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I've spent 25 years helping people get out of their own way. Somewhere in there, I got out of mine.
Fascinated by Design is what happens when a psychologist follows her own advice — stops performing, starts living, and has a lot of opinions about what she finds. I'm Suzanne Meunier, a 4/6 Splenic Projector coming down from the roof at 50, and this podcast is me living my design out loud.
We're going to talk about Human Design. We're going to talk about what it actually takes to love yourself, love another person, and show up for a world in the middle of a massive shift. Psychology, energy medicine, hard-won wisdom — whatever's fascinating me that week.
Glad you're here.
FASCINATED BY DESIGN
Episode 1: Welcome to My Fascinating Experiment
Transcript
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[INTRO NOTE]
This episode opens with a brief reflection I added after the fact — about what I noticed when I went back and listened to the first two episodes, and what I'm committing to doing differently. It's unscripted.
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[PODCAST INTRO]
Welcome to Fascinated by Design. I'm a 4/6 Splenic Projector living my design in real time and sharing insights from decades of practicing psychology and energy medicine. Ready to dive into what's fascinating me today? Let's go.
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[ADDED INTRO]
Hi, this is Fascinated by Design, and I'm Suzanne. This is an intro to the intro that I'm adding after the fact because my intention with this podcast is to share my real time embodiment of my human design. And after creating the first two episodes and going back and listening to all of them, I realize how I got pulled into old conditioning from my career in academia and some of the lower expressions of a few of my gifts in the way that I've gone about trying to create this.
I was searching for a way to be efficient, to save some energy for my projector self, to make the process of creating this sustainable, and instead it feels inauthentic. So rather than going back and redoing everything, I'm going to share it as it is with this note. And in the meantime, try to figure out a way where I can share things more authentically in the future, which might be with very little editing — because I want to talk to all of you like I talk to my friends, and that's not how these first two episodes came to be.
I suspect I'll share more with you during the third episode once I've found my new footing. So without further ado, here's episode one.
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[EPISODE ONE]
I've had a vision for about 10 years that I wasn't ready to share until now. Welcome to Fascinated by Design. I'm Suzanne Meunier, a soul coach, pattern breaker, transformation doula, and 4/6 Splenic Projector.
I'm excited that it's finally time to share my vision with you. I'll get into more about the full vision and why now in a little bit. But first, the basic concept. In this podcast, I'll be sharing my real life stories of living my design. Because I'm a projector, one of the things that I'm meant to do is follow my fascinations, and one of the things that has been fascinating me for years is the human design system itself.
I've been really inspired watching some people who are on the path of embodying their design. And it's made me want to go deeper into my own human design experiment. For a number of reasons, I'm feeling called to share that experiment with all of you. Even though Fascinated by Design is a human design embodiment podcast, I'm not going to be teaching you about human design mechanics here. There are wonderful teachers that are doing that work already, and I'll link to some of my favorites in the show notes.
What I will be doing is sharing a lot of personal stories of how I've come to know the things that I know. I earned a PhD in clinical psychology, and I've worked as a psychologist for over 20 years. I've also been fascinated by ancient wisdom traditions and mysticism, and so now I serve more as a soul coach, pattern breaker, and transformation doula. I love getting into the depths of human transformation, taking the spiritual and transcendent, and finding ways to ground it into the practical. Since I've worked with so many clients over the years, I have a lot of ideas about how to make transformation more easeful and frankly, more joyful.
But as any projector out there knows, my strategy is to wait to be recognized and invited. For those of you who may not know, the projector energy type has an aura that is focused and penetrating. And as you might imagine, anything that involves penetration requires consent. So the strategy that projectors need to follow is to be recognized for the wisdom they have to share, and then invited to share it.
The exception to that is building my lighthouse, which means I can take anything that excites me, create something, and put it out there in the world. So that's what I'm doing here. I've learned that projectors who passively wait to be invited can develop their not-self theme of bitterness, and I really don't have any interest in doing that. So this is an exciting way to build my lighthouse and connect with those of you who would like to invite me.
One of the things I want to do with this podcast is answer your questions. If there's anything you'd like me to share my opinions about, please email me at suzanne@soulbloomcoaching.com with the subject line: Invited.
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[MY STORY]
Throughout my career as a psychologist, I have studied and specialized in the treatment of anxiety. There's a joke in my profession that whatever you go into studying is actually research — not research. We really are all just drawn to understanding ourselves.
As a child, I was a highly sensitive person living in an environment where the emotional responses around me were unpredictable. And as we all do, I adapted to my environment. I learned early on that it was my job — and actually everyone's job in the family system — to keep a particular member of my family regulated. For me, that meant trying not to be too loud, make too much noise, have too many feelings or needs, take up too much space. Anything that might cause that person to get anxious or dysregulated.
What I've seen over the years is that many highly sensitive people have a difficult time managing their intense emotional responses. And so they try to figure out what people around them expect, what the rules of life are, so that they can just perfect and follow them. That was definitely the case for me. I used perfectionism and striving as a strategy to find a sense of worth. The problem, though, was that any feeling of worth I had was really dependent on my ability to perform in the moment.
So if I was able to meet expectations or achieve whatever I was striving towards, I'd feel relieved. But if I couldn't, I felt pretty awful. I mean, even though it didn't make any sense, there was a point in my childhood where my felt sense was that I was worse than Hitler. There were enough circumstances where I seemed to miss the mark or get it wrong that I developed a profound sense of shame. And the more shame I felt, the more driven I was to use my strategies of perfectionism and striving to overcome it.
To be honest, I definitely don't regret some of this. There were real benefits to developing those strategies. That striving helped me earn a PhD and a lot of professional success. But none of that healed the deep sense of shame and feelings of being unlovable that I carried inside of myself.
Looking back now, I can see that it made absolutely no sense that I had a false sense of being worse than Hitler. But emotional reasoning does not respond to logic. It only responds to love. More on that later.
Since my life was so riddled with anxiety, my version of self-discovery was to learn about overcoming fear and anxiety. And what I learned was that the only way to get through fear is to face it head-on. The way I talk about this with my clients now is to think about worry or fear like a hypothesis. In science, you can't just accept a hypothesis as true. You have to test it. And so whenever we have a fear, that's how we want to approach it. We want to conduct an experiment and find out for ourselves.
I started conducting a bunch of experiments to test my fears of being weird or too much or unlovable, among many others. One of the ways that I did that was to test a specific social anxiety I had about singing in front of people. From early in childhood, I had absolutely loved singing, and in high school, I wanted to be around musical theater, but I didn't have the courage to actually try out for a part. So I decided to be in the tech crew, just so I could get close to it.
Once I learned in graduate school that I had to encourage my clients to face their fears, I knew I couldn't advise them to do it unless I was willing to do the same. That meant I had to conduct some experiments about singing in front of other people and test whether or not I was going to make a fool of myself.
I started going to weekly karaoke nights with some of my friends, and at first, I would only go up to the microphone if I could sing at the same time as somebody else. My body was so flooded with anxiety that that was about as much as I could handle to start. But over time, I started to go up and sing songs on my own. And eventually, we got to a point as a group where we'd play a silly game that we called Fuck You Karaoke.
When we played that game, no one was allowed to put in songs for themselves. Somebody in the group would put up a song for me, and I didn't know what it was until the title came up on the screen. When I walked up to the microphone, I had no idea if I was even going to know what the song was or be able to sing it. I just had to go up and figure it out. By that time, instead of being terrifying, it was actually hilarious. Because by then, I had plenty of experiences going up to the microphone and singing — and even if I made a mistake or got part of a song wrong, it wasn't a big deal. No one really cared.
All of the pressure I had put on myself, all of those perfectionistic standards, didn't matter. Not only did I discover that no one was holding me to the same high standards I was holding myself to, but I could also face discomfort. I could go up to that microphone feeling all of those nervous feelings in my body and handle them. I learned that disaster was not the thing living on the other side of my fears. It was actually freedom.
Much later, I noticed an opportunity to take the practice of facing that fear even further. There was a version of me from high school that I kept thinking about — the one who had wanted to audition for the school musical and didn't, who got close by working the tech crew, but never actually walked out onto that stage. And years later, I decided I wanted to give that part of myself a do-over. Not to prove that I could do it or because I thought I'd get a standing ovation. It was a gift to that younger me who didn't yet have the tools to face that kind of fear.
I found a local community theater and went to the open auditions. There was only one role in my age range, and I knew I didn't really want the part. I didn't actually care about getting the role. If I did, that would've been great. But if I didn't, that was also fine. I just wanted to show up for myself.
I walked into that building and my anxiety was a 10 out of 10. So much so that I wanted to turn around and walk out. I knew I needed to give myself a moment for my body to adjust before taking the next step, and I decided to go into the bathroom. I gave myself a moment to arrive, to be like, okay, I'm actually doing this. And then I decided to take it one moment at a time.
I walked into the room and saw a table with sign-up sheets for the different roles. I circled the one in my age range, wrote down my name and information, and I turned it in. I sat there in the audience and watched the other people audition while waiting for them to call my name. When they did, I walked up on that stage and sang the audition song. My hands might have been shaking a little, but I projected my voice. And actually, in that moment, my voice felt powerful.
Next, there was a dance portion, and I got up on the stage with everyone else and did the choreography. And that was it. The experience was over. I left that night feeling so proud of myself. I even made a Facebook post about it at the time because I wanted to share my story with others. I wanted to say that it's never too late to go back and face your fears or follow your dreams.
Here's what I know now that I didn't know then. It wasn't really about musical theater. It was about going back for a kid who never got to walk out on that stage. Giving her something that she'd been waiting for for a long time. And I think that's actually one of the most profound forms of love there is — the kind you act your way into.
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[SPIRITUAL AWAKENING]
For a while, I was pretty happy facing my fears and supporting other people to overcome theirs. I began my career as a licensed psychologist specializing in cognitive behavioral therapy for anxiety disorders. I loved the grounded, evidence-based, scientific approach. It felt like it gave me a lot of predictability. There were clear rules, even manuals, about how it all worked. At that time, science was my religion. And I felt very secure in my worldview as an atheist.
And then something surprising — well, no, shocking — happened. I experienced what I can only refer to as a spontaneous spiritual awakening.
It started when I learned about a particular spiritual concept, and as I was learning about it, I remember my skeptical mind pushing back at the same time that my body was having this very strong response. Looking back now, I can see that what transpired over the next several days is what people sometimes refer to as ascension symptoms. It escalated to the point where I felt very sick in bed with symptoms that were flu-ish for almost a day.
And when I finally felt better, I decided to go to a friend's housewarming party. My friend's house was in this beautiful vineyard in Arkansas, and as I was sitting there with everyone, I was watching this — in retrospect, very unremarkable — sunset that I was so amazed by. I didn't have any words for what I felt at the time, but now I could say that the boundary of my personal energy body dissolved. I felt at complete oneness with everything around me. I think that's why I loved that sunset so much. It was unlike anything I have ever felt before or since, and it's one of those things that's ineffable.
Shortly after that, I started to experience many things that a person going through spiritual emergence starts to notice. It seemed like there were messages around me everywhere — in license plates, signs, songs on the radio, so many synchronicities. This was the beginning of the crack in my old way of understanding life.
If you've had an experience like this, where your foundational views of life started to fall apart, then you understand how you tend to cling to the way you've always understood the world. For me, I started questioning my own sanity. Because after all, I was a clinical psychologist who knew that one of the criteria for a type of psychosis is to think that there are special messages personally for you in the way that things around you are arranged. I comforted myself by remembering that people who are experiencing psychosis don't question whether or not they have intact reality testing.
The next thing I tried was to dive into the world of physics to try to understand how these experiences could be explained by science. It still felt important to hold on to some foundation in science. It helped for a while, but even physics still can't explain a lot of deeply spiritual experiences.
Eventually, I started to explore spirituality more specifically and found Ram Dass, who I related to so much from his own journey as a clinical psychologist into spirituality. The way he shared his personal stories helped to validate and normalize what I was going through.
And even though I'm a 4/6 profile type in human design, I also have a lot of one line energy in my chart. And that investigator-like energy prompted me to dive into all of these ancient wisdom traditions and energy medicine teachings with the same fervor that I had previously given to science.
It took some time for my old worldview to dissolve, and there was even a period of void between the old falling apart and having a new foundation to understand the world. A new way of understanding myself. I eventually came out of the spiritual closet within my scientific community, knowing that there would be some people who would never interact with me the same way. But it was unbearable to try to fit into a version of myself that I no longer was.
As with any old identity or paradigm that's fallen apart, it has been such a blessing to be free from its constraints. And that's not to say it wasn't uncomfortable and scary at the time. But now, when I see that there's something that needs to be shed from my life, I have just as much excitement about the possibilities of becoming as I do feelings of grief over what I'm saying goodbye to. And I trust that looking back, I will be full of gratitude for the change.
That trust — that's something I've had to learn. And it's one of the things I most want to share with you.
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[THE COLLECTIVE SHIFT]
Because what I've come to understand is that this process of unbecoming and becoming again isn't just personal. It's happening at a global scale right now.
Walking through many cycles of unbecoming and becoming again has revealed a lot of patterns about how transformation actually works. It's not straight line. It moves through a series of stages that offer us initiations. And it's one of my passions and greatest honors to guide other people through that process.
What I really love to do is bridge both worlds I've spent so much time in. I take all of the things that I've learned from shamanic arts and energy medicine, human design, psychedelic-assisted therapy, and ground them into very practical, evidence-based guidance. To me, these two worlds are not opposites. And seeing them as one thing is where real transformation comes from.
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[WHY NOW]
Now that you know a little bit more about me, I want to share why I'm creating this podcast at this particular moment in time.
The first has to do with my profile type. Being someone with a six line as one of my profile numbers means that I live my life in three stages. It's about a 20-year period in the life of someone with a six line — a period of metabolizing the results of their discoveries and developing the wisdom that will eventually make them into what the human design system calls a role model.
I have absolutely been feeling this transition in my own life, and it's one of the main reasons I feel called to share so many personal stories as my way of embodying my human design. Role model energy is all about teaching from embodied experience. And to be honest with you, there's still a part of this that feels strange to me. My six line energy is my unconscious profile line. But I am experiencing people recognizing me for this energy. So I guess I'm going to lean into it.
I can already feel how there will be moments where my mind is going to say things like, "Are you sure you're really going to share that publicly with anyone who can listen?" And the answer is yes. I'm just going to step into deep trust and see what happens.
The second reason has to do with what's happening collectively. And this one genuinely fascinates me. That process of unbecoming and becoming — it's happening at a global scale. And we need frameworks and tools to navigate through it now more than ever.
From what I understand, and I'm not an expert about this, we've been in a cycle that exists for about 400 years dominated by an energy called the Cross of Planning. This energy prompted us to gather together, cooperate, and plan collectively. To develop hierarchical institutions. To feel this deep human urge to fit in. To belong to something greater than ourselves. It created a world oriented around the group. Our security came from the tribe. Our identity came from our role within a system.
And every energy has both a light and a shadow side. Because it was such a group-oriented energy, it also created a lot of pressure to conform. To suppress individual differentiation. Human design is called the science of differentiation. So this collective energy from the Cross of Planning has really promoted a lot of conditioning around seeking approval and believing that our worth is tied to our usefulness to the group.
Now that energy is dissolving. And there's a phenomenon in behaviorism that helps me understand what we're watching in the world right now. When reinforcement is removed from a behavior — think about a classic operant conditioning experiment you may have learned about in an intro psych class, where a rat presses a lever to get food pellets. Whenever they press the lever, they reliably get food, so they keep pressing. But if at some point you remove the food, the first thing the rat does is press the lever even more. That's called the extinction burst. Even though reinforcement has been taken away, the first thing an organism does is try harder at the same approach.
The old paradigm of the Cross of Planning — this group-based mentality — is having an extinction burst. The energy that has been driving it and reinforcing it is dissolving. So many people and systems are trying harder to make the old models work. We can see many people clinging to their group identities for dear life.
But we're shifting into something new. The new energy is called the Cross of the Sleeping Phoenix. And its essence is individual awakening. The awakening of the individual as the new organizing principle of humanity. Where the Cross of Planning said, "Belong to the group to survive," the Cross of the Sleeping Phoenix says, "Know yourself or be lost."
And what's fascinating to me about it is that it's the sleeping phoenix, not the risen one. What that feels like to me — and the process of unbecoming and becoming that I was describing personally — is that void stage. Like the stage of the chrysalis when the caterpillar goes into its cocoon and dissolves into goo before it transforms into something new.
The phoenix as an archetype of death and rebirth is unique from others like the hero's journey or the wounded healer. In the hero's journey, the hero is tested but endures, returns with wisdom. The wounded healer is broken and recovers. With the phoenix, there's no enduring. There's no remnant of the old that persists. It enters into the fire of purification and is burned into ash.
One of the shadows of the phoenix archetype is wanting to escape that ash phase — or the void phase. To rush the rising before the burning has been completed. What feels true to me right now is that dissolution is not going to be a choice for any of us. The choice will be doing it consciously and on our own terms, or unconsciously — waiting for the fire of purification to come our way while we cling to the old.
The third reason I feel called to share this right now has to do with my own incarnation cross. I have what's called the cross of service. And your incarnation cross is about the energy you're here to embody in this lifetime. For me, that's service. As I see what's happening collectively, I feel a strong call to take all of the wisdom I've gathered through my study of psychology and spirituality — and especially my embodied experience — and share it with others so that they can have more ease in their own transformation.
And actually, my very favorite part is that the process of transformation itself can be an adventure. Another aspect of the cross of service is to see patterns of how humanity can be aligned with more joy and vitality. So even though we have this big paradigm shift coming and there are going to be moments that are uncomfortable or difficult, this could actually be fun too.
As much as this work can be challenging, there are moments where I'm able to zoom out to a broader perspective and look at the comedy of the whole thing. Like watching my own life unfold like a movie in a theater. When you watch a movie, you're not mad at the writer because it's a tragedy or a mystery or a thriller. You just take it in as entertainment for whatever it is. And I do my best to try to observe my own life from the same perspective. Fascinated by the unfolding of my storyline.
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[SOUL BLOOM]
The way I feel called to be of service right now is to offer my embodied human design experience through this podcast and to support people through Soul Bloom Coaching.
The reason I decided to call it Soul Bloom is because we go through these cyclical processes of transformation. When the seed of a new phase of life is planted, it's planted in darkness, in dirt even. But somehow, that seed receives nourishment, and it cracks open, leaving its old form behind. It builds roots. It makes its way to the light. And with that light and the rain, something beautiful grows. The bud of new life begins to emerge.
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[THE VISION]
I shared my personal story of feeling completely worthless, unlovable, and just filled by shame for a reason. There was a time when it felt impossible that I could love myself. But what I've learned is that I get to decide the conditions for loving myself, and I can choose to make that love unconditional.
I've seen so many ways that I was always the creator of my own limitations — so many of them. And I can see those self-limiting patterns in others. I want to share with you how I overcame those limitations so that you can do the same. So that no one has to be the limiting factor in their own happiness and self-love.
Once you can get through all of those limiting beliefs, you see that you hold all of the power. With that power, you can change your life in an instant. You make decisions every moment about how you want to shape your reality. It was difficult for me to realize — like Dorothy — I had the power all along. At first, I wanted to deny that that was true. Because if I had the power all along, and I used it to stay stuck, then I'd have to deal with all the discomfort around the idea that I could have saved myself or changed my life sooner. But that's where deep compassion for the human experience comes in. I can't know something until I know it. And there's no value in going back and being upset with myself for something I didn't see or understand at the time.
Instead, now that I see that I have the power, I want to use it as widely as I can.
My vision for healing has three parts.
The first part starts with the self. Building a solid foundation of love and self-acceptance. Acknowledging your own power. As I continue to share stories with you, I'll share a lot of my ideas about how you put this into practice. I'm a huge fan of spiritual ideas. Without practical wisdom to ground them, they can actually get in the way of real healing, real growth. I'm excited to share the practical ways to ground that unconditional love for yourself.
But we're not alone in this world, which takes us to the second phase. Learning how to love another while maintaining our own sovereignty and love of self.
Over the years, I've seen many relationships operating with an unspoken contract. I won't provoke your ego if you don't provoke mine. The relationship functions to maintain a consistent, stable sense of self. But here's what I've found personally, and what I've witnessed again and again with clients. Every person we're in relationship with is a sacred mirror. The things we love most about someone often reflect a quality we carry inside of ourselves. And the things that trigger us — the things that activate the strongest reactions — those are pointing somewhere inside of us that needs attention or compassion or healing. When something we see in someone else triggers us, it's an opportunity to love that thing inside of ourselves even more deeply.
This is what I mean by conscious relationship. Not a relationship that protects the ego, but one that becomes a container for mutual growth where both people become stronger, more honest, more themselves through their love and connection. What if instead of trying to maintain a stable sense of self, we could build relationships that actually help us evolve through this paradigm shift? Relationships where we take our sovereignty as individuals and use it to co-create something neither of us could become alone.
To me, this is one of the most exciting edges of this work.
I attended an advanced human design training and retreat hosted by Dana and Shayna of DayLuna. And what was especially remarkable to me about it was the lack of competition energy among the people who were there. I think that was absolutely about the energetic container that was created by Shayna and Dana. But I also think it's because of the human design system itself. We were all learning about and exploring a system that says: don't be anyone else but yourself.
What if instead of seeing someone who's living a very different life, with different values and different beliefs — what if we were fascinated by it? What if it sparked curiosity instead of judgment? We could look at the unfolding of everyone's life like, wow, that's how you're doing this journey? Your movie's so different from mine. That's so cool.
And trust me, I understand that there's a lot of pain and human suffering happening right now, and this approach doesn't work for everybody. But if we can come to some understanding that human beings are going to do this journey of life differently, then maybe instead of trying to control how people are doing it, we can live in the moment and focus on the people who want to create and explore in a similar way to us.
And the final phase of this vision is love of all of humanity. Ram Dass once talked about thinking of people the way you think of trees. He said, when you look at a tree and how the branches break off, and one grows this way and another grows that way, you're not mad at the tree for how it's growing. You just take it in. I believe that we can learn to do that with each other.
My goal with both Fascinated by Design and Soul Bloom Coaching is to create a gathering place — a community for everyone who's exploring how to navigate through this transition. Where people have the tools to love and accept themselves, others, and all of humanity.
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[SACRED DISCOMFORT]
I want to share one more piece of my human design before we close, because I think it points to a very clear starting place for all of this. I have what's called the gate of crisis as one of my moon gates. This energy is about navigating emotional hardship. And for me, as my moon gate, it drives me beneath the surface. An unconscious motivation to seek emotional depth, and to be pulled towards experiences that require transformation.
Even though I've been through many periods of my life that were very emotionally challenging, I wouldn't change a thing. Because of everything that I learned from it. What I've developed through all of that is a relationship to uncomfortable emotions that I find to be different from how many people relate to them.
We have words like positive and negative emotions. Many of us treat certain emotions like they're bad things we should avoid at all costs. But what if emotional discomfort is not a signal to escape or control? What if it's a doorway? What if the feelings we're desperately trying to avoid are actually the ones carrying the most information? They're messengers, and they're here to guide you.
What I've found personally is that discomfort is the secret doorway to the freedom and joy that I desire in my life. When discomfort is arising, I lean into it — like I did with my fear of singing in public.
Our emotions come to us in waves. It's e-motion — energy in motion. They build to a peak, and then they dissipate. And like the waves in the ocean, you're not going to defeat them. You need to learn to ride it. The goal isn't to stop the hard feelings. It's to develop the capacity to be with a feeling and let it move through. Our ability to stay with what's uncomfortable without collapsing or running — that's where freedom actually lives.
Since this is such a critical part of the growth process, I really see it as the foundation of everything I talk about in my vision. I've created something called Sacred Discomfort — an offering that teaches you to turn toward what's hard with curiosity and acceptance. I'll have a link in the show notes for anyone who's interested in exploring this practice.
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[CLOSE]
Thank you so much for being here and learning a little bit about who I am and why I'm here sharing my stories with you.
Moving forward, some episodes will be deeper reflections on specific aspects of my design and what it's like to live them. Other times I'll be sharing my broader vision for humanity navigating through these seasons of change. Some episodes will be whatever fascination I genuinely can't stop thinking about. And because sharing my opinions is a key part of embodying my design, I may also offer some episodes that are just my unsolicited opinions.
I would absolutely love for you to invite me to share some thoughts about your own curiosities by emailing me at suzanne@soulbloomcoaching.com with the subject line: Invited.
Because my authority is the spleen, some aspects of how this podcast will be structured are still a mystery to me — because I'm following my guidance in real time. And I'm genuinely excited to see how this next storyline of my movie unfolds with all of you.
Until next time — be mindful of what you create.