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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.
Embodying My Collective Energy and Open G Center
Fascinated By Design with Suzanne Meunier, Ph.D.
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[00:00:00]
Hello, I'm Suzanne. Some people have been asking me what it's been like since launching, and to be honest with you, life has actually been pretty magical.
It seems to me like a lot of that has been stemming from getting out of my mind and following my strategy and authority for sure.
This past weekend, my splenic authority and my four line energy was guiding me to a bunch of really fun new connections. And they also guided me to an interaction with somebody that ended a 13-year process that I've been trying to work through, and it all happened simply in an instant. So if that's not magical, I don't know what is.
[00:01:00]
Today I wanna share about some aspects of my design that I've been thinking about a lot. If you're not very familiar with human design, you might get a little bit lost with some of the terms, but that's okay if you don't understand it all. There's still aspects of my experience that I think anyone can relate to.
And for those of you who are human design enthusiasts, I'm actually going to link my human design chart in the show notes. I know I get curious about other people's designs when they're sharing information about human design, so I want you to know the mechanics of the person who is speaking here.
I wanna also specifically follow up and explain the little intro to the intro that I added to the very first episode.
I'm gonna start with a story.
[00:02:00]
For most of my life, I've processed whatever was going on in my life pretty privately. Part of that was that I didn't feel that there was anyone safe to share it with. And also, as a coping mechanism, I tried really hard to present myself as competent and together.
As I shared in the first episode, I had this deep sense of shame underneath everything, and so I had a bunch of masks that I was wearing to try to hide, to prevent what felt like inevitable rejection.
I've actually had a close friend say to me, "Suzanne, your superpower is appearing fine." And it really was. It was a skill that I had learned. But that skill also prevented me from being seen.
[00:03:00]
Over the years, I've gotten really good at being much more vulnerable and transparent. But a pattern that has continued for a long time was to keep my cards close while I was in process with something, and then share it after the fact. Like after I figured it out or grew in some way, when it somehow felt complete.
So here's a little context for the note that I added to the beginning of the first episode.
I took a leadership training course with my shamanic arts teacher, and we had a section of the workshop where we were learning story crafting. The teacher had us break into pairs to find the bones of our story, and I decided to tell one I'd never told before. I told stories all the time in my work as a therapist.
[00:04:00]
But I figured I'd learn more by trying to create a new one than just revising one I was familiar with.
I developed some bullet points and a landing pad, or the takeaway of the story, and there was nothing about it that felt remarkable at the time.
After we all finished with our preparation, we all sat down to listen to each other's stories. My teacher paused because to her it felt like somebody had something that they needed to share or ask. It appeared like she was tracking someone's energy. I checked in with myself and I was like, "Yeah, I don't have anything to say."
Or at least I thought.
[00:05:00]
I sat in the audience and I watched several other people telling their stories, and after about the third person, I noticed that my body was shaking. The longer I sat there, the more uncontrollable the shaking became.
Now, this is something that happens to me from time to time when I have an energetic activation, and I could tell it was not going away. So when she asked who was next, I said, "I have to go."
I stood up and walked to the front of the room to tell my story, and I immediately felt like I was gonna cry. I asked to take a second, and my teacher asked me if I wanted a hug. I said yes. Hug seemed like a really good idea in that moment.
[00:06:00]
And in response, she came up and hugged me, but not only that, the entire group of people in the class surrounded me in one giant group hug.
And that, of course, made me sob uncontrollably.
I gave myself some time to release all of the emotional tension that in retrospect had been building up for about 20 years. Then I started to tell my story just as I planned it.
The story was basically about the first time I let someone in to see the messy parts of me.
I was in grad school when I became friends with a woman who was 20 years older than me. She felt safe to share the truth of all of the difficulty I was experiencing at the time.
[00:07:00]
I told her a lot of things. What I didn't realize at the time was that I was dumping my problems onto her.
She cared for me enough to tell me the truth about it. She told me, "That's not how friendship works." It was the only way I had experienced friendship until then, except I was always the one doing the listening.
The point of my story was to appreciate the courage it takes for someone to tell you an uncomfortable truth. As I told that story, I had tears streaming down my face the entire time. But the story lost nothing. In fact, I think it benefited from the raw emotion that I was feeling.
[00:08:00]
As I looked into the eyes of everyone in the audience, they were locked in to every word.
That was a really powerful experience for me. It was a full circle moment.
That story, that moment when I shared that story, is the most raw I've ever been when standing in a leadership position, or at least in a situation where I was the center of attention.
And what it impressed upon me was that I don't need masks.
This is why the first two episodes felt a little off to me. Not because they were bad in any way. I'm proud of them. But because I know I wasn't fully connected to the feelings of what I was talking about.
[00:09:00]
When I talk about the work I do, I sometimes call myself a pattern breaker. And for me, right now, I'm breaking the pattern once and for all of waiting until something is resolved or perfected before I share it.
I'm always so honored when somebody gifts me their vulnerability.
For a while now, I've been feeling called to drop my self-protective masks. I just wanna be for real, for real in everything that I share here with you.
And just like I've been having some difficulty embodying aspects of my design in the conversations I have with friends who are also human design enthusiasts, I know we're all experiencing these kinds of challenges.
[00:10:00]
Specifically today, I wanna talk a little bit about the energy of my channels. I have two defined channels, which are the channel of acceptance and the channel of judgment.
When I was planning the first episode, I had so many things I wanted to say, and I was trying to figure out the most logical way to present everything without droning on and on in a way that's not respectful to people's time.
I sat down and just randomly recorded a bunch of things that were on my mind. There was a lot of what I said that felt really good, but I also had some technical problems recording it.
Listening back, I realized that I was including a bunch of details that probably didn't need to be in it. So I salvaged the recordings I had, and I used them to make a revised script. I took out the parts that didn't need to be there, and
[00:11:00]
it had a better overall flow. When I created the final version of it, I was reading a script of all of those revisions.
The lower expression of the channel of acceptance is needing all of your facts and figures aligned and not trusting the words to just come out. That's exactly what felt off to me in the way the episode came to be.
When I tell stories with clients for the first time, it's always amazing to me how I somehow pull it all together in this way that lands beautifully for them so that they get the insight that's exactly what they need. When that happens, I feel that channel in its highest expression. I know that gift is inside of me.
Some conditioning that I've had from my life in academia didn't help here
[00:12:00]
either. You know, when you write a paper, you just kinda get all your thoughts down on the page and then go back and revise and revise and revise, and eventually get to the flow of the wording to be just right.
Because of how important the launch of the podcast was to me, it was so easy to get pulled back into those patterns and energetic expressions. To top it off, I also have the channel of judgment, which probably intensified all of this because I can see endless ways how things can be improved and corrected.
The lowest expression of that channel is when I'm directing that energy towards myself, like I was with those first couple recordings.
All of that said, I absolutely love the practice of celebrating.
[00:13:00]
No matter what the journey was, no matter how all of this unfolded, the truth is I'm celebrating my accomplishment to get this podcast going and all of the things that happened along the way.
I'll share with you how I got stuck a few times on my way here. It was actually clarity about a different part of my design that helped me to get unstuck.
For those of you who may be checking out my chart, you can see that I have a completely open G center. There's a lot of aspects of having an open G center that I've been so fascinated by, like how I can connect with just about anybody. I learned the hard way trying to get some of my friend groups together that that was unique when I realized that they didn't all necessarily get along.
[00:14:00]
I also often joke that I'm on version 4.3 or 8.2 of who I am.
When trying to think about how to get my vision out into the world, I struggled with a lower expression of my open G center. I was having difficulty committing to a consistent identity for my business. The way I was thinking about it was I just wanna serve the most people I possibly can. So how can I package or present this information to serve the most people? And I figured I'd reverse engineer from that.
I had so many different ideas. I considered a book at one point. I've done a previous version of a podcast. More recently, I went to a conference where people were talking about developing apps, and I started getting a ton of ideas about how I can make my vision
[00:15:00]
into an app. After a while, none of those ideas felt like the right thing. And I'd get frustrated. There were even some points where I felt hopeless. Like I was never gonna figure it out.
It wasn't until I noticed a pattern of connecting in with somebody else's energy and amplifying them that I realized why I was having so many false starts. I might have been connecting in with somebody who had a defined G center, and I know for sure that some of those people were generators.
As an open G center and as a projector, I was connecting in and amplifying their energy. I got totally caught up in it.
[00:16:00]
I got lost in their expressions.
When I was attempting to bring one of those ideas into creation, I noticed a lot of the energy had gone away because I wasn't connected to somebody else's field anymore. It was really confusing why I had so much creativity, so many insights, all of this enthusiasm about an idea that could dry up so quickly.
That's when it became clear I had to return to my fascinations. And since human design has been a fascination, a consistent fascination for a long time, it was obvious that the most joyful expression of my vision was to create something through the lens of human design.
[00:17:00]
Now that I'm diving in even more deeply, I'm seeing an aspect of my design that is making me feel like creating this podcast was actually an inevitability.
It turns out I have a lot of collective energy in my chart. Out of the 19 unique gates that I have, 11 of them are collective. I think it's even eight of those that are in the logic and understanding circuit. To top that off, I also have gate 44 as both of my north node gates. So I have pattern recognition galore in my chart.
I had an insight recently about my experience with all of this collective energy.
[00:18:00]
For a long time, I felt like I've seen these patterns, these collective patterns, and I share my insights with some friends. Sometimes they're into it, but whether or not they are, there's always this feeling of it not fully landing that I didn't understand until recently.
The missing piece was that this collective energy really isn't meant to be transmitted one-on-one. Even if somebody is a human design enthusiast or someone from my shamanic arts community who loves talking about big existential ideas, there's still a disconnect in transmitting collective energy on an individual scale.
The logical circuit I've discovered actually requires testing, observing, refining, and sharing. Both of my channels, all of the gates in my incarnation
[00:19:00]
cross and more are all part of the circuit.
So now it's clear sharing my vision is necessary. It's a necessary part of expressing that collective energy. It's the completion of it. And if I'm really committed to embodying my human design, it's a non-negotiable.
What I've been doing for the last 20 years when I've been hanging out on the roof has been honing and revising on an individual level or group level with my clients. The patterns I've observed and I teach about all the time now have been refined in those contexts, but they haven't been tested at the level of the collective.
[00:20:00]
Now it makes perfect sense. It's almost laughable, the unfolding of my story, that I'm here at this transition into this final stage of my six line, coming to the realization that I have no choice but to share it collectively.
Fascinated by Design is the most logical way to do that.
One of the biggest reasons why I thought about making a podcast specifically was because I wanna create community. I want a back and forth. I want this to be a conversation with all of you.
As I've been really thinking more about the expression of collective energy, I've realized I can't complete this expression of energy without your feedback.
[00:21:00]
I was having a conversation with a new friend recently talking about all of this, and she had my chart up and was looking at it. She commented to me about something that just made light bulbs go off. It was about my open G center perhaps being a help in my ability to transmit this collective energy since I don't have this consistent sense of self. There's not a specific type of identity through which I'm sharing these observations.
Since I don't have an anchor to a fixed identity, I can move into someone else's world and genuinely meet them there. I'm not comparing their experience to some version of myself. I'm just with them. And then I can step back out just as easily.
[00:22:00]
Teaching people to honor and accept difference, even better, to be fascinated by it, is a big part of what I feel called to do. We're not all built the same way. We're not supposed to be. When we stop trying to make everyone operate like we do, something opens up in relationships, in families, in how we move through the world.
It's these kinds of details about human design that's why I'm so hooked on it. I just happened to be born at the right time, so my personality and design are aligned in such a way where I have these gifts all come together in this unique expression. It's just the coolest thing.
[00:23:00]
What I'm hoping I can do by trying to be more raw is to be an even clearer messenger for what the collective needs to hear about the patterns we're in that no longer serve us.
The patterns that I've discovered working with people on an individual basis about how to overcome struggle, to own their own power and their perspective.
In my heart, in my bones, I feel that these patterns can be of great value to the times that we're in now. But I can't figure out all of this alone. I need your feedback about what sticks and what doesn't. It's only in having an open conversation with anyone who chooses to listen to this and feels
[00:24:00]
moved to share their insights that I'll know if the patterns that I'm seeing hold or if they need to be further refined.
If something has landed for you in this episode or any of the previous ones, I'd love to hear your feedback. I'd love to know what patterns lit something up for you, what patterns you've been able to bring into your life. Of course, for my human design community out there, if you're intrigued by something in my chart and how it relates to my self-expression on this podcast, I would love to hear your insights or questions.
I'd love to share in your fascinations.
And as always, if there's a pattern you'd like me to share my opinion about, I'm happy to be invited by you.
[00:25:00]
Thank you to everyone who asked questions about how it's been launching this project and what's been unfolding since. Like I said, it's really been surprising and magical in the most amazing ways. I find that as I step more fully into my power and authenticity, the universe has been responding almost to the point where I'm like, "Is this real?"
Recently, it's been responding in some really exciting ways. I'll share more about what's in the works soon. But there will likely be some opportunities to join me for some deep connection and exploration of our creative power through a women's retreat and a couples retreat, I think, eventually.
If you haven't already, make sure to join my mailing list to be the first to hear about these opportunities, as
[00:26:00]
both of these experiences will be intimate intentionally and therefore spaces will be limited. You'll also grab my free Sacred Discomfort guide as a thank you for connecting.
I'm really looking forward to sharing more about these exciting developments with you soon. For now, I'm gonna follow the playfulness of my fascinations and trust that the right words will come through when I need them. What I've been learning slowly and imperfectly is to trust that this will be true for the podcast too. I'm not gonna force an episode just because it's been a certain amount of time or whatever reason I think in my mind I should be posting something. I'm gonna wait until something is genuinely moving through me that needs to be said.
[00:27:00]
For me, that's working with my design instead of against it. When something is right, my splenic authority tells me. This episode happened that way. I wasn't really planning to record. I just knew it was time.
Thank you for spending some time with me today, and I thank you in advance for any of you who choose to share your insights with me.
Until next time, be mindful of what you create.