Ep#10 Human Design: Leading a Revolution from the Inside Out with Elyse Preston

In this episode of Your Story Medicine, I welcome Connection Coach and Human Design Guide, Elyse Preston. Elyse’s work focuses on centering connection as an essential ingredient for healing and social transformation with a mission to support leaders, changemakers and visionaries to experience energy healing and self-awareness so that they can cultivate communities, services, and experiences that center radical healing and liberation. Elyse defines Human Design and shares with us the power this system holds, as well as the ways in which it can help us cultivate self-love and self-understanding.

Feeling good while doing good. Doesn’t that sound euphoric? Elyse is here to help us understand how Human Design can help us achieve that and shares her personal experience of using the wisdom of Human Design to stay rooted in challenging times.

How would you describe your medicine?

I’m so excited to be blending healing, alignment, and pleasure. Human design is a tool that helps us with knowing ourselves, loving ourselves, trusting ourselves, and being ourselves. There’s often a pressure to be overworked, so I’m taking a stand for pushing ourselves outside of that box and releasing those harmful forms of conditioning, leaning into the truth that we can be of highest service to ourselves and our planet by utilizing our energy and our gifts, as well as nourishment and connection.

What is your ancestral lineage and how has that influenced your medicine today?

I’m biracial so my mom’s lineage is German, Czechoslovakian, and Polish and my dad is black. I don’t have much context around what countries in Africa his side comes from, but we do have ancestors that settled in Texas and Louisiana after being forced to come to the US. Now, my family resides in Maryland. 

I’ve been navigating living in a biracial body and growing up in predominantly white spaces, while also having the experience of my parents navigating a world that’s different than the one they grew up in. As a result of moving to a more urban area, I have been exposed to different opportunities than my cousins and other relatives that were growing up in small towns. I’ve been trying to understand my own racial and socioeconomic identities. I’ve always been very intuitive, emotional, and spiritual and I grew up with a lot of questions, which has been very formative to the work that I do now. I’ve always felt like a lone wolf, so a big part of my brand is about connection, belonging, and loving up on what makes us individuals. It’s all about supporting your inherent worthiness and the authentic, unique person you’ve always been. 

Tell us about your transition from working for a non-profit to being in Human Design. Did it happen overnight?

Not at all. It was a very winding journey. Undergrad gave me a lot of knowledge, power, and understanding to really start to own aspects of my identity and to challenge places where that was being harmed. After college, I worked at a community center and had a dual experience of gratitude for my connection with the community members along with disappointment and frustration with the structure of the organization that I was working within. There was an all-white board and leadership team that was not connected to and prioritizing the needs of the community. I hopped around to a few different non-profits and found the same themes. I was at a loss and getting to a point of apathy.

Yoga teacher training was transformative for me. During that 10 months, I went deep into my spiritual exploration and that’s where I discovered human design and just became completely obsessed. It wasn’t about creating a business around it at first, it was about sharing what I learned. I hosted community yoga classes and self-care Saturday events at my house, to center our own self-care and healing.

It was in a conversation with a mutual friend of ours that allowed me to consider expanding this into a career. It took a few years of sharing with people in my community before I invested in a business coach and created a brand around these offerings. 

How would you describe Human Design?

Human design is a system that supports us with experiencing self-love and self-understanding. 

It’s a combination of astrology, the Chinese I Ching, the Hindu chakra system, the tree of life in Kabalah, and a little bit of quantum physics and quantum mechanics. 

This system is based in energetics and helps us root into the fact that we are all carrying with us a really unique vibration and frequency and through our healing process, we are deconditioning and releasing what doesn’t belong to us in order to come back home to ourselves. 

Can you break down the energy types?

There are five key energy types within the system of human design.

Jumakae is a Manifestor – These people initiate things and are bold and visionary. They’re driven, powerful, impulsive, and influential. Their strongest strategy is to inform and doing so with bursts of energy. If they aren’t engaging in the process of informing, they may experience a lot of resistance from others.

I am a Projector – They’re known as the seers and the guides. They’re able to see into other people and systems in order to bring more efficiency. Their strengths are around managing, supporting, and directing, as they are insightful and intuitive. Their strategy is to wait for recognition and invitation. If we offer unsolicited insight, it can come off as bossy or won’t be received well. Consent goes a long way with projectors. 

There are also Generators, Manifesting Generators, and Reflectors. Book a session with Elyse to find out which one you are!

How can Human Design support us in being rooted in challenging times?

It has offered me so many supportive tools to help me navigate this unprecedented and challenging time in a way that is unique, personalized, and supportive for my own energetic needs and soul’s purpose. As a projector, I know now that I’m someone who needs a lot of rest to feel restored. Taking naps and working with my feet up is supportive for me as a projector and that’s something I may have shamed myself for before. It also gives us information about the environments and foods/food habits that work best for us. 

If you could envision yourself as a future ancestor, what would you say to Elyse who was still figuring it out?

This quote from Karen Curry Parker is tied into the theme of today’s episode:

“We are designed to feel good when we are being who we are and doing what our soul came here to do.”

I would love to share that guidance with myself because I spent a lot of times operating in a space that didn’t feel good to me.  

Conclusion: Everything is working in our highest divine favor. Human Design is a tool we can use to support our self-love and self-understanding, helping to bring us to a place where we can reach our highest potential. We’re all unique beings with different strengths. Strategies that work for someone else may not work for us. It’s important to dive deep into who we are to figure out how we can best serve our soul’s purpose.

Action Integration: Try out Elyse’s 5-Day Human Design Masterclass, write about your overall experience, and consider sharing your findings with someone who would be interested in hearing them. You never know what you’ll learn about yourself!

Learn more about Elyse and her offerings:

Visit her website: www.bemoreconnected.net 

Follow her on Instagram: www.instagram.com/be.more.connected 

Join her Facebook Group - Human Design for Visionary Changemakers: www.facebook.com/groups/1080685602303969 

FREE 5-Day Human Design Challenge: bit.ly/humandesignmasterclass