Your Life's Work: Playing the Starring Role in Your Own Movie

Do you like movies?

I do. Love ‘em. I’m one of those people who can be so totally absorbed in watching, that in my body, when I watch it feels as if what I’m seeing is actually happening to me. This is thanks in part to the Channel 41-30, focused recognition of feelings, the strength of Imagination.

Naturally for my design with its sensitivity to sound, I avoid certain kinds of movies. Like horror! I remember watching a horror movie with my sister’s family and screaming at the bloody murder in front of me! This is thanks to the Channel 1-8, being the demonstrative voice of the group. I never lived it down.

Everyone you see in this life has a very special part to play in their own life movie. Everyone deserves a starring role in their own life movie.

So how do you discover your role?

There are three vital and critical aspects to know about how you are here to fulfill your life’s purpose.

Would you like to know yours?

In the Human Design System:

1. Your Character is your Profile.

2. Your Role is your Cross.

3. Your Characteristics are your Design.

In Human Design for Business (the career and business application of the Human Design System) we call this your “Life Work.”

This casting analogy comes from Ra, who taught the Life Work material using film as the metaphor (Jovian Archive).

The logic is worth sitting with. Your Design is the equipment you arrive with: the energy you run on and the way you decide. Your Profile is the character you play while using that equipment. Your Cross is the part that character has in the wider story. Ra would demonstrate the stack on his own chart: the Design supplied the engine, the Profile made him a particular kind of investigator, and the Cross set what he was here to do with both.

What makes the analogy land is the failure case. Everyone arrives with characteristics. Not everyone ends up with a character and a role, because those only come from living as yourself. Turn up to the audition carrying equipment but no part, and film already has a word for what you become.

I remember being an extra on the tv shows Baywatch and Wind Over Water as an actress in my late teens in Hawaii. 

Being an extra back then paid $100 a day. There’s no spoken parts when you are an extra, you’re a part of the scene. You are expendable, replaceable, almost unnoticeable to the audience and totally ignored by the stars. In the movies, as an extra, you’re a background part of what’s happening. Even though I took Bo Derek on a scuba diving trip… in the filming, she ignored me. Because I was an extra. 

Ra used to act this out: the Emotional Generator parked at the back of the scene, engine humming, contributing nothing the camera cares about and never appearing in the credits. Which is true enough. You won’t find me in the credits of Baywatch either.

Ra jokingly calls that being “Furniture.” Why?

He tells a story about how he’d been a Magazine Publisher in his early adult days in Canada and had hired a photographer to do a shoot for him. And the Photographer, very agitated, barked at his assistant, “Get me some furniture!” Ra, thinking she was going to bring back sofas and chairs, was stunned to see the assistant bring back three girls to place in the background of the shot.

“You give me a full stadium, I’ll give you a furniture showroom.” He joked after teaching Human Design for over a decade. 

His point was that the not-self is exactly this: characteristics with no character and no role. You do not get to live out your Cross or your Profile until you are living as your own nature; until then the equipment is running, but nobody is playing anyone. It is a background existence, and he was blunt about how little life there is in it.

Don’t be an extra. You have so much more human depth and divinity than being background furniture.

If you would like to go deeper into your own Life Work (your Profile, your Cross, and how they combine), that is exactly what a Life Work reading covers.

Love Yourself,**

Laveena