What is conditioning in the Human Design System

Welcome to Palm Tree Talks, a podcast dedicated to creating a stress free life. My name is Astrid and I’m the founder of palmtreemoments.com. I invite you to join me as I dive into the personal development system called human design. Let’s talk about travel, business, mindset, self love and stress reduction. And how to translate the insights of the human design system into your travel and work life.

What is conditioning? 

That is a question that I often get when I’m talking about our deconditioning process. And conditioning is something that’s very hard to grasp when you’re right in the middle of it. So when you’re in the red race, when you’re working a 9 to 5 job, when you are in your busy, normal life, it’s really hard to see conditioning, right?

Because you think that that’s a normal thing. It’s your reality. It’s what everybody else does. So that is, therefore, the truth, or your truth. It’s the reality, right? And conditioning is basically everything that we have learned when we came onto this world. So we have nature and we have nurture. Human design gives you clues, especially your birth chart gives you clues about your specific and unique nature.

What you’re designed to do here on this planet, what’s your purpose, what’s your role. What are you good at? What are your core strengths? And conditioning is basically everything that’s called nurture. It’s all the behavior that we learned, that we learned from our environment, that we learned from our parents, that we learned from siblings, that we learned from school, especially in the school system.

It’s a very heavy force of conditioning. In the first seven years of your life, there is a lot of conditioning going on because you grow up as a child and you’re dependent on your parents, so you have to abide by their rules and they will teach you what they think is normal and what they think is not normal.

But yeah, what is really normal, right? I mean, there are 8 billion people on this world. 8 billion people have a different experience of this world. We all have a specific lens that we watch the world based on our limiting beliefs, based on the country that we’re born in, based on the food that we eat.

What is normal for one person is very abnormal for another person. So there’s definitely a lot of what is relative truth versus what’s absolute truth. I mean, that there’s gravity, that is something that we can say. Okay, it’s proven. We all understand the concept of gravity, because we are mentally aware that we’re a tiny little blob, a green blue blob, that is drifting in the ocean of the universe, in a neutrino ocean with all the energy in the dark matter.

We are spinning in our solar system around the Sun. And the moon is spinning around us, around the earth, and we’re mentally aware that gravity exists because we can see the pool in the bush when we watch the sea in the ebb and flow movements. We can understand it by looking at the northern light and understanding why there are certain forces present.

Pulling things from one end to the other. Yes. Gravity is something that we understand. If you ever saw those pictures on Instagram, where there’s a camera of the Milky Way, but the camera rotates. I did astrophotography a little bit ago when I was in New Zealand, I took some beautiful pictures of the Milky Way.

Here in the Netherlands, you can’t really see the Milky Way that great because A, light pollution and B. Well, it’s mostly clouded here, unfortunately. And yeah, there are not so many open spaces here to enjoy that beautiful night sky view. But anyway, I am drifting off course here. What I want to get back to is gravity is something that we can understand.

And if you look at those pictures with the rotating sky, it’s not the sky that rotates. It’s us, right? We on earth are moving at a really high speed, yet we don’t feel anything of that because we are so used and attuned to gravity. So that’s definitely an absolute truth. Pretty much everything else is relative truth because what I think, or what I believe, is maybe not something that you believe.

That’s all based on the rules of society, right? The written and the unwritten rules of society. And the written rules of our history, because these rules are passed down from generation to generation to generation to generation. A few episodes back I referred to the crab basket effect. That stems from a very ancient behavioral way that if you ever placed yourself outside of the group, you were not safe.

If you lived in Europe in the 16th or 17th century, as a woman, You were not safe if you were not protected by a man, right? Nowadays, luckily, there’s a whole different situation here, but what was then true is now not true anymore. All those stories and all those concerns for our safety were passed down from generation to generation to generation to generation.

And that’s what we called conditioning, because It’s rules, constructs, and we made it all up. So when you look at a baby, when they enter the world, it’s really interesting to see what happens. This baby is very new to this world, and if it is hungry, or if it needs attention, or it wants something, it can’t really express themselves just yet.

I mean, they don’t have words yet, they don’t have, maybe they don’t even have sight. site that well developed, but they do have a voice and they can communicate very lightly with crying and they take up space that way. They’re not afraid to take up that space because they just yell, hello, here I am. I just need something.

It’s up to you to figure out what I need, but I need something, right? It’s really interesting to see that. A baby is not afraid to take up space. It just exists. Survival is very much a thing for a baby, right? Because baby needs their parents for everything. For food, for warmth, for attention, for love, for a feeling of safety.

We’re very dependent on our environment. So, in that survival mechanism, we learn from a very early age to smile when we see a person, a human being, because if we smile to that person, that person gives us attention. You see the mothers and fathers really enjoying their first laughs of their babies. And I really experienced that myself with my nephews, like, it’s such a special moment of connection, right, when you are interacting with a small baby like that.

But they learn from a very early age, when they’re just a few weeks old. That if they try to please you, if they try to laugh, if they try to do a certain motion with their head, that you will give them love and attention. And that’s the first layer of conditioning. So basically, it’s our… It’s a pleasing behavior towards our parents.

It’s a pleasing behavior towards our environment in order for us to survive another day. And that’s conditioning. What’s also conditioning is the construct like a 40 hour work week. If we fast forward to the adult stage of life, Henry Ford created that system because he needed workers in an assembly line to create his cars.

He constructed that vision of work 40 hours a week. Here in the Netherlands, in our history, they used to work six days a week. Weekend is a conditioning as well. I actually work a lot during weekends because, for me, it’s just another day. My days are not really that different from a weekday versus a weekend day right now.

But mentally, there’s this societal norm that you do not work on weekends, because then there’s something wrong with you, or then… There’s something that you are not enjoying. Well, for me, when I’m traveling, I don’t care if it’s a weekday or weekend. I’m traveling anyway, and I’m enjoying it anyway, and that’s the same with how I live my life right now.

There’s not a whole lot of difference for me to be it a Wednesday versus be it a Sunday. I am still going to take time off whenever I want to take time off and it doesn’t really matter if I work a couple hours in the morning and then go to a forest on a Wednesday or on a Sunday. It’s just another day, right?

But we constructed this calendar and we attached all these meanings to different Moments in our agenda, we attach different things to specific dates, like holidays and it’s all conditioning, right? It’s such a weird concept if you start to look at all the things in your life in that way and realize that everything is conditioning.

I had another example of conditioning that was very, very obvious to me now that I’m a little bit further in my deconditioning process. And that was that I have been afraid of spiders for as long as I can remember. This week I had a huge spider in my garden. It jolted me into like a screaming party, basically.

And I know mentally that that is conditioning, right? Why am I not afraid for a snail? Or a different creature, a mouse, but I am really afraid for the spider. It’s a trauma, and I’m well aware of that, but it is also conditioning, because that’s what we’ve been taught to do. It’s in every horror movie. It’s in the second part of the Harry Potter movie.

There are spiders. There’s a lot of people who… Fear this creature, so it’s an accepted form of conditioning in our society to be afraid of spiders. Some people are afraid of dogs, and other people love dogs. I mean, there’s no logic to it, right? Probably they had a bad experience with dogs. Same with cats.

Like, I love cats. I have three of them. Some people are really afraid of cats. That is all conditioning. And especially conditioning that is rooted in fear. I am well aware of that, that it’s conditioning. Doesn’t mean that I am going out there and I’m not afraid of spiders anymore, right? That is an awareness process.

Okay, I’m aware of it, doesn’t mean that I can fully accept it just yet. And that’s with a whole lot of things in the human design system and in personal development in general. It’s awareness first, and it might be mental awareness, it might be first a lot of mental knowledge that you consume. You dive into, you research, you read books, you listen to a podcast and everything and it’s all good.

But it doesn’t mean that it actually clicks inside of you. It may take months to digest that information and to really implement it in your life. Just like I am definitely not ready to deal with that level of reconditioning. Whenever I see another big black spider in my garden. Anyway, it’s all conditioning, and it’s really interesting to look at the world like that.

There’s also a book that is talking about relative truth versus the absolute truth, and that is The Code of the Extraordinary Mind. It’s from the founder of Mindvalley. It’s definitely a book that you want to read if you’re a little bit more into personal development, so I’ll link it in the show notes.

We are the product of our environment, we are the product of our educational system, we are the product of our parents, and we are the product of our fears. I’m a human being, I have my fears. It is what it is, right? It is up to us to do something with that and to start deconditioning in our own way to kind of tear down bit by bit by bit the onion that we are with all the layers of the human design system, layer by layer by layer.

We are coming more back into who we are deep down, our authentic selves. As soon as we start to embrace that a little bit more, it is so interesting for sure. And it’s a fun process. I mean, have fun with it. There’s no need to do this fast. Ross said you need at least seven years to decondition and that’s the first layer of deconditioning.

So whatever age you are now, divide it by times seven and that’s how many layers of conditioning you are exposed to. So if you want to decondition, think of all the time that you need to decondition, right? That’s a lot. Our cells renew in seven years, so that’s why that seven year cycle is so important.

It’s a long process. We might never get fully done. We are here to learn and to keep learning and to keep learning and to keep growing. So it’s okay. Take your time. It will come in your own timing. Don’t worry. Don’t rush it. Don’t rush it. And that’s what I wanted to leave with you today. I hope you have a wonderful day