If you are in the spirituality space, you’d have to be living under a rock not to have heard of the New Paradigm and the Aquarian Age. A new paradigm is a new way of thinking or doing things that replaces an old way. It can also refer to a set of beliefs that replaces another set that is no longer considered applicable. Both definitions apply in what spiritual people mean.
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As Pluto journeys back out of Retrograde into Aquarius, and one of the major players in global politics heads for a heated Presidential election, the talk of moving past the Patriarchy is reaching beyond people with a connection to the New Age. Gone is the worshipping of authority and uniformity, it’s now the age of the individual.
In the Human Design system we are (at time of writing) about 3 years away from a paradigm shift, the effects of which have already started to be felt. Ever since 1615, the energy has been in the Cross of Planning. That was the shift from the Mediaeval world of kings and feudal lords, to the modern era of commerce and science. It was the time after the Reformation, heralding the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution that underpins our capitalistic society (the patriarchy predates that, though).
The New Paradigm
The next era, that of the Cross of the Sleeping Phoenix has a poetic edgy name, and an even nicer meaning. It’s an era of individuality, authenticity, responsibility, and self-love. It couldn’t be more in contrast with a time when our worth has been tied to our work and not only just our work, but the output of it. An era where success was seen monetarily, and morality was linked to how industrious we are.
Many of us who have “awakened” have begun to slow down, look inward, and get in touch with the true essence of ourselves below the layers of conditioning that our society has imposed on us. Freeing ourselves from generational trauma, we are now raising children with gentle parenting rather than fear, and we are building businesses that are slow and built around us in order to serve us instead of us and our employees serve the bottom line.
The Cross of the Sleeping Phoenix
The Cross of the Sleeping Phoenix is a mutative process that is taking place in the Solar Plexus Center, according to the Jovian Archive which is the curator of the work of the late Ra Uru Hu, the first teacher of Human Design. It involves the gates 55, 59, 34, and 20. In Human Design terms, a gate is a specific point in the bodygraph (that is, the visual representation of our designs) that represents a particular energetic frequency. All of the gates correspond to astrological signs, and the incarnation cross can be seen as the sum of the key themes of our lives. Including the life of the planet, in this case.
The Cross gets is name from the shape formed by the lines intersecting the four gates, which are the astrological axis where the Personality Sun (the Sun Sign in Astrology) and the Design Sun (which represents inherited traits in our subconscious) sit in opposition to the Earth gates, which is the opposite tendency that helps bring balance and grounds us. For the Sleeping Phoenix we see the Pisces-Virgo axis at play in 55/59 and the Sagittarius-Gemini one in 34/20. Planetary speaking, we see Jupiter as a key player, but also the main gate in this combination is in the sign of Venus’s exaltation.
The True Meaning of Abundance
Gate 55 is the gate of Spirit, and its core theme is that abundance is strictly a question of spirit. And this is something that I’ve been working on reframing, because a lot of the unresourceful messages I received growing up as a Catholic are consistent with this idea. We were always encouraged to seek spiritual treasures above earthly ones, told that it is in giving that we receive, and that God is generous and loving even when the world around us is clearly unfair.
If the source of our joy is God then there is no question that our lives would be abundantly rich in ways that the heathens who don’t believe in God can never imagine, busy as they are chasing illusory things in a rat race stacked against them. But this, I believe, is not the lesson of this Incarnation Cross.
As Human Design works in polarities (as per one of the Hermetic Laws), the way the world does too, we find this tendency towards the liminal grounded in gate 59, the gate of Sexuality. I can’t think of a much more obvious call for things to be incarnate. But far from being about our base instincts to procreation, as wonderful and sacred as they are, this gate is about intimacy. It’s a tribal gate that brings us down from the realm of the Spirit to the lives we share with the people in our day to day.
The Importance of Embodiment
And the cross of the Sleeping Phoenix is rounded up by the themes of power and clarity, both in service of the common good. Christie Inge writes of Gate 34: “(It) is the energy for sovereignty, empowerment, and steady vision. The 34 empowers you to cultivate inner strength, faith, and flow to make your visions a reality.” Then Gate 20 becomes about the divine timing to speak this truth and act on it. But it is 34 that is the most interesting to me.
Last year, I took part in a Wealth Activation Aromatherapy session. As the conversation unfolded to the smell of cypress oil (which in magic corresponds to my main deity, Hades), I casually mentioned a struggle I had with worthiness around money as someone raised Catholic. And the facilitator, herself raised Catholic, spoke about the parable of the talents.
The Parable of the Talents
In the Gospel according to Matthew chapter 25 verses 14–30 there’s a story that Jesus told the crowd about a master who was leaving his house to travel, and, before leaving, entrusted his property to his servants. According to the abilities of each man, one servant received five talents, the second had received two, and the third received only one. Upon his return, the first and the second servants had each put their talents to work, and had doubled the value of the property with which they were entrusted. The third servant, however, had merely hidden his talent, burying it in the ground, and was punished by his master, unlike the two that were rewarded.
And it occurred to me just how much mental gymnastics had gone in our Catechism classes to try and explain this story completely symbolically. The talents, as it’s the common usage in English nowadays, are merely gifts that we have and are not meant to be taken literally. If we did take them literally, as the aromatherapist does, they’d be an awful lot of money. It was 58.9 kg (129 lb 14 oz) worth of gold. And it was not until the late 13th century that the idea of talents as we understand it came to be attached to this parable, and it’s probably when the word came to be used for skills and abilities. For over 1200 years of Christian history, everyone knew this story was about money.
And I wonder if that changed the way they looked at God compared to the way I was raised to do so, which is effectively a toxic dom that would never be allowed anywhere near a reputable BDSM establishment.
Rethinking Wealth in the New Paradigm
As business owners, wealth is key to what we do. Making money is what keeps us in business and able to buy from other businesses, and building wealth is what allows us to provide for ourselves and our families in the long term and whatever circumstances we might face.
One key aspect of the New Paradigm is that we are moving away from beliefs in scarcity and remembering the truth that abundance is our birthright. We did not come to Earth to struggle and it’s not holier to be poor.
Many people are embracing Aquarian Pricing as a way to leave it up to the Universe to provide in a more radical way, but you can still have firm prices that feel good to you and meet your needs! Something else that is shifting is a greater understanding of pricing by value provided instead of exchanging time for money.
Even employment is changing, as industries shift and more people than ever are starting businesses, and many of them are lifestyle businesses like mine which are by design built around supporting my desired life. In the UK alone, in the first half of 2024 there have been 468000 new businesses according to research by Beauhurst and supported by NatWest.
New Paradigm: Individual Freedom in a Supportive Collective
To call the New Paradigm the age of the individual is not incorrect, but it’s a limited understanding. It’s the collective that is shifting, becoming arranged around the celebration of the individual and what we uniquely bring to the whole. Individual talents are cultivated and encouraged, and energetic alignment is prioritised over conformity. We are safe to be us, and in fact it is through each of us being uniquely us that the whole group thrives.
We no longer praise selflessness and putting ourselves last for the benefit of others: the wellbeing of everyone is paramount and a good for the whole group. It’s a whole rethinking of what it means to be a good person and serve the collective. The things that raise our frequency are the things that raise the collective frequency.
Feminine business is a way of looking at our work through the lenses of service to ourselves and others. We sit back and let our businesses support us. That doesn’t mean we don’t work, or even not work hard, but we value energetic output over energetic input. We know the 8 hour work week is ineffective, and the new paradigm way is to maximise our individual energy.
