, you create more Sacral energy. It gives you life and helps you sustain life. You have this vitality that emanates from within you when you do what you love.

You create so much Sacral energy that it might feel hard to burn it off, like having never-ending energy.

And those of us who have undefined Sacral centers are so thankful when that happens because we pick up, absorb, and amplify your Sacral, lifegiving energy – because we don’t make it ourselves. It’s not fixed within us.

This really resonated with me when recalling times that I suffered from adrenal depletion, fatigue and burnout, particularly when I suffered through the effects of overtraining.

I spent years training for long distance endurance events - marathons and half marathons. And when I think about it, while I loved being in those moments, I really don't think I had the energy to sustain it and perform in a way that I desperately wanted to.

As I’ve said, I’ve spent much of my life surrounded by Generators and Manifesting Generators – those who have defined Sacral centers.

I picked up on their energy, but it's not fixed in me, so I wasn’t able to sustain it for long periods of time.

Related to this, defined Sacral centers have the gift of an internal moderation system. They know when enough is enough for them.

They know when they've had enough to eat, enough sleep, enough exercise. They're able to self-moderate themselves.

Those of us who have undefined Sacral centers can’t do this.

So, while we can get a taste of it, it's not innate to us.

So, it’s challenging for us undefined Sacral Types, to manage our energy this way.

Therefore, I personally don’t have a problem with using apps and devices like my Oura ring or MyFitnessPal to help me moderate myself.

There's a reason why I overtrained - I couldn't tell when my body had reached its peak for exercise. I had to learn the hard way, over the period of many years and in some ways, I’m still recovering and healing from it, while trying to learn ways to self-moderate moving forward.

And it's the same thing when it comes to eating. There is a reason why it’s best for me to not have any treats in my house because I'm not someone who can just open a bag of potato chips and eat a few pieces and then put it away.

I’m going to eat the whole thing in one sitting. I’ve been this way my whole life and I’ve beaten myself up over it time and time again. Because I'm not one of these people who can follow an 80/20 rule.

If you're familiar with the work of Gretchen Rubin, in her book, “Better Than Before,” she talks about people who are Moderators, who have the ability to moderate themselves, and people who don't, who she calls “Abstainers.”

I'm an Abstainer and learning that I have an undefined Sacral center put this into context and made so much sense for me. It explained so much about why I'm able to do the things that I'm able to do, and why I'm unable to do the things that I'm not able to do.

It’s helped me to accept myself for what I am and have more grace with myself for what I’m not.

The fourth and final motor center is the Heart center.

The Heart center governs our will, ego, sense of worthiness, our self-esteem, how we feel valued and what we value.

It’s governed by our gallbladder and thymus gland.

If you have a defined Heart center, you're strong-willed. You know what you want, and you have this consistent desire and the energy to go out and make it happen. And when you do that, you create more Heart center energy in you.

You have a sense of the value of things.

Those of us, yes again me included, who don't have a defined Heart center, don’t have this energy consistent in us.

Our willpower comes when we're around someone who has this energy. We absorb and amplify it, but it comes and goes. We don't feel it all the time.

So, we’re not competitive people. We’re not driven by achievement.

But this also makes us vulnerable to the conditioning of comparisons like, “Oh I really could be doing that” or “I really should be doing that.”

And this is where we undefined Heart centers want to be careful because it can have a direct impact on our self-esteem, how we feel about ourselves, how we value ourselves.

We can be vulnerable to having a low sense of self-worth because we may not be living up to the expectations of other people, particularly if we have parents or a manager, or people in authoritative positions have defined Heart centers, who are driven by competition and achievement.

And so, if this is you, you have an undefined Heart center, it’s okay to be okay with accepting less - less money, less fame, less achievement.

This is where being conscious of where we might be susceptible to conditioning is huge.

I’ve spent well over a decade therapy trying to work through a number of things, and I absolutely advocate therapy. I think the world would be a lot happier if more people were in therapy.

But I equally feel the same about Human Design. Knowing my Human Design helps me to have more grace with myself, understanding why I am the way that I am, why I feel the way I do, and where I’m prone to being I'm conditioned, and what I can do to kind of work through it.

So, if you have an undefined Heart center, understand that your success doesn't need to be defined by achievements. There's nothing wrong with being defined by achievement, but it’s not the only way to define success. So that is the four motor centers.

I feel like I could spend so much time going into each one even more in depth, but that’s what we do in the Human Design readings that I do with my clients.

In the next few episodes, we're going to cover the other centers - the pressure centers, the awareness centers and then the manifestation centers.

If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment on the show notes for this episode at www.livefablife.com/185 for Episode 185, or come on over and find me on Instagram at @livefablifewithnaomi.

If you want to dive into your Human Design chart visit www.livefablife.com/services and book a session with me. So that's it for this week, as always thank you so much for listening, and spending your time with me. Until next time, bye for now!

Naomi Nakamura is a Functional Wellness & Human Design Coach. She helps women who struggle with stress, fatigue, and burnout find freedom and empowerment by optimizing their health, finding balance, and upgrading their energy so they can live life on their own terms. 



Combining her diverse professional background, and her unique approach integrates Functional Nutrition and Human Design she guides clients on a highly individualized journey of self-discovery, observation, and integration by removing physical, mental, and emotional confusion and overwhelm, simply taking them back to the very basics of health through their Human Design.

She believes that when our bodies function optimally, our personalities and souls can shine through everything that we think and do with empowering clarity and ease.

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 | Pinterest

How do you make decisions? Do you make a pro vs con list? Do you “go with your gut?” Do you overthink? What’s your decision-making process and how is it working for you?

In Human Design, each person has an “Authority” - your inner guidance system on the best way for you to make decisions.

In this episode, we explore: 

• The seven possible Authorities

• How they are determined

• What each Authority is about and how to lean into them to guide your decisions

Listen to the Episode:

Mentioned in this Episode:

• Episode 182: Human Design Non-Sacral Types and Their Strategies

• Episode 183: Human Design Sacral Types and Their Strategies

• Episode 026: What Is Functional Nutrition

• Episode 166: A Foundational Breakdown of Your Human Design Chart

• Human Design with Naomi

Connect with Naomi:

• Ask a question

• Connect on social media: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter

• Send an email

Share the Episode:

Read the Transcript:

Hello and welcome to a new episode of The Live FAB Life Podcast. I'm your host Naomi Nakamura, and we’re continuing with our introduction into Human Design.

As I said in the last episode I'm laying the groundwork, talking about the introductory, foundational parts of Human Design because while I can’t wait to dive in and cover the more advanced parts of Human Design, like your primary health system, we can’t really go there until we understand the foundational pieces.

We can’t run before we walk.

It’s like I tell clients who ask me about what the Digestion and Environment parts in their Human Design charts. Until you have a solid understanding of your Type, Strategy and Authority, I don’t want to even go there.

I equate it to health coaching clients who want to try some really advanced, complicated diet or want to go into advanced, expensive lab work, but still are hooked on sugar, on highly processed food, who aren’t exercising regularly and aren’t sleeping.

Take care of the basics, the core foundations first because it might be all you need. Furthermore, I don’t really think you can grasp the full enormity of any advanced topic until you have a solid understanding of the basics.

So that’s why I’ve dedicated three episodes to Type, Strategy and Authority because if you know nothing else about Human Design, just knowing these three things from your Human Design chart can be transformational for you.

If you don’t have any interest in learning more about Human Design, although I suspect you do, just knowing your Type and Strategy, what we covered in Episodes 182 and 183, and then your Authority, what we’ve talking about in this episode, will be powerful.

When it comes to your Human Design Authority, it’s all about decision-making. How you make decisions. So let me ask you, “How do you make decisions?”

Do you pull out a piece of paper and write down a pro versus cons list? I've done that many times over.

Do you follow your gut?

Do you have to talk things about and ask others for their input?

Are you an overthinker?

Whatever your process is, how is it working for you?

Most of these are valid strategies to use, the exception being overthinking, but is it the right strategy for you?

As I’ve said before, blanket statement advice doesn't work for everyone so telling everyone to “go with your gut” or “follow your heart” literally doesn't work for everyone.

So, today, we’re going to talk about the different Human Design authorities, how they’re determined, what they mean and how to lean into them.

In Human Design, every person has an authority. But unlike your Type and your Strategy, which go together with each other, it’s a little different with Authorities.

For example, you and I could both be Projectors who need to wait for the invitations, but we may not have the same different Authority.

Before I get into the specifics of that, let’s talk about what your Authority is.

To put it simply, your Authority is your inner guidance system. Think of it as your own personal GPS system that helps you navigate how to make decisions. What’s the best way for your decision-making process, because it’s not the same for everyone, right?

To learn more about Authorities, unlike Type and Strategy, just because we might have the same Type and Strategy, that doesn't mean that we're going to have the same Authority.

There are seven different Authorities that we can have. How your Authority is determined is based upon your Human Design body graph chart, specifically, what centers in your chart are defined.

So, in Episode 166, I shared a breakdown of the Human Design body graph chart and the nine energy centers. If a center is colored in, it’s defined. And if it’s not colored in, and it’s white, it’s either undefined or opened.

And so, depending on what centers in your chart are defined, that's going to determine what your Authority is. So, let’s go through each of the seven possible Authorities and I'll explain how it's determined on your chart.

But before I do, let me just share that, in my opinion, learning how to lean into your Authority is a lifelong journey. Everything about Human Design is a lifelong journey.

So, with that, let's get started.

The very first Authority in Human Design is the Emotional Authority. The reason why it’s first, is that if your Solar Plexus center is defined, and your Solar Plexus center is on the bottom right side of your chart, if that center is colored in and defined, that automatically makes you have an Emotional Authority.

So, when we look at someone’s chart, that's the first center we look at; that's the order of operations. It starts with the Solar Plexus center

If you have an Emotional Authority, you're all about your feelings. When your Solar Plexus center is defined, this means that you're always creating and emanating, giving off, emotional energy.

And so, you my friend, you're governed by your feelings. It’s so appropriate for you to let yourself feel things out, feel your emotional highs and emotional lows. This is natural for you.

In Human Design we call the emotional highs and emotional lows, “waves.” So, when it comes to having an Emotional Authority, you best make decisions by riding out your emotional waves. Ride out the emotional highs at the emotional lows, and in between those waves, when you’re feeling even keeled that's when you want to make decisions.

Wait for the clarity that comes in between your waves.

If you're feeling exceptionally high, that’s not the time for you to make a decision; neither is when you’re feeling. So, what this means is that spontaneity is not for you. Neither is blanket statement advice like “following your gut” and “listening to your heart.” It’s not for you.

So, if you have an Emotional Authority, you really want to observe, and to know what your emotional highs and lows feel like, so you can know when you're in between those moments.

Wait for the moments of clarity that come in between your waves - that's the best way for you to make your decisions.

Next, in the order of operations for Authorities is the Sacral Authority. I spent the past two episodes talking about the Sacral center and how it’s all about your lifeforce energy.

So, if your Solar Plexus center is white and not colored in, but your Sacral center is colored in, then you are a Sacral authority. The Sacral authority is all about the gut. And physically, on the Human Design charts, that's where the Sacral center is located – at the gut.

So, if you have a Sacral authority, you are governed by your gut and how you make decisions.

“Following your gut”, your gut instincts and your gut feeling is appropriate for you. Whenever you feel that nagging, pulling feeling in your gut, the butterflies in your belly, lean in and listen to it.

One way to develop clarity with your gut is to ask yourself binary questions because your gut can’t answer open ended questions. Asking your gut, “What should I do about this?” isn’t ideal.

Rather, ask your gut, binary questions, two option questions – “Yes or no”, “this or that”, “true or false.” You get the idea.

And make your decisions based upon how excited you feel, or you don't feel in your gut, about something.

One other note if you have a Sacral Authority - you have the gift of always knowing whether something is right for you, or not. You have this divine sense of timing. And you always when something is right for you, and when enough is enough. When you’ve had enough to eat, enough sleep, enough exercise – you have the gift of moderation. Not everyone has this – so embrace it!

Third in the order of operations is the Splenic Authority. If your Solar Plexus and Sacral centers are both white and undefined, but your Splenic center is shaded in and defined, this makes you have a Splenic Authority.

I have a Splenic Authority, and we're all about our instincts.

If you have a Splenic Authority, you have the gift of discernment, an inner knowing that speaks in the moment. It’s a knowing that isn’t from our logical minds because we can’t always explain it.

When I was first learning about having a Splenic Authority, one question I had, that you may have too is, “What's the difference between gut feeling and instincts?”

Gut feelings from the Sacral center feel like a nagging, pulling, vibrational feeling in your gut. It's the butterflies in your belly.

Whereas instincts from the Spleen aren’t gut feelings, but rather a knowing. A feeling of discernment that can’t always be explained. It's like a whisper in your mind that happens in the moment and can go away as quickly as it appeared. So having a Splenic Authority is all about spontaneity and trusting our instincts. It’s about welcoming, paying attention, and honoring our quiet moments.

I find that it helps to have a notepad or a voice memo app ready to capture the thoughts that come in those quiet moments because once it’s gone, it’s gone. And if you're not in tune at the moment, you can easily miss it.

It’s also helpful to calm your nervous system. Episodes 174 and 175 are all about the nervous system – and that was selfishly intentional as I wanted to learn more about calming my nervous system, having a Splenic Authority.

Next, in the order of operations is the Ego Authority.

If your Solar Plexus, Sacral, and Splenic centers are not shaded in and white they’re undefined. And your Heart center, the tiny little triangle on the right side of your chart is colored in and defined, this makes you have an Ego Authority.

If you have an Ego Authority, you’re all about your Heart - makes sense right, since it’s based on a defined Heart center.

So, if this is you, listening to your heart IS appropriate for you. You best make decisions by asking yourself, “Is this something that my heart truly wants, or not?” “Is this something I want because I truly want it, or am expected to want it? Or do I think I want it because everyone's telling me that I should want this?”

So, if you have an Ego Authority, clarity comes when you talk things out; when you discuss things long enough for your true heart's desires to come out and emerge.

Like I said, ask yourself, “Do I really want this? Or is this something that everyone expects me to want but I actually don't want it? Will this get me what I really truly need?

That’s the Ego Authority.

Moving on, next is the Self-Projected Authority.

As you probably guessed, if your Solar Plexus, Sacral, Splenic, and Heart centers are undefined, but your G-Center, the one that’s right in the middle of your chart, is colored in and defined, this makes you a Self-Projected Authority

Self-Projected Authorities are exclusive only to Projectors.

If you go back and listen to Episode 182, I talked about what makes a Projector a Projector, in terms of the Human Design chart. So, if you have all those other four centers undefined, not colored in, but your G-Center is defined, this can only happen if you’re a Projector, and this is what makes you have a Self-Projected Authority.

With the G-Center governing your identity and sense of direction in life, having a Self-Projected Authority is all about knowing who you are and where you want to go in this world. Clarity comes to you when you’re able to talk things out with someone else.

Their opinion and advice don’t matter; it has no bearing on your decisions, you just need to hear yourself put things into words for the clarity to come to you.

Can you see how blanket statement advice like, “go with your gut” and “follow your heart” truly doesn’t work for everyone? It’s the bio-individuality that goes beyond our plates, or what I talked about in Episode 180.

Next in line is what is called Mental Authority.

If any of the three centers at the top of your Human Design chart, the Head, Ajna and Throat centers are shaded in and defined, and all the other centers on your chart below the Throat center is white, and undefined or open, then you have a Mental Authority.

I haven't had any clients who I've done readings for yet, who have a Mental Authority – its rather rare, and also exclusive only to Projectors.

If you have a Mental Authority, you're all about observing and seeing the world around you, which correlates to the Head Ajna centers being observing and seeing what’s going on in the world.

So, if you have a Mental Authority, clarity comes to you from your surroundings, what’s around you. So, my friend, put yourself in a place that feels safe for you. Then observe and look for clues in what's going on around you. That's going to help you make decisions.

Lastly, in the order of operations for Authorities, is the Lunar Authority. And the Lunar Authority is exclusive to Reflectors.

Because the Lunar Authority is for people who have no defined centers – all the energy centers in their Human Design chart are white, undefined, or open.

If you recall from Episode 182, those with no defined centers in their Human Design charts are automatically Reflectors.

And as such, that automatically makes them have a Lunar Authority - exclusive to Reflectors.

Lunar Authorities are all about following the moon cycle – the Lunar cycle. Clarity comes when you give yourself that time to make a decision. Follow the 28-day moon cycle.

So, Lunar authority friends, you don't want to rush things. Take your time, and let things come to you.

And there you have it my friends. That's a quick overview of the seven Authorities of Human Design. There's emotional authority that's all about the Solar Plexus, center, the Sacral Authority that's all about the Sacral center, the Splenic Authority that's all about the Splenic center, the Ego authority that’s all about the Heart center, the Self-Projected Authority that's all about identity and the G-Center, the Mental Authority, that's all about the either Head, Ajna and/or Throat center, and then of course the Lunar Authority that happens when one all the centers in one’s chart is completely undefined or open.

So, if you know what your Authority is, you can look at your Human Design chart and understand why you have the Authority that you do and how to best lean into it.

And if you don't have your Human Design chart yet, you can go to www.geneticmatrix.com to look it up, and I’ll have a link to it in the show notes for this episode which you'll find at www.livefablife.com/184 for Episode 184.

Then when you get your chart, come back and listen to this episode, and the rest of the episodes on Human Design. I recommend also checking out the posts on Authority that I have on my Instagram account at @livefablifewithnaomi that has some additional tips for each Authority.

And if you'd like to explore your chart more, and learn how to integrate your Type, Strategy and Authority into your daily life - your health, work, relationships, really any aspect of your life, then I book a reading with me and let’s dive into your chart. You can find more information on how to do that at www.livefablife.com/services.

Sharing one’s Human Design chart with someone and helping them understand what’s in their chart, seeing their excitement and the validation that they feel when they learn about their chart, is truly one of my most favorite things to do.

So, we’ve covered the core foundations of Human Design – Type, Strategy, and Authority. If you learn nothing else about Human Design, just integrating these three things will give you so much insight to help you navigate life with less resistance and more ease.

Now of course, because I’m me, there’s so much more to explore about Human Design, and we’re going there! In fact, in the next few episodes we're diving into the nine energy centers because as you can see, they’re what determines your Type, Strategy and Authority.

We're gonna dive into what each center is, what they represent, what they mean, and how they work together. So, I welcome you to listen in and continue the conversation.

If you have any questions, if you want to reach out to me, you can leave a comment on the show notes for this episode or come find me on Instagram - I’m happy to chat with you!

That's it for this week. Have a good week and I'll see you right back here again next time. Bye for now.

Naomi Nakamura is a Functional Wellness & Human Design Coach. She helps women who struggle with stress, fatigue, and burnout find freedom and empowerment by optimizing their health, finding balance, and upgrading their energy so they can live life on their own terms. 



Combining her diverse professional background, and her unique approach integrates Functional Nutrition and Human Design she guides clients on a highly individualized journey of self-discovery, observation, and integration by removing physical, mental, and emotional confusion and overwhelm, simply taking them back to the very basics of health through their Human Design.

She believes that when our bodies function optimally, our personalities and souls can shine through everything that we think and do with empowering clarity and ease.

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 | Pinterest

Learning about your Type is likely your first entry point into Human Design, and every Type has a Strategy. In this episode, we explore the Sacral Types - Generators and Manifesting Generators. You’ll hear me share:

• What are Types and Strategies

• What’s the Sacral center in the Human Design Body Graph chart

• The difference between Non-Sacral and Sacral Types

• A rundown of Generators and Manifesting Generators and their Strategies

Listen to the Episode:

Mentioned in this Episode:

• Episode 180: Bioindividuality and Human Design

• Episode 181: What Your Human Design Reveals

• Episode 182: Human Design Non-Sacral Types and Their Strategies

• Human Design with Naomi

Connect with Naomi:

• Ask a question

• Connect on social media: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter

• Send an email

Share the Episode:

Read the Transcript:

Hello, my friends and welcome back to The Live Fab Life Podcast. I'm your host Naomi Nakamura.

Today we’re continuing talking about the Type and Strategies in Human Design.

In the last episode, Episode 182, I talked about the Non-Sacral Type and Strategies – Manifestors, Projectors, and Reflectors.

So today we're going to be talking about the remaining two Sacral Type and Strategies - Generators and Manifesting Generators.

Before I go on, I want to recap some of the foundational details I shared in the last episode just to set context for you if you haven't listened to Episode 182 yet. And if you have listened to Episode 182, thank you for listening, and stick with me here because you might pick up a few things that maybe you missed the first time.

So, in Human Design, there are five Types. Finding out your Human Design Type is likely going to be your very first entry point into Human Design.

Your Type is really how we start to embrace our differences; it’s what makes us unique.

From a macro perspective, if we take a bird's eye view and we look at all five Types, we can see how they’re complementary and how each Type has a role to play in society.

Now, every Type has a Strategy. Your Strategy is how you're designed to move through the world, how you can navigate through life with the least amount of resistance.

If you follow your Strategy, you’ll find that you'll be able to move through life with more ease and less resistance because you're living in alignment with what energetically is right for you – what’s meant for you.

So your Strategy is how you can best create opportunities in the world to use your gifts – how you can offer your gifts to the world in the best way that it’ll be received. That’s what your Type and Strategy is.

Now, we talked about non-Sacral Types and their Strategies in Episode, so today we're talking about the two remaining Types who are both Sacral Types.

The Sacral Center is one of the nine energy centers in the Human Design body graph chart. It’s where our lifeforce energy comes from – where our life-giving energy comes from.

The Sacral Center is so powerful that when someone has it defined in their Human Design chart, that alone automatically makes them a Generator or a Manifesting Generator - for the Manifesting Generator depending on some other elements in their charts which we’ll get to shortly.

When your Sacral center is defined, this means that you’re generating and giving off the lifeforce energy of this center.

When your Sacral center is open or undefined, you're sensitive and vulnerable to pick up and absorb Sacral center energy from those around you who have it defined.

So, in Human Design, this is what we mean Sacral versus non-Sacral Types; those who have this center defined and those who don't.

Today, we’re talking about the Sacral Types - the Generators and Manifesting Generators.

If you look at someone's human design chart and their Sacral center is defined, this alone makes them Generators – plain and simple. That’s how strong the Sacral center is.

Generators are super cool people. Their natural aura is that they're warm, they're inviting, they're magnetic and if you’re a Generator, you naturally attract and draw people to you, especially when you’re doing something that you love to do.

Because when you’re doing what you love, you create more of that lifeforce Sacral energy, and that’s what attracts people to you.

If you’re a Generator, you have a natural charisma, and people want to be around that – they want more of it.

And when non-Sacral Types, the Manifestors, Projectors and Reflectors, that are around you, well, they’re going to want to use some of your Sacral energy for their own benefit.

So, what I really want to emphasize is that when you're doing what you love, you're naturally creating more energy to share. So, there’s no need to hustle, no need to grind, no need to chase to make things happen.

When you're doing what you love, it doesn't feel like work, because you're just so happy doing it, mastering it.

Because this lifeforce energy is so inherent to you, Generators, you’re the hustlers in the world – the ones who get things done. You provide the energy to create and so your gift to the world is your work.

Now, a lot of Generators tend to feel a little bit off put when they hear that because of the word “work.” They think, “Well I'm just here to work” and it doesn’t sit well with them because they equate “work” with “job.”

So, what I want to offer to Generators is rethink the word “work.” Don't think of “work” as your job. Your gift to the world is not your job. Your gift to the world is your work.

So, think of work in doing whatever it is that you love to do.

You could have a job, but the work that you love to do could be the same thing as your job, or it could be different.

But what you consider your “work,” whatever that one thing that you just love to do is, think of that as your “work.” And when you do that thing, you're creating more energy, and that is your gift to the world.

So, it's really important for you Generators to be passionate about whatever it is that you're putting your energy into. And if you're not, well, that's how you get burned out. If you're in a job that you don't love, you probably have some stress related to it.

And so, again, I know I've said this a dozen times already, but it's true – Generators, when you're doing work that you love to do, you give off a magnetic aura that attracts people and you draw them to you, pull them to you, and they can’t get enough of it – they’re going to want more of whatever it is you're offering.

Now, Generators, your gut shows you the way. When you listen to your gut, and honor your gut, and remember, the Sacral center in the Human Design body graph chart is where your gut is, it's your belly.

And so, because you Generators are all about the Sacral center, so you're all about the gut. When you listen to your gut, and honor the desires of your gut, that's when you know you're on the right track, and doing the right thing.

So, unless you feel like whatever it is you're doing is a “hell yes”, then it should be a “hell no.”

If your gut is telling you, “Hell yes this is what I want to do!”, and you’re super excited about it, then it’s a no brainer – do it! It’s what you're meant to do!

But if it's a hell no, and your gut has this nagging feeling, like dread, in your belly, it’s a “hell no” and you know it’s something's not right for you.

So, go with your gut. I know, that is such a common term, “go with your gut” It's not meant for everyone, but it’s truly meant for Generators.

Let your gut show you the way. Don't overthink it because when you start to overthink, well that's when you're disconnected from your gut. And so when you're disconnected from your gut, that's when you feel tired, fatigue, you're going to have low energy and those are all clear signs that you're off track because when you're in alignment, and when you're doing something that you love, you’re naturally energetic, my Generator friend.

Your signature feeling when you’re in alignment is satisfaction. And when you're not in alignment, in Human Design, we call that you're “Not-Self” and for you, Generators, when you feel that, you feel frustrated.

So, if you ever feel frustration, or you're feeling tired, rundown and burnt out, that's when you want to check in with your gut and see if you're actually doing something that you are passionate about, that lights up your fire, that you WANT to do.

Now, along with your Type, you also have a Strategy, and Generators, your Strategy is to wait for things to come to you so that you can then decide how you want to respond.

You get to choose how to respond to something, but initiating isn't for you. Initiating is only for Manifestors, it's not for anyone else. The rest of us have to wait for something to happen, before we can then take action.

And so, for you, my Generator friend, your Strategy is: To Respond.

The best use of your energy is to wait for something to happen, and then check in with your gut to see how best to respond. Is it hell, yes? Or is it a hell, no” Let your gut show you the way because if your gut isn't on board, then it's really pointless for you.

A couple of tips I have for my Generator friends, is because your gut shows you the way you really need to be in tune with your body - really become embodied with it.

And so, you do that by observation - observation with non-judgement.

I’ve talked about this, observation with non-judgement, in past episodes. I can't remember the specific episodes right now, but I'll find and link to them in the show notes.

So, you really want to observe how you come to feel things. How does your body embody things? If your body and your gut show you the way, observe what it feels like when you respond to work? What does creativity feel like? What do you desire? What does pleasure feel like? What does optimism feel like to you? What feels life affirming? How are you embodying these things?

Take notice as you go about your day and let life come to you so you can respond to it.

So that’s Generators, my friend.

Now, the final Human Design Type is the Manifesting Generators.

Like Generators, Manifesting Generators are Sacral beings, also having defined Sacral centers.

But unlike Generator, Manifesting Generators also have a motor center that connects to the Throat Center.

The motor centers are the Root center which governs our momentum, the Solar Plexus center which governs our emotions, our Heart center, which is all about our willpower, and of course the Sacral center with life force energy.

When someone has a defined Sacral center, and a defined Throat center that connects to one of these motor centers – that’s what makes a Manifesting Generator.

Manifesting Generators are a hybrid between Generators and Manifestors.

Like Generators, you my MG friends, you're also here to make things happen. Your natural aura is your creativity, playfulness, and your agility.

You move with speed and quickness that others, even Generators don't have.

You’re also someone who attracts energy when you’re doing what you love. Your charisma shines through and everyone wants to be around you.

You, my Manifesting Generator friend, you have the most energy of all Types in Human Design. You can get a lot of things done which naturally means you’re great at multitasking, and you actually need less downtime in between your tasks, whatever it is you’re doing.

Don’t get me wrong, you still need downtime and rest, all of the Types do, but you, Manifesting Generator, need it less than the rest of us.

You also have a lot of interests. Because you move with speed and agility, you also have endurance, and that allows you to have a lot of interests. So, it's healthy for you, Manifesting Generator, to have a lot of different kinds of work, hobbies, and other things you’re involved in.

In fact, you actually need a lot of things to capture your attention so that you don't get bored.

All this being said, a common challenge for you my Manifesting Generator friend is that you might feel ashamed or even misunderstood about having different interests or changing your paths. Don't feel guilty about this – this is something that's very natural to you.

So, give yourself permission, and reserve the right to change your mind, as you go through life.

Along those lines, it's important for you, to surround yourself with people who understand this is how you are and are accepting and supportive that you’re going to have a lot of things going on, you're going to have a lot of different interests and your interests are going to change, and it's they’re okay with it and understand that it’s actually very correct for you.

Like our Generator friends, your gut also shows you the way. You too, feel things vibrationally in your gut. So, listen to it. When you honor what your gut is telling you, if it's a “hell yes, then you're on the right track. If you're overthinking, that's when you’re disconnected from your gut. If you're feeling dread, then it should be a “hell no.”

If you’re feeling low energy fatigued or burned out, it’s also a clear sign that you're energetically off track. But since you're a Manifesting Generator, you can quickly get back on track.

And when you do so, your signature is also “Satisfaction.” When you're in alignment, you feel satisfied. And when you're not, when you're in your Not-Self you also feel frustration. So, when you're feeling frustrated, pause, step back and take inventory about why you might be frustrated.

Again, like Generators, you Strategy is also “to respond.” While you are a hybrid Type, and have Manifestor properties, initiating is not for you.

Waiting for things to come to you is how you can best move through life, reducing resistance. Going out and creating a spark and initiating something new just isn’t for you.

You're here to catch the ripple, then put things into action. So, the best use of your energy, the best way to manage it is to wait for something to happen and then let your gut show you what's the best way for you to respond to it. Is that a “Hell, yes?” Or is it a “hell no!”

Some tips for you Manifesting Generators are, because you have different interests that could very well change often, become a constant observer. Regularly review and ask yourself, “Am I still interested in this?” “Is this something I want to keep doing?”, and then prune out what no longer lights you up.

It's okay to let go of something that no longer lights you up. It might be a book club, or a running club, or maybe your knitting circle; and maybe the book club or the, maybe the book club, or running t isn’t your jam anymore. It's okay to let it go, because, again, if you hang on to things that no longer interest you, it’s just going to drain you and then you start to resent it, and eventually hate it, so it's okay to say this isn't for me anymore.

Own it, embrace it. Allow yourself to change your mind. Give yourself permission to be flexible. And remember, when you’re feeling frustrated, pause, stop, and find some clarity by listening to your gut and what it's telling you, and then course correct and change directions.

So, this is my brief overview of the Human Design Types and their strategies. I could go on and on about each of them, but I think it gives you a good idea of what a Sacral Type is, Generators and Manifesting Generators.

Next week I’ll be back talking about your Human Design Authority, and how you make decisions. Because, if you learn nothing else about Human Design, and you only know your Type, Strategy and Authority, it’s still powerful and you can really get a lot out of it just by knowing these three things.

If you have any questions, or if you would like to comment on your observations of your Type and Strategy, come on over to the show notes and leave a comment. The show notes for this episode can be found at www.livefablife.com/183, for Episode 183.

And you can come over and find me on Instagram at @livefablifewithnaomi. I share about Human Design there and in fact, I’m starting a new thing I'm trying out is a test. If you're an avid user of Instagram, then you’re familiar with Instagram stories, and how you can share certain stories exclusively with Close Friends’ audience.

So, if you’re curious to get a peek into the behind the scenes of what’s going on in my life, my coaching work, this podcast, then leave a comment or respond to one of my stories asking to be added to my Close Friends list.

Disclaimer, it's not going to be limited to just Human Design or one exclusive topic. It's going to be whatever it is I’m wanting to share.

We'll see how it goes. It’s merely an experiment that I’d like to try and in my Human Design Chart, that’s my 3rd Line coming through. We haven’t talked about Profile Lines yet, but I’ve got an episode dedicated to it.

Thank you, as always, for listening, as you can tell, I really love talking about Human Design and tying it to our thoughts, habits and behavior, and ultimately our wellbeing. As we cover the foundational aspects of it, I'll start tying it into how it shows up in our health, and how it can either be a tool to support and enhance it, although you can probably see the synchronicities already.

So, I’ll close here - have a great week and I'll see you right back here again next time.

Naomi Nakamura is a Functional Wellness & Human Design Coach. She helps women who struggle with stress, fatigue, and burnout find freedom and empowerment by optimizing their health, finding balance, and upgrading their energy so they can live life on their own terms. 



Combining her diverse professional background, and her unique approach integrates Functional Nutrition and Human Design she guides clients on a highly individualized journey of self-discovery, observation, and integration by removing physical, mental, and emotional confusion and overwhelm, simply taking them back to the very basics of health through their Human Design.

She believes that when our bodies function optimally, our personalities and souls can shine through everything that we think and do with empowering clarity and ease.

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 | Pinterest

Learning about your Type is likely your first entry point into Human Design, and every Type has a Strategy. In this episode, we explore the Non-Sacral Types - Manifestors, Projectors, and Reflectors. You’ll hear me share:

• What are Types and Strategies

• What’s the Sacral center in the Human Design Body Graph chart

• The difference between Non-Sacral and Sacral Types

• A rundown of Manifestors, Projectors, and Reflectors and their Strategies

Listen to the Episode:

Mentioned in this Episode:

• Episode 180: Bioindividuality and Human Design

• Episode 181: What Your Human Design Reveals

• Human Design with Naomi

Connect with Naomi:

• Ask a question

• Connect on social media: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter

• Send an email

Share the Episode:

Read the Transcript:

Well, hello my friend, and welcome to The Live Fab Life Podcast. I'm your host, Naomi Nakamura.

For the rest of the summer, and likely into much of the Fall, we’re going to be diving into laying out the foundation of Human Design so you can start to see the synchronicities of how it can be such a powerful tool in managing stress and avoiding fatigue and burnout.

In the past two episodes, Episodes 180 and 181, I explained what Human Design is, and how it takes bio-individuality, the idea that there is no one diet that works for everyone, beyond your plate.

Because as we know, general blanket statement advice isn’t useful, because it doesn’t embrace our uniqueness.

But there are times that we’re out of touch with who we are and what makes us unique and Human Design is a great way to remind us of our gifts and bring us back into our genius. And I'm hoping that as I share more about Human Design with you, that you'll have the same experience with it as I have.

So, in this episode, and the next one as well, we’re going to be covering the different Types and Strategies in Human Design.

There’s five Types, and each type has a Strategy.

I thought about going through a laundry list of explaining each Type, what their characteristics and attributes are, but what I decided to do instead is to group this topic into two episodes, because there's a lot of information to cover.

So, this episode is going to be on the non-Sacral Types and their Strategies, and then the next episode, Episode 183, is going to be on the Sacral Types and what their strategies are.

Knowing what your Type is likely to be your first entry point to Human Design, and your Type is how we start to embrace our differences, what makes us unique.

From a macro perspective, if we collectively look at all five Types, we can see how they complement each other and how each Type has a role to play in an ideal society. But before I go any further, I want to say that if you learn and embrace nothing else about Human Design other than your Type and Strategy it’s still going to help you as you navigate through life – that’s how powerful they are.

Now as I said, there are five Types, and each Type has a Strategy. Your Strategy is how you’re designed to navigate through life with the least amount of resistance. So, if you follow your Strategy, you’re going to find more ease because you're in alignment with what, energetically, is right for you. Your Strategy is how you can best create opportunities to use your gifts.

In order to explain what non-Sacral vs Sacral Types are, I need to talk briefly about the Sacral center. The Sacral center is one of the nine energy centers in the Human Design body graph chart. It’s where our lifeforce energy comes from. It’s so powerful that when someone has the Sacral center defined in their chart, this alone automatically makes them a Generator or a Manifesting Generator (depending on other elements of their chart). When your Sacral center is defined, you’re generating and giving off the energy of this center. When your Sacral center is undefined, you’re vulnerable to pick up and absorb the energy of the Sacral center from others.

So, this is what we mean by Sacral and Non-Sacral Types; Sacral being those who have this center defined, Generators and Manifesting Generators. Today we're talking Non-Sacral Types – Manifestors, Reflectors and Projectors– which is my Type.

Non-Sacral Types are pretty chill people. We have a natural calmness about us and we’re sensitive people because like I said we absorb the Sacral energy from the Sacral Types around us. We take their Sacral energy in, and we can amplify it for a period of time. But because we’re Non-Sacral Types, we can’t sustain their Sacral energy. So, it’s critical that we know we have to manage our energy, allowing ourselves plenty of time for rest and renewal. If we don’t, well, that’s how we can experience fatigue and burnout.

So, let's into each of the non-Sacral Types, with Manifestors.

Unlike Projectors and Reflectors, Manifestors ARE able to create their own energy, but unlike Generators and Manifesting Generators, they don’t have defined Sacral centers.

Manifestors are direct, they make an impact, and they know exactly what they want. So, it’s important for Manifestors to acknowledge and own desires - what is it that they want.

Manifestors are here to initiate, to bring forth new ideas. Initiation is their gift to the world. They don’t have to wait for something to happen for them to take action. None of the other Human Design Types can do this.

So, if you are a Manifestor, ask yourself, “What sparks am I here to create?”

The Manifestors’ aura is to push things away, and when they do, they’re able to make space and create energy for new things to come forth.

So, if you're a Manifestor, don't play small. You’re not meant to play small. You’re a born leader.

If you’ve been conditioned or at some point in your life, been made to feel like you’re “extra”, “too much,” or people have felt threatened or offended by, know that there's nothing for you to be apologetic about – this is who you are. Own it - you're meant to do whatever it is you want to do.

Like I said, you’re the only Type that doesn’t need to wait for something to happen to take initiative. Just go and do it.

But don’t forget, you’re a non-Sacral Type, so energy management is critical. You’re going to need to manage your energy highs with your lows, don’t put so much expectation on yourself or your pace of productivity.

Every Type has a Strategy, and the Strategy for Manifestors is to inform others of what they’ve decided to initiate.

Manifestors, you want to inform others of your decisions AFTER you make them, but before you take action. Why? You might make a decision and start to take action, but when people feel unprepared or taken by surprise by it, their reactions can create resistance for you.

So, Manifestors remember, you don’t need to wait for anyone, or get anyone’s permission to start something, but you do want to INFORM people of it to avoid resistance. Think of it as managing expectations, and by doing so, you’re establishing healthy boundaries.

One last note for Manifestors, when you feel Peace, you know that you’re living in alignment with your design. It’s when you feel Anger that you know that you’re not.

Next let's look at Projectors. I’m a Projector so I love talking about Projectors. Like Manifestors, Projectors are a non-Sacral Types.

But unlike Manifestors, we don’t create our own energy. Rather, Projectors can be vulnerable to picking up, amplifying, and being conditioned by the energies of others which makes us sensitive people.

So, it's really important for us to differentiate what’s actually authentic to us versus what we're picking up and amplifying from others. And when we’re able to do that, have the recognition to know when to release what we don’t need anymore – a healthy way for Projectors to establish boundaries.

Projectors have an aura that’s penetrating allowing us the ability to see the big picture, and to deeply see other people.

So, if you think about it, because we have this deep sensitivity to see, feel, and absorb, we need to:

Give ourselves time to process the take things we take in Afford ourselves down time, and alone time to focus

Projectors, we're the guides. We absorb and organize where the Manifestors initiate and push energy away.

Projectors, our ability to read the room, if you well, to see the big picture and to really take things in means that we see things differently. As such, we’re here to show others that there’s different ways of doing things, that working hard doesn’t always equate to success, that there’s more efficient ways to get things done. If there was one thing about my Type that resonated with me, well, this is it.

Our gift to the world is our ability to understand people, to understand situations, and how to be a guide to make life more efficient and effective.

So, it's important for us Projectors to reframe what work and success means so that we can define it. Because how it's done before, may not be the best way to do it now.

Like Manifestors, it’s important for Projectors to prioritize energy management. Being non-Sacral Types, with undefined energy centers that make us open to pick up energy from others, we’re susceptible to fatigue and burnout.

So, my fellow Projectors, take rest when you need it. Be careful not to rely on stimulants or substances like coffee or Red Bull.

We don't have the sustainable energy of the Sacral center. Sacral Types, when they’re doing something that they love, they create more energy! We don’t do that, though we can be made to feel that way when we’re around Sacral Types since we can pick up on their energy. But at the end of the day, our Sacral centers are undefined so it’s not something that we can sustain in the long-term.

When it comes to Strategy, the Strategy for Projectors, is to Wait for the Invitation.

If you’re hearing this for the first time, it might take a bit to process. It takes a while to learn. I’m still learning it and I imagine I’ll continue to learn it for years to come.

In theory, I get it. In fact, I've witnessed and experienced it, but there's still a lot to learn, so if this is new to you, let yourself absorb it.

So, what does it mean to Wait for the Invitation?

Well, it means that we need to be recognized for what we have to offer and then invited to share it – literally and/or energetically.

If an invitation is extended the person doing so recognizes whatever gift or thing that you have to offer is of value. They recognize you as the expert that can share it with them, and they're opening up and asking – inviting you to share more. Think of it as giving advice. When you’ve given, or even been offered unsolicited, unwelcome advice, how well is it received? Likely not very well. The same goes as offering something without an invitation. It’s likely to fall flat.

The crux for us Projectors is that we’re not experienced to know what invitations look or feel like. So, the onus is on us, Projectors, to learn how to discern when an invitation is being extended - when someone is open and receptive for whatever it is that you have to share.

When we wait for the invitation, that’s when we feel success! Success isn’t something that needs to be earned, it’s a matter of waiting for the right moment. And we don’t wait for the right moment, for the invitation, and things fall flat, that’s when we’re bitter. That’s the Not-Self for Projectors.

Manifestors feel Peace or Anger, Projectors feel Success or Bitterness.

Now, the third and final non-Sacral Type that we're covering today are Reflector. I'm gonna be honest with you, Reflectors are different beings. They’re very rare and unique, making up only 1% of the population, so it makes sense that they’re the Type I relate to the least. Or rather, I’m still learning how to relate to them.

What makes someone a Reflector is that not only are they non-Sacral Types, meaning that they have an undefined Sacral center, but they don't have ANY defined centers in their Human Design chart.

So, remember we said that Undefined and/or Open centers means that someone is sensitive and vulnerable to picking up and amplifying the energies from others? Because Reflectors have no definition in their charts, they’re VERY sensitive people.

So, it's important for Reflectors to surround themselves with people who are healthy for them. I mean, it’s important for all of us to do, but particularly for Reflectors since they’re so vulnerable to pick up on the energy of those near to them.

I like to think of Reflectors, as kinda like the consciousness of society.

We have the Manifestors who initiate and bring forth the ideas, the Generators and Manifesting Generators who build and create, the Projectors who organize and guide, and then the Reflectors who mirror what's going on with the collective.

They reflect on what's going on with society, with humanity. Reflectors can show us what's working again for the collective and what’s not. They feel it through their experiences, reflecting the energy of the people, situations, environment - the community around them, which is why, like I said, it makes me think of Reflectors as the consciousness of society.

They feel things very deeply, showing us what our highest potential is, and also, when we’re living in our shadows. Their purpose here is to guide the collective towards a peaceful and cooperative direction. Because their charts are so undefined, it can be challenging for Reflectors to know who they are or wonder if people “see” them for who they are, versus what energy they’re picking up and amplifying from others.

So, they need time to process what’s taking place around them. So, the Strategy for Reflectors is to follow the lunar cycle.

The lunar cycle is 28 days, so it’s best for Reflectors to allow themselves the lunar cycle to process what they're trying to decide.

They can use the lunar cycle to track how they feel over the course of the 28 days and use the time to process where they’re being conditioned, where they're picking up and amplifying other people’s energy versus where they can really step into their purpose.

So that’s the Types and Strategies of the three non-Sacral Types – Manifestors, Projectors and Reflectors - in Human Design.

Some questions for you to think about:

Are you a non-Sacral Types? If so, how did this resonate with you? If you’re a Sacral Type, do you know a non-Sacral Type and how do these traits show up in them? If you know your Type, have you experimented with your Strategy? What happened?

I love to talk about all things Human Design, so come on over to the e show notes for this episode at www.livefablife.com/182 for Episode 182 or come over to my Instagram @livefablifewithnaomi and look for the post on this episode and leave a comment there.

I'm really curious to hear from you about your Type and Strategy.

Next week, in Episode 183, we’re going to cover the Types with defined Sacral Centers - the Generators and Manifesting Generators. Collectively, they make up about 70% of the population so a lot of you!

Before I close this episode, I’d like to share a personal experience with you.

In my full-time job, I’m a Program Manager, a Project Manager and this work comes to me so naturally that honestly, 95% of the time it doesn’t feel like work. In fact, my work doesn’t even take up my full day – I can’t remember the last time I worked a solid 8+ hours.

For a long time, I felt really guilty about this, and I would discuss this with my former manager, who’s been a 2-time guest on the show, in Episodes 121 and 129.

I’ll never forget what she told me. She said, “Naomi, you need to understand that your skills and ability to organize us and keep us on track is not something that we can do ourselves. I can’t do it, and you know the people on our team can’t do it. It’s just not a skill that we have. So, understand that this is your gift and you’re really good at it and we need you. And the reason that it comes so easy for you is because it's such a natural thing for you. So just because it's not taking up eight hours of your day doesn’t mean anything. You work very efficiently, and you get the job done.”

We had this conversation like five or six years ago, long before I’d ever heard of Human Design.

So, this is not to say that every Projector needs to be a Project or Program Manager, that’s not it at all. But I share this because I realized that what seems so natural to me is not something that comes natural to other people. It’s MY gift.

What comes natural to you, may not come natural to me – it’s YOUR gift. And Human Design is what highlights this to us and shines light on the subtleties and things that we may take for granted about ourselves.

That’s it for this episode, so I’ll see you right back here next week for Episode 183.

Thanks, bye!

Naomi Nakamura is a Functional Wellness & Human Design Coach. She helps women who struggle with stress, fatigue, and burnout find freedom and empowerment by optimizing their health, finding balance, and upgrading their energy so they can live life on their own terms. 



Combining her diverse professional background, and her unique approach integrates Functional Nutrition and Human Design she guides clients on a highly individualized journey of self-discovery, observation, and integration by removing physical, mental, and emotional confusion and overwhelm, simply taking them back to the very basics of health through their Human Design.

She believes that when our bodies function optimally, our personalities and souls can shine through everything that we think and do with empowering clarity and ease.

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 | Pinterest

For the past four years, this show has explored all the ways that we experience stress, fatigue, and burnout, focusing on addressing it through Functional Nutrition and what we put on our plates, gut health, environmental inputs, and lifestyle factors.

Over the past couple of months, through solo shows and guest interviews, I’ve primed you with the notions that peeling back the layers, and taking a functional approach into why these things happen, goes beyond what's on our plates and into what’s also going on with our minds, thoughts, emotions in addition to our physical bodies.

Human Design has been the system that’s helped me become aware of how these things are tied together and how to address them in a bio-individual way that’s unique to me.

So in this episode, we’re diving more deeply into Human Design. You’ll hear me share:

• What exactly Human Design is and its origin story

• What are the benefits of Human Design

• Two examples of how it links to specific health conditions I’ve had - thyroid and adrenal dysfunction

Listen to the Episode:

Mentioned in this Episode:

• Episode 174: Your Body Keeps Score: How Your Life Experiences Are Stored In Your Tissues with Dr. Shea Osuna

• Episode 175: Live Your Life Through A Healthy Nervous System with Dr. Shea Osuna

• Episode 176: Exploring Brain Rewiring to Manage Anxiety, Overwhelm & Exhaustion with Carly Lockman

• Episode 179: Subconscious Capacity Building with Nadia Gabrielle

• Episode 177: Wardrobe as Wellness with Jenny Wirt of Sartorevi

• Episode 180: Bioindividuality and Human Design

• Human Design with Naomi

Connect with Naomi:

• Ask a question

• Connect on social media: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter

• Send an email

Share the Episode:

Read the Transcript:

Hey friend, welcome back to The Live FAB Life Podcast. I’m your host, Naomi Nakamura.

Over the past year, you likely have noticed a shift in the topics here on the show. Well, not so much a shift, more of an expansion.

For the first four years of this show, can you believe next month will be 4 hours already?!, I’ve focused on the episodes on four categories - Nutrition and what we put on our plates, Gut Health, Environmental Toxins and Lifestyle topics, with things like exercise and movement, sleep, stress, basically the catchall for all the additional wellness topics I’ve dedicated episodes to.

While those topics are still critical topics of this show and the work that I do, I’ve come to learn, through my own experiences and from those that I work with, as we take a functional approach and peel back of the layers of why these things happen, at the root of much of our stress and struggles is our work, relationships, and what goes on inside, not just with our physical insides, but with our thoughts and emotions.

So I’ve spent the past couple of months priming you to expand into an even deeper exploration of this through:

Episode 174: Your Body Keeps Score: How Your Life Experiences Are Stored In Your Tissues with Dr. Shea Osuna Episode 175: Live Your Life Through A Healthy Nervous System with Dr. Shea Osuna Episode 176: Exploring Brain Rewiring to Manage Anxiety, Overwhelm & Exhaustion with Carly Lockman" Episode 179: Subconscious Capacity Building with Nadia Gabrielle And even Episode 177: Wardrobe as Wellness with Jenny Wirt of Sartorevi

And with the last episode, Episode 180 I talked about, really, the intersection of where health coaching and Human Design meets. And hopefully by now, I’ve been able to paint a clear picture for you on why I’ve added Human Design as a core part of my health coaching practice and approach.

You’ve heard me share how Human Design has become a powerful tool for me personally, as I continue the ongoing management of my stress, to minimize my fatigue and burnout. And when I’m able to do so, it ultimately supports my overall health.

Because like I mentioned, we take a functional approach in our health, an approach that has always and will continue to be the foundation of my work, it’s about asking not just “what”, but “why?”

Why am I tired and burnt out? Why am I having thyroid problems? Why are my adrenals dysfunctioning? And with each answer we keep asking, “But why?” because that’s how we get to the true root of the problem. It’s like being the little kid who keeps asking, “But why?”

Over the past year, as I’ve kept asking, “Why?” I’ve seen how our stress goes even deeper than being rooted in our work and relationships. What I’ve come to realize is that at the root of most, not all, but most of our stress is our ability to communicate, establish and uphold boundaries.

What I mean by this is our ability to communicate to those closest to us, what we need from them as our partners, family, friends, colleagues - what we need from them to feel loved, seen, supported, acknowledged, respected, appreciated - when we need it, and why.

And then also the ability to establish, clearly communicate and uphold our boundaries.

Think about it, at the root, the very root of much of our stress, anxiety, dysfunction are these things.

And for many of us, we’re unable to do these things, or do them well, because of fears of how we might be perceived, judged, or even lashed back at, guilt about why we need these things to begin with, and then sometimes it’s actually a total lack of awareness about what we even need to begin with.

Let’s take a closer look at two personal stressful struggles that I’ve had.

First, as long time listeners may already be familiar with, I’ve had a thyroid condition, specifically, hypothyroidism.

Some of the symptoms I experienced were fatigue, unexplained weight gain, dry skin, a puffy face, muscle weakness and joint pain which, I think, a lot of my sports injuries could be attributed to, and even bouts of anxiety and depression.

Now, while I did take medication to manage my symptoms in the short-term, I took a step back to look at the big picture.

Was it really my thyroid? Could my IBS, SIBO, Leaky Gut, hormone imbalances all be connected to this? What do all these things have in common?

Well, they’re rooted in stress. So - what’s stressing me out?

In addition to medications, food and lifestyle did help me manage some of my symptoms - removing sugar, gluten, dairy and other food sensitivities, getting more sleep, taking a probiotic and other targeted supplements, meditation and breathwork - all things that help manage stress.

But a holistic treatment for thyroid dysfunction is speaking your truth. And this hit the nail on the head for me. I didn’t feel empowered to speak my truth, but more importantly, why?

I lacked confidence, wasn’t communicating effectively, and to a certain extent, didn’t know my own voice!

Now, this podcast has been a significant part of my healing in learning how to find my voice and speak my truth. And guess what - I’m not on thyroid medication anymore and all those other conditions I had, for the most part they’re either cleared up or well-managed now.

Taking it a step further, when I started digging into Human Design and learning about my design, one of just two defined energy centers in my chart is the Throat Center! And the throat is embodied by the thyroid and governs communication and self-expression. And not owning my voice, not honoring what I want to express, not trusting what comes out of my mouth - well that’s not being in alignment with who I am, so it’s no wonder I had a dysfunctional thyroid! And when the thyroid, the master gland in our body isn’t functioning properly, we become vulnerable to all the other possible side effects!

Learning about my Human Design didn’t shed new light on this, I’d already known that speaking your truth is part of the thyroid holistic healing path, but it sure put things into context for me and validated when I already believed to be true.

The second personal story I’d like to share, is also one that isn’t new to long-time listeners. It’s my struggle with adrenal fatigue. Yes, yes, I know that technically your adrenal glands can’t get “fatigued” but its the popular term for dysfunctioning, overtaxed adrenal glands.

And adrenal dysfunction is what got me into health coaching to begin with, because it was my gateway into functional health and what first got me on the path of asking, “but why is this happening, and what’s really at the root of this?”

If you haven’t heard this part of my story before, I trained for long-distance running, for half marathons and marathons, nonstop for about six years. To say that my life completely revolves around it would be an understatement. I ate, slept and breathed training. It dominated my social life, personal life, work life - everything.

And all along the way, my body kept breaking down. It was always one injury after another. And that was just what you could see on the outside.

My body broke down even worse on the inside with pretty bad digestive issues, hormone imbalances - I mean, its all connected, right?

And it got to the point where the thing that I started doing, running, to relieve stress, became the biggest source of stress in my life.

I didn’t have healthy boundaries around it, I was ashamed to admit to myself that I needed a break - not a short, two week break, but a long-term, likely a permanent break. But mostly, I was afraid of what others thought of me. It was a self-imposed pressure that was breaking me.

Once I became aware of it, I went through this phase of having my mind blown that there is such a thing as too much exercise. You see, as someone who lived a very sedentary life through childhood, teenage years and early adulthood, I took so much pride in the lifestyle that I’d been living. And to learn that overexercises and overtraining are very real things and can actually be harmful to your health - well it was a lot to process.

As well-documented in my personal blog, as well as in older blog posts and episodes here, I went through the diet and lifestyle steps of recovery and healing my adrenal function, but in the spirit of the functional approach, I kept asking myself, “Why?”

Well for starters, I don’t do well with self-moderation.

If you’re familiar with the work of Gretchen Rubin, of Abstainers vs Moderators, I’m an Abstainer. It has to be all or nothing for me. 80/20 rules and other self-moderating approaches - well, I fail at them. While this never really bothered me, I did wonder, “Why am I like this?”

Fast forward to learning about my Human Design, specifically two aspects of it - and undefined Root center and an undefined Sacral center.

The Root center is embodied by the adrenal glands. It governs drive, momentum, forward progress. It’s also a pressure center. And for those of us who have it undefined, we’re not meant to put undue pressure on ourselves.

We’re vulnerable to absorbing stress and pressure from others. And if we’re not careful and have healthy boundaries around it, it can lead to adrenal dysfunction which among other things, shows up as fatigue & burnout.

The Sacral Center is our source of lifeforce energy. It governs our vitality and ability to sustain life.

It's why, when a defined Sacral Center automatically makes a person either a Generator or Manifesting Generator, the two Human Design types with the most energy, stamina and endurance.

Having an undefined Sacral Center doesn’t mean we’re less energetic, rather, we have a natural calmness while also amplifying the energy from others. What this looks like is having temporary bouts of extreme energy or productivity that’s not sustainable.

It needs to be balanced with periods of rest.

Another gift of the Sacral Center is the ability to self-moderate. Those who have it defined can do so, they know when enough is enough. Those who don’t have it defined don’t.

When I learned this, gosh it made so much sense. No wonder, I’m an “all or nothing” person. No wonder, I have a tendency to “over do” things - over eat, over work, over train.

Can you see how powerful Human Design can be in helping you understand yourself? Validate what you already know to be true, but not sure how or why?

General, blanket statement advice on diet, lifestyle and life, can only take you so far. To truly understand what’s at the root of something, and then how to address it in a way that’s best meant for you, requires deep understanding and self-awareness, and Human Design, along with self-observation with non-judgement, are among the tools to help you get there.

So to answer a few questions I’ve gotten about Human Design:

What exactly is Human Design?

I’ve previously answered this by explaining that Human Design a framework that can help you understand yourself, but it’s origin story is that:

Human Design is based upon ancient systems of astrology, the chakra system - which is why you heard me refer to energy centers, the Chinese I’Ching system, the Kabbalist tradition, and the modern systems of Astronomy, Quantum Mechanics, genetics, and biochemistry. There’s a lot to it! ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ The founder of Human Design has said, “Human Design is not a belief system. It does not require that you believe in anything. It's neither stories nor philosophy. It's a concrete map to the nature of being, a mapping of your genetic code. It reveals our complete nature in all its subtleties. Human Design opens the door to the potential of self-love, a love of life, and the love of others through understanding.”

And when you’re able to love yourself and understand and love others, that’s how you have a love for life, feel joy, feel happy and happy people are healthy people.

For me, Human Design has been a personal roadmap, a user guide, if you will, that helps me get-to-know myself and all of my subtleties, understanding who I am, not what I’ve been conditioned to be.

What are the benefits of Human Design?

I’m sure everyone who embraces their Human Design has a different answer for this, but personally speaking, knowing, understanding and most importantly, integrating my Design has (re)affirmed aspects about myself that deep down I knew to be true but either never gave myself the permission to explore or had never been acknowledged by anyone else.

Again, the subtleties of ourselves that I’ve come to appreciate and embrace. Things about myself where in the past, I’d been embarrassed about and thought needed “fixing.” ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ My Human Design gives me context and perspective that helps me adjust to changes,big and small, that happen every day so that I know how to best respond, considering not only myself, but others who are involved, especially if I know their design as well.

I understand how to best create opportunities and make decisions for myself. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ In short, integrating my Human Design builds my confidence, every day, teaching me how to trust myself and my instincts, giving me permission let go of fear and doubt. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ But beyond what it does for me, it also helps me understand others, like I said, when I know their design, and how to best communicate and interact with them so that we both feel supported and productive. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ I can go on and on, but in short, my Human Design helps me to better manage my energy and in turn stress so that I feel like I’m experiencing life with more appreciation and less resistance, rather than just going through the motions. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ And this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Now, I contemplated really getting specific and breaking down the Human Design chart for you, but this episode is getting fairly long, so I’ll either save that for another episode, or another resource for you, whether that be in a video, workshop or PDF. Not sure but I will keep you updated!

Now, as I mentioned at the beginning of this episode, I’ve purposefully spend the past couple of months prepping you toward this, and for at least the next couple of upcoming months, maybe even longer, we’re going to go full steam ahead with laying the foundation of Human Design and how it can be used a tool for health.

That’s it for today, thanks for listening and hope you’ll continue on with me on this journey into Human Design!

Bye!

Naomi Nakamura is a Functional Wellness & Human Design Coach. She helps women who struggle with stress, fatigue, and burnout find freedom and empowerment by optimizing their health, finding balance, and upgrading their energy so they can live life on their own terms. 



Combining her diverse professional background, and her unique approach integrates Functional Nutrition and Human Design she guides clients on a highly individualized journey of self-discovery, observation, and integration by removing physical, mental, and emotional confusion and overwhelm, simply taking them back to the very basics of health through their Human Design.

She believes that when our bodies function optimally, our personalities and souls can shine through everything that we think and do with empowering clarity and ease.

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 | Pinterest

Human Design embraces your uniqueness, showing why general, blanket statement advice may not work for you. It's not that there’s anything wrong with you, rather, there’s a more effective way that comes more naturally to you, which begs the question, “How well do we know ourselves? What parts of us are inherent to us? What parts have we been conditioned to be?”

The onus is on each of us to observe, explore, and uncover the answers to those questions, and what emerges is a deep sense of self-awareness that develops into an intimate knowledge of who you really are, and what you need to thrive - not just what you might have been conditioned to believe.

In the solo episode, I explore the intersection between bio-individuality, the idea that no one diet works for everyone, and Human Design, a framework that sheds like on our subtle, innate gifts.

You’ll hear me share:

• What is bio-individuality?

• What is Human Design?

• The intersection of where they meet

• How, collaboratively, they can help us step into our highest potential

Listen to the Episode:

Mentioned in this Episode:

• Episodes on Human Design

• 21-Day Sugar Detox with Naomi

• Episode 008: How to Break-up with Sugar

• Episode 145: Shifting Your Mindset through Self-Awareness

• Genetic Matrix

Connect with Naomi:

• Ask a question

• Connect on social media: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter

• Send an email

Share this Episode:

Read the Transcript:

Hey friend, welcome back to The Live FAB Life Podcast. I’m your host, Naomi Nakamura.

As I’ve sporadically shared in earlier episodes, as well as on my Instagram account, earlier this year I’ve expanded my work to include Human Design. In fact, it’s become quite a core piece of it.

And a few weeks, maybe even a couple of months ago, I had put a call out to my Instagram community opening the space up for any questions about Human Design and I’m thrilled to have gotten so many questions about it.

There’s so many layers to Human Design and knowing what people are curious about has given me an idea of where to start when I share about it, and based on the questions I got, it appears that I should start with the very basics.

I started answering some of the questions on my Instagram account, but I realized that they’re also GREAT topics for the podcast so the next few weeks, probably into months will be sharing the foundations of Human Design so that if you’re not familiar with it, you can get a basic understanding of it and can then have context as I weave it into the topics that I’ve discussed over the past four years of this show – because in my mind, it all ties together.

So the first question that I’m tackling today was not directly, yet directly related to Human Design…”Are you still doing health coaching?”

I can see how it would be confusing to the casual listener or follower if you’re not paying attention to closely and might have missed the shift where one day I’m talking about the Functional Nutrition, Gut Health, Environmental Toxins, sugar detoxes and what not, and then suddenly scroll through and see something called Human Design?

So short answer – yes, I am still doing health coaching and offering the 21-Day Sugar Detox.

Long answer? I want to spend this episode doing some level setting of how Human Design synergistically compliments the work that I’ve been doing, and even takes it a step further.

Back when I was in nutrition school, one of the first concepts that was emphasized over and over again, was the idea of bio individuality – the idea that there is no one right way of eating that applies to everyone.

We are all really, really unique individuals.

And even then, within ourselves, we also change and evolve, and as we do, our needs change as well. What my mind and body needs now in the year 2021, at the age of 46, is much different than what it needed a decade ago back in 2011, when I was in my mid-30’s and an endurance athlete.

Having open Head and Ajna centers in my Human Design, I’m flexible in my thinking, able to see many different angles of situations.

As I’ve pondered the concept of bio-individuality, I’ve found myself expanding on that, going beyond that thinking because along the same lines of there not being a universal “healthy” diet that works for everyone, general health recommendations don’t really work either.

So the onus is on each of us to constantly be doing a lot of self-observation, kindly with non-judgement, to find what works for each and every one of us - uniquely. And when we take a functional approach, with medicine, nutrition, wellness, we always ask not just “what” is going on, or “what” is the problem, but “why” is this a problem to begin with? Why is it happening? What’s really at the root of it?

Sometimes this requires a lot of really introspection, but what comes out of it is a deep sense of self-awareness that develops into an intimate knowledge of just who you really are. And the knowing of just what it is that you need to thrive, and not what you perhaps might have been conditioned to believe.

And this is where each of us can ask ourselves, “What makes me unique? What makes me different from even my closest family members?” An identical twin can even ask what makes them different from their twin?

It really begs the question of, How well do we know ourselves? What parts of us are inherent to us, and what parts have we been conditioned to be?

Personal growth and development has become a large part of my self-healing journey and recently I was listening to someone speak on how we can come to truly love ourselves.

And what this person said was that to do so, to truly love ourselves, we need to let go of who we think we’re supposed to be, and instead, be who we really are. That we should stop trying to be the person who we think others expect us to be.

And yes, while I agree with that whole heartedly, it also left me asking, “But who am I? Do I even know who I really am?”

Because while it’s said that we’re out of alignment when our external selves don’t match with who we are or what we’re feeling internally, how many of us truly know who we actually are to begin with?

Now this is not me saying we don’t know ourselves because I believe that for the most part - we do. What I am suggesting is that we check-in, as we continually do, because as I said before, we change over time.

Transparently I can say that in my younger, more formative years, I don’t think I knew who I really was. I knew who my parents wanted me to be. Who those closest to me wanted me to be. But with time, life lessons learned and just evolving as a person, I feel like I have a closer relationship with myself, if that makes sense. I feel comfortable acknowledging and exploring parts of myself that I shied away from or avoided before, and now by embracing it, well it feels liberating.

And Human Design played a big transformative role in this evolution for me.

As I mentioned earlier, based on the kinds of questions I received, I don’t think many in my community are very familiar with Human Design.

Human Design is a framework that gives us insight and awareness to our authentic selves so that we can step into our highest potential in so many facets of our lives.

From how we can best offer our gifts to the world, create opportunities for ourselves, make decisions, communicate with and relate to others - I mean, can you imagine how synergistic society can be if we all had this understanding of not just ourselves, but of others as well? Isn’t that what we want? Harmony?

I’m of the belief that when we have inner peace, we’re healthier people, and when we have inner turmoil and out of alignment, that has a direct impact on our physical health.

So imagine how transformative Human Design can be in our work, relationships, communications - pretty much all aspects of our lives. How impactful can it be on our confidence and self-esteem? How we feel about ourselves?

How influential can it be on our stress levels and how we respond to and manage stress, fatigue and burnout? Because that in and of itself has a direct impact on the habits, choices and decisions we make for ourselves every single day.

So this was my long answer to the question, “Are you still doing health coaching?”

Yes, I am, with the 21-Day Sugar Detox, which by the way, I know offer as a self-paced program because I want to have it available to you based on your availability, not mine, as an entry point program to bettering your physical health, but also offering more targeted Functional Wellness coaching using the principles of Functional Nutrition to help those who have chronic conditions or specific concerns.

Because when we’re able to clear out the physical interferences, we can then take it a step further and incorporate Human Design, really rounding out the opportunity for a transformative experience.

So, over the course of the next several episodes, I’ll explore the fundamental, foundational basics of it with you for those of you who might be hearing about Human Design for the first time, sharing mostly from the lens of my own personal experiences with it, how I’m learning to integrate it, and how it helps me manage my stress.

In my Human Design chart, my Profile Lines are 1 and 3 meaning that through my 1st Line, I dive in, research, and find safety and security in the knowledge of the topics that interest me (ie Human Design), and through my 3rd Line, I need to discover and experience things for myself, learning by trial and error, and then sharing what I experienced with others as learned wisdom.

I mean, that right there is the accurate description of what this show is, before I even knew anything about Human Design.

Sharing my personal stories, experiences and lessons learned with you, and over the next several episodes, likely through the end of the summer, if I follow my mapped out plan, all on Human Design.

If you’re curious to look up your Human Design chart, you go to www.geneticmatrix.com and look it up for free and I’ll link to it in the show notes, but if you do, you’ll find that you’ll probably gonna need some help understanding it.

And if that’s something you’re interested in, you can book a foundational reading with me, which I’ll also link to in the show notes.

That’s it for today, thanks for listening and hope you’ll join me on a journey into Human Design!

Bye!

Naomi Nakamura is a Functional Wellness & Human Design Coach. She helps women who struggle with stress, fatigue, and burnout find freedom and empowerment by optimizing their health, finding balance, and upgrading their energy so they can live life on their own terms. 



Combining her diverse professional background, and her unique approach integrates Functional Nutrition and Human Design she guides clients on a highly individualized journey of self-discovery, observation, and integration by removing physical, mental, and emotional confusion and overwhelm, simply taking them back to the very basics of health through their Human Design.

She believes that when our bodies function optimally, our personalities and souls can shine through everything that we think and do with empowering clarity and ease.

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 | Pinterest

When undertaking any new project or endeavor, whether personal or business-related, it’s always important to have a plan or strategy in place. However, while strategies can be executed, there’s always non-tangible things that hold us back from fully realizing what’s possible & those things are often limiting beliefs that lie in our subconscious.

Joining me in this episode is Nadia Gabrielle, a guide and mentor for business owners and non-business owners.

Merging her business background in Brand Building, Design Thinking & Service Design with her 12+ years of experience working in the creative, wellness & self-development space, Nadia uses conscious strategic tools and subconscious capacity building, to help her clients set themselves up for success in their lives and businesses by providing support at the points where strategy and capacity meet.

I recently had the opportunity to take Nadia’s fantastic Service Design School to help me apply Design Thinking principles to structure my coaching services. What I didn’t expect and I’m utterly grateful for was learning about subconscious capacity building and exploring what areas of my subconscious can be expanded.

In this episode you’ll hear Nadia share:

• What are strategy and capacity and what are the things that hold us back

• What is subconscious capacity building and how do we do this?

• How she uses Human Design and Astrology in her client work

• What is Design Thinking and Service Design School

• Client transformations she’s witnesses

Listen to the Episode:

Mentioned in the Episode:

• Projectors Invited

• Design Thinking

• Service Design School (waitlist)

• Deep Work Workshop

Connect with Nadia Gabrielle:

• Nadia’s website

• Connect with Nadia on Instagram

  Connect with Naomi:

• Ask a question

• Connect on social media: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter

• Send an email

Share the Episode:

Read the Transcript:

Naomi Nakamura: Hello, my friends, and welcome back to the Live FAB Life podcast. I'm your host, Naomi Nakamura.

Now, whenever we take on a new project or a new endeavor, whether it is personal or business related, it is always important to have some type of plan or a strategy in place, right? However, we can have all the strategies in the world and we can execute against them, but there are always going to be other non-tangible things that can hold us back from fully realizing what's possible, from fully reaching our potential. And often, those things are limiting beliefs that lie in our subconscious.

So, joining me in this episode is Nadia Gabrielle. And Nadia is a guide and mentor for business owners and non-business owners. Merging her business background in brand building, design thinking, and service design with her 12 plus years of working in the creative wellness and self-development space, Nadia uses conscious strategic tools and subconscious capacity building to help her clients set themselves up for success, both in their lives and in their businesses, by providing support at the points where strategy and capacity meet.

Now, I recently had the opportunity to take Nadia's Service Design School, which is absolutely fantastic. And I took that program to help me apply design thinking principles into how I structure my coaching services. What I didn't expect from the experience, and what I'm utterly grateful for, was learning about subconscious capacity building and having the opportunity and the space to explore what areas of my subconscious, perhaps, are being limited and can be expanded.

So, in this episode, you are going to hear Nadia share what is strategy and capacity. And what are the things that commonly hold us back. What is subconscious capacity building and how do we do that. How she uses human design and astrology in her client work, and what is design thinking, and what is Service Design School. And she also shares with us powerful client transformations that she's witnessed through her work with her clients.

This is such a great conversation. I'm so grateful for Nadia for giving off her time to come and have a chat with me. She is based in Europe. So, she gave up some of her evening and into her weekend so that we can chat. And I'm really grateful for the experience, and I so enjoyed our conversation and I hope you do too. So, with that, let's get to the show.

Hi, Nadia. Welcome to the show.

Nadia Gabrielle: Hi, Naomi. Thank you so much for having me.

Naomi Nakamura: I am so excited to chat today. We've had this scheduled for a while. I [crosstalk 00:03:17] your program a couple of months ago and I got way more out of it than I ever expected. Specifically, about what we're going to be talking about today. So, I'm really excited to have you on to share the work that you do and what you help people with. So, for those who don't know you, can you introduce yourself to us?

Nadia Gabrielle: Of course. I'm Nadia and as you said, we met through Service Design School, which is one of the programs I offer. So, what I do is, I work with mostly business owners, but also with individuals, on their strategy and their capacity. I do lots of teaching. I'm also the creator of Projectors Invited, which is a platform for human design projectors.

Naomi Nakamura: We'll get into all of those in a little bit. But I first found you, I guess, somehow you ended up in my people you may know, or discover section on Instagram.

Nadia Gabrielle: Oh, I love that.

Naomi Nakamura: It was the @ProjectorsInvited because I'm a Projector, I'm a 1/3 Splenic Projector.

Nadia Gabrielle: [inaudible 00:04:10] right?

Naomi Nakamura: Yes. And you're a Self-Projected Projector, right?

Nadia Gabrielle: That's exactly right.

Naomi Nakamura: So, I'm so curious how did @ProjectorsInvited come about? Because for those of you who are listening, I've recently brought Human Design into the work that I do. And this is a fairly new topic that we talk about here on the show, but-

Nadia Gabrielle: I love that.

Naomi Nakamura: .... that it's such a fun account and [crosstalk 00:04:32] it makes me go all the times.

Nadia Gabrielle: I'm so glad. Let me just light a candle because what kind of a witch am I if I don't have a candle lit. Okay. Now we're good. "Projectors meme items", I'm so glad you like it. It really just started out as a meme page and me, its anonymous meme, Lord, which I loved. And then in the meantime, it really kind of has grown on its own. It expands as protect your specific newsletter and classes and something I've been working on that will be out soon.

Probably not quite yet at the time that this is released because I have no motors defined, I am-

Naomi Nakamura: I get it.

Nadia Gabrielle: ... it's taking a while for me to get this. I've been working on the idea I've had for a long time. And then each time I want to start, I don't have the mind space right now.

Naomi Nakamura: Yes.

Nadia Gabrielle: I can only focus on one thing, but yeah, all sorts of fun things. It's totally taken on a life of its own. And the way it started was just really me being me and being a really playful person and always looking at things through a very humorous lens and seeing the comedy in any situation. And then of course also having a lot of insight into Projectors through my own experiments, but also from working with and teaching hundreds of protectors. And that gives me kind of this unique access. And I love us.

Naomi Nakamura: I love how you signed everything. Love us. It's a-

Nadia Gabrielle: Love us. [crosstalk 00:05:58]. I really do.

Naomi Nakamura: Yeah, it's so relatable. And it's so true.

Nadia Gabrielle: And we're quite different, right. or-

Naomi Nakamura: We are.

Nadia Gabrielle: ... a mechanics are different. So, I really want us to have a space to celebrate that and to learn more and to be understood and to have a lot of [inaudible 00:06:15] that for us and I'm really glad that people like it.

Naomi Nakamura: Well, thank you. Now you do much more than Projectors and-

Nadia Gabrielle: I could do a lot.

Naomi Nakamura: ... You do a lot of work with strategy and capacity-

Nadia Gabrielle: Yes.

Naomi Nakamura: ... and I do this as a side hustle and I've been doing it for five or six years now, and-

Nadia Gabrielle: Mm-hmm.

Naomi Nakamura: ... I've never actually thought about things in the context of capacity. Can you share your approach to that and how you help people with that?

Nadia Gabrielle: Yes. So of course, to me, there are two pillars to a thriving, sustainable business that actually brings you joy and that isn't just making you miserable maybe your corporate job or desktop did before. I think that-

Naomi Nakamura: I do want to say to me, that is a difference between a job and work-

Nadia Gabrielle: yeah.

Naomi Nakamura: ... is the joy.

Nadia Gabrielle: Yeah. It's so important. And I see a lot of people lose that. And I just think it's so important because I mean ... let me speak for myself. I didn't get into this to be miserable.

Naomi Nakamura: Yes.

Nadia Gabrielle: I want to be excited about the work that I do because I'm also the driving force of this business. So, I have to be excited.

Naomi Nakamura: Mm-hmm.

Nadia Gabrielle: Otherwise it's not going to work. So, for me, we need both conscious strategy and subconscious capacity. And what I mean by that, I mean, we can probably all agree on the strategy piece, right? It's a good idea to have some sort of a sound proven strategy to build upon in your business, which basically just means having a plan, right?

Naomi Nakamura: yes.

Nadia Gabrielle: Having a structure. Not getting up in the morning and building everything in you again, because you sat down, you made that plan, you built a structure. So, now you can move within that and build upon that. And then when it comes to these plannings structuring strategic activities, those always take place in the conscious part of our mind because it's the conscious mind that is capable of entertaining these possibilities and moving these pieces around, so to speak and comparing different possible outcomes, calculating, planning ahead. These are all very firmly in the conscious mind. The conscious mind is rational and logical. However, the conscious mind really only has about 5% impact on our actual everyday behavior, which is wild. So, the time we're being driven by our subconscious and what that means is that while the conscious mind may [crosstalk 00:08:34] it's really the subconscious that will get you there.

And so, in order to make sure that it does things such as calibration has to be aligned with that conscious goal. Does that makes sense so far?

Naomi Nakamura: It totally does. When I've heard you speak about this, it really makes-

Nadia Gabrielle: yeah.

Naomi Nakamura: [inaudible 00:08:50]. Because like I said, I never thought about it that way and then it made me start thinking, gosh, what's in my subconscious?

Nadia Gabrielle: What is my capacity [crosstalk 00:08:59]

Naomi Nakamura: Exactly. What is my capacity here?

Nadia Gabrielle: Yeah.

Naomi Nakamura: So, in the work that you've done with all the clients you've worked with, what do you find our commonalities back? What holds us back?

Nadia Gabrielle: Yeah. I mean, I find that really, you can say that whenever find-

Naomi Nakamura: yeah.

Nadia Gabrielle: ... between what you consciously want, right? What your plan is, what we're saying and what you have the subconscious capacity for. So, generally you can say that what you have in your life and your [inaudible 00:09:26] right now, that's what you have the capacity for.

Because you already have it. But then a lot of us tend to get stuck on a capacity plateau. The truth is that whenever, once you get to the next level, but that's earning more, what's having more impacts whether that's having more ease, having more visibility, right? Having more eyes on you. Anything that requires you to level up in some way requires a capacity level up. And so, while we might be fine at our current capacity level, when you have bigger goals for yourself, for your business, your current capacity level won't really support those. Let me think of a good example. There's one projector client that I've been working with and these are pretty universal, but this is a real situation. She has unearthed some pretty significant financial capacity gap. So, on one hand she had her conscious revenue goals. Like we were just saying, write a really sound plan to achieve those.

But she had never built her capacity to be the kind of person who makes that amount of money. So, there's the gap, right? Her subconscious had its own narrative about the amount that she was allowed to make. And that was for her going back to some childhood experiences, also cultural norms and so on. And her subconscious, which is keep her within those confines of that income bracket. What happened was that she actually made quite a lot of money through a new offer. And then in German we say it flowed through her hands, right? she had it, but it's almost her bank account rejected it or couldn't take it. So, all of a sudden there were all of these reasons that the money was going out again before she found herself right back at that same sum that she was used to seeing in her bank account, because that's what she had the capacity for. Right? That's what her subconscious felt safe with.

And then behind there's this whole narrative that, who do you think you are? People think this and this for her specifically, you will no longer be part of a specific community if you outearn certain people for other people that might be out earning your spouse out, out earning your parents. These narratives are so unique to each person. So, it depends on their own subconscious blueprints. It's kind of reminds me of lottery winners who never got to build capacity to hold that amount and then it's just basically gone as quickly as they came in.

Naomi Nakamura: I relate to that so much. Like I said-

Nadia Gabrielle: Yeah.

Naomi Nakamura: ... I do this work as a side hustle because-

Nadia Gabrielle: yeah.

Naomi Nakamura: I have really good full-time job that I actually really enjoy. I'm a Projector on my job as a Project Manager where I'm actually just-

Nadia Gabrielle: I love that.

Naomi Nakamura: You know. And-

Nadia Gabrielle: You are managing energy.

Naomi Nakamura: I am managing energy and so, I don't hate my full-time job.

Nadia Gabrielle: I am so glad.

Naomi Nakamura: [crosstalk 00:12:04] But at the same time this whole conversation and learning from you has me thinking, do I say I don't have a desire to leave my full-time job because I don't believe I have the capacity to [crosstalk 00:12:16] either equate or go beyond the earnings that I currently make in my full-time job?

Nadia Gabrielle: Exactly. I mean, I don't know for you, but yeah, exactly. And right, because unlike the conscious mind, like we were saying, the subconscious isn't governed by reason and logic and rational thinking.

Naomi Nakamura: Mm-hmm.

Nadia Gabrielle: So, all of the subconscious really holds the experiences that we've had in our formative years and I know we talked about this in Service Design School and in many cases, really strong programming develops.

We say from any year old to age seven. So, we carry these experiences with us. And it's not just the experience of this, but the conclusions that we've drawn based on those. So, in terms of to what you were saying, what is safe for me?

What is possible for me? What am I allowed to do? What will bring me the most love? What will guarantee me the least amount of conflict?.

These are very primal patterns that were installed at a very early age when we also were lacking the ability to think in a more sophisticated, layered manner, right? So it was very much black and white thinking.

And the thing that's the operating system that we're still running onto the state and that is in life that is in business, right? So, we said 5% conscious mind. That means 95%, we're not conscious. We're not making conscious decisions. And instead are enacting patterns, making decisions that stem from these early years.

And then when we sit down, we take a business strategy course, or we sit down and we map out our Q3 Q4 goals, or someone else sits down and makes a plan about possibly going into business for themselves full-time for sure we're present and conscious in that moment, but that's not the part of us that will then actually be getting us to that goal.

So, in order to be able to achieve that, we need, we need the subconscious on board. So [crosstalk 00:14:02]

Naomi Nakamura: And I'm nodding my head.

Nadia Gabrielle: ... capacity. Yeah.

Naomi Nakamura: Because you don't hear people talk about this in business.

Nadia Gabrielle: No.

Naomi Nakamura: You don't [crosstalk 00:14:09] hear business coaches, teaching entrepreneurs this ... I've worked in a corporate world and the tech industry for over 20 years. You don't hear these things here and yet it's the [crosstalk 00:14:19] reality.

Nadia Gabrielle: It really is. And you see it play out once you start. I'm sure this has been the case for you now that you've been learning more about this and experimenting. Once you see things through that lens, you're like, oh, I see.

Naomi Nakamura: Exactly.

Nadia Gabrielle: And this is a really classic example with a client who has found kind of the dream right, major success, basically overnight.

Essentially she was discovered by someone influential and that person recommended she's the person to book in with in her industry. And because that happened very quickly, no part of her business had yet developed the capacity to deal with that influx of interest, that influx of eyes on her, that influx of bookings.

So, that's the capacity in her processes and in her structure, right? There was no automation. She did everything manually by herself. She had no help, no system set up. But then of course, more than just the systems, it was her own capacity that had no time to expand and adjust to this new level. So, basically what happened was her system eventually went into total overdrive. She went into overwhelm, made her Instagram private, right? [crosstalk 00:15:30]

Naomi Nakamura: Oh, No.

Nadia Gabrielle: Yeah. She didn't [crosstalk 00:15:31] want that [crosstalk 00:15:31] eyes on her.

Naomi Nakamura: I was just [crosstalk 00:15:33] going to say, because you can have the business processes and the operations [crosstalk 00:15:36] not set up. You can have your energy love and your capacity, but then there's also the can I handle the eyes on me part.

Nadia Gabrielle: Can I handle that? And I see this all the time. And of course, even with myself, I'm a double Scorpio. I'm not innately naturally made sort of outwardly visible. But yeah, I mean with her, she felt really uncomfortable posting. There were differently layers to that and more interest also means the possibility of more criticism, which goes back to that primal system that we all carry of. What if someone calls me out, then there was some of what we generally refer to as imposter syndrome although, I don't love that term. So, fears of, am I even good at this?

Do we even deserve this? Do we even belong in this space? There were so many people have done this for years. There's so much more experience and so on. And then add to that, the lack of capacity to set boundaries because she never had to right? She wasn't necessarily bad at it, but she [crosstalk 00:16:33] had only been practicing.

Yeah, exactly. That's another thing. Don't get me started on that. I mean, yeah, I'm a prime example of myself. I had to take a crash course and my twenties. Yeah. I never learned that. And it played out to my detriment until I had to. And so these are all the different layers of capacity that we need to build. So, that gives you a little bit of insight and these are quite extreme examples, but it happens in micro ways as well. It doesn't take this kind of big overnight success [crosstalk 00:17:05] to really show that someone might come up against the capacity wall when they decide to do live events. But they never built the capacity to show up live.

That looks super easy, but is it? No.

Naomi Nakamura: It's Totally true. And for me, it's, when I think back to where I started five or six years ago, even [crosstalk 00:17:22] just having my face on camera was so frightening to me. And so over the years I felt like, gosh, I really grown a lot. I've expanded my capacity, which I have. But there's not really a place where you can say I'm there.

Nadia Gabrielle: Yeah, no, it's really levels.

Naomi Nakamura: [crosstalk 00:17:41] It's levels and there's [crosstalk 00:17:42] always going to be more you can do. And that's really what made me pause and pay attention to you were saying, because I kind of thought I did a lot of this work, but I'm realizing that there's probably a lot more that would help me to kind of explore here. So, how do we go about building capacity?

Nadia Gabrielle: Yeah. Great question. And I just want to say to what you were saying.

I think what's also really important. I kind of have ... this was very much instilled to me by my mom and my [inaudible 00:18:12] which aunts, [inaudible 00:00:18:13] ... I guess they would be kind of like the joy of the eternal learning.

Of course there's always more so as we set, every new level requires a new level of capacity. But it's also really wonderful to just think of about this is the capacity that I've built. Like you said for you, right? You have both the capacity to show up with your face and to show yourself. And that's amazing.

So, I don't ever want us to fall into that trap of okay, but there's more to do, right? There's more to fix. Let's also enjoy what we have built.

And then to your question, how do we do that? I really truly believe in having a teacher or a guide whenever we do anything in the realm of the subconscious, someone who knows what they're talking about, someone you trust, someone you feel comfortable with.

I find that paramount because your system needs to be at ease to be receptive, to change. Right?

Naomi Nakamura: Mm-hmm.

Nadia Gabrielle: Also someone who has quite a bit of experience and has seen all sorts of ways that these narratives can play out. And who's confident in guiding you because when it comes to the subconscious, these things tend to be in our own blind spots. So, it's sometimes difficult to even see, even though we might have an idea of what it is to really pinpoint what is really going on here can be really difficult. And then also going back to that principle of your system needing to feel safe and held, which is a main principle of subconscious work, because otherwise it will be really unlikely that you can allow yourself to go deep enough-

Naomi Nakamura: Yeah.

Nadia Gabrielle: ... to rewrite those narratives and experience to shifts. And really what we want to do is as we said, identify the gaps to where are you not currently equipped to sustain your goals.

If you were to achieve your goals right now, would your system be able to handle them or would it do everything in its power to get you right back to where you started because that's, what's perceived as safe, [crosstalk 00:20:02] right?

Naomi Nakamura: Mm-hmm.

Nadia Gabrielle: And then from there we need to address the subconscious level, the two minds, right?

The conscious and the subconscious work quite differently. So, the things that work for the conscious mind, which is usually what was felt, I mean included feel very comfortable with any sorts of analytical pursuits, any sorts of intellectual pursuits that works really well for the conscious mind, but it doesn't work for the subconscious, it doesn't land. There isn't that communication.

And then after that, it takes practice so that you can gradually upward adjust and expand that capacity through action, through exercising, these narrow-pathways and through making that new way of showing up more robust.

Because each time you engage in action in line with that, it strengthens the new way of being or the capacity to expand that and it kind of moves you away from the old pattern.

Naomi Nakamura: The whole thing feels and sounds, and probably is because we both experienced it - quite scary.

Nadia Gabrielle: But is it scarier than-

Naomi Nakamura: Than

Nadia Gabrielle: ... just doing the thing?

Naomi Nakamura: Yes, exactly. Right. What's on the [crosstalk 00:21:07] other side of fear, you know.

Nadia Gabrielle: Exactly. That's exactly it, right?

The subconscious is naturally feared adverse. Is it adverse or adverts? adverse I think. This is not my first language. I have to say this in every podcast. People are like, what?

It doesn't want you to take risks. It doesn't want you to step outside that because it doesn't know what's on the other side. But your current situation might be not great. And then it could be much better on the other side. So, it's really up to each individual. But usually when people find me, they're like, yeah, I'm ready.

[crosstalk 00:21:40] I don't want to do this anymore. I've done this for 20 years. And it's not working.

Naomi Nakamura: Yeah, exactly. I'm sure you have witnessed some amazing transformation.

Nadia Gabrielle: Yes.Yes.

Naomi Nakamura: I would love to hear some of that.

Nadia Gabrielle: Yes. One that happened very recently that really touched me was with a Projector client whom I've been working with for about eight months. And we worked mainly on really stepping into her brilliance, being allowed to have fun at work. [crosstalk 00:22:05] Wow, what a noble concept. Yeah.

Naomi Nakamura: That joy piece of it.

Nadia Gabrielle: Exactly. And then also to have things be easy.

And then we worked on building financial capacity and she messaged me saying that she felt like her system was completely overhauled because she'd had this narrative, right. This identity, almost that point on who works in a profession where there isn't any money or any wealth.

So, very early on, she has taken on that identity and over time again, but it's strengthened. And then she had that belief that she wouldn't be financially successful, but she'd always be happy.

So, then we have that linkage. There's so much in terms of layers, but of course, really, she won't vote. And she messaged me to say that she made more in one or two months this year than ever before.

Naomi Nakamura: Wow.

Nadia Gabrielle: And that this would be the amount that usually she would have to stretch over half a year or a couple of months to survive and hearing stories like that is what drives me.

There's another one who's a Projector. She did a video for me that's on my website, which I just think is so wonderful. She completely overhauled her personal life and the year and a half that we've been working together to the degree where she to meet as a fully new person.

With her I feel like I have witnessed or rebirth. When I speak to her now I can hear her strong defined G-Center where she has cleared away all of that debris that was keeping her non-speaking up, feeling guilty about her desires.

And I can just see now how she's really firmly standing in her [inaudible 00:23:40] no trajectory, which was one of the things she previously felt guilty about, even admitting. And she's truly a woman of capacity. It's always really a pleasure to meet with her and see how far she's come.

Another one is a Generator client that I worked with for a couple months. This also makes me so happy with her. We weren't working on business at all, but on her personal life. And in the end, I have to say in my experience, the more we go towards the core, the subconscious doesn't really in term in with, we would say have different drawers. Like the [crosstalk 00:24:14] subconscious. Yeah Exactly.

Naomi Nakamura: This is business.

Nadia Gabrielle: This is a business.

Naomi Nakamura: First of all. [crosstalk 00:24:19] We're human. It's all-

Nadia Gabrielle: It all comes down. Yeah.

Naomi Nakamura: ... Yes.

Nadia Gabrielle: Am I safe? Am I loved? Is this right? .And with her, we worked on body image and the self-love and what made me so happy with her is that just through focusing on her building that love and acceptance for herself, the other topics just completely fell into place, right? She felt better in her body. She didn't have those same struggles with restrictive eating or having to force herself to exercise. We wrote that and she reprogrammed that in her subconscious.

And she now comes from a place of love and appreciation towards herself and not punishment. So, as a result, her skin has gotten better because she no longer picks it. She feels more comfortable in her body. She loves to spend time being active just because it feels good. She naturally drinks less. Those are all the things that she told me that were resolved. But we never actually focused on any of these just because-

Naomi Nakamura: I had accepted.

Nadia Gabrielle: ... exactly [crosstalk 00:25:17] when you go deep all of those symptoms, you just cover that area. If you go to the core, those more surface level topics, just take care of themselves. And then I have another one. Last one. I just also [crosstalk 00:25:30] love my clients [crosstalk 00:25:32].

Naomi Nakamura: I love the stories because these are real people that these happened to you.

Nadia Gabrielle: They are.

Naomi Nakamura: They are not get rich quick. These only [crosstalk 00:25:40]

Nadia Gabrielle: No. [crosstalk 00:25:41]

Naomi Nakamura: Exactly.

These are people who are doing the deep inner work and then finding that it brings all these other parts of their life...

Nadia Gabrielle: Yes. And it's so beautiful to see. And with this person, she's a New York clients. She's also Projector. She was also in Service Design School. And after our first session in which we worked on expanding her capacity for ease in business and really just letting go of that hustle mode, only feeling worthy when she's on the brink of exhaustion, right?

Naomi Nakamura: That's so important for a projector like you.

Nadia Gabrielle: That's so deep in so many of us. And after this first session, she reported that she has never felt this level of ease in her work and things just flowing in her business and that she set to beat her own record revenue and make more that month than she ever had before. But she was just feeling good, doing that and feeling at ease and not having things be so hard all the time.

And so hearing that, and then from a projector, right, it makes me so happy for her and for all them because I mean, I say this all the time, but it's true. I really work with the best people.

Naomi Nakamura: You bring it up a lot of Astrology and Human Design into your work, which I love.

Nadia Gabrielle: Yes.

Naomi Nakamura: And so how does that play into all of this?

Nadia Gabrielle: Good question? You're a Projector Splenic, we said. What's your Sun, Moon and Rising?

Naomi Nakamura: My Sun is Sagittarius. My moon is Scorpio and my Rising is Aries.

Nadia Gabrielle: Nice. Quite a bit of fire in there.

Naomi Nakamura: Yes. Bit of fire.

Nadia Gabrielle: It plays a big role for me, especially Human Design. I'm definitely not an astrologer. I do dabble heavily and I incorporate it mainly in two ways.

So, firstly, with my clients, this as well through the study of these fields, it becomes so apparent to you that one size doesn't fit all and everyone has different needs and different fractals, as we would say in human design, different, energetic makeup.

So, I look at every single one-on-one client's chart before I hop on a call with them for the first time. And I tailor my work to their needs. It's really important to me to be permission giving and to be affirming what they innately already carry rather than adding to their conditioning. Right. And giving them even more that they then feel the need to change or feel bad about. Which sadly has happened to me a few times with some of my own support team or coaches in the past, whom I loved dearly. But sadly, the lack of understanding, especially of my Projector aura, it was very detrimental. And I have to say now when someone doesn't understand that I get little to nothing out of business coaching or any other type of support because it changes everything and-

Naomi Nakamura: It does.

Nadia Gabrielle: ... I want to be. Right?

Naomi Nakamura: Yes, I mean, think about it.

The world that we live in is, [crosstalk 00:28:30] well, yeah, it is very much structured for the Manifesting Generator and the Generators to thrive.

Nadia Gabrielle: Exactly.

Naomi Nakamura: So, where does that leave for those of us who are non-sacrals?

Nadia Gabrielle: Exactly. And even for them, I mean, I love working with energy types and they have their own narratives and layers of conditioning, right. That they've been made to believe is bad about themselves.

So, we all have that, but really what's important to me is to be able to guide someone correctly and more than happy to put in these hours beforehand.

I did that this morning. I prepped for some sessions next week and it always makes me so happy because I want to have an understanding of someone's needs and areas for us to zoom in on, an area that may be a bit tender and so on.

Naomi Nakamura: Well, I think that's truly what it means to be a guide, as opposed to coming in and saying, this is my-

Nadia Gabrielle: structure.

Naomi Nakamura: ... my structure.

And we're going to make you fit in-

Nadia Gabrielle: five steps. Yeah.

Naomi Nakamura: ... Exactly. It's like square peg round hole. Right.

Nadia Gabrielle: Exactly. And it's not going to work. Right. [crosstalk 00:29:26] it's just going to make someone feels even worse because they're like, wait, why can't I hack this [crosstalk 00:29:32].

Naomi Nakamura: Exactly.

Nadia Gabrielle: And then the other way that I use this is for myself, it guides the way that I work. My whole thing right now is always not getting stuck in the realm of insights. That's what I see in a lot of frameworks. But for me it's very much okay, cool. This is what I have to work with. This is my definition. This is my profile. That, what does that mean for me on a Thursday when I'm sitting down to work to get this project started, right?

Naomi Nakamura: Yes.

Nadia Gabrielle: How does that inform how I work? How does that inform how I price my services?

How does that inform my scheduling? How does it impact the kinds of people that I want to work with? And in what way, all of these things I have adjusted for myself by way of really practically applying my chart, which is also what I'm always most interested in doing with my client. What is the practical application? How do you make it easier on yourself with the design that you have because we're not changing your design [crosstalk 00:30:29] when we design for that?

Naomi Nakamura: And it helps manage expectations, which then leads to better communication, which then leads to better relationships and better output. And everybody feels better.

Nadia Gabrielle: I so agree. I mean, I've seen this in my own family. I see this. There's just a deep end level of understanding and also with my friends with myself.

Naomi Nakamura: So, I said your Service Design School and I don't think I shared this with you.

In my full-time job, I am not a Product Manager. I'm a Program Manager, but I work in a Product Management organization and we had an executive who was very much into Design Thinking.

Nadia Gabrielle: I love that.

Naomi Nakamura: And Yeah. He had ... Because we're all very much remote even before this past year. And so I remember having this Design Thinking books show up in my mailbox a few years ago and I'm like, I think I know what this is. And I think they threw it away or gave it to somebody.

I didn't know why. And I hear them talking about this, the Product Managers all the time and whenever we have an event, cause I helped plan a lot of events. It's always we want to take that "Design Thinking" approach. So, let's bring someone in from that because we have a Design Thinking team who-

Nadia Gabrielle: I loved that.

Naomi Nakamura: ... [crosstalk 00:31:42] and all of that. And so, I've kind of picked up things here and there, but I heard you on a podcast talking about it, but talking about it in terms of Services for people who are in Services and it really resonated with me cause I was like, oh wait, this is something that you talk about in my full-time job. But-

Nadia Gabrielle: Yeah. This something I can use as my side hustle.

Naomi Nakamura: ... Exactly. And so, I signed up for Service Design School and it was wonderful. And I will admit, I actually went through the whole experience live before I take any action. And then [crosstalk 00:32:12] I went through all of the modules before I took action and now I am finishing up, actually the last of my interviews tomorrow.

Nadia Gabrielle: I love that.

Naomi Nakamura: [crosstalk 00:32:23] And it was the most useful in this such a great use of my time and we'll get into what it is.

But I just want to say, it's not only giving me insight into how to structure my Services, but it's really helping me see how I can go back and even further defined my "niche" I guess.

And then also tighten up copy and really everything it's really helped me focus on, okay, what exactly are people's problems and how can I help them to fill in the gaps, not just in how I help them, but also in the experience I can provide.

Nadia Gabrielle: Yes.

Naomi Nakamura: So all of that [crosstalk 00:32:59].

Nadia Gabrielle: Yes.

Naomi Nakamura: [crosstalk 00:33:02]

Nadia Gabrielle: Well, you said it perfectly. I'm so glad now [crosstalk 00:33:07].

Naomi Nakamura: [crosstalk 00:33:07] What is Design Thinking to begin with.

Nadia Gabrielle: Yeah. I mean that start ... because Service Design School, it kind of, marries these different disciplines, it's a group program I offer every year.

It was very natural for me to build that curriculum, and that container because Service Design Thinking is part of what I studied at university. And it's part of what I got my degree in.

So, as we said before, I do both Strategy and Capacity. I loved them both. And I think we need both. And that really very much reflects my own background.

So, I've been in the self-development sphere in some capacity for over 12 years now. I started studying the subconscious and subconscious work 11 years ago and I have a degree in Business Building and Design Thinking Service design, and have worked in that field prior to this iteration of my business.

So, Service Design School came to be because I work with a lot of service-based business owners, coaches, therapists, creative consultants, nutritionists, human design, readers, and so on.

And in my work, I could see that there's a lot of my clients were feeling stuck not having that strategy piece, not knowing how to set up their services, not knowing what's important and what the invisible steps are that need to happen in the backend of it really successful profitable service, right?

Because we can't gleen these things just from looking at someone else's website or Instagram.

Naomi Nakamura: Right and exactly what you had said in school, you also can't ask people what they need because they don't know what they need.

Nadia Gabrielle: They don't know what they need. This is a direct quote from one of my teachers. You can't ask people what they need because they don't know. And all of this, I call this the dark matter in the galaxy of the business.

And I love to help people with this and teach this. It's one of the things that I know I'm very good at and that I have a lot of experience and I got to, I have to credit, I got to study, with some of the world's greatest disciplines, which I'm so grateful for.

So, I built Service Design School. I do it once a year and it takes you through the entire step-by-step process of what needs to happen in the backend for a service to be a success in the front end and to be really delightful for your people to experience.

And then, because I'm me, there's also some other elements in there that aren't purely strategic.

So, we talk about entrepreneurial archetypes, we talk about financial capacity, we did a Human Design deep work session. People have really loved it to based on the feedback that I've received and gotten a lot of value from it. So, I'm already excited for the next cohort.

Naomi Nakamura: It was so great. I really enjoyed it. And actually in front of me, I have all of my ... I have printed out all of the worksheets and I've been working through them this week.

Nadia Gabrielle: yay.

Naomi Nakamura: [crosstalk 00:35:49] action.

Nadia Gabrielle: Yes.

Naomi Nakamura: I'm a 1/3 so I eat up all the information, but-

Nadia Gabrielle: You dive in.

Naomi Nakamura: ... Yes.

Nadia Gabrielle: You go deep. Yeah. [inaudible 00:36:00] I love that. I loved having you. I remember when we did our deep work and wonderful having you in this cohort.

Naomi Nakamura: Well, I have so enjoyed our conversation today.

Nadia Gabrielle: Me too.

Naomi Nakamura: And I would love for you to share where can people learn more about what you do?

Nadia Gabrielle: Yeah. It's mainly my website www.NadiaGabrielle.com, or my Instagram @_Nadia Gabrielle or of course, if you're a Projector, come find us at @ProjectorsInvited

Naomi Nakamura: Or if you want to learn and understand about Projectors if there's a Projector in your life.

Nadia Gabrielle: ... Yes. If you love a Projector, then please learn about-

Naomi Nakamura: Yes.

Nadia Gabrielle: ... how those energetics work. And that's really it. I'm also actually going to be teaching a Human Design deep work session in July. So, that's going to be fun and that's pretty much it.

Naomi Nakamura: I will have links to all of those things in the show notes.

So, thank you so much. I should say Nadia is in Europe. So, it's very late in the day for her when we are recording this on a Friday. So, I'm encroaching her weekends. So, thank you so much-

Nadia Gabrielle: That was so wonderful.

Naomi Nakamura: ... giving of Your time and for joining me today and appreciate.

Nadia Gabrielle: Thank you so much for having me. And again, thank you for being in Service Design School. It was wonderful having this group and to chat today.

Naomi Nakamura is a Functional Wellness & Human Design Coach. She helps women who struggle with stress, fatigue, and burnout find freedom and empowerment by optimizing their health, finding balance, and upgrading their energy so they can live life on their own terms. 



Combining her diverse professional background, and her unique approach integrates Functional Nutrition and Human Design she guides clients on a highly individualized journey of self-discovery, observation, and integration by removing physical, mental, and emotional confusion and overwhelm, simply taking them back to the very basics of health through their Human Design.

She believes that when our bodies function optimally, our personalities and souls can shine through everything that we think and do with empowering clarity and ease.

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 | Pinterest

I recently put a call out to my Instagram community for requests on topics for future episodes. One topic that came up was how to make wellness more inclusive.

It’s a vast topic given the variety of things that fall into the wellness space. I certainly don’t have all the answers, but I do believe that we can find empowerment when we become leaders in our own health care.

In this solo episode, I share why I take an integrative approach to wellness, marrying science with holistic practices, and how I found empowerment through education, taking a leadership role in my health.

Listen to the Episode:

Mentioned in this Episode:

• Episode 024: An Introduction to Acupuncture with Emily Chui

• Episode 172: The Stories We Don’t Talk About: An Asian American Experience, Acupuncture and Traditional Chinese Medicine with Emily Chui

• Episode 174: Your Body Keeps Score: How Your Life Experiences Are Stored In Your Tissues with Dr. Shea Osuna

• Episode 175: Live Your Life Through A Healthy Nervous System with Dr. Shea Osuna

• Episode 145: Shifting Your Mindset through Self-Awareness

• Observation with Non-Judgement

• Episode 153: Integrating My Human Design Type As A Projector

Connect with Naomi:

• Ask a question

• Connect on social media: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter

• Send an email

Share the Episode:

Read the Transcript:

Hello, my friend and welcome back to The Live Fab Life Podcast. I'm your host Naomi Nakamura. About a month or so ago, as I was working on what topics of the next quarter’s podcast episodes would be, I put a call out to my Instagram community to see if there were any requests on specific topics.

I had a bunch of requests come in that will be covered over the next few weeks and months, but today’s episode is in response to a topic request that to be quite honest, I’ve been ruminating on for well over a year - how to make wellness more inclusive.

In retrospect, because hindsight is everything, I thought back to 2015-16 when I just finished nutrition school and was starting out as a health coach. I remember feeling very out of place, that I didn’t fit into what a typical health coach looked like – a tall blonde in a bathing suit doing yoga on the beach in Bali.

We can laugh about it now, but back then, that was very much the image out there of a health coach. I remember thinking that I could not be farther away from that persona, and I wondered if there was a place for me as a health coach because let’s be honest, at least at that time, there weren’t a lot of health coaches that looked like me.

But when it comes to how to make wellness more inclusive, I certainly don’t have all the answers, AND wellness is a broad term, and it covers a variety of things.

I did a little prodding and while the person who requested this topic was referring to how to make clean beauty more inclusive and science-based, that’s not what this conversation is going to address, at least not in this episode – I’ll save that for a future one.

But if we think about wellness, there's so many different things that fall into this category:

Yoga and movement Breathwork and meditation Nutrition and healthy eating Gut and hormone health Lowering your toxic load, which those two things for me, are why clean beauty matters

There’s also:

Acupuncture and chiropractic care – two topics that we discussed in recent episodes There is clean beauty, supplements, really, anything that supports your well-being can fall into the “wellness” space

As I said, I don't have a whole lot of answers on how to make wellness inclusive in these different areas, because I do think there are many ways it’s not inclusive right now and there's a lot of opportunity to make it so.

When it comes to inclusivity, some simple things that we can all do are:

Be mindful of the language that we use. To be honest, that wasn’t something I gave a lot of thought to, but now that I’ve been aware of it, I try to be more mindful in the words that I choose to speak

Another thing that I think matters is cultural appropriation. There are so many things in the wellness world that come from ancient cultures, and I think acknowledgement of that is important.

Share our stories. I did that a little with last month’s episodes for Asian Pacific Heritage Month, but I think sharing our stories, and they not always have to be about race and culture, though that’s important too, but stories on our personal experiences, can help us understand each other and how we came be where we are and who we are. In my personal experience, this fosters a deeper sense of understanding, appreciation, compassion, and empathy for each other.

Along with sharing our stories, how about having meaningful, intentional conversations, and truly showing interest in what the other person actually has to say? When you ask someone, “How’s it going?” genuinely mean it and hear what they have to say.

When I was 17 years old, I left Hawai’i to go to college on the mainland. It was certainly a cultural adjustment and one running joke that my Hawai’i friends and I made was that people would say, “Hi, how are you?” and as we’d answer them, they’d keep walking on by, not interested at all in hearing us answer their question.

It’s funny and we can laugh at it, but I think truly listening to each other, being interested in what other people have to say, and not only that, but feeling the energy behind their words, their emotions, their body language, really SEEING them is another a way that can foster inclusivity.

And lastly, and this is what I really want to spend some time talking about is fostering inclusivity with empowerment through education.

Like wellness is a vast topic, health coaching can also encompass so many areas. My interest has always been in uncovering the root of what’s behind our health concerns. What’s beyond the obvious that’s hidden beneath. Because often, what appears to be the issue is actually a byproduct of a deeper issue.

Then, when it's uncovered, take an integrative approach to address it through the body, mind, and spirit.

There’s always been this divide between holistic or alternative practices vs western, made even greater over the past year with the Covid pandemic.

Both approaches have value, and when practiced together, can be very powerful and even more effective than when used individually.

For example, medications. I’m not opposed to them. Sometimes, they are to calm a situation that needs immediate attention. I’ve been open about taking thyroid medication on and off over years, but when I needed to take it, my goal was always to try making diet and lifestyle changes to heal and support my thyroid function so that I didn’t need to take medications forever.

There are people who believe that once they’re put on medications, no matter the condition, they’re on it for life and that’s simply not true.

There are also people who have health conditions that can be remedied with some diet and lifestyle changes but they're not willing to do so. They'd rather take medications, which doesn't address what's really at the root of their problem, than make the effort to make some changes.

So, if we want to make health and wellness more inclusive? Empower through education. Medications are expensive, health insurances are limited, and don’t even address true healing. Because, as you recall in Episode 174 – our life experiences are stored in our physical bodies so deep healing happens when we address the body, mind and spirit.

So how do we do that?

What’s helped me, and what I teach and guide my clients to do is to do a whole lot of self-observations, get curious and investigate.

For a long time, going as far back as my childhood, I've struggled with getting good quality sleep. As an adult, when insomnia and the inability to get a restful night's sleep became problematic, I went to see my general practitioner. This is before I began exploring alternative healing modalities. My doctor’s answer was to prescribe Ambien and Lunesta, which worked temporarily until they didn't.

That’s when I turned to herbal remedies and over the counter supplements. They had the same results as the medications - they worked for a little while but then eventually they stopped working.

By then I had developed other health conditions that, in retrospect, I believe are related to poor sleep. With my health in a hot mess, that’s when I learned about Functional Medicine and decided to give it a try, because at that point, what did I have to lose?

There’s no doubt that Functional Medicine helped me in so many ways, but the reality is that Functional Medicine is also expensive. It's really costly, even with good insurance. I still struggled with the costs of doctor visits, lab work, and the endless stream of supplements.

I had to pick and choose what was a priority because I couldn’t afford everything that my doctor wanted me to do because Functional Medicine typically isn’t covered by most insurance plans.

Now, I’m lucky, I’m extremely lucky not only to have good insurance, but also to have found a Functional Medicine center within the medical group where I’d been getting my primary care. It’s now where I go for primary care and my insurance covers some of it, but even then, it’s still costly.

While there is no replacing licensed medical professionals for many things, educating ourselves on what we can do for ourselves to improve whatever conditions we’re each struggling with can go a long way so that we don’t have to be so dependent on a broken healthcare system that doesn’t work for most.

Here's a couple of examples that come to mind of how this can help, and I share these because they’re personal experiences either with myself or with someone in my family.

For someone suffering with diabetes who is dependent on insulin, can some education on blood sugar and how to manage and keep it balanced, AND how they can incorporate those lessons in such a way that fits into their daily life empower them to make better choices with what to feed, or what NOT to feed themselves? Getting real on how damaging soda truly is, how it's damaging and what are alternatives so that they don’t feel so deprived if they choose to stop drinking soda?

How about relearning just what is real food? What is healthy, nutrient-dense food that won’t wreck their blood sugar but balance it? And then, what are some healthier options that are close to what their typical diet is, especially if it's based on native cultures?

As a kid, I watched my grandmother have to give my grandfather insulin injections and watched him really struggle because whatever diet recommendations his doctor made were so different from his native Filipino diet. It’s no wonder he felt so deprived and helpless – unable to help himself yet struggled to financially afford the medications that he needed to live.

I was just a kid, but I’ll never forget watching them go through that.

What about someone who suffers with IBS and or raging gut issues. I share this because this was me, and is pretty common with so many people struggling with similar conditions where we suspect that food sensitivities or intolerances are a key factor.

How about, instead of having to pay for really expensive, not covered by insurance, lab tests to identify potential food allergies, sensitivities, intolerances, which is what I did, can someone become empowered by learning how to do an elimination diet to identify offending foods?

And, as a byproduct of this exercise in self-observation, can someone become empowered perhaps by observing, for the first time in a while, or maybe even ever, what their eating habits are, not what they perceived them to be, and what their emotions are around foods that can possibly lead learning about intuitive eating that can lead to even more learning and empowerment?

I share these scenarios because it’s what my own personal experiences have been, and the experiences of some of my past clients who I worked with through an elimination diet process to address IBS but came out of experience, not only empowered in what they can do to address their IBS, but also able to identify their patterns and behaviors around food, improving their relationship with it.

The unexpected byproduct was their mindset shifts - you can hear one of my past clients share her experience with this back in Episode 025 and I’ll link to it in the show notes if that's something that you're interested in hearing more about.

Now, coming back to my struggles with sleep, as I shared, I took Ambien and Lunesta that my general practitioner prescribed for me, and while they did help me in the short-term, the reality is they were just band aids, because they didn't address the larger problem.

The supplements I took, the essential oils I diffused, all these other things were much of the same – band aids on a deeper problem because the root of the problem still wasn't addressed.

At this point I considered that perhaps there was something deeper going on at the subconscious level that was really preventing me from getting deep, restful sleep.

So, I deduced that if I can unpack whatever’s in my subconscious and identify what it is and work on addressing and healing whatever’s there, then perhaps I can also heal other health ailments that I have come about because of my inability to sleep well.

How much better could my body function with better sleep?

This is when I pulled back on everything. I stopped all the costly supplements to the point where now, the only things I take are a daily probiotic, vitamin D, and L-Glutamine. I stopped everything else, and I was on a lot of stuff, but I stopped all of it, and instead, I opened myself up to genuinely develop a consistent meditation practice.

I learned how to do breathwork. I started journaling, which if you haven’t journaled before, requires a level of vulnerability that I really struggled with at the beginning.

But I gave myself permission to try and told myself that it was okay if a lot of gunk comes up from past pain and traumas that I, to be honest, I didn’t want to deal with, but I’m trying to investigate and uncover what’s truly at the root of my problem.

I personally feel that stress is at the root of every problem, however it is that we experienced stress, but the point I want to emphasize is that through education, I’ve been able to empower myself so that I’m able to take more of a leadership role in my health, and in my wellness, using skills that are entirely within me. I don’t really have to be dependent on anyone to do self-observation, to do an elimination diet, to meditate, to journal.

I didn’t have these skills to begin with, but I was able to learn, both from free and paid resources, but by being empowered, I’m more inclusive in my own health and wellness.

And when we’re more empowered and leaders in our own health, we feel better, and when we feel better, we’re happier, and happier people are less focused on themselves, and as humans, want to help other people, the community, we think beyond ourselves.

And that’s a long-winded way of sharing just my perspective on how we can make health and wellness more inclusive.

Like I said, I don't have all the answers, heck, I don’t even know if this is the right answer. , But this is where my thoughts are at this moment – who knows, maybe I’ll change in six months – I mean, I have an Open Head center and an Open Ajna center in my Human Design, which means I’m able to see things from many different perspectives….

But since I was asked to share my thoughts, and remember, I’m a Projector in Human Design and we Projectors have to wait for invitations…

So, I'm gonna leave this right here, and thank you so much for listening.

As always, I'd love to hear your ideas and perspectives, perhaps you might offer one that I hadn’t thought of, so I'm happy to hear from them.

You can always reach out to me on the show notes for this episode at www.livefablife.com/178 for Episode 178, or you can come over and find me on Instagram at @livefablifewithnaomi.

Thank you so much for your time. I say this a lot, but I truly mean it - we can never have more time, we all only have 24 hours in a day and we all have so many things going on. I know I do, and I know you do too, so the fact that you have made it to the end of this episode, and you're still listening, well, I appreciate that. I appreciate your time, and I appreciate your attention and I just want you to know that. Thank you for listening and I'll see you right back here again next week. Bye.

Naomi Nakamura is a Functional Wellness & Human Design Coach. She helps women who struggle with stress, fatigue, and burnout find freedom and empowerment by optimizing their health, finding balance, and upgrading their energy so they can live life on their own terms. 



Combining her diverse professional background, and her unique approach integrates Functional Nutrition and Human Design she guides clients on a highly individualized journey of self-discovery, observation, and integration by removing physical, mental, and emotional confusion and overwhelm, simply taking them back to the very basics of health through their Human Design.

She believes that when our bodies function optimally, our personalities and souls can shine through everything that we think and do with empowering clarity and ease.

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 | Pinterest

Have you followed fashion “rules” that you learned from reading teen and fashion magazines? Or struggled over the years knowing how to dress when your body changed to varying sizes?

I’ve experienced this too, spending years searching for help but never really finding anything that “fit” until I found Jenny Wirt of Sartorevi.

Jenny is a potent energy healer whose background includes experience as a fashion stylist and creative director, alongside her Master of Physical Therapy degree and Craniosacral Therapy training.

Independently, Jenny has also studied chakra balancing, inner child healing, and manifestation work.

Additionally, Jenny trained as an assistant fashion stylist in New York, Amsterdam, and Los Angeles, where she honed her visual prowess, working on advertising and editorial shoots for brands and publications like ELLE, Glamour, Bloomingdale’s and Bergdorf Goodman.

Jenny has creatively merged her diverse skills and talents into her wellness-based personal styling offerings under the brand “Sartorevi”, which stands for “sartorial revival.”

Driven by the conviction that every woman deserves to feel radiant, magnetic, and powerful within her body, she believes in empowering women through fashion selections to facilitate healing from the inside out and the outside in her wardrobe as wellness sessions.

Episode Highlights:

• How she merged her diverse professional background and talents to create Sartorevi

• How our wardrobe is an external reflection of what's going on internally

• The influence of colors and their relationship to our chakra centers

• Her styling philosophy and tips on building a transitional wardrobe

Listen to the Episode:

Mentioned in the Episode:

• Wardrobe As Wellness

• Book a session with Jenny

Connect with Jenny Wirt of Sartorevi:

• Sartorevi website

• Connect with Jenny on Instagram

  Connect with Naomi:

• Ask a question

• Connect on social media: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter

• Send an email

Share the Episode:

Read the Transcript:

Naomi Nakamura: Hello, my friends and welcome back to The Live FAB Life Podcast. I'm your host, Naomi Nakamura and I'm truly, so excited to share this episode with you.

Over the years, and I'm sure many of you can relate to this, I've physically gone through a lot of changes. I've been many different sizes, I've gone through many different fads. And a lot of what my fashion sense started to develop when I was really young and was reading Teen and Seventeen magazines. I think, there wasn't even Teen Vogue when I was a teenager, but I was really into all these things. And I started learning about what are these fashion rules and what should I wear for what, and really carried that with me throughout my adulthood. But like I said, my body has gone through many different changes over the years.

I have been into different styles and different fads, and over the past few years, I've really been at a loss as how to style myself. I didn't know what my personal style is anymore. And I've been looking for help with this for, I'd say, the past three years. And I found some resources, but really didn't find anything that quite resonated with me. My own values change, especially in how I source clothes, where I shop at, and then different things that were recommended to me didn't feel quite right.

I discovered Jenny Wirt and was introduced to her through Instagram and mutual friends. And I was really curious about her service Wardrobe As Wellness, because I never considered what we wear or fashion as part of wellness. And so I actually booked a session with Jenny Wirt and it was so wonderful. It just exceeded my expectations. So let me just quickly introduce Jenny Wirt to you.

Jenny Wirt is a potent energy healer, but she has a really diverse professional background. She is a physical therapist. She's done work in cranial sacral therapy. She studied chakra balancing, does manifestation work, but she is also a fashion stylist. And she brings all of these things together in the service that she offers. And I went into there expecting to get recommendations on what lines and what styles and what cuts and shapes would work for me, what colors would work. And I definitely got all of that, but then I also cost so much more. And when I talk about her experience as an energy healer, I'm talking about chakra balancing, she brings all of that into the session in such a unique way. And like I said, in many ways, a wake-up call for me.

And it really validated a lot of things, as well as brought things to my attention that maybe I had been putting off or not really wanting to acknowledge or deal with. And again, it was nothing in a bad way, it was just all really gratifying in a personal growth way. I'm really truly excited and so grateful for Jenny Wirt to agree to come on and to share her work with you. And I share much of my experience as well. So I hope you enjoy this. So much of how we present ourselves externally is a reflection of what's going on internally and we really get into that topic. So with that, let's get to the show. Hi, Jenny Wirt, welcome to the show.

Jenny Wirt: Hi, Naomi. Thanks for having me.

Naomi Nakamura: I am very excited to have this conversation with you. I recently had a styling session with you and it was such a wonderful experience. So I'm excited to share who you are and what you do with the listeners. For those who don't yet know you can you introduce yourself?

Jenny Wirt: Sure. Yeah. And thank you for having me on, and I'm excited to be able to share, and I've loved working together and working with you on your personal style. And I'm a wardrobe stylist and healer. And my background is in physical therapy, taken this a little bit of an evolution, I guess, to get to this place where I'm bringing all of that together into one offering. And I've been doing that in LA, but I just moved to Ojai.

Naomi Nakamura: Oh, wonderful.

Jenny Wirt: Yeah. Which is exciting and dreamy and all the things that I expect it would be.

Naomi Nakamura: You have this diverse professional background. Can you share with us the evolution of where you started and how one led to the other?

Jenny Wirt: I got my degree in physical therapy and used that to travel. So I was traveling around and was offered a travel position in New York and I took it. And while I was there decided that I wanted to do something more creative. So I got into fashion styling, which was a total 180 in a lot of ways, but there was this aspect where I was getting to do something that was a little bit more creatively fulfilling, but didn't feel like I was helping people or contributing in a larger sense that I wanted to be able to do with my career, achieve I guess my career. Yeah. I have been on this back and forth and doing a little bit of each and then I moved to LA about four and a half years ago and was working in a wellness facility and having a little bit more of a holistic input. And patients that I was working with would ask me, "Are you a healer?" I just felt to do something and I wasn't trying to do anything, but yeah, I guess I just had that natural connection to people in that way.

Then I got trained in craniosacral therapy, which I had experienced myself and really loved the results and everything snowballed from there. It was a very different experience and I had to change the way that I worked with clients because I couldn't see the number, the volume of people that I was seeing before doing the healing work, which is what I felt really inspired to do. I quit my job and I started healing clients and doing that kind of work. And then I noticed as they would come in, I think I always just paid attention, observe what people are wearing, because I think it's interesting. And where I was noticing that there was correlation between what they were coming in wearing in terms of the colors, or maybe be types of clothes, like a more masculine utilitarian clean versus the super feminine flowy, or certain colors. And that really correlated to what I was seeing energetically as I was working with them in a session.

That's how it came together, was that I just didn't feel like there was really as much separation as with anything, it's an outward reflection of what's internal. And whether we think about it consciously or not.

Naomi Nakamura: For those who aren't familiar, can you share what cranial sacral work is?

Jenny Wirt: Yes. It's its own physiological system in the body, like your respiratory system or cardiovascular system. So it's the cerebral spinal fluid that surrounds the brain and the spinal cord and everything that it's housed in. And it's the rhythm that it creates as that fluid is produced and reabsorbed. So there's a subtle body expansion and contraction. And with the craniosacral therapy is releasing the restrictions in the fascia, but can be stored, they call it trauma, but it's physical, emotional stress or repetitive use, or that one time you bumped your head on the table and you can work in any point of the body because the fascia system is one whole system. And so you can work on any joint in the body and impact the tissue in that way, by releasing the fascia, you improve that rhythm, which affects the central nervous system. And there's also an energetic component as well. You have to approach the person in a certain way to be able to assess and treat that system.

Naomi Nakamura: So that's what you mean when you said you were seeing the correlation between people's outward presentation versus what you were seeing going on internally with them?

Jenny Wirt: Right. And I guess, I mean, I think it's probably not purely craniosacral therapy. That's, it's an intuitive thing. I'm a very visual person and I also receive intuitive information whenever I'm working in a session with someone visually. So I can visually see there's a blockage, they're holding all their energy on the right side, which is the masculine side. And I can work with them to move that. And then I would also may prescribe, say more feminine leaning wardrobe pieces to help support that balance.

Naomi Nakamura: I had the experience of going through that with you. And I was so amazed because, well, let me back it up a little bit. I never really knew what my personal style was, I would read fashion magazines since I was a pre-teen and read these things about, well, what's good for this skin tone and whatnot, and what's good for this body shape or body size. And it just, I never really evolved to what that might be for me as well as I changed over the years. And looking back and I actually thought about this after our session, I'd been searching for that kind of help. I realized in 2019, I signed up for some personal stylist, free workshop they had or something. And they never really helped me and I actually took someone's program, another person's program in 2020, I never really got what I was looking for, but I signed up for a session with you and I answered a really just simple questionnaire.

And then you sent me a mood board or self board to look at beforehand, before we even met face to face at all, had any have a one-on-one interaction. And what you presented it just stunned me because I feel like it hit all these things that I was not only, in fact I was looking for, in terms of aesthetics and style, but when you bring in the energy work with it, with the chakras, it really hit the nail on the head in many ways. And it was just powerful to me because like you said, you do this intuitively, but we had never even had any type of one-on-one interaction prior to that other than exchanging of emails. Can you share with people, what exactly is your wardrobe as wellness experience? Especially the one that I went through.

Jenny Wirt: Yeah. Well, first of all, thank you. That's so kind of you to say, and I'm so glad that we found each other. I mean, the reason I think that it feels like there was a connection there before was because I did connect to your energetic body and see what you had going on. And I think we often do this and you had already started to do this. You were wearing more dresses and certain colors that you're gravitating towards.

Naomi Nakamura: And just for listeners, all I did was center my Instagram account beforehand. I didn't send any other pictures or anything. I'm like, here's my Instagram with some selfies.

Jenny Wirt: Yeah. So, I do distance healing as well. I can tune into a person without having met them. And I think then I just listen intuitively as I'm going through. You filled out a questionnaire, so that gave me some information. But then also as I was reading your questionnaire, certain things would go off or something, like, oh, that's something. Or there's something there, there's something deeper emotionally or something that needs some support or some balance or whatever that might be. So yeah, there's the questionnaire that is helpful to me. I do just a really quick energetic check-in to see color wise. I think, often those colors that correlate with those areas of our body that are maybe a little bit out of balance or just need some support, those colors feel really good to see, even if it's not a color that you normally gravitate towards. It can be one or the other, it can be that it feels really good or that it feels very, it can be a little bit polarizing sometimes too, if it's an area of your body that you've disconnected from that you actively push away.

I, for example, always hated the color orange, which is sacral and yeah, so there's just a relationship there that color has felt better to me as I started to heal that area of my body and worked on supporting that.

Naomi Nakamura: When you talk about the colors, maybe can you speak about what those colors are? For me, and you brought forth the bringing in a lot of golden yellows into my wardrobe. And I was always conditioned to think, whoa, as someone who has... I'm Asian, so there's a lot of just natural yellow tone skin that I should stay away from those colors. I literally have no yellow in my closet, but that's something that you brought up. That's a connection to the solar plexus. Now, when I look at different Instagram accounts or different brands, I'm actually finding a whole different appreciation. And then I'm thinking, well, why didn't I believe that this was not a good color for me? And I think that's what you're getting at. Can you talk more about the colors and what they correspond to?

Jenny Wirt: Yeah. And I also just want to say, I mean, everybody's so individualized and all of these, I don't want to call them, they're like guidelines, if you feel really good in a color or a shape that doesn't necessarily fit your "body type or skin tone," or if it doesn't fall in that category, the biggest thing is for you to feel really illuminated and lit up by what you're wearing. And yeah, so there's a skin tone component where depending on your skin tone, whether it's warm, cool or neutral, certain colors are going to brighten you up more, but there are also ways that you can play with bringing in those colors that maybe don't best compliment your skin tone in a way that isn't going to make you look washed out or whatever that might be. And then there's also the range of pigment too, a hyper saturated versus a very muted pigment are going to look different on different intones or compliment those differently.

And then as far as the energy, I mean, the colors are just correlated to the energy centers of the body. I think some people might be familiar with those, but it's, root is red, sacral is orange, solar plexus is that golden yellow, heart is either pink or green and sometimes both. And that for me is usually an intuitive thing. I can intuitively pick up on it's green for this person or pink or both. And then throat is that aquamarine turquoise light blue, and third eye is indigo, the deep. I always associate it more with navy in terms of colors that people wear. But it's more of a purple-y deep purple. And then a crown is a violet, so a lavender light purple. And then white is associated with your aura, which is the combination of all of those, the energy that is surrounding you like a little energy bubble.

And then there's, whites reflective, so it's going to reflect, energy is going to bounce off of it. Can you think about some light ray, you wear white when you go out in the sun, it bounced that sunlight off and then black is going to absorb. It's the same concept with those two colors there.

Naomi Nakamura: I love that. I feel like it opens this whole world of creativity. I think I shared with you that my family comments on this a lot that, "Oh, you're wearing something other than jeans and a black tank top, what's going on with you?" Because that honestly was just my uniform for many years. And I feel like this whole new world of creativity has been opened up for me, which feels really fun. And yeah, I can't describe it any other way, other than it feels joyful and fun.

Jenny Wirt: That's amazing. You could tell me if you had a different experience but I think sometimes especially women, we dress in a way that we feel is safe and that we know, okay, this is okay, all the time on every level, because I think that there's a lot of societal input around what women wear more so than men. And it's just a lot of you take in what you think looks good, or there'll be these rules in a magazine, or don't wear this or wear this this fall. There's all these things that maybe don't necessarily resonate with you personally, or don't work for you personally, that get inflicted on us. And then it's like, well, I don't know what to wear. So I'm going to just wear these things that I know are good and safe and all cool here.

Naomi Nakamura: What you described is exactly my experience is I stuck to the jeans and black tank tops because it felt safe for pretty much all occasions or even that you can make as casual or you can even make those dressy. But I think again, I was somebody who just read every single teen magazine out there and every single fashion magazine and my perception was based upon what was in these articles about "fashion rules". And I guess I just didn't have the confidence or the guidance to be able to figure out, well, how can I explore this other part of me? Probably seen this meme about when you see something in the magazine and then you put it on and you're like, how do you think it's going to look and then how it actually looks. But then it also, I feel like this again, like I said, it opens up this whole new world and almost gave me permission to start to experiment.

Especially this whole past year of being in a pandemic, where we were most of the time confined to our homes, where I will fully admit, I invested in a lot of really leisure wear of comfort wear. And now if you like, it's time to open up and start getting excited about dressing in something else other than a t-shirt and jogger pants again. And I don't know, that's where I'm at right now.

Jenny Wirt: Well, and I think, I mean, part of what my goal is, and I hope this is what I bring to every session is to educate you on what really works for you and how to take something, you might see something in a magazine and you're like, oh, that's really great. Well, how do you take the elements out of that, that work for you? And knowing, because I think going shopping can be overwhelming-

Naomi Nakamura: Very overwhelming.

Jenny Wirt: And so knowing, being able to go through an online store or a physical store and know, okay, well, this is going to be really great on me or not, or this is how I can wear this in a way that's going to be really flattering for me and my body. Very personal and individualized and specific to you, not only from an aesthetic point of view, but also to support your wellbeing too, which is the holistic approach, this whole person perspective.

Naomi Nakamura: I think it's a whole another opportunity for us to really come to ourselves, both in our bodies and in our emotions and our mental health and get to know ourselves in yet another way. Because I think even when we were conversing and you were saying this kind of a pant may look good for you and measure your natural waist. And I was like, Oh, what's my natural waist? I didn't know what that was. And I didn't know, especially when you're shopping online and you're looking at measurements of what would be recommended and picking your size. I don't necessarily know. I didn't know what a natural waist was, but at the same time with the energetic part, again, it's this whole opportunity to take a step back and to take an honest look at yourself and just give yourself the space to get to know yourself again. That was really my takeaway of the experience.

Jenny Wirt: Yeah. Well, that's great. That's perfect. Because I never want to be inflicting anything on someone else, like wear this, it's more like, yeah, who are you? How do you want to dress? How do you want to be presenting yourself to the world? And helping basically, just a lot of support around that. How can I share with you the best tools for you to be able to go out into the world as your most full and complete and whole fully expressed embodied self?

Naomi Nakamura: Yeah. And I shared this with you as well. Is part of my, I guess challenge, was that I had changed in many ways. And so I didn't know how to dress myself because we all change over time. And I'm realizing now that I've actually also evolved in many non-physical ways. And having that brought to my attention is giving me again the permission and really, I guess, urging myself and giving myself the time and the space to explore those areas as well. Can you walk people through what is the client experience? What's the process that you take people through?

Jenny Wirt: We talked about it a little bit already. We start with the questionnaire and I'll create a mood board and also a style guide so that you have something to refer back to not only for aesthetics and colors, which the colors by the way can change in terms of maybe right now you need a lot of golden yellow with sprinkles of some other colors. And not to say that you can't wear anything outside of those, but it's just a recommendation, I guess. And then as you heal or as you change or as different things come up over the course of your life, you might gravitate more or you might want the support of other colors. But yeah, so we start with the style guide, to mood board, we have a little bit of email back and forth at the beginning. And then we go into the video call, which is an hour and 15 minutes, which is usually a good amount of time to go through everything, answer any questions.

And I also do that energetic check-in beforehand. So then it gives us an opportunity to sort through and... Because there's a big emotional component around the way that we dress, I think, and often in ways that we don't fully understand until you get into that situation where it's being put in front of you, like, well, are you maybe hiding in your clothes a little bit? Or is there something emotional? Somebody maybe told you that you can't wear this color or you maybe had to wear a certain thing growing up where you felt restricted? Or whatever that is, there is a little bit of unpacking that emotional component as well. And then, so then we get into the fun stuff and talk about the shapes and proportions and the ways that you can put clothes on your body in a way that's going to create a lot of balance and enhance your natural features. And then if there's anything from your closet, which you had already gone through a lot of your-

Naomi Nakamura: Oh, I've gone through so many times with the pandemic, there's almost nothing left there.

Jenny Wirt: Yeah. It just depends on what situation the person's in. If they need some help around how do I sift through all these things that I have, or in your case, it's maybe focus more on what do we bring in and not elements of creating a full wardrobe so that you can bring the ideas really to give you all the tools, to do it yourself, to go see your closet and sort through from that perspective. I think maybe it just attracts the Marie Kondo when there've been a few women that I've worked with, who will say, "I've already done the Marie Kondo" and I'm like, "Well, that's awesome and great, but you also want to look at it from a point of view of what is this piece doing for you? Can you edit it or can you alter it or diet, or" there're ways that you can make what you already have work for you so that it's really a sustainable way of going through your closet, I guess, or keeping as much of what you already have in the first place.

And I think, I was going to mention this earlier, but I think that most women that I work with have an idea of you know when you put something on and it feels really good, but you maybe don't know why it does. Why what they put together on this model in a magazine looks so good on that model. It's a lot to do with where are you drawing the eye? How are they balancing the proportions? And that kind of thing. So it's really just to give you a lot of knowledge around that so that you know how to create those elements in your own wardrobe and you can pull anything. You know what to do with what you've got and you know what to bring in, and so that everything is really working for you and it's not a stressful experience. It's yeah, a joyful, happy experience that it should be.

Naomi Nakamura: Yeah. I just never gave much thought or considered the amount of emotions that's tied into how we dress ourselves and what we put on our body. And one thing you mentioned is that what I put on my questionnaire is that it's become a lot more important to me at this time in my life to really wear a lot more sustainable brands. I find myself not even having a desire to go to the local mall or to shop at these big brand name stores, I find myself actually seeking out clothing from maybe lesser name shops or boutiques or brand names. And so I appreciated that you were able to bring that in to the recommendations that you had for me.

Jenny Wirt: Yeah. Well, I think we're really aligned on that aspect and I think there's a lot more awareness being created around that and their impact, that fashion has on environment. But even if you didn't do that, even just the process of going through, if you didn't make that a point, the process of going through this experience is going to be more sustainable because you'll know what you have in your closet, you'll know that it works for, you'll know what to bring in so you're not buying a bunch of things that you're never going to wear because they weren't right for you in the first place. So it's moving forward. It's always going to be more sustainable even if you are buying clothes that are not sustainably made that in itself is a sustainable element. But yes, we can talk forever about these brands and the eco-friendly and then also the fabric choices and dyes and how those impact your skin. And because you're absorbing through your skin, is your largest organ and those things make a difference. And I think to the environment on a broader scale. Lot's of ways to do that.

Naomi Nakamura: Yeah, I think the most fun has been, I've been working from home for nine years now and you're almost like, well, this gives you permission that you don't have to just wear [inaudible 00:28:08] or wear and sweats all day. And I've actually, I'm wearing a dress today and I've been doing that more often lately. And I actually find energetically a new way to show up for my work, just in a more positive way, I guess, a little bit more alert and awake and not just like I'm in sweats today, this is the energy you're going to get out of me today. And of course, I still have those days, but they're not every day.

Jenny Wirt: No. Well, I think it's nice to not feel like you have to have a reason to feel good and to put some effort towards, but it also doesn't take that much more effort to throw on a dress than it does to throw on sweatpants, especially if it's the right kind of piece where you can feel just as comfortable and-

Naomi Nakamura: I would argue that during this summer, it's actually more comfortable to wear a dress than it is to wear sweats or a long pants because they get hot. I'm not someone who likes to sweat.

Jenny Wirt: Yeah. I think you don't have to have a reason to get dressed up. I am probably always overdressed because I like to do it especially something that you enjoy, which just sounds like you're finding that you do enjoy that experience of playing a little bit in your clothes. There's no reason that you can't put on some jewelry, even if you're not leaving the house. And I think this is maybe not so relevant now, but at the beginning I was telling people put on shoes, it feels good to have a full, complete ensemble going. I think it can feel a little bit hopeless, I'm not going anywhere anyway, so I don't even need to bother with it.

Naomi Nakamura: That's exactly what it was like. But yeah, I always found that I had work clothes and non-work clothes. And I guess in my head, the work clothes just felt more restrictive and not comfortable. And I just think this new approach of just having it all be the same, is working for me. And I think it's also just, I don't know, in my head and in my budget, I'm like, I don't need work clothes and then play clothes and then going out clothes, it really can all be the same.

Jenny Wirt: Yeah. I really love those pieces that can transition. And I think that's another aspect of that societal input or you have to dress a certain way, you need to look like everybody else in your office. Even if you have a dress code that you're maintaining, you can still bring in your personality through clothes that can function in your workplace and pair them differently with the nicer pants versus jeans and to go out to dinner after or pieces that are just not segmented. I think that's always a great goal to have so that you don't feel like a split personality in one space and you have to like be a different person and your wardrobe reflects that. But if you can show up and how much better are you going to show up to your work, if you can be a complete version of yourself while you're there or even if you're at home, if you can show up while you're at home in this more complete Naomi self?

Naomi Nakamura: Well, like I said, my experience working with you was so fantastic. It was so exciting to me. I keep going back to the Pinterest board you created for me, I've gotten a few pieces and really excited to start incorporating them, but where can people find you and connect with you?

Jenny Wirt: I can be found on Instagram @sartorevi, which is, I don't know if I need to spell that out. I made it up as a name, so.

Naomi Nakamura: I will connect to your website and your Instagram on the show notes for this episode.

Jenny Wirt: Okay, perfect. Well, I can be found in Ojai as well. I'm going to be around and seeing, healing clients here. And then most of my work is digitally based, that's maybe the question you were asking. Yeah. So it's mostly digitally based at this point and I can be found online or Instagram, my website.

Naomi Nakamura: Awesome. Well, thank you so much for joining and for your time. I was sharing with you just from a business perspective, I just love how you've been able to incorporate your very diverse background into this one service that I think can benefit so many people.

Jenny Wirt: Yeah. Well, thank you. That's so nice to hear. It's been a journey to get to this place and I think it's still evolving. I would like to move into creating garments and elements more like custom pieces or ready to wear that has a lot of... That takes the guesswork out of what to buy I guess, that's all very made a certain way, like being very particular about the fabric choices and the dyes and all of that. So there's just not a lot of questions I guess, around what to choose and what works for you and that kind of thing.

Naomi Nakamura: Well, I'm excited to see what's to come. Thank you.

Jenny Wirt: Thank you so much.

Naomi Nakamura is a Functional Wellness & Human Design Coach. She helps women who struggle with stress, fatigue, and burnout find freedom and empowerment by optimizing their health, finding balance, and upgrading their energy so they can live life on their own terms. 



Combining her diverse professional background, and her unique approach integrates Functional Nutrition and Human Design she guides clients on a highly individualized journey of self-discovery, observation, and integration by removing physical, mental, and emotional confusion and overwhelm, simply taking them back to the very basics of health through their Human Design.

She believes that when our bodies function optimally, our personalities and souls can shine through everything that we think and do with empowering clarity and ease.

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 | Pinterest

Have you ever experienced a healing journey where a lot of the practices would be deemed metaphysical (eg, deep meditation, energy work, yoga, etc) but you didn’t know exactly why they worked?

Returning guest Carly Lockman has and in this episode, she’s back sharing her own “real people stories” on her experience with Brain Rewiring. 

After birthing her third child in the middle of a pandemic, Carly found herself struggling with anxiety, overwhelm, and exhaustion that was taking her to dark places, triggering past trauma.

Out of sheer desperation, she turned to Brain Rewiring for help.

You’ll hear Carly share:

• What is brain rewiring?

• The psychological science behind brain rewiring

• Her before, during, and after experience with brain rewiring 

Listen to the Episode:

Mentioned in the Episode:

• Episode 080: Getting Started with Herbs for Wellness, with Carly Lockman

• Dynamic Neural Retraining System – Instructional Online Course

• The Gupta Program

• Nicole Sachs, The Cure for Chronic Pain

Connect with Carly Lockman:

• Carly Lockman’s website

• Connect with Carly on Instagram

  Connect with Naomi:

• Ask a question

• Connect on social media: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter

• Send an email

Share the Episode:

Read the Transcript:

Naomi Nakamura: Hello, my friends. And welcome back to the Live FAB Life Podcast. I'm your host Naomi Nakamura. And joining me today is my friend and returning guest Carly Lockman.

Carly is a fellow Integrative nNtrition Health Coach, as well as an Herbalist. She first joined me, gosh, I actually looked this up. She first joined me for an episode over two years ago. It doesn't even seem like it was that long ago, but she joined me back in Episode 080 on Getting Started with Herbs for Wellness.

Earlier this year, I did a Human Design reading with Carly and during our session, she shared with me how she had been practicing and studying brain rewiring. I was so intrigued by everything that she shared with me, that I invited her to come back to the show and to share her personal story, her real people story on her experience with it.

So you are going to hear Carly share what exactly is brain rewiring, and why she needed it, and why she sought it out. She's going to share the science behind it and really gives us a tactical view of how she learned to practice it, and what that daily practice looks like. And she gets really vulnerable and opens up and shares what difficulties it helped her with, and what life actually looks like now. Like I said, I found the whole topic to be fascinating, and I'm actually starting to learn it myself. So I want to thank Carly for coming back, and for opening up, and sharing some really personal information with us. So with that, let's get to the show.

Hello, my friend. Welcome back to the show.

Carly Lockman: Thank you for having me. I'm so happy to be here again.

Naomi Nakamura: I was this morning doing a little bit of prep for our chat today and I was like, "When was Carly last on the show?" It was over two years ago.

Carly Lockman: I know. I was thinking that as well. Totally different world we live in now.

Naomi Nakamura: I know. I was like, "This is probably a year ago." And then I realized, I'm like, "Oh wait, the whole last year happened. We probably shouldn't even count." But you were last on way back in episode 80. And you talked about just an introduction to herbs, because that's a specialty of yours as a health coach. We're here today to talk about something totally new and different. Before we get into that, for those who maybe haven't listened to episode 80 yet, can you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do?

Carly Lockman: Yeah. So I am an integrative nutritionist and herbalist serving women. I primarily work with mothers. I am also a mom of three kids myself. I have an eight year old daughter, a four year old son, and a 10 month old son. And I live in San Diego, but I am formerly from Chicago.

Naomi Nakamura: So I was going to ask you what have you been up to since you were last on the show. But clearly, you now have a 10 month old son.

Carly Lockman: Yeah. So I had a baby in 2020. That was a very unique experience. I can't say that I recommend it. We had already been in three months of quarantine when he was born. So it definitely posed some unique challenges, which I think I'll get into as we talk further.

But most recently, I have just been trying to get into the groove of being a mom of three. We're getting out a lot more now, which is really wonderful for everybody's sanity. Cut back a lot on my working hours. Like so many people in 2020, I feel like I was just hit with this jolt of insight. And I realized that the way I was working was not sustainable. And it was not in line with my values.

Of course, there was going to be a natural pause anyway with having a baby. I've really at this juncture taken a big setback from work. As cliche as it is, I was also really struck by how fleeting this time is with my kids being small. And I think I'd fallen into that familiar trap that so many women fall into, working mothers, where I was not feeling present at work. And I wasn't feeling present at home. And I was kind of feeling like I was failing in either place. The best move for me this point has been to just step back a lot. And fortunately, I've had the luxury to be able to do that without a tremendous amount of strain.

So that's what I'm doing. I'm just kind of taking some time to enjoy my family and work on my own health and healing. And I hope that when I get back in the swing of things with work, it'll be with very different perspective. And I will hopefully be able to achieve, I mean I feel like balance is ... I almost hate to use the word balance. It's so overused and it seems unattainable. But I hope to be able to achieve just a better sense of prioritization I guess that's more in line with my own values.

Naomi Nakamura: Yeah. And I think balance is relative, right? So it's going to mean different things to different people. So whatever that means to you. That's my perspective.

So earlier this year, I can't believe we're already in May. We're recording this in May, by the way [crosstalk 00:05:42]. But earlier this year, we dove a little bit into your human design chart. And through that conversation, you shared with me how you've been spending the past several months studying about, I don't know if it's new, so I'm going to say new to you I guess approach called brain rewiring. So that's what we're talking about today. I'd love to hear, what is it?

Carly Lockman: Okay. So yeah, I just hit, I'm almost at my I think eight month anniversary of brain rewiring. So that's really exciting. It feels really momentous that I've committed to this kind of a practice for so long. Essentially, it harnesses the power of neuroplasticity, which is the idea that from birth to death, the brain is totally changeable. And it harnesses this neuroplasticity in order to help us create the lives that we want.

The brain works in a use it or lose it fashion. Meaning what you focus on, what you spend the most time on, the brain then creates these complex neural networks around to reinforce because it's such a smart computer and it's such a servant for us that it says, "Hey. You're paying attention to this thing. So I therefore need to devote a lot of energy to this particular thing and making sure you can do this really well."

And it's kind of funny because I feel like in the new age community, you hear a lot of what you focus on expands. And people will throw shade at that. But there is actually neuroscience to back that up because the brain is designed to create neural networks around what you focus on.

You can imagine how that kind of neuroplasticity could either work in your favor or not. Right? Most people because they're operating in a relatively unconscious way. I mean most people, especially coming out of 2020, are operating from this primal sense of survival. Right. They're not very conscious of the things that they're focusing on. And the brain inherently has a negativity bias, and it has that to keep us safe, right? From that primal tiger that could come out at any minute and take our baby. Most people have created a system of neural networks that really aren't serving them and aren't helping them to create the life that they want.

So what brain rewiring does is it gives you this strategic roadmap to follow so that you can prune off those neural networks that aren't serving you and build new neural networks that are serving you and are helping you to create the life that you want.

Naomi Nakamura: I really like that. Because I feel like especially in the wellness world that we both are active in, there's this whole idea of woo-woo stuff out there. But to me, it's the mind body connection is an actual real thing that's backed by science. If you really study the brain, and the anatomy, and the body. So it's not this abstract thing, although in many ways, people talk about it that way. So this really brings it together.

Carly Lockman: Absolutely yeah. I've had referring to now is two healing journeys. And my first healing journey, physical healing journey, which is also a mental, emotional healing journey because I see them as very intertwined.

Naomi Nakamura: They are. They always are.

Carly Lockman: Yes, yes. But just to be clear, I have had physical manifestations in my body. So in my first healing journey, I was using a lot of practices that would really be deemed more metaphysical. Like deep meditation, 'energy work,' lots of yoga. Those things were instrumental in creating this internal shift that then seemed to allow the physical interventions to start working. When before, they hadn't been working. So I really started to see how healing happened from within.

But I didn't have any kind of science to explain what was happening. I mean, I shared my story a little bit. But just from the perspective of wanting to be looked at as a credible practitioner, I didn't do a ton of proselytizing my methods because I didn't know exactly why they worked. And it was seemingly metaphysical in nature. But going through the process of brain rewiring, and understanding how the brain functions, and how complex that function is, and how interconnected it is with how the body functions, I now understand why so many of these metaphysical practices work. I mean, science is just catching up to what people have been doing for millennia. I mean, we've had meditation and energy work in its various forums and prayer practices for thousands and thousands of years. Right? And we're just now understanding that actually creates changes in the brain.

Naomi Nakamura: So what led you to study this and to pursue it?

Carly Lockman: Sheer desperation, right? We have to have our back up against a wall to make a major change. I'm hoping that will not happen to me again in this lifetime. I feel that I've learned that lesson knock on wood.

Naomi Nakamura: It sounds like you're more equipped with tools to manage situations.

Carly Lockman: Yes, absolutely. But that has been a theme in my life of just needing real harsh redirections. And I'm working to consciously change that now. But basically after my son was born in June, leading up to his birth, I was already getting a little bit nervous. Because as I had mentioned, we had already been in quarantine for three months. Part of my specialty as a practitioner is working with women on a postpartum plan because postpartum is when so ... if women are going to have, if they have a predisposition to a physical or mental malady or both, it's probably going to show up postpartum because you're so incredibly depleted. The body is just very vulnerable.

Taking my own advice, I had this really wonderful postpartum plan. But of course, this postpartum plan was reliant on other people. Because you need your village, you need lots of support when you bring a child into the world, ideally for the best outcome anyway.

So I was already getting concerned when it was clear that we were still going to be in quarantine when he was bor., because I realized that parts of my postpartum plan were just not going to work. I was just not going to get those things. I wasn't going to have that level of support that I know is so key. I think we were all under such tremendous stress.

Naomi Nakamura: And back then, it was like there was still so much unknown between March and June. There was still so much unknown. Things were still trying to be figured out. So yeah, I can see.

Carly Lockman: Yeah. And then the process of having a baby is a lot of unknown too. And you have to do a lot of surrender to the unknown. And I think for me, it was just really this compounded situation of feeling so much external stress, and unknown, and uncertainty, along with the stress and uncertainty of bringing another life into the world. I started experiencing some health issues that were akin to things that I experienced years ago a few weeks prior to the birth. And that really threw me off my game because I was thinking here I am supposed to have this baby in a couple of weeks, and I am in no shape to have a baby with what was going on in my body.

And I got better before he was born, but not to where I wanted to be. I was still not in ideal shape to be having a baby. I was having a home birth, which I had had a very successful home birth with my middle son, a really beautiful home birth. So I knew how to do it. And I knew that my body could do it. I was grateful that unlike many women, I didn't have to worry about going into a hospital and not having anybody with me, and all of the difficulties that women were encountering in the hospital system. So that was of some relief. But I definitely think that I underestimated the amount of stress I was holding in my body and fear really.

I was able to have the home birth. The active labor was quite short, but the early labor was very long and it was actually very hard. Which was unusual. Usually early labor isn't difficult, but for me it almost felt like active labor. And I was just so exhausted. I felt like I didn't have the energy that the birth was requiring. And I felt like my head was not in the game at all. And then I kind of got in this what I now know through brain rewiring is a limbic system loop where my brain was actually looping over the concern that my body wasn't up to the task. I believe that limbic loop influences physiology. So my birth just kind of got harder the more I looped about it being hard, right?

By the time he was born, I just felt so utterly exhausted. And typically, the midwives will come back the first several days to spend time with you and make sure everything's going okay. But of course, it was 2020 and they're having to take COVID precautions. And he was born and it was like, "Okay, well we'll see you over Zoom in three days." I'm a third time mom, so I'm relatively confident. But it was unsettling to have just had a baby and just be totally left, and know that my only contact was going to be over Zoom with my medical practitioners.

The first several days were of course a blur. And it turned out that he had tongue-tie, which my first daughter had had. And it was a terrible experience. So I had some trauma triggered around that, and I was having a PTSD reaction, which threw me into a physical flare where I was dealing with symptoms of the illness that I had dealt with years ago. And honestly, it was just so insanely overwhelming. I mean my health failing while having this new baby in the middle of a pandemic, I really thought this was it. I was not going to make it through this. And I didn't know if I wanted to make it through it, frankly. It was just really dark.

And I started having panic attacks that I just could not control. I had dealt with some panic in my twenties, so I had a decent toolbox for addressing it, but nothing was working. I was so desperate to help myself. And I knew I was at the crossroads where my only option was medication.

First of all, as I know you are, I'm very versed in the way SSRIs function and the implications they have on the body. And I know that in some cases, they can be helpful. But they can often cause a host of secondary problems. And they're very difficult to get off of. And they're essentially masking a problem. So it's like I was going to have to deal with this at some point. And again, I know that some people are helped by them for a period of time.

But in my case, because of the way my symptoms presented and the possible side effects of these drugs, I realized I wouldn't be able to tell the difference between what my symptoms were and what were potential side effects. And I didn't see myself being able to get better from this physical issue on those kinds of drugs. So they really didn't seem like an option to me.

I mean, I went through this for a solid four months. Yeah. Donovan was about four months when I started brain rewiring.

Naomi Nakamura: So October in the fall?

Carly Lockman: Yeah. Late October. Late October, I started.

Naomi Nakamura: Were you aware of it beforehand? Or how did it even come on your radar where you're like, "Maybe this can help me"?

Carly Lockman: So I had been in touch with, I don't know if you know Amanda from The Curious Coconut. She's in the holistic sphere. She's actually been dealing with long COVID. She and I were in touch just sort of as a support system over Voxer, because we were both going through these really harrowing experiences. And she said a friend of hers had mentioned brain rewiring to her as something to help. And she mentioned two programs. One was DNRS and the other was Gupta. DNRS stands for the Dynamic Neural Rehabilitation System. And she said, "Supposedly, you can just go on YouTube and kind of get a feel for either program, and decide what's right for you." She had told me that I don't know, probably in September. But I didn't really start looking into it until late October. And I didn't start practicing until early November. I chose DNRS because it just resonated with me more. Some people feel it's sort of militant. But at that time, that's what I needed. My limbic system, which is the area of the brain that's designed to protect you in a very primal sense, was in such overdrive, that I needed have a very clear roadmap for how to calm that limbic system and start creating new, healthier neural pathways.

And I was really confident that if I could get my limbic system under control, if I could get out of this prolonged state of fight or flight, that my body would start to heal itself. I was using a lot of physical interventions that I knew from past experience worked for me. But they weren't working because I was stuck in a limbic loop, I was stuck in fight or flight. That became the priority was getting out of fight or flight. And once I started researching DNRS and Gupta too, but DNRS is just what spoke to me. I felt confident that DNRS would be able to help me get my brain out of that loop.

Naomi Nakamura: I love that you recognized that you were in that state. Because I think a lot of people who maybe aren't as aware, they're in this state and they don't even realize they're in this state. And then to even know where to start.

Carly Lockman: Yeah. I mean, I'm fortunate that just being in this industry, I am very resourced. And I was actually surprised though once I started getting into brain rewiring, I'm like, "I can't believe that I've never learned about this previously." Perhaps I had heard about it and just not gone over my head because I wasn't feeling like I needed something like that.

Naomi Nakamura: So you evaluated both programs that were shared with you and you selected one. So what did that start look like?

Carly Lockman: Okay. So the way I started the DNRS online program, which is as far as I can tell is more or less just a taping of the in-person program. It's not particularly high tech or anything like that. So it's a series of lectures where it's basically talking about what neuroplasticity is, how brain rewiring works. They're really big into presenting the science to you so that your brain is then primed to understand how it works. And you're more apt to successfully complete the program.

Naomi Nakamura: That's how my brain operates is understanding okay, where does this come from? What is the background of it? So not everybody learns that way. But like you, that's the way I learn as well.

Carly Lockman: Yeah, absolutely. I think knowing the why is really key and important for a lot of people. So I really appreciated that. So that's probably the first 50% of the program. And then the second half is learning the actual practice.

And the core practice of DNRS specifically is called rounds. And it's essentially this process of having a short little chat with your brain, with your limbic system. You're engaging your prefrontal cortex, which is the intelligent, higher thinking center of the brain to talk to that primal center of the brain, the limbic system. And explain to it that, "You're actually totally safe. And I know that you may not feel safe. But in fact, in this moment, we are totally safe." And there's a particular script that you can use and modify to your needs specifically. And then from there, you go into a past memory that's really positive. And the idea of going into this past memory is that you're creating what's called dose chemistry. Dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, and endorphins, right? These are all the feel-good chemicals that the brain releases and that neuroscience now understands are incredibly healing. Both to our mental emotional being and the physical body. Because we are getting into that parasympathetic nervous system. We're getting into what's called a rest and repair.

And then you sit in that past memory for five to seven minutes. And then you go into a future visualization. And in the future visualization, typically what you're going to be doing is imagining yourself doing something that seems inaccessible to you right now.

So for me, I was housebound. A lot of my future visualizations would just be being able to take my kids out on my own. You really get the sensory qualities of that future. And again, you're trying to stimulate those hormones' dose chemistry. And you linger in that for about five to seven minutes as well. And then you come back to your center.

Naomi Nakamura: So just to clarify, you lead yourself through this exercise?

Carly Lockman: Yes.

Naomi Nakamura: And is this something you did on a daily basis, or multiple times a day, or as you felt that you needed? What did that practice look like for you?

Carly Lockman: So the recommendation is an hour of practice a day for at least six months.

Naomi Nakamura: Consecutive hour? Can you do 30 minute-

Carly Lockman: Nope. You can break it up. You can totally break it up. In the beginning, I was so incapacitated that I had nothing else to do anyway. So I was probably doing a couple of hours of practice a day. And I got plugged into some really wonderful groups. There's a huge network of WhatsApp groups that support brain retraining and DNRS specifically. And a lot of people do what's called buddy rounds. It's great for accountability. Well, it's great for two reasons. One is accountability. And the other is because we have these things called mirror neurons, where when the brain sees somebody else doing something, it receives some of the benefit of just watching that person do that positive thing essentially, or hearing in this case.

So you would get on the phone with somebody that wants to do a round, and you would listen to them do their round, and then they would listen to you do your round. So once I started doing buddy rounds, I think that really took my practice to the next level. It just felt really wonderful to have that extra support, and accountability, and to see so many people are working this right alongside me.

In addition to doing rounds, so typically, I try to do a morning round and an evening round. And I like to do buddy round. If I'm able to find a partner, I prefer to do buddy rounds.

Naomi Nakamura: And these are just random people who you just connect with in your groups?

Carly Lockman: Yeah. So there are specifically groups for finding buddies to do rounds with. And there's tons of people in the group. So more often than not, you can find somebody just on the fly.

And in addition to that, a big part of the practice is catching what are called pops, or pathways, neural pathways of the past. So these old ways of thinking that have been so ingrained that are detrimental to your health and healing and to getting into that parasympathetic mode. You learn to stop them in their tracks and redirect. And ideally, if it's something really significant that you really feel like you're in a limbic system loop about, you would actually do a round right then to get the brain out of that think state, out of the limbic state, and into parasympathetic.

Naomi Nakamura: I feel like we're at time where a lot of us are realizing or really questioning what has been conditioned to me and what is my actual truth. And a lot of things we need to be reparented with. And I feel like this is a great tool that can help someone through that process.

Carly Lockman: Yes. You bring up re-parenting. I think it's really important because one thing I will say that is important to understand about a program like DNRS, DNRS is strictly designed to calm the limbic system and get you out of fight or flight. It isn't designed to address deep-seated trauma that might truly need addressing. For some people, they might get stuck in DNRS at a certain point because they have deep-seated trauma that needs to be addressed, that isn't being addressed. Right?

What I found to be the best combination of healing modalities is to get the limbic system calm through a system like DNRS or Gupta. And it could take you months to do that depending on, I mean everybody has a different level of limbic system dysfunction.

Naomi Nakamura: That was going to be my next question to you is what is, I don't want to say typical timeline because I understand that everyone's timeline is different. But what would you say that looks like?

Carly Lockman: Well, I can tell you about my experience specifically. And actually, what's interesting is I started because I didn't know about brain rewiring at first when I was having these issues, the first thing I started doing because I recognized that I had a PTSD response that put me into this physical flare.

The first thing I started doing was somatic trauma therapy, which I think is really wonderful. Somatic trauma therapy is essentially the, it's based on the idea that trauma is stored in the body. There's actually a physical imprint that's made in the nervous system. So you use physical movement practices to then release that trauma. I think it's an incredible practice.

But at the time I started doing it, I found myself actually getting worse. And I was like, "What is going on? I'm addressing the trauma." It was frustrating. And what I later learned was my limbic system was not stable enough to handle that trauma work.

So I think it's interesting because right now in the holistic community, doing your shadow work and doing your trauma work is really hot. But a lot of people don't have the limbic system stability to really be able to handle it. So ideally, you're doing some kind of brain rewiring practice to get the limbic system calm. And once you feel that your limbic system is relatively stable, you can start more safely integrating some of this trauma work because you know how to stop your brain from getting in a loop about it and get back into dose chemistry.

I think the pitfall of trauma work for people without a stable limbic system, even a somatic process which is so wonderful. You might have a lot of release. But then that familiar, primal brain kicks in. And it starts fixating, and obsessing, and looping. And that's where you're not going to get better. So you have to be able to harness that primal center of the brain and know how to stop a loop in its tracks and move into a different state of neurochemistry I think for trauma work to be really successful.

Naomi Nakamura: I love that. Because I'm always very open about trying different approaches and trying different things. And I'm not wanting to get stuck on one thing. I think this is the only way you can heal yourself or whatever it is you're trying to do, right? It's like the same way with diets. I'm not stuck on one. There's different things that's going to help different people at different points in your life. Something else might have helped you back then. And then at this point in your life, this is what helped you now. So I really like how you found something in addition to the tools you already had to add to your healing toolkit.

Carly Lockman: Yes, absolutely. And this point in my journey, I'm connected with a lot of other they're called neural retrainers, people practicing brain rewiring. And the people that I see that are most successful are doing some combination of brain rewiring and emotional release through somatics is really popular in the brain wiring community. There's also something that I just started doing that I really enjoy called JournalSpeak. It was created by this woman Nicole Sachs. She was an apprentice of Dr. John Sarno, who-

Naomi Nakamura: I read his book.

Carly Lockman: Did you? Okay.

Naomi Nakamura: I read his book back in 2012 when I was injured.

Carly Lockman: Yeah. Yeah. So he is credited with coming up with the idea that the body actually will manifest emotional trauma essentially. So Nicole Sachs was an apprentice of his for years. And when he passed, she took over his practice. And he had always had patients do expressive writing, but she really fleshed it out quite a bit more into a very specific practice. In her practice, you're basically spending 20 minutes just ... and she has particular prompts you can use too. But getting out the most venomous, nasty, raw feelings that you have that aren't necessarily true. But it's the feeling that just needs to be expressed.

I find often, I don't want to go over 20 minutes. But she recommends after you do that practice that you do a loving kindness meditation. And for me, I'll actually do a DNRS round. But the reason she's recommending that is so that people don't do the practice and then get into a limbic loop. She just maybe doesn't have that vocabulary for it. But that's the reasoning. That's one of the tools I use for emotional release.

Over time, I've learned to differentiate between what is my limbic system, the prime area of the brain just kind of spewing nonsense at me that I just need to shut down. And what is truly an emotion that I'm going to need to express in some kind of way?

And when I recognize an emotion that is going to need to be expressed, usually I'll do one of two things. If I'm in a place where I can somatically express it through my body, like if I'm just hanging out at home, I will kind of feel into it in my body and just kind of let it move through, and let any organic movements that my body feels led to engage in. I'll just let that kind of happen until it comes to a natural stop. Or I'll literally speak to that limbic part of my brain and I'll say, "Okay, I hear you. I see you. And we're going to do journal speak about this leader."

And it's interesting because the limbic system, it could also be related to as the inner child. So it's much like speaking to a child where maybe if you can imagine at a fancy dinner, the child acting out. And if you just told that child over and over, "Be quiet, be quiet, be quiet." What's going to happen? The child's going to get louder. But instead, if you could take the child aside and say, "I understand where you're coming from. I get it. And we'll talk about this when we get home. I'm going to make some special time for you." That's essentially what I'm telling this part of my brain that needs to express this important thing. So even just that will kind of bring me into a more parasympathetic state until I can do that release work.

But again, this in my opinion is something, the somatic work, any kind of emotional release I think for a lot of people that are in major limbic dysfunction, it's got to come later. It's got to come after you calm the limbic system down for long enough. Because you have to be able to stop that loop from happening. And not just cognitively either. You have to have the central nervous system to really handle it.

Naomi Nakamura: It's very empowering.

Carly Lockman: It really is. It's incredibly empowering. I think it's a missing link in a lot of holistic arenas.

Naomi Nakamura: So clearly, it's had a tremendous impact on you. So what is your outlook now? Is things feeling better? I mean clearly it is, but share with us. What does that look like now?

Carly Lockman: I am being completely transparent. I'm not where exactly where I want to be. But I would say probably 85% of the way there.

Naomi Nakamura: So not in sheer desperate mode.

Carly Lockman: No. No, no, no. Even three months ago, I was not able to take my kids out on my own. I could take the older ones out one at a time, but I just didn't feel like I could handle having them all with me together. I didn't feel like I had the physical stamina for that. I also didn't trust my limbic system to be able to be calm enough to help support that physical stamina. I had never taken the baby out until he was nine months old, which is wild to think about.

Naomi Nakamura: That is wild to think about. The first nine months of his life was in the home.

Carly Lockman: Pretty much. And my husband would take him out sometimes. But me personally, I did not feel like I could leave the house with him, that I had the physical capacity to do that. So now, I'm able to take all my kids out really with no problem. I'm, as it's been safer to do, I've been able to engage in social activities with some of our friends here, which is so incredible.

Naomi Nakamura: Things we will never take for granted again.

Carly Lockman: Right. Totally. Totally. Yeah. In general, my world has gotten a lot bigger. It got really small there for a while. And it's expanded so much. And I have been using physical interventions as well, but they didn't really start to take off until I was able to get my limbic system calm enough. Until I was able to get in that parasympathetic state for a long enough time.

I mean look, I'm human. Every day isn't all roses. But I definitely feel empowered in a way that I have never felt before. Because as I mentioned in my first healing journey, I was using actually a lot of brand rewiring tactics, but I didn't know it. So I didn't feel like I had this clear strategic plan that I could use. So now, having that roadmap and knowing that that's always there for me that if I had a bit of an off day, I just need to come back to this map because this works is incredibly empowering.

Naomi Nakamura: What I also think is empowering is that, so a lot of the things that we would do for self-care over the past 14 months, we have not been able to do, right? Physically, I would get a massage at the gym every month. I would see my acupuncturist, which I've done virtually. All of these things that required in-person assistance and support for our healing, we've either had to modify somehow and haven't been able to do. This is something that you can do entirely contained within yourself. Even having to live in and shut down in quarantine, that's not something that you've had to modify or you're still able to do it in full practice for yourself.

Carly Lockman: Yes. No, that's such a great point. It really is something that it's a tool that it requires I guess little from the outside. It's very much an internal practice. And that being said, again, there's a wonderful community of people also doing this. When you want to connect, as long as you have an internet connection, you can do that. Which is really, really fantastic. But yes, I think it really puts people back in the driver's seat. And I know so many people that deal with chronic, physical, or mental health issues, they have this fundamental sense of disempowerment. Because they've probably turned their power as we're conditioned to do, turned their power over to practitioners that haven't been able to help them. So they get into this place of hopelessness and desperation. And to have something that allows them to find their power again and find their confidence again, I mean that's priceless. And again, I really feel that the physical healing, because most people that come to DNRS or Gupta have a physical health issue they're trying to deal with. Some people, it's just anxiety, depression, or trauma. But most people-

Naomi Nakamura: But then all of those things also have physical impact. Is it anxiety, or you can't sleep. You still deal with all of these things on a daily basis. So you took yourself through this as a person in need of healing. Is this something you're now offering to clients, or do you plan to in the future? What are your thoughts there?

Carly Lockman: Yeah. So when I get back into my practice, at this point with this knowledge, I can't not integrate these things into my practice in some way. I don't yet know what that's going to look like. So at this point, I'm just pointing people to the resources that I've used. But I would like to create some kind of a system that encompasses in a holistic way both the brain rewiring and the emotional release. I don't know exactly how that will look for my clients. I'm still working on my healing too. So that's the type of priority. And like I said, just reestablishing this connection with my family right now. But I do know that it will become part of my practice when I'm ready for it.

Naomi Nakamura: Well when that happens, how can people connect with you?

Carly Lockman: So you can find me on Instagram @carlylockman, C-A-R-L-Y L-O-C-K-M-A-N. And I don't share as much as I used to, but I'm still on there pretty frequently. And you can find links to everything else from there to my website, email, etc.

Naomi Nakamura: I'll link to that in the show notes. Thank you for coming on, and being so open, and sharing about your journey and your experiences. I'm so curious to learn more about this because I have always been my curiosity about how do I get myself out of fight or flight? Like a good night's sleep, which I feel like for me, I got a good night's sleep. But compared to other people, my sleep is [inaudible 00:41:33].

Carly Lockman: Yeah. And I think what's really cool about these modalities too is that once you move past the point of desperation, right? And you've solved a lot of these major problems that are impeding just your daily life, then you can move on to thinking about, "Hey, how do I want to optimize my life? How do I want to optimize my relationships? How do I want to optimize my career?"

Naomi Nakamura: So you're not just surviving, you're actually thriving.

Carly Lockman: Exactly. So there's so many applications for this practice.

Naomi Nakamura: Awesome. Well, thank you so much for joining me.

Carly Lockman: Thank you for having me. It's been wonderful.

Naomi Nakamura is a Functional Wellness & Human Design Coach. She helps women who struggle with stress, fatigue, and burnout find freedom and empowerment by optimizing their health, finding balance, and upgrading their energy so they can live life on their own terms. 



Combining her diverse professional background, and her unique approach integrates Functional Nutrition and Human Design she guides clients on a highly individualized journey of self-discovery, observation, and integration by removing physical, mental, and emotional confusion and overwhelm, simply taking them back to the very basics of health through their Human Design.

She believes that when our bodies function optimally, our personalities and souls can shine through everything that we think and do with empowering clarity and ease.

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 | Pinterest

We’re back for the second installment of a two-part mini-series with Dr. Shea Osuna (Tune into Part 1 in Episode 174)!

In this episode, Dr. Shea shares:

• What the nervous system is and why a healthy nervous system is important

• What it means to live your life through your nervous system

• Four things that interfere with a healthy nervous system

• How chiropractic care + transformational coaching can support your nervous system through interferences

Listen to the Episode:

Mentioned in the Episode:

• Episode 174: Your Body Keeps Score: How Your Life Experiences Are Stored In Your Tissues with Dr. Shea Osuna

• Episode 086: Sauna Therapy for Detoxification and Healing with Brian Richards, SaunaSpace

Connect with Dr. Shea Lindsay Osuna:

• Dr. Shea’s Practice: The Well Healing Center website

• Upcoming Events with Dr. Shea

• Connect with Dr. Shea on Instagram

  Connect with Naomi:

• Ask a question

• Connect on social media: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter

• Send an email

Share the Episode:

Read the Transcript:

Naomi Nakamura: Hello, my friends and welcome back to another episode of The Live FAB Life Podcast. I'm your host Naomi Nakamura and today I am joined once again by Dr. Shea Osuna for part two of our two-part discussion on chiropractic medicine and the mind body connection.

If you haven't yet listened to part one in Episode 174, I highly recommend you do so, but here's a recap of Dr. Shea's Bio. Dr. Shea Osuna is a prenatal chiropractor with a focus on network spinal transformational healing who practices with a deep desire to be a facilitator for healing. Her intention with each person that she works with is to assist them in remembering the truth of who they are before trauma and stressors bog them down. She believes, that when we no longer feel the need to carry around so much baggage, when we feel free to live, how we've always dreamed of living, to be resilient in what life throws at us and to truly thrive.

After feeling lost and defeated from her personal experiences with intense anxiety for years, she found a technique called network spinal that helped her find more ease in her body and it changed her relationship with anxiety. Since then, Dr. Shea has dedicated herself to learning this powerful approach. She spent five years practicing in the Bay Area where I live, but she's since landed in Lafayette, Colorado where she has an in-person practice, but she also offers online transformational coaching. If you're not in Colorado, that's how you can work with her.

Now, as I mentioned in the last episode when Dr. Shea and I started planning out what topics we're going to talk about, I realized that there are so many great things to cover, there's no way we'd be able to do it in one episode, so this is part two. Like I said, if you haven't listened to part one, go back and listen to Episode 174. Today in Episode 175, you're going to hear us continue our conversation and we're going to discuss what is the nervous system and why a healthy nervous system is important. We're going to talk about what it means to live your life through a healthy nervous system and what are the different stressors that interfere with having a healthy nervous system. She shares with us how chiropractic care supports your nervous system through the interferences that come into play.

Then, we wrapped things up talking about how the nervous system connects with your mind and body and why transformational coaching complements her special flavor of chiropractic care. Again, listen to Episode 174 and then come back and listen to this one if you haven't already done so. With that, let's get to the show. Hi, Dr. Shea. Welcome back to the show.

Dr. Shea Osuna: Thank you. Thanks for having me back. This is really exciting.

Naomi Nakamura: I know. With those maybe perhaps haven't heard part one of your episode with us, can you give us an introduction and tell us who you are and what it is that you do?

Dr. Shea Osuna: Yeah, I am a chiropractor. I live in Louisville, Colorado. I practice in Lafayette. I do a technique called network spinal which is slightly different than your traditional chiropractic with very low force to start, so people are not getting the same forceful or we call it structural care as much, but the structure is changing. What we're looking at is just patterns of tension, how trauma is stored in the body and our experience through life and how those are holding patterns in our nervous system. We really work with the whole person to dive into shifting the stories, the traumas, the patterns and really helping them heal from the inside out. That's the work that I do.

I also do a lot of transformational coaching because it naturally comes up with the work I do. As people start to unravel, they start to ask a lot more questions about how to just live more in alignment with their life. That's where my expertise comes in.

Naomi Nakamura: We talked a lot about that in our first interview last week. To give folks a recap, you spoke to some of the myths that are out there about chiropractic medicine and you talked about how your posture can directly impact your perception or your reality or your outlook on life and then you talked about how the body keeps score of what you just said of all the trauma and the things that happen between your life, but like you just mentioned, a lot of this happens in your nervous system and that's what we're going to be talking about today. I know in the last episode, you briefly talked about what the nervous system is, but I'd love for you to start us out to set that table for what we're going to talk about today. What is a nervous system?

Dr. Shea Osuna: I think it's important to hit that home again, especially if you haven't heard the first one, but highly recommend you go back because the first episode really, I think, set the groundwork for getting through, like you said, some myths and some things and just really setting the tone for probably a conversation that's going to get a little bit more crazy, I think naturally. The nervous system consists of our brain, our spinal cord, all of the nerves that come out to all of our organs, our tissues. It is not only just an internal process, but it's how we process the world.

Trillions of bits of information are coming into our brain and then we're processing those. Then that is giving us information around how it is we need to respond or be in the world. Then also, the nervous system is giving us feedback from our organs back and forth, right? Given an example to help, say I am getting chased by a wild dog. I think this little bit more relatable than like a lion. A lot of people would be like, "I'd be running from a lion," but say there is a dog that doesn't look safe ...

Naomi Nakamura: Friendly.

Dr. Shea Osuna: ... friendly chasing you, that is going to be information coming into your nervous system saying, "You're in fight or flight. You need to run." What is that going to tell your body? Stop digestion. Stop all of the other cleanup that you're doing and to rest, to digest. Narrow your focus. Your peripheral vision goes down. You get into tunnel vision. Your heart rate goes up. Your blood pressure goes up. You start to think for more of a primal brain.

Naomi Nakamura: Survival mode.

Dr. Shea Osuna: Survival mode, right? That is how the external comes into your nervous system. Now you have, "Okay, I'm safe. I'm relaxed." The brain is going to say, "Okay, this is a great time to digest and rest." Say your stomach is giving feedback about something you ate that bothered your stomach. Your nervous system is going to process that, come back down and say, "Okay, do we need to eliminate this quickly? Do I have food poisoning?" It's our internal and or external feedback loop basically of how do we perceive the world and what's happening internally and how do we live and operate. That's our nervous system, is such an intricate thing and it is like a computer system that learns, right? It's like really amazing technology.

Naomi Nakamura: It is and we talked about a little bit of this the last time, but the mind-body connection, because I feel like we still think about these things as two separate things and they're really not. They're just a one whole system all together.

Dr. Shea Osuna: Yeah, we are one being. Our soul, our mind, our body are all the same thing, but as humans, we like to compartmentalize and have black and whites and we love to say, "Oh, the symptom is right here, so it must be this thing, right?" or to say, "Oh, I'm having anxiety. It must be that one thing, right?" To have a certainty around a symptom or an experience is really important in the human condition. It creates safety and so that, I think, is a part of it, is separating those three things.

Naomi Nakamura: You talked about this, what does it mean to live your life through a healthy nervous system? What does that look like?

Dr. Shea Osuna: This is interesting. One of my favorite questions, actually, which is probably I wrote it down and we teach classes on this all the time for my practice. My business partner and I offer free workshops and free classes monthly. If anyone really likes what they're hearing, you're more than welcome. You can all share this stuff with you.

Naomi Nakamura: I'll add it to the show notes.

Dr. Shea Osuna: They can go on and see it and we would love to have anyone join because we do them virtually as well as in person, but what does it mean to live your life through healthy nervous system? Since the nervous system, like I explained, is gauging everything about your external environment and your internal environment, having a healthy nervous system seems pretty important, right?

Naomi Nakamura: I feel like this is one of these questions that feels so simple, but then if you stop and think about it, it's one of those things that you go, "I actually don't know."

Dr. Shea Osuna: "What does that actually mean?"

Naomi Nakamura: Exactly.

Dr. Shea Osuna: I totally agree. A healthy nervous system, what does a healthy nervous system look like? I think that's probably the best thing to break down first, right?

Naomi Nakamura: Exactly.

Dr. Shea Osuna: A healthy nervous system, it's adaptable. It's adaptable, which also means that the structure of the spine is flexible. It's pliable. There's movements there. There's connection there. We talked a lot about posture and how that shapes our reality last time. If somebody is locked in a hunched position and their nervous system is locked in that position. They're not flexible. They're not adaptable. When stressors come into a system that's locked in this hunched over position, it's really hard for them to adapt to stress. It sends them farther into fight or flight.

Naomi Nakamura: I was going to say you start that off with what physically does that look like. As you're speaking, I can clearly see how that can translate into someone's behavior and into their mindset when they're locked and inflexible.

Dr. Shea Osuna: I think it's important to talk about that part because you have to see the balance there or the opposite. And so yeah, when someone has their locked position and now we talked about the boss, right? Somebody who has a flexible spine and nervous system and the person who's locked in what their experience of having their boss asked them to come into their office for a meeting, right? One thing, they're getting sacked and they did something wrong. One thing, they're getting a raise or they're getting a promotion.

Naomi Nakamura: That's the exact same situation. It's the person's perception of it.

Dr. Shea Osuna: That's a healthy nervous system. That's the difference. Basically, a healthy nervous system can adapt stressors. The other really great piece of this is it can not only just adapt to stressors, it can grow and reorganize and change from stressors. I think that that's a really important piece because I just got off a coaching call with a client who is saying to me, "I just feel like I'm getting by right now. I'm just trying to get through." Does that sound like someone who is able to use the stress happening in their life to transform it into their gift or something better?

Naomi Nakamura: That sounds like survival mode. The situation with being chased by an angry dog just-

Dr. Shea Osuna: She's getting chased by life. She feels like life is against her. She just has to get through it. She has to put her head down and survive, right? Not a healthy nervous system at the moment. Where when we are being flexible and adaptable and we have that same feedback, we can go, "Okay, let me step back. Let me take a breath. What is this trying to tell me? What is this trying to show me? What is this trying to teach me?" I'm going to take a side note here. There are things in life that happened that are just hard and they suck, okay? A healthy adaptable nervous system, what it can do in those moments are things that we just can't help, loss of the loved one is a big one.

Naomi Nakamura: A pandemic.

Dr. Shea Osuna: A pandemic, right? These are things we cannot control and how a healthy nervous system adapts to those things is it allows us to just feel what needs to be felt. A healthy nervous system has energy and emotion, it's energy and emotion. When we can keep our system moving and our energy moving, when we feel grief come up, we can just feel the grief and we can give ourselves that permission. Where when we have a locked down nervous system or stuck in fight or flight, emotion is not something that is really ...

We don't want to be doing that when we're being chased by a bear. Naturally, our system suppresses emotion. It gets locked in our system. That is an important thing to say too, is when the things that we can't control happen. It's hard sometimes in the moment to step back, "What is this trying to teach me that I lost my grandmother or my child?" Sometimes the healthy nervous system is just like, "Wow, I just need to be and just grieve and that's okay."

Naomi Nakamura: Something that I talked about in Human Design, especially for those with an Emotional authority is that, again, exactly what you said, literally the exact words, emotion is energy in motion. It can actually be a negative thing to avoid emotions because you might perceive them as negative or bad or to suppress emotions and to just allow yourself to feel it, whether they be joy and happy or whether they be grief and really difficult. It's all energy and motion and is healthy to just allow yourself to experience those things.

Dr. Shea Osuna: It absolutely is. That is 100% the truth. One of the big things I teach my patients, my clients, everyone I work with and I live by myself is you cannot feel the full range of emotion without both sides. This is one of the things where I'm working with a client right now because she's on antidepressants. This again, I'm not a therapist, I don't take people off of them, just a little side note, I respect anyone's decision that needs to be on anything in the moment, their lifesaving when necessary, but it is also important to understand, and almost across the board, most people you talk to or have to take these medications will tell you this is that they're not able to feel the cap of joy and passion as they could before, even though the lows are not so much there.

That's a part of life is if we suppress anger and we suppress grief and we suppress sadness, we are also closed off to the cap of feeling joy and gratitude and abundance. You have to have both sides. You can't just pick one. I think that's the hard part too is we're taught in society that we're supposed to just be even with peaks of happiness. If we have lows, there's something wrong with us.

Naomi Nakamura: Well, that's the whole toxic positivity, right? It's like telling you that feeling bad is a bad thing and that's not true.

Dr. Shea Osuna: Exactly. I do teach that and remind people a lot and especially as women, our hormones, think about it, our hormones run. They transition every eight days or so and then we're also on that 30-ish day cycle. We're very connected to each other to the rhythms of the moon, to the astrology which human design in astrology, that's why it rings so true. We have to really see that to our advantage to say, "Oh, we are cyclical beings. We're supposed to have this and we're supposed to have highs." When we can learn ...

Here, we come back to the question, a healthy nervous system. When we can create a healthy environment in our system and we can become flexible and adaptable, these waves are not so scary anymore because a locked nervous system wants that even keel, certainty, safety, "This is all I can handle." When it gets too high, it's too much. When it gets too low, it's too much, right?

Healthy nervous system, adaptable nervous system can ebb and flow and it can rebound from the lows. It can see the high is coming down and know that that's okay too. That's really the importance of a healthy nervous system, is to be able to ride those waves. The other pieces like, now we get into things that still maybe we can't control, but not so serious as the loss of a loved one, but let's say that you lost your job which is still not something that you can control, but it's still not life threatening or just something that you can't rebound from, right? You can really step back. A healthy nervous system will go, "Okay, that sucked in the moment," and still feel the fear, that's really important too. This doesn't mean positive-

Naomi Nakamura: And the uncertainty.

Dr. Shea Osuna: Right. This doesn't mean that chronic positivity of like, "I know it's going to be the best thing that's ever happened to me," you may get there, but first, it's okay to feel the fear and the grief and all of those rhythms like we're talking about, but then from that lens, we can step back, take ourselves out of it. A healthy nervous system will not blame or judge. It will just go, "Okay, that happened. Let me feel what I need to feel and now let me see what has this taught me or what door has this opened." You can bounce back, right? You can start to create this rhythm where you're truly knowing. I think the biggest difference of what we talked about earlier, the difference between, "Is the world against me or is the universe against me or for me?"

I always think that a nervous system locked in fight or flight, "The world and the universe, God," whoever it is, that spirit, whatever you call it, "is against me. I have to get through. I have to put my head down. I have to survive because everything from the external environment is against me," where a healthy adaptable nervous system is like, "No, I can work with all of this and it's for me," big difference.

Naomi Nakamura: What does interference look like physically? I think you also mentioned chemically as well. I'm really curious about what do those things look like.

Dr. Shea Osuna: Yeah, totally. Basically, the way that I look at the nervous system and the way that I care plans is I look at the body and then I look at the three-legged stool, I call it, chemical, physical and emotional, which I talked about last time. Those stressors or traumas or experiences can cause the interference. I think it's important to just come back to that for a second. Let's just talk about all three really quick, okay? Physical, let's just start simple. Physical interference looks like repetitive movements in one direction. Let's just give like an example of golfers who don't train both sides, right? If they're not doing the work, obviously high-end athletes, they have all the trainers do the thing, but weekend warriors, they go out and they're just doing one-sided stuff all the time. That's physical rotation in the system in one direction. A job, that's a repetitive thing. Slouching at your desk all day is a thing.

Naomi Nakamura: As I sit up and straighten my posture.

Dr. Shea Osuna: Totally. I'm lounging right now too. I know and I think about it all the time. Even just an acute trauma, an injury, those are all physical things that can change the nervous system. I will say holding your kid on one hip. [inaudible 00:19:14] talk to the mamas a little bit or holding them on your chest and around breastfeeding. I'm a breastfeeding mom, so that's a big one for me, right? I'm slouched in this position all the time.

Naomi Nakamura: Because you're not welcoming in adaptability. You're just going straight to the one position or the one side all the time.

Dr. Shea Osuna: Exactly and it's repetitive. It's over and over the same side, muscles contract on that side. The nervous system tends to favor that side. The way that you get into your car or sit in your car while you're driving is a huge one.

Naomi Nakamura: That's probably how people get carpal tunnel and neck pain and back pain.

Dr. Shea Osuna: Ergonomical things.

Naomi Nakamura: All the typical things one might seek a chiropractor for.

Dr. Shea Osuna: Yes, that's all the physical. Yes, exactly. Then emotional, we talked about energy and motion. No matter how you slice it, people can argue that, even some people who think that when they hear the word that we're mostly energy is woo-woo. It's actually truth. We are only about 1% matter, 99% energy that organizes our matter to be able to be seen and to be who we are, right? When we are storing emotion, it creates blockages in the nervous system the same way the physical does. Let's look at the ribcage, our sympathetic nervous system, our fight or flight nervous system, the chain of nerves runs right down the sides have our spines down our rib cage.

When people are locked in fight or flight, I do find their ribcages very inflexible. They might have a hunchback or just a super flat spine. It locks the physical body. It really does. It changes the way we breathe. It changes the way that we hold our body, the way we talk. It changes the musculature. Anxiety, I just did this talk, anxiety in the pelvic floor is unbelievable. It was actually higher than sexual trauma which is mind blowing to me, tension in the pelvic floor from just anxiety. Our emotions are stored in our physical body is what I'm trying to get at. When we do that and when we tighten certain areas, when we lock down certain areas, our nervous system becomes less flexible.

Also when we're in that state like I talked about with emotions, when we hold them in, we get less and less bandwidth to be able to tolerate emotions because we weren't taught how to process them as kids, so now a tiny bit of stress can throw your system out of whack. Where if you have a lot of bandwidth, you feel emotion, you're able to go a lot farther. That's how emotion soars in the physical body. Then like I said, the less adaptable we get, the more we learn to suppress them, the less wiggle room we have to the point where even happy emotions feel vulnerable and feel risky.

That is really profound because I have a lot of people who come to me, "I actually can't feel joy and happiness. I'm actually afraid. Maybe I don't deserve it or if I take myself out of fight or flight and allow myself to be happy for a moment, something bad is going to happen." They actually see fear and danger in happy emotions as well. That's how the emotion stores in the system. Now the chemical, there are certain chemicals and frequencies, radiations that can impact our nervous system, EMS being one of them. What happens when we're with Wi-Fi on our phones?

It actually interacts with the vibration and the frequency of our own nervous system and changes it to create anxiety. It changes our frequency and it messes with our heart frequency. That's why it can cause anxiety in people, it can cause a lot of other ailments, headaches, things like that. Other chemical-

Naomi Nakamura: That's really interesting, because for the past year, everyone's been in their home, working in their homes. I've been working in my home for nine years now, but this is something new for a lot of people. If they're not aware of that, even not being able to go outside and get a break from it, I can see that having a really big impact on people over the past 13, 14 months.

Dr. Shea Osuna: This is a very challenging controversial topic for me because I totally understand what the government was trying to do in protecting people because that's their job, but you also do have to be open to the conversation for what's happening to people's health because of this, the disconnect from family and from community, being indoors all the time, being so much more on Wi-Fi, not getting as much exercise and fresh air, naturally wearing masks. There are studies that have shown that it elicits a fear response. People don't breathe as deeply. It changes their anxiety response as well. There's a lot of things happening that are keeping people locked in fear just because of how we've had to adapt to this crisis.

Naomi Nakamura: If they weren't adaptable before, it's even tougher.

Dr. Shea Osuna: Yeah, it's really hard and I'm feeling so deeply for all these people, because yeah, it's a really hard thing because it's like, "Okay, one way, I felt necessary to respond in this way, but also, what is also being taken a toll?" There's no one that I've met so far that will argue with me that the level of mental health has declined substantially because of this pandemic, because of fear, because of disconnect. That is a big piece. Now we add that. On the positive though, people are not in these big office buildings as much. Guess what's in big office buildings? Dust, molds, all sorts of other cleaning products. They are actually being taken away from some of these other chemicals. Mold is a big one that affects the nervous system.

Naomi Nakamura: I actually just had a friend of mine a week ago tell me that she's been having all of these issues, that she just learned that she has mold in her body. That's something she's having to deal with right now.

Dr. Shea Osuna: It's pretty amazing. They're neurotoxins honestly. Aspartame that is in some of the sugar-free gums is a neurotoxin.

Naomi Nakamura: In diet drinks and-

Dr. Shea Osuna: Yup, in diet drinks. Plastics, phthalates, BPAs, those our nervous system irritants. They are hormone disruptors. All of these chemicals we're exposed to. Here's the other thing about a pandemic. Guess what they're trying to do? Disinfect everything. Everywhere you go, it's chemical disinfectants. It's a really big problem that's messing with our microbiome which also affects our nervous system. An unhealthy gut equals an unhealthy nervous system. People who have gluten sensitivities, a lot of their symptoms are neurological which is why they're not caught is because they looked at the nervous system when they should be looking to the gut.

There's a million different things, not to scare anyone because we're exposed to hundreds of toxins a day, but one part of my job is to help people remove what they can remove from their bodies, from their system and from their life, cleaning products, beauty products, things we have control over and then I teach them how to healthily detox their system from these things, a couple of supplements, a couple modalities such as sauna, rebounding or dry brushing and Epsom salt baths, things to help purge gently from the system to help their nervous system have a fighting chance because I can do all the work physically as a chiropractor and with my modality, but if people are exposed to mold or constantly putting on chemicals in their body, it can be a really hard thing to see the amount of change.

Naomi Nakamura: It's like you're doing all of this work, but then yet, if you haven't addressed those other things, you're undermining the work that you're doing. As a side note actually, I have my sauna space light on me right now. I keep it at my desk because I am in front of a computer screen a lot of the times and-

Dr. Shea Osuna: I love it.

Naomi Nakamura: I love it on my desk.

Dr. Shea Osuna: We actually just bought a panel for the house too, I'm really excited-

Naomi Nakamura: I'm jealous. If I had the space, I get the whole contraption. I just don't have the space for it.

Dr. Shea Osuna: It's life changing. We have an infrared sauna, a full-spectrum sauna now and it's really upleveled our health, our quality of life and just red light therapy in general is great for helping just decrease the overall stress. That's the other thing I want to mention too is I do a lot of functional medicine. I've put in quotes because I don't like the term medicine because I am not an MD, don't practice Western medicine, but I work with looking at the system as a whole and how to remove toxins and how to support the system, but one of the biggest things also is through all of this. The reason that my work is so successful is because we deal with stress.

If I only do functional stuff with people and I help them remove toxins and I help them detox their home, a lot of them don't see change because stress, emotional, psychological stress runs these pathways in our body that create deficiencies in certain vitamins because they are needed so much to fuel these adrenaline pathways and the stress pathways, that when you're not removing the way that people adapt to stress or changing the adaptability to stress, those things cannot. This is a very holistic integrated system that you do have to be aware and look at the whole system and have someone look at it with you to go, "Okay, what are the biggest problems here and how do we help you adapt and remove what can be removed?"

Naomi Nakamura: Let's go through that. The different things that people can do and let's start with, what are some of the chiropractic ways that you help people with these things that interfere with the function of their nervous system?

Dr. Shea Osuna: As a chiropractor, obviously I rely on my hands physically for me to take care of people. The first thing is I'm a chiropractor. Like I said, I am here as a resource to any of your listeners who want a referral. I have a huge network of people who do my own technique, women I trust, the people I trust, men I trust that I could find someone in their area. There's a lot of chiropractors that are in alignment with what I believe too, so it's nice to get a referral from someone who actually is talking and preaching and working the way that I am also talking about right now. That's the first thing.

I work on helping bring a respiratory wave into the spine and into the nervous system to help their whole system come out of fight or flight to help their body unravel the saran wrap or the first level of layer of defense in their system. I look at it as a garden. Let's go in the garden We just bought a house and there's a beautiful garden in the back. Let's just go look around. Let's go discover what's there. Then once we discover what's there, we are out fight or flight in the nervous system, we can start pulling weeds, we can start going, "Okay, this belief doesn't really serve me anymore. This physical thing doesn't serve me anymore. Let's start to reorganize the system."

Naomi Nakamura: When you're pulling the weeds, you got to get the root because if not, they just grow back.

Dr. Shea Osuna: Exactly, so we get to the root of what's actually happening and the roots being the way we adapt to stress, the chemical, the physical, the emotional, all the stuff we just talked about. We pull those weeds, okay? Then we start to plant new vegetation and that's where we start to get more connected to our purpose, to the stories and belief systems that feel authentic and that do serve us. That's how I work personally through physical work, through talking through emotion, through integrating the body and breath and things like that, but what other people can do physically is breathwork is really, really powerful. Connecting with your breath is a really great way to take your system out of fight or flight on your own, to connect more deeply with your body, to feel where the breath goes easily and where it doesn't, what stuff-

Naomi Nakamura: I have to share about breathwork. It was right at the start of the pandemic, but the pandemic was not a catalyst for this conversation. I have been working with my functional medicine doctors for a long time because I've struggled with sleep pretty much my whole life, even through childhood. I was in a phase where I can't sleep well. I can fall asleep fine, but I get up in the middle of the night and I can't go back to sleep. It's always cute to me when people were like, "Oh, have you tried melatonin?" I took it for 10 years. I've done all those things. I need something and I was at the point where I realized that taking CBD oil and supplements all that, I needed something deeper that my reason for not being able to sleep, I really was looking at something deep internal to what is there that maybe I haven't addressed or resolved yet.

To your point about breathwork, my doctor, she's also an MD, recommended to me to try breathwork and to look into yoga nidra. It was at the start of the pandemic where everything's shut down, but she recommended a couple of studios to me that were offering virtual classes and that felt something really personal to me that I didn't feel comfortable going into a setting or situation where everyone was stranger. Actually, I reached out to a friend of mine who is a yoga teacher and had a couple of sessions. She taught me some yoga nidra techniques that ... Even last night, I was up at 2:00 and I go, "I'm not going to be able to fall back asleep again."

I went back to those breathing techniques that she taught me and I was able to go back to sleep again. Again, even in times where you think you might not be in fight or flight mode, just going back to breathwork can never really just calm your whole nervous system down.

Dr. Shea Osuna: What it does is it helps calm the system, it helps bring oxygen. When we're breathing more deeply, it naturally says, "Okay, we're not in a stressful state. We're safe. Let's relax." From that, we can sleep easier, we're able to feel our emotions. A lot of times when I'm feeling really buzzy, I've had a stress and I just lay down and do some breathwork, all of a sudden, that's why people just start crying. People will tell me all the time, "I was in the middle of my breathwork and I just started crying. I started feeling angry or whatever it was." It's because when we calm our system, we feel safe to feel, so that naturally comes up. It's a beautiful, multilevel positive thing for the body.

I could go on and on about oxygen and re-oxygening cells and pump in, how it's a pump for our lymphatic system and also I should talk about the vagus nerve. It helps to stimulate the vagus nerve which is our biggest parasympathetic nerve in our body, our rest and digest, it's connected to every organ we have basically. It's an amazing nerve and it goes through our diaphragm. When we do diaphragmatic breathing, it calms that down.

Naomi Nakamura: I have to tell you too, I actually got ... There's a skincare company, but they sell this vagus nerve product which is ... One is a pillow mist. It's just these really calming scents and the other one is an oil, but they tell you to put it on the back of your neck. I remember last, you said that a lot of parasympathetic is in the back of our neck and that's actually where they tell you to apply it. I apply it every night before I go to sleep. How much of an impact it has, I don't know, but it smells lovely. It's very relaxing to me. It's really just part of my bedtime ritual.

Dr. Shea Osuna: That's a lot of the same theory which is really great. Some other things that I recommend with the physical too, I could go all day, so we're just going to keep them simple, but let's go back to the vagus nerve. Things that also help with the vagus nerve is cold exposure, gargling, loud singing, breathwork. All these things help to stimulate our parasympathetic nervous system. Those are really great ways to interrupt the patterns. My thing with my patients is, "How often can we interrupt the pattern? The pattern that we're trying to break, that your nervous system has been running in for however long, how often can we break that cycle so that you can repattern your nervous system to believe something new?"

Naomi Nakamura: I love that, interrupt the pattern.

Dr. Shea Osuna: Those are a lot of physical things, that gentle movement, like said yoga nidra is a great thing. I think what's really important too is unstructured movement, which for a long time until I met my husband, Brian, was ... "What do you mean by unstructured movements?" "Go to yoga class. Go for a run. Take this Pilates class." I was a Pilates instructor. All those are great, but unstructured movement, meaning roll around on the floor-

Naomi Nakamura: Play.

Dr. Shea Osuna: Play, be fun with your movement. Just put on some slow music and just move your hips, move them, bring breath into them, just start to ground, unfiltered, unstructured movements. If you're scared, if you're embarrassed, lock yourself in your room and do it there by yourself. It took me a long time to learn how to loosen up to do this kind of movement. Those are the things physically that I really think are super powerful for people to just repattern without having someone else facilitate for them.

Naomi Nakamura: I will say this, as we've talked over the past two episodes, especially when you talk about adaptability, I used to be someone who did a lot of endurance training. I did a lot of running for marathons and half marathons. It was very rigid and structured and it would add so much stress to me if I'd miss a day of my schedule that my coach gave me or if I didn't hit the targets that he set for me. It actually got to a point where it's counterproductive, where at one time before where I was able to find joy in running, it became something that was joyless for me and I was constantly injured.

I really stepped back for about the past, almost five years now, and I really haven't been doing anything structured, but when you talk about not being adaptable and having something happen, well, I actually injured myself earlier this year and talk about forcing you to slow down and as you break the pattern and try something new, because yoga was the only thing that felt safe to do, I'm doing that. Now, it feels a little bit foolish not to do it when just 10 or 20 minutes a day is really all you need, but what's resulted from that for me is realizing that just 10, 20, 30 and sometimes 45 minutes, which is for me now, that's a long workout, whereas before that 45 minutes was ... Well, that's less than five miles or that's only five miles.

Now having that less structured about what am I going to do today for my workout, it really depends on what I feel doing when I wake up in the morning and just being adaptable to what my body feels where some day it is a hit workout, someday it is a strength training workout, someday I started taking these dance workouts, which for me, that is play because I don't dance.

Dr. Shea Osuna: It's so fun.

Naomi Nakamura: I actually feel lighter physically and also in just to my overall mentality, but also with just doing yoga every day. I don't do anything crazy or too strenuous, but I also feel physically it's opened myself up so much more, especially in my core area. It's really made me aware of tension that I had no idea I was holding in different parts of my body.

Dr. Shea Osuna: It's so funny. As you're talking about this, I can relate so deeply. I keep saying I was because I'm not structured the same way you were just talking about, but I am a runner and I have been since I was about 12 years old. I relate to that so much. Before I started having kids, I was at the peak and I was trail racing. I have a certain weight that if I'm not that weight, it doesn't feel as effortless. I just was so hard on myself about the weight. If your run felt crappy, everything sucks. You feel like, "I'm terrible. I suck at this." It's because you had one bad run and it's more detrimental to your psyche and to your body than it is good. I'm in the same place you are right now. I do yoga every day. It feels amazing. Our run is scheduled. I have to schedule everything because I have a 15-month-old. That day, I checked in with my body and I said, "Actually, I'm really tired. I don't think a run is going to serve me."

I did my run the next day and I had a great run and it was really fun, but it's like listening to what does my body need that day and giving yourself the permission for that. That's so powerful. I'm so, so glad to hear that that has been your journey.

Naomi Nakamura: Well, and it's also not to say that running is bad, but it's the same perspective about you said, you get called into your boss's office, what is your response to the situation going to be. For me, it's been the same thing because I went through this whole period about, "Running is terrible for you. No one should do it anymore," then I really realized that was just my response to it. I will still go out for a very short run every once in a while, but as long as I'm feeling joyful in the experience, that's a good thing for me.

Dr. Shea Osuna: Exactly. I totally agree. Running is my favorite and I'm starting to run again. This is a really relevant conversation for me right now. I wish I just had this conversation with my husband and saying, "I do have a little bit of fear that I'm going to drop back into where I was when I really want this to be an enjoyable experience," because running does light me up and it does fuel my soul and the thoughts and the creativity that come from it is the part I want to connect with, not necessarily, "I have to be this weight and I have to be doing this much." This is really actually very present for me right now. Yay.

Naomi Nakamura: Well, anything else to add for us before we wrap things up?

Dr. Shea Osuna: I'm trying to think. I want to give a well-rounded ... I think with the emotional part for people, I think with the breathwork and we touched on that, how when we just take our system out of fight or flight and give ourselves space, we are able to process and feel. I just really welcome people to allow themselves to have a little more space to feel. Anger is a hard one. I've actually do want to address anger because men have been taught that anger is dangerous and that they have to suppress that because they could hurt someone. Women have been taught to suppress anger because it's not ladylike or whatever.

I'm going to share a really personal story really quick. My husband and I lost our child two and a half years ago and our first child, our daughter. If anyone is familiar with grief, one of the stages is anger. I had to really learn how to process it because if I didn't, I knew enough to know that I would get sick. I could physically get sick. I knew so many women who ended up with cancers and all these different ailments after losing a child because they just didn't have the resources. I found that the best way for me personally, and Brian had to find his way because he would have broken the bed probably because he's a much stronger person than I am, but I had to come in the bedroom and start punching pillows and screaming into pillows and punching my bed and really getting it out of my system.

For men, I know for him, taking a hammer to a tire out somewhere and doing something to really allow your body to release those things. They are okay. We are primal creatures. These emotions are really normal and when they're suppressed is when we start to get sick. It might not look that crazy for you like a big two-year-old tantrum like mine did, but give yourself the permission to start to ask the question of, "Can I just give myself a little bit of space to start to be curious about what is stored in my body and what kind of emotions I do suppress?" and the ways to see that is how reactive you are. Do you react to things in your home with your family that are not really big deals because you just have a lot of stuff in there.

I think that's a good place to start, is just to be really curious and to give yourself the permission to be messy about it a little bit and to not really know what's happening. Most people that I talk to, when they're on this emotional journey, they go, "I literally feel like I'm two again. I'm trying to learn how to feel again and how to express and that's-

Naomi Nakamura: It's the beginner's mind.

Dr. Shea Osuna: It is and it's the truth because that's when it starts and we aren't really taught how to process our emotions healthily. It's the biggest you can give your kids is to learn how to process your own emotions, so that they see what it's like to do it in a healthy way. I think that's the big piece of the emotion. Then to touch on the chemical, really gentle things that are pretty safe for everyone, again disclaimer, not medical advice, make sure if this is a question for you, you talk to a practitioner, whether it's a holistic practitioner or your MD, whatever it is, do your own research, but Epsom salt baths are one of the best ways to help open the pores to pull out some toxins out of the system and relax, as hot as you can tolerate obviously. I have people who go in for five minutes. That's all they can tolerate and then they keep going.

Naomi Nakamura: I do it at least once a week.

Dr. Shea Osuna: It's great. You're working your way up to about 20 minutes is amazing, but again, I've had patients who don't sweat well, they don't detox. Well, the way that you know that is if you go out for a run or you go into a sauna and you're not really sweating very much, you're glistening, not enough. This is a way to train your body to sweat more and to detox and purge. People who have stagnant digestive systems, that's also a sign as well. Things like that. Magnesium, that's a really great way calm, is a great drink for people who have stagnant digestive systems who feel like they can't rest at night. Great thing to do.

Then just being as simple as possible, coming back to the basics. Look at all the chemicals. If you don't know what's in your beauty products, type in some of those words on the back and see what they say. Finding ways to detox what you put on your body and in your body, organic foods.

Naomi Nakamura: Cleaning products, oh, my gosh.

Dr. Shea Osuna: Cleaning products. I really, really love Branch Basics. They send you a starter kit with a concentrate and we spray everything in our bathroom.

Naomi Nakamura: I have those stuff too.

Dr. Shea Osuna: We do our laundry with it. It's amazing. There's really great ways that you can detox your home, what you're putting in your body.

Naomi Nakamura: I think one simple thing with that is just seeing if something has a fragrance in it, because if you see the word fragrance, that is a red light to you that this has things that should not be in there.

Dr. Shea Osuna: 100%, fragrance is a big one. What you can do for fragrance is add a drop of therapeutic grade essential oil instead. That's a really good way.

Naomi Nakamura: If you feel like you need fragrance, because that's not the point, where like, "I don't even need fragrance for things."

Dr. Shea Osuna: Absolutely, I feel the same way, but once in a while, on my lotion, I have a Body Butter. That's really clean. Sometimes it's nice to just have a little something. I rub it on my son with lavender oil sometimes and he calms down. I think the biggest thing that you can control is taking out the chemicals from your home as best you can, creating a sound environment for sleep with less toxins, organic sheets, organic bedding, less EMS in the room, unplug your WiFi at night. Those are all of the chemical things that I suggest people start with.

Naomi Nakamura: I made a big investment last year of getting my organic mattress. I love it, but I definitely had to save up a couple of years to make that investment.

Dr. Shea Osuna: Totally, but it is one of the best investments that you can give. They do say that at night is the biggest thing where we spend so much time on our pillows and our mattress. We are also in a very vulnerable state while we sleep because our body is supposed to be doing cleanup. The less toxins that we have to process at night, the more that we can do cleanup. It is one of the best, best things you can give your health.

Naomi Nakamura: Absolutely. Well, thank you so much for sharing with us and for getting so vulnerable with us. Where can people connect with you?

Dr. Shea Osuna: Like I said, I don't have really as much of a personal Instagram anymore, @thewellhealingcenter is my official page for my business. Then my website is thewellhealingcenter.com. If you go slash events, you can go and find all the free events that we do, so you can join them if you want to. I will also share, like I said, my personal email drshealindsay@gmail.com, which you can put in the notes. I'm free for people wanting to email me about referrals or questions, coaching, anything like that. Those are a few ways that you can find me.

Naomi Nakamura: Well, thank you so much. I appreciate sharing your wisdom and your time with us.

Dr. Shea Osuna: Thank you for having me. It was really wonderful to be able to share.

Naomi Nakamura is a Functional Wellness & Human Design Coach. She helps women who struggle with stress, fatigue, and burnout find freedom and empowerment by optimizing their health, finding balance, and upgrading their energy so they can live life on their own terms. 



Combining her diverse professional background, and her unique approach integrates Functional Nutrition and Human Design she guides clients on a highly individualized journey of self-discovery, observation, and integration by removing physical, mental, and emotional confusion and overwhelm, simply taking them back to the very basics of health through their Human Design.

She believes that when our bodies function optimally, our personalities and souls can shine through everything that we think and do with empowering clarity and ease.

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 | Pinterest

If you’ve ever struggled with chronic aches and pain, this episode is for you. Joining me for a two-part mini-series is Dr. Shea Osuna. Dr. Shea is a chiropractor, based in Lafayette, Colorado, who specializes in a technique called Network Spinal. 

This gentle approach is based on the foundation that we’re vibrating cells, looking at what’s the tone, tension, shape, and position of your spine and nervous system, and how it self-regulates itself from tension.

Dr. Shea up levels this technique with transformational coaching to provide her clients a soul-finding experience.

Episode Highlights:

• Busting myths on chiropractic medicine

• What is the Network Spinach technique

• How your posture directly impacts your perception of reality and the world

• How your body keeps the score and stores your life experiences in your tissues

Listen to the Episode:

Mentioned in the Episode:

• Episode 157: Tips for Movement and Fitness Anywhere with Bryan Osuna of Committed HP

Connect with Dr. Shea Lindsay Osuna:

• Dr. Shea’s Practice: The Well Healing Center website

• Connect with Dr. Shea on Instagram

  Connect with Naomi:

• Ask a question

• Connect on social media: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter

• Send an email

Share the Episode:

Read the Transcript:

Naomi Nakamura: Hello there and welcome back to the Live FAB Life podcast. I'm your host, Naomi Nakamura, and joining me in this episode is Dr. Shea Osuna. Dr. Shea is a pre-natal chiropractor with a focus on Network Spinal transformation healing, who practices with a deep desire to be a facilitator for healing. Her intention with each person that she works with is to assist them in remembering the truth of who they are before traumas and stressors bog them down.

She believes that when we no longer feel the need to carry around so much baggage, we are free to live life how we have always dreamed of living, to be resilient to what life throws at us and to truly thrive. After feeling lost and defeated from personal experiences with intense anxiety for years, Dr. Shea found a technique called Network Spinal that helped her find more ease in her body and change her relationship to anxiety.

Since then, she's dedicated herself to this powerful approach. She's spent the past five years practicing in my back yard in the Bay area, but has recently landed in Lafayette, Colorado, where she has an in-person practice, but she also offers online transformational coaching. So when Dr. Shea and I started planning out what topics we were going to discuss in this episode, I quickly realized that we were going to need more than one episode to cover everything, because there's so much good stuff that we cover.

So this episode is actually the first of a two part series. So here in part one, you will hear Dr. Shea break down some of the myths around chiropractic medicine. You'll hear her discuss how your posture and the shape of your spine directly impacts your perception of reality and how you view the world, and you will hear how your body keeps score and how your life experiences are stored in your tissues.

Now, as a side note, I met Dr. Shea through her husband, Bryan Osuna, founder of COMMITTED HP, who joined me back in Episode 157, Tips for Movement and Fitness Anywhere, so if you haven't listened to Episode 157 yet be sure you also do so. So with that, let's get to the show. Hi Dr. Shea. Welcome to the show.

Shea Osuna: Hi. Thank you for having me.

Naomi Nakamura: I am really excited to have this conversation with you. We had your husband on. I think it was in episode 157, and he kind of mentioned what you do, and I was like, "Oh, I would love to have her on." So I'm glad we're making this happen.

Shea Osuna: Yeah, me too.

Naomi Nakamura: Yeah. So for those who aren't familiar with you, can you introduce yourself and share with us what it is that you do?

Shea Osuna: Yeah, absolutely. So as you said, my name's Dr. Shea Osuna, and I am a chiropractor, but I really started to dive into being curious about patterns in the nervous system. And so for those of you who don't know a lot about chiropractic, it's actually not just like a back doctor, but it's actually working with the nervous system directly, and our intention when we adjust or when we work with people is to affect the way that the nervous system self-regulates tension and stress.

And obviously some people have been to more of a traditional chiropractor, where they're looking at the bones that are fixated and trying to push them back into place using some sort of light force, but I started to be kind of curious about why do people start to come in week after week with the exact same pattern in their system and nothing is changing? And most people needed that adjustment every single week to keep themselves from having symptoms.

And some people can say obviously we want to add in exercise. We want to decrease inflammation and all of that, but for me I was really curious. I really want people's lives to change. I want them to feel motivated to change their diet. I want them to want to up-level their life. I want them to choose to exercise, right? Like I wanted them to make the decisions and feel empowered versus being someone's savior or being their hero, or someone that they were reliant on.

And so I dove into this technique called Network Spinal, which is a low force technique ... we'll deem it under that ... and it's actually called a tonal technique. And the reason it's called a tonal technique is because it's based on the foundation that we are vibrating cells, and so it really looks at what is the tone, the tension, the shape and the position of your nervous system of your spine and how it basically self-regulates itself from tension or does not.

And so I was really, really curious about this and found this technique and that's been I guess the baseline of where I began my journey as a healer, and it's only the beginning because I've now taken that technique and up-leveled it even more into a level of transformational coaching and soul-finding searching connecting type of work. And so that's kind of been my journey through that. And we can dive in more of course.

Naomi Nakamura: Yeah. [inaudible 00:05:41] You keep using that word, curious, because now I'm very curious and like you I've been working as a health coach for like five years now, and it's the same thing. People come to you because they want you to tell them what to do, but the change really doesn't happen until they feel empowered and not compelled to do something.

I have personally been seeing a chiropractor for over a decade, and I started to because I was doing a lot of endurance events and I kept getting injured, and I don't know who recommended that I start I seeing a chiropractor, so I did, and I get the feeling it's more of a traditional type, but as I shared with people that I see my chiropractor like every two or three weeks literally for like eleven years now, I'm always surprised at the response I get from some people about, "Oh, it's just going to break your bones."

And some of these people are medical professionals, and they're like, "Well, I need to talk to one of the doctors at the hospital to find out if it's even really legit, because I'm skeptical about this kind of treatment," and really? So what are some of the myths that you've encountered and how do you respond to them?

Shea Osuna: Yeah. I'm actually really glad we're talking about this. Like there's part of me that's like, "Ugh," but it's really a thing and it's true.

Naomi Nakamura: Yeah. People are like, "I don't want them to snap my neck." It actually feels really good, to be honest.

Shea Osuna: Absolutely. I mean it totally does, and yeah. So here's a couple things. The first thing is that believe it or not, chiropractic has pretty much been under attack for years and years and years. If you look back ... I think it's between the '50s and '70s, I think it was in the '70s, chiropractic was basically attacked by the American Medical Association because they were telling us that we were practicing without medical license, because people were showing that they could treat certain things.

And at the time, chiropractors didn't have any rule that they couldn't say that they could treat a certain thing or they were getting results with certain ailments, and so the medical profession basically attacked the chiropractic profession saying that they were practicing without a medical license. We weren't allowed to do all of these things. And sadly ever since, there's been a very big gap between the western medical model and traditional chiropractic model.

And it's really sad, because I find that there's really room for all of us, and I find that it's really hard to have these conversations with medical providers because that's the world they came from, right? And we come from this other world and everyone's ego's in the way, and no one wants to be open to conversation. So there's really where it kind of all started. And so some of the myths that are out there ... and medical professionals definitely do it ... and I'll have to say, my fellow chiropractors don't do a great job always of using the right terminology and educating in the ways.

I think it's stepping up, but so many chiropractors use the word pop and crack and all these things, and most people don't even know what's actually making the sound. When we take something like that, say, snapping the neck, right, what a chiropractor is actually doing is they're feeling ... this is a structural adjustment. This isn't even what I do, but a structural adjustment, they're going to feel your neck.

Some of them are going to muscle test you. Some of them are going to do range of motion. They're going to do all sorts of different things to test your neurology, to test whether there is neurological dysfunction because of this fixation in your neck. Fixation or subluxation, which is in-between the bones of the spine, the vertebra, and when there's a fixation there, there could be decreased nerve flow to that area, or increased, too much, nerve flow to that area.

So it's kind of like a cell phone. They use the cell phone terminology, like if someone was getting less frequency into the phone, you wouldn't hear them, right? You'd get that ... You hear parts of the message. And that's kind of the idea of chiropractic, is that organ or that tissue where the subluxation is is getting a mixed message. It's maybe not getting the whole message. And that's where we see dysfunction and [inaudible 00:10:01] have it.

So that's what they're looking for, and then what they do is they contact the bone and they just bring your neck to a slight [inaudible 00:10:11] of tension to where it kind of takes the muscle and the guarding out of it so that you can't fight and then they just put a gentle force in the direction that the bone needs to go to help it open, and help it realign and help the nerve flow and the blood flow back to the area.

So it's actually really gentle. For those people who are really scared, even I have to wiggle my toes when I get my neck structurally adjusted, and I am a chiropractor, and I will say that as a trained chiropractor, it actually takes quite a bit of force and quite a bit of intention to hurt someone, honestly.

Naomi Nakamura: I'm laughing because I've been getting adjustments every two to three weeks for 11 years, and I actually find it relieves a lot of tension in my body after an adjustment, but to your point, when I'm lying in the chair and my chiropractor laughs, because he's like, "Okay, you know what's coming." And I mentally have to shut my eyes and tell myself, "Relax. Relax." I literally just repeat those words and then he adjusts, but it's really not a big deal at all, and there's no pain, and I never felt I'm in danger of being hurt.

Shea Osuna: I have to say, it has to be your intention to hurt someone, and as a chiropractor and as a health care practitioner, probably didn't go into that profession to hurt people, right? You want to help them. That's your intention. So I think that's one of the biggest things to break down. And also the cracking and popping that you hear, number one, you don't have to hear that for a bone to be adjusted. A lot of times, I'll go, wait. That was great. I felt the bone move back into place or release, and there was no sound.

The crack or the pop is usually just air releasing from the joint, just like if you were to crack your knuckles. Doesn't mean you adjusted your hand, but there's air in the joint and it just kind of comes out. So it's not bones rubbing together. It's not any of that scary stuff. And just to say, if it's something that people are really afraid of, there's over a hundred techniques of chiropractic, and that's the beauty of this work is that if someone has full spinal fusion, you can still get chiropractic care.

You have really bad osteoporosis, you can still get gentle chiropractic care, because the idea is let's self-regulate the nervous system. Let's regulate the nervous system so that ... and we can go into this more about why that's important, but for everyone it's really important, and you can find your modality if you find your technique that really resonates with you.

Naomi Nakamura: I do want to go into that, but you mentioned a little while ago that you don't practice that specific technique. So can you describe your technique and how it differs from maybe traditional chiropractic techniques?

Shea Osuna: Absolutely. So like I said, when I am assessing the body, I'm not just assessing what bones are fixated, the direct subluxation. I'm looking at them. I'm taking note of them. What I'm actually doing is I'm stepping back. I have a full conversation in the initial exam with my patients about pretty much their entire life. We talk history of trauma, physical, emotional, chemical toxins, and then I take a step back and I look at the entire spine, and I look at their posture.

How do they present themselves? People can't see me hunching, but I'll hunch for you. Did they come in with their heart guarded and their head coming forward or their tailbone tucked? Do they look rotated? What's happening in their system, and why? What's the story behind it? And so I ask those questions that are like what in this person's life is making them hunched over and tail-tucked and kind of hiding from life? Like what is the story, right? What's the pattern?

And so that's what I am curious about, rather than just like the bone out of place and how to get it back, but how can I actually support this person's system to unravel this in their body and unravel the story in their life so they can up-level. And so I think the easiest way to explain this is traditional chiropractic is under the model of restorative, and my type of chiropractic is under the hub of reorganizational, so we're really helping the system learn strategies to reorganize to higher level and take them past the injury or the ailment or whatever it was and up-level them to beyond it, rather than before it. Does that make sense?

Naomi Nakamura: It does. So physically, are your techniques different, and the actual bodywork that you do?

Shea Osuna: Yup. So the technique is different, so that's kind of how I start, is just looking at the system, and then when I get that information, I have another little physical system of analysis and my question is where in the spine is their tension patterns? Alf Breigs calls it adverse mechanical cord tension. So it means that there's mechanical cord tension in the spine, either twisting, like wringing a towel or a bending side to side or forward and back, and it's tension there. So that nerve flow and that blood flow that we talked about is decreased, right?

So now, with my technique, I find an area usually on the pelvis or the neck, because that's where your parasympathetic nerves live, parasympathetic nerves being that rest and digest part of the nervous system versus sympathetic, which is what we all [inaudible 00:15:20] fight or flight, right? So I make a contact on one of those two places, and what I mean by a contact is a very gentle ... it's like the pads of my fingers.

I hold there and I make a very quick gentle contact into a spot on the spine that I found clinically, kind of ... So we could go on and on about that part, but I don't have to teach people the technique. So I find the area that I need to go to and I make a very gentle contact, and what happens is the spine all of a sudden starts to send information into your prefrontal cortex, subconscious mind and back down, and it kind of asks the question ... We'll make it more real and interactive. Like am I still in this state of protection or defense? Can I unravel what's there, or do I still need it to protect myself?

Most of the time the threat's not there anymore and people start to unravel. They start to breathe more deeply. We look for a respiratory wave to go all the way up their spine and into their head, and you'll watch their connective tissue start to move, their muscles start to move, and they just start to release tension in their nervous system, on their own, with just a very gentle, quick touch. And so that's how the very beginning starts.

As people progress in care, we do go a little bit deeper. We hold contacts a little bit longer. They change position from lying face down to on their side or on their back, but again it's all really gentle, low force tonal techniques, working with the frequency of the body. So an example being like that tailbone tucked position that I talked about, the frequency ... what they've actually found by hooking up and watching a frequency of the nervous system, it sounds like this ...

I don't want to live in a nervous system that sounds like that, right? So what we do is we put that light contact force in as basically a way to go ... And the cells and the system start to entrain and reset to that lower frequency, which is a healing frequency. So it's pretty amazing.

Naomi Nakamura: I can see how powerful this is, because when you talk about the nerves of the parasympathetic system being in the neck, speaking from personal experience, I have had the most challenging time finding a pillow to comfortably sleep on. I literally took all my pillows one time into my chiropractor's office and was like, "Help me. I can't get a good night's sleep."

And she basically looked at all of them and she said, well the problem is because of my size, the space from my neck is really small, so even all of these neck supporting pillows, they're not my size. And we worked out a situation that helps me. But that being an issue, and so that's affecting your parasympathetic system, your fight and flight, that's affecting your sleep.

And affecting your nervous system, it really is going to have an impact on all areas of your life and how you function every day, not just in the motions that you go through, but in the decisions that you make and the choices that you make, and the way you communicate and the way ... your relationships to other people. So I think this is a really good example of truly a mind-body connection.

Shea Osuna: You are hitting it right on the head, and this is why I chose this level of work, is your nervous system is taking in about ... I think it's something like 13 or 30 trillion bits of information ... Don't quote me on the number, but it's trillions of bits ... they call it bits ... per minute, or per second and-

Naomi Nakamura: Can we just take a step back a little bit and for the sake of the listeners explain what the nervous system is.

Shea Osuna: Thank you. So the nervous system is our brain, our spinal cord, all of the nerves that come out to our organs, every single tissue we have. So our central nervous system is our brain and our spinal cord and our peripheral nervous system comes out to all of our tissues, our extremities, meaning our arms and legs and our organs. And the nervous system regulates everything. Every single thing that we do. We cannot function without our nervous system.

We cannot breathe. We cannot talk. We cannot interact with the world. And it not only tells our system what to do, but it interacts with the world so that our perception of the world can tell our nervous system how to respond. So it is basically the powerhouse of our entire body and our entire life, because the way that our nervous system works, it's kind of like a computer system that learns.

So based on our experiences of our life and of the world, we know how to respond and how to act. That's why trauma patterns happen, or everyone's been in a relationship and then they're in a new one and all of a sudden they're getting triggered by the same stuff they were in the past relationship even though it's a brand new one. It's your nervous system.

Naomi Nakamura: So interesting.

Shea Osuna: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah, and that nervous system takes in all those bits of information every second of the day.

Naomi Nakamura: So when we're talking about different topics we can discuss here ... and by the way, this is actually going to be a two part, because you gave me a list of so many topics. I'm like we need to talk about all of them. I don't think we can cover it all in one episode so we're having you back for a second episode, but one of the topics you put forth was how your posture and your spine directly impact your perception and your reality of the world, and I think that's kind of what you're leading to. So can you speak more into that?

Shea Osuna: Yes, absolutely. I know you have to slow me down, because I'll just give you all of it.

Naomi Nakamura: No, I'm eating it all up.

Shea Osuna: So yeah, this is such an easy thing for people to grasp, and I kind of touched on it when we talked about that one posture. But I love it, because this is the way I educate my patients. This is the way I educate people in the community, that the way that our spine is positioned can really dictate how we see the world, and because of these trillions of bit of information per second, we only take in a very small amount of those consciously.

And what we end up doing is we take it into the conscious mind, and we start to organize it into ways that make sense to us, and we compare very quickly. This is all ... A lot of it's subconscious. We compare very quickly to our past experiences to categorize safe, not safe, like what's happening. And so an easy way show people this is that the way that our posture is shows how we see reality.

Think about it as let's just put on like goggles, okay? Like reality goggles, and I'll explain it ... You can see me, but basically let's take that person with the tucked tail, hunched over, head's forward, heart is closed, shoulders are rounded forward.

Naomi Nakamura: Kind of like how I sit every day at my desk, and probably how most people who are office works are sitting at our desk, leaning forward, looking into our screens.

Shea Osuna: Right? Yes. You and everyone else, and even people who didn't used to because now they're all at home on Zoom, right?

Naomi Nakamura: Exactly.

Shea Osuna: And so this is a big pattern. And so if you think about someone like that, you tell me, what is your energetic state when you're hunched over, when you tuck your tail, your head's forward, your shoulders are rounded forward, like ...

Naomi Nakamura: Much higher. And it's not energizing.

Shea Osuna: Yeah. It's not energizing. So if you take that pattern ... And so it's one thing to just sit like that, but some people walk around like that all day too. Their systems are locked in that position. And so when I see that, what I think ... what that represents in my work is when a tailbone is tucked, you think about an animal with its tail between its legs. Protection mode. Closing off the shoulders-

Naomi Nakamura: Unsure, as well.

Shea Osuna: ... rounding the shoulders. Yes, unsure if the world is safe, where they fit into it. I'm in protective mode just in case something happens, so high alert. Vigilance. Shoulders are rounded forward. They're protecting their front, they're protecting their organs, their heart. Head comes forward because they're disconnected from their soul and in their intuition and into their heart, and they're using their mind to try to navigate, right?

And when their head comes forward, a lot of emotional tension in their lower neck, of resentment, of anger, of sadness, of disappointment, all is really found here. So when we liberate that, people start to release those emotions in their body. So you have that final pattern, you see the world from that lens. Now you're at work and your boss calls you up and says "Hey, can you meet me in my office in 10 minutes?"

From this point, from that position, what is your mind going to think? "Oh my gosh, I'm getting fired. My boss hates me. I can't do anything right," or "It's their fault." It's going to be these really negative [crosstalk 00:23:47].

Naomi Nakamura: Yeah, and you automatically go on alert because you're bracing yourself in anticipation that something negative's about to happen, and you're almost in like survival mode. Shea Osuna: Exactly. So this is how your posture shapes your reality, or the reality that you see, right? Your perception of the experience. Now let's take the person next to you at your desk who sits like this, all tall, free breathing. I forgot that. People in those final postures of tucked, you don't breathe well. So now this other person's shoulders are rolled back.

They're breathing, they're awake. They're sitting on a bounce ball, which I'm sitting on right now, and they're moving their hips and they're connected to their body. They're feeling energy in their body. Now their boss calls them and says "Hey, can you meet me in my office in 10 minutes?"

What's that person going to think? "Oh, maybe they really liked my project that I submitted. Maybe I'm getting a raise, you know?"

Naomi Nakamura: Or a promotion or [crosstalk 00:24:46]. Right.

Shea Osuna: Or a promotion. Something, right? So the way that they perceive that phone call-

Naomi Nakamura: The same situation.

Shea Osuna: Same exact situation, completely different. And how are they going to go into the office? They're going to go in tall and excited and [crosstalk 00:25:00]-

Naomi Nakamura: Confident.

Shea Osuna: ... and confident to their boss, where the other person's going to come in slouched and like, "Oh man, what's going to happen next?" right? And their boss is going to see that and go, "Wow. I was going to give this person a raise, but now I'm not," right? Or the person who's open, like, "Wow, you actually really deserve this promotion. Look at the energy you're bringing in to me and into our work."

And so that's just a really small example of that, and sadly it's a little bit more complicated than just ... Well, this isn't true. It is very simple of changing your posture. You can change your posture and change your energy instantaneously. That's what power postures are for, right? People always say before you go into a big meeting, open your arms up. Sit up tall. Sit in that power position.

So there is that, but there is also the part that our experiences of our life start to store in our body.

Naomi Nakamura: I'm so interested in hearing about this.

Shea Osuna: Yes. Based on our traumas, our experiences, our nervous system is taught to shrink or to expand, to be authentic or to not, and so based on if we feel seen, safe and supported at home as children. And this has been a really big topic with one of my coaching clients recently. We had to sit and really break this down, because she felt guilty that her childhood wasn't hard, right? She wasn't physically abused, she wasn't screamed at, and yet she has this really strong trauma response.

And we really had to break down that it doesn't have to be something that society deems this huge deal to impact your nervous system and to cause a response that you don't understand. And I really want to push that for people, because there's this fighting off of like well, people are starving somewhere and it does not numb the experience that you had, or talk it down or anything like that.

So based on your nervous system when you were a child, did you feel safe, seen and supported? And that is the three things that we needed when we were children, and seen also means seen in our authenticity. Were we received as our authentic selves? And if we were not, we're taught to repress that.

Naomi Nakamura: And so you have these adults who don't know who their authentic selves are.

Shea Osuna: Yes. Because it wasn't seen as and they weren't supported as children, [crosstalk 00:27:24]-

Naomi Nakamura: Right, exactly. Yeah.

Shea Osuna: ... really hard. So there's that piece, and so seen is one of the big things. Emotional range is also another one. We live in a world ... I'm raising a 15-month-old boy, and I walk around and I see kids being shushed all the time. I see parents embarrassed by their kid having a tantrum. And don't get me wrong, I am too sometimes, you know? We just went camping and my husband and I were like, "Ugh. He's going to cry in the tent. These poor people next to us."

Like worrying about other people and what they're going to think of us as parents, but the whole thing is that we weren't really taught as children how to regulate our emotions in a healthy way. So we repressed them, and now we're raising children, and either you had an angry parent who lashed out or a passive parent who pushed it all down, and so either you learned that or the opposite, and you never were really taught how to regulate your own emotion.

And so I just read this beautiful quote. I was teaching a class last night, and it basically said emotions in flow do not cause pain. Emotions that are stagnant cause pain.

Naomi Nakamura: It's so interesting, because I'm doing human design work now, and-

Shea Osuna: [crosstalk 00:28:38].

Naomi Nakamura: Yeah, and there's a center in the body, the emotional center, and some of the shadow work of that is believing that negative feelings are bad or trying to suppress negative feelings because you perceive them to be bad. But they're just emotion, and for some people it's completely ... I mean it's healthy for everyone to feel all these emotions, but for some people it's part of their DNA. Like literally.

Shea Osuna: It's hard.

Naomi Nakamura: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Shea Osuna: Yeah. Yes. And that's also something to really take into consideration. It's like your makeup, where were the stars aligned, what's your astrology chart look like, your human design, how was your upbringing? All of these ... What's your gender, or what you were raised as? Being a woman versus a man in culture is way different with what we were taught on how to feel our emotions.

So it's basically energy in motion. That's how you can break down emotion.

Naomi Nakamura: That's exactly how I describe emotion, is that it's energy in motion.

Shea Osuna: That's all it is. And so we label it and make it scary as bad or good. But when you break down the sensation in your body, excitement actually feels the same as fear. And when you break it down, when you stop the story and you actually sit with the emotion in your belly or in your chest, wherever you feel fear, or when you're excited, the sensation's almost exactly the same.

Naomi Nakamura: Like your belly's doing flip flops or butterflies in your belly? You get it when you're excited and you feel it when you're anticipating or you're fearing something.

Shea Osuna: Exactly. And so it's the sensation in the body that they found through a lot of somatic psychology work, is that what most people are really afraid of, especially people with trauma. And so that's how we kind of get started. And so the point of this being is that when there's energy stored in your nervous system in the form of unfelt emotions, then we store patterns in our nervous system.

Thoughts, trauma and toxins are what cause nervous system interference, what cause us to not be able to regulate stress well, and cause holding patterns that affect our reality in our system. So those are the three things, and if we can start to help people regulate by taking that tension out of their system, help them remove those chemical, physical and emotional traumas from their life and make them more resilient, they can heal and as stressors come in they're not carrying this baggage of the past with them.

They're dealing with them head on as they come in a more present fashion. So that's the goal.

Naomi Nakamura: Well, and you're teaching them, really, life skills that are empowering that they can then continue to use in their lives as they continually ... as things come to them, they're equipped to manage situations to deal with them in the healthiest way that's appropriate for them.

Shea Osuna: Exactly. That's the goal, is you're authentic, right? Like your authentic way of doing it, because mine is not your way, no one's is, and so that's what I really love about doing the work that I do, is that we're looking at the person in front of us and helping them decide what feels best to them, what's sustainable for them, what's manageable in their environment that they're in in their life? How can we take small steps and make this possible for you to decide, right?

Instead of having some guru tell you this is how you need to do it, it's like let's help you find your own way.

Naomi Nakamura: Yeah, and I love that because ... and I do this in my own work ... is I really have an extensive ... well, for my health question part, a really extensive health history, because in order for me to help someone as they are now, I need to understand what led up to them becoming or in this situation that they are now. And this is also where there is never going to be a one size fits all answer that's appropriate for everyone.

So if you're trying to like manage your health by just following Instagram accounts, great. That helps, but if you're looking for true healing, if you just really want that, it takes a lot more. It's really deep work.

Shea Osuna: It is. It's a really wonderful point, and I was just on a walk with a dear friend of mine who lives surprisingly in my neighborhood. We kind of finally connected and she's medicine woman, amazing healer, does a lot of soul work, and we were just talking about this. Basically even us doing the work, we still need to reach out to people to hold us accountable.

Naomi Nakamura: Oh absolutely.

Shea Osuna: I see my own person, I see my own person for the work I do, and I see somebody else who does more like somatic therapy with me and mental and really helps me up-level, and I invest that in my life even though I have all the knowledge, I reach out because I know that working with someone is going to help me up-level in my own life [crosstalk 00:33:19].

Naomi Nakamura: I think that's the sign of a healthy healer, is when they recognize that they need the same support that they provide to others.

Shea Osuna: Absolutely. I think it's a red flag sometimes when the people aren't doing the work that are doing the work with you, right? Like they need to be doing their own work and up-leveling and being curious about what's more for themselves so that they can show up in that capacity. And so when a practitioner starts to get really narrow-minded or fixed in their way of practicing, it's something to question, I think personally.

Naomi Nakamura: I 100% with you. So I know we're going to continue on in a follow-up episode, but I'm really curious and I'm really bummed because you lived in my area and you don't anymore, so is your work limited to in-person work, or are there ways for people to work with you virtually?

Shea Osuna: The physical work that I do of Network Spinal needs to be in-person, and the really great thing is is because actually having a baby and pandemic really pushed me to ask that question, of I really want to still continue to work with people and so I started to create online practice, taking everything I know from Network Spinal and a sister technique that I learned called Somatic Respiratory Integration, which is a movement breathing affirmations pattern that affects the nervous system, 12 stages, and I've kind of morphed it into my own, honestly.

And of course you do, right? You have to bring the art in. And so what I ended up creating is a 12 week dive in immersive, where basically I take all the things that I know how to self-regulate the nervous system without being one-on-one with someone, I teach them the tools, the resources.

Obviously I'm not a therapist, but we do have a lot of conversation, and what I do is I help them hear the stories and then we find it in the body, and then we acknowledge in the body and I help them learn how to feel the emotion there, the sensation there. And not just to release it, but what if it comes back? Let's take anxiety. I work with a lot of anxiety patients. Er, I'll call them clients as coaching, because I don't work under my license with this.

But I work with a lot of anxiety and I had it myself, so it's something close to my heart. I still experience it. But it's not really about getting rid of it forever, it's about changing your relationship to it. And so that's what I help people do in my coaching, is change their relationship to stress and all these things that cause us so much friction in our lives that we continually try to move away from, and I help them use the pain, use the anxiety, use the discomfort, mental and emotional and physical discomfort, as a gift, as a fuel, as a messenger, to help them find what needs to change in their life.

And so that's what my coaching looks like. We do a lot of visualizations. We do a lot of somatic work. We talk. We really dive in. It is some of the deepest work I've ever done.

Naomi Nakamura: I can imagine.

Shea Osuna: It's amazing. It's humbling. It's fun. And so yeah, that's my online offering now, because I want to be able to help more people. I wanted to be able to navigate this whole pandemic and how to support people. And so yeah, it's exciting. I'm working on doing a little bit of group coaching to help bring down price, but I'm also pretty reasonable. I'm not going to be one of those coaches that's like, "Oh, you want to work with me for 12 weeks. $50,000."

Naomi Nakamura: Oh my gosh.

Shea Osuna: I want it to be in people's grasp, right? Like I want to change people's lives.

Naomi Nakamura: You want to be in people's grasp, but at the same time ... And I really want folks to understand this, because this is deep work, and you want to make it affordable for people, but also in my experience when something is really, really cheap, it attracts people who aren't ready for the work.

Shea Osuna: Absolutely. I'm really glad you said that.

Naomi Nakamura: And it doesn't help the client, and it doesn't help the healer. And so understand that there is a value in the work that you're getting, and so it's ... I have made these investments for myself, and it's some of the best investments that I make, because what you get out of it, you really can't put a dollar value on it.

Shea Osuna: Oh, absolutely. I'm really glad you said that, because ... And I'll be super honest, if there's any practitioners out there, I think that's part of the hard part of being a healer, is charging, because you want to help everyone. And this has been my own journey too of what feels congruent and in alignment and worth it for me to be able to show up, because I want to be paid enough to feel like I can fully show up and ween out the people who aren't ready.

Naomi Nakamura: Exactly, because it is nothing worse for everyone involved when you have someone you're working with who's not ready for it yet.

Shea Osuna: Yup. It never ends well.

Naomi Nakamura: It never ends well, and I too ... I try to be affordable for people, but at the same time, you really don't want people who aren't in the right mindset for the work that you do.

Shea Osuna: Absolutely.

Naomi Nakamura: But what I love about what you're doing is that ... Especially this year there's been so much science versus wellness and holistic and it's this battle, but if you really understand the work that it is, it is all connected, because when you talk about woo-woo work, that really is about your mental health and again, your brain and your nervous system. So this is not some made up stuff, and-

Shea Osuna: It's science.

Naomi Nakamura: It's not fluff. It is all science, and I think when you really take a step back and understand basic anatomy, which let's be honest, most people don't even understand how our human bodies function, but when you start to understand how all the different systems in the body function together and how they impact each other, there really is no gap between holistic and what we call science or western medicine, because it's really just your perspective and you've got to reframe how you look at your body, at your health, and how the human body functions.

Shea Osuna: Agreed.

Naomi Nakamura: I don't know. With the training that I've done, that was really the main point that was hammered home, so I don't feel like they need to make this choice between am I following science or am I following holistic health, because to me, it's the same thing if you understand how the human body actually works.

Shea Osuna: Absolutely. I mean I am a chiropractor. I was board certified. I had to take all this exams that allowed the science to be good. Like believe me, the science is there, and I'm going to push it even farther to say how has following western medicine and ... And for some people you might say it's been great, and I honor you. Like this is not back and forth argument of what's better, right? But for those of you who are asking ... who want more, who maybe want a different way than maybe just medication, how is it working for you?

And are you even remotely open to just ask yourself the question, even if it's a placebo, even if it's a miracle that can't be explained but it changed your life, are you open to it? Right? Like do we always have to have science to hide behind when your life changed and your pain went away, and you built this business that satisfies you financially and your soul and like do we have to prove it if it worked, right? Like can't we be open to some things that maybe we can't explain?

Naomi Nakamura: Yeah.

Shea Osuna: And I think that's what really needs to change in our culture too, because so many other cultures pray to gods that ... and go do rain dances and do things that we can't prove with science that they work, and they make us happy, and they make us connected. That, I think, is one of the biggest, biggest pieces for me, and what also came up when you were talking was ... around the money thing especially, when you look at how much your life changes from this, the investment, like you said, is priceless, because most of my people go on to quitting their corporate jobs that they don't like and building their own businesses and becoming extremely successful to the point where what they paid me is nothing.

Naomi Nakamura: Right, because if you think about like ... Right. So just using that one ... That's only one scenario. When you go back to what you said about how someone is ... their physical body is their shoulders are hunched over, their shoulders are up in their neck, like they have all of ... That's their posture, and it can come from being in a situation that just doesn't bring you fulfillment, and doesn't even bring you joy.

So when you talk about people leaving or making career changes, it's because they're suddenly doing something that they find joy in and fulfillment.

Shea Osuna: They're [inaudible 00:41:58].

Naomi Nakamura: And yes, they're liberated and it's energizing to them. And that's not to say those type of changes are for everyone, but that's just one example of the impact that this kind of work can have.

Shea Osuna: Yeah. I always say that the people who find me are seekers. They want more.

Naomi Nakamura: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Shea Osuna: Like I said, I have no judgment for anyone who just wants to feel out of pain and good and go on with their life and keep things the way they are, and they look for little tweaks here and there, and that's wonderful. The point of it is are you satisfied with your life? Are you finding joy in your day-to-day? And if you're not, then it's time to look for more. If little tweaks like a cool little exercise routine brings you joy, or a little change in your diet, and that's all you need, absolutely.

But there's some people on this planet, me included, that cannot stop digging deeper, and if that's you, this is the type of work that is there for you, and it's novel and it's beautiful and you feel more connected to your soul and your purpose and I merge the science, of course, and I use the science, but the idea is to get deeper into the truth of who you are. At the core of your soul, why are you here? And that's, I think, what we're all seeking, right?

Naomi Nakamura: Yeah, I think this is probably one of the biggest lessons I learned last year. It's really seeing the need-to have-tos, and releasing the shoulds.

Shea Osuna: Yes.

Naomi Nakamura: And as simple as that sounds ... And some people will be like, "You're getting all woo-woo again," but if you really think about it, that's really what it comes down to.

Shea Osuna: Oh, it's real. It's not even woo-woo. It's science. Like I tell people all the time, I'm like, "You are shoulding all over yourself right now." And where are the shoulds coming from? Cultural conditioning of how we're supposed to show up, and that's part of the misalignments in the pelvis that I see a lot, is cultural conditioning, and feeling the way that you're living based on how culture's telling you versus what feels authentic and natural to you, and that shows up in pelvis, and it's amazing when it's liberated.

Those are the people who go leave their jobs. It's kind of a joke. Not to scare anyone away, but I've had probably 10 patients leave their jobs because of being under care. It's like unbelievable.

Naomi Nakamura: Well on that note, we'll end here, and we'll have you back next week for a follow-up episode. And we have a bunch of more topics that I can't wait to get into, but in the meantime, how can people connect with you?

Shea Osuna: Yeah, so simply if you just want to find some really fun information, The Well Healing Center is my physical practice in Lafayette, Colorado. You can follow it on Instagram if you want, or also you can email me personally at dr, doctor, D-R, Shea, S-H-E-A, Lindsay, L-I-N-D-S-A-Y, @gmail.com if you just want more information, support. If you want to find a practitioner in your area, I'd be happy to. So those are a couple ways that we can connect.

You can even find me on The Well Healing Center Instagram and just private message me if you want, and I'd be happy to just connect you with the right people or give you some guidance. So I'm here.

Naomi Nakamura: And I will link to all of those in the show notes. So thank you so much, and we'll see you back next week.

Naomi Nakamura is a Functional Wellness & Human Design Coach. She helps women who struggle with stress, fatigue, and burnout find freedom and empowerment by optimizing their health, finding balance, and upgrading their energy so they can live life on their own terms. 



Combining her diverse professional background, and her unique approach integrates Functional Nutrition and Human Design she guides clients on a highly individualized journey of self-discovery, observation, and integration by removing physical, mental, and emotional confusion and overwhelm, simply taking them back to the very basics of health through their Human Design.

She believes that when our bodies function optimally, our personalities and souls can shine through everything that we think and do with empowering clarity and ease.

Naomi resides in the San Francisco Bay Area and can often be found exploring the area with her puppy girl, Coco Pop!

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