Why Everything Feels Off Despite All of Your Self Development Efforts
You Keep Trying to Fix What Was Never Broken
“You see, all it takes is the readiness to take the journey, to disconnect from the madness of the not-self world and its not-self purposes, to rediscover the dignity of what it is to be you. It’s a wonderful thing to love yourself. It’s truly magic.”
- Ra Uru Hu
Borrowed frequency is what happens when you unknowingly take on energy that doesn’t match your personal design and build your life with it.
For the last several weeks, we’ve been looking at it from a purely conceptual standpoint, now it’s time to get into the nitty gritty:
What it really means
Where it comes from
How to change your relationship with it so that it doesn’t run your life
Because make no mistake: it is running your life if you’re not paying attention.
The Trap of Borrowed Frequency
It never leaves, but that doesn’t mean you’re powerless.
Here’s the truth that most people don’t want to hear and that most Human Design experts won’t tell you: your borrowed frequency doesn’t disappear just because you become aware of it.
It doesn’t get “dealt with” or eliminated through a process. It’s part of your makeup. The Universe doesn’t do exchanges or refunds. It’s here for the long haul.
But once you learn to recognize it, and stop handing it the keys, you take back your power.
When you’re ready to know yourself and love yourself as you are, you stop falling for its tricks. You stop reacting. You start observing. And even when it flares up again, trying to pull you into a pattern you’ve worked hard to outgrow, you know exactly what’s happening. You name it. You adjust. You keep moving.
No shame. No self-blame. Just clarity, awareness, and ownership.
Where Borrowed Frequency Begins
So where does the pattern actually start?
It starts with the simple fact that no one taught your parents how your energy is designed to operate. And unless you’ve had your chart read, no one taught you either.
How many times have you heard a parent joke about the lack of an instruction manual when they brought their baby home? The wild thing is: every human comes with a manual. It’s called your Human Design chart.
It holds the map to:
How you’re designed to move through the world
How to make aligned decisions
What environments best support your purpose
What areas of life will trip you up if you’re not aware
Your chart shows you both the True Frequency you’re meant to hold (your Definition circled in green in the example below) and the Borrowed Frequency that can derail you (your Openness circled in red). It’s all right there. But without knowledge and guidance, you default to conditioning. Absorbing whatever’s around you and assuming that’s who you are or need to be.
The Mind is the Master of Borrowed Frequency
Understanding how the Mind conjures your borrowed frequency is the first step in diminishing its control.
Let’s be clear: Your Mind is not your Authority. It was never meant to lead your life.
Your Human Design chart makes that obvious (once you know what you’re looking at). You’re designed to make decisions from a different center, aka your Inner Authority. That might be your gut, your emotions, your intuition, your self, your ego, your environment, or even a lunar rhythm.
The Mind? Its job is awareness. Observation. Processing. Not decision-making.
But the Mind doesn’t want to let go. It wants control. It fixates on what it doesn’t understand (i.e. your openness) and builds strategies in an attempt to protect you from pain, failure, and uncertainty (though almost always creating more it). That’s how it hooks into borrowed frequency.
It starts running the show with stories like:
You have to prove your worth
You need to figure it out now
You can’t make other people upset
You’re behind and have to find ways to keep up
And just like that, you’re living someone else’s life. From a frequency your Mind is trying to control, but doesn’t understand.
There are nearly 1,100 different frequency combinations per gate in the Human Design BodyGraph. When you’re defined, that particular gate is fixed in a very specific frequency. It can’t be changed, altered, or modified in any way. When you’re open, you have the chance to experience that gate from any one of the 1,100 different frequencies. Therein lies the trap.
My Open Ego: A Real Example
Take my chart. I have a completely open ego center.
No definition. No gates. Just pure openness.
That means:
I don’t have consistent access to willpower
I’m not built to be competitive (as a former D1 athlete BTW)
I amplify defined ego energy around me by 200%
When I’m around people with defined ego centers (minority of the world believe it or not), my openness doesn’t just feel their frequency, it amplifies it. My Mind, desperate for consistency, tries to lock in on a particular frequency. Since I have the ability to experience all 4,400 frequencies (4 gates x 1,100 combinations), trying to hone in on one is an overwhelming task but it desperately tries all the same. It clings to proving. To pushing. To pretending I’m here to keep up with their commitment.
That has looked like:
Saying yes to projects I didn’t have the bandwidth for, just to prove I’m capable
Minimizing my needs in relationships to seem “cool” and “low-maintenance”
Over-giving to prove I’m kind, generous, and worthy
And that’s just my ego center. I also have openness in my G center (identity/love/direction), solar plexus (emotions), and head (inspiration), along with two bridging gates. That’s a lot of energetic variability for my Mind to try and fixate. And fixate it does.
Consider ALL of the combinations it’s trying to fixate on from my open sources, and you start to see how powerful and daunting a borrowed frequency really is. My Mind has spent years trying to answer every question, find every direction, get love from the right people, say the right things, and avoid upsetting anyone all while dragging me away from the one thing I’m actually here to do: respond. Trust my gut. Trust my intuition. Let life show me what’s next.
Readiness is a Decision
This isn’t about decoding your chart in a vacuum. It’s not about learning another framework just to stay stuck in your head. It’s about deciding you’re ready to see yourself, and I mean really see yourself, for who you are.
That’s when things shift.
Understanding your borrowed frequency isn’t the hard part. The hard part is noticing when your Mind is running the show, and choosing to pause. To breathe. To follow your Authority instead.
When I realized my open ego meant I’d never have a fixed sense of self-worth, I was devastated. But let’s be honest, I lived for nearly 40 years with that devastation. I’d spent decades trying to “fix” that part of myself. But the truth? It wasn’t broken. It was never supposed to be fixed.
I’m not here to prove. I’m here to learn through experiencing all the different ego frequencies. And with that understanding has come deep relief. Deep self-respect. Deep self love. And the more I experiment my true frequency, deep and utter magic.
My open ego will always struggle with a sense of worth, and my Mind will always try to fixate on a frequency to prove myself. I can’t change that or do anything about it. But I can be HELLA conscious of when it’s happening and shift my behavior so that I don’t get trapped in my Mind’s bullshit or make a decision through the lens of proving and end up making my life that much harder. I’m starting to learn I don’t have to fight my Mind. I just have to recognize when it’s trying to run the show and essentially tell it to kindly, “f**k off.”
There’s so much beauty and freedom in knowing this information. It’s just my Mind. I don’t have to figure out where the message came from or some 9-step mental hacking routine to snap myself out of it. I simply have to realize when my Mind is trying to demand control over my true Authority by fixating on a borrowed frequency it doesn’t understand.
When you have awareness, you have the choice to break the pattern that keeps you stuck.
Are You Ready?
Only you can decide. But it might feel like:
You’re tired of the same routines and reactions
You know you’re playing smaller than what you’re built for
You want to stop performing and start living
You’re done proving
You’re ready to give all of yourself to something real
You’re craving love, joy, fulfillment, passion, and purpose—not someday, but now
If any of that hits, it might be time to stop looking out there for the answer.
And start going within.