Nik McRae: Astrology + Human Design
In this new series, I intend to introduce you to interesting healers and guides—across all sorts of modalities—who have something valuable to offer the world.
Nik McRae knew from a young age that he had intuitive gifts: For one, it runs in his family. His mom, who works as an intuitive and healer introduced him to Reiki and energetic re-patterning when he was eight, though it took him a decade of rebellion before he acknowledged the call—and he practiced on himself for a long time first. “In my teen years, I had really deep shadows to work with and challenges to integrate,” he explains. He was drawn to Human Design and Astrology, learning to read both types of charts and integrate them into a more holistic understanding of the people around him. “When I started out, I didn't really want to use these for anything more than my own personal experience, but as I started to see the value in the tools and how successful these perspectives were with helping people change their lives, it began to be more evident that this was something I was going to be doing.” Though he gets a lot of joy out of his work, he explained that the universe forced his hand: “Every time I tried to walk away from astrology, my life would fall apart.”
I met Nik through Carissa Schumacher. Nik is highly intuitive, it’s true, but the combination of Human Design and astrology—and his adeptness with both—is remarkable, considering his age. He’s also very, very smart. A session is a delight, and he offered deeply revelatory insights into my design and personality that I hadn’t heard before. I highly recommend an introductory reading, though Nik has also started providing people ongoing guidance, offering tools and other paths of integration for those who want to go beyond the basics of their charts. After the fold, Nik also explains what’s coming up for us with Pluto transitioning into Aquarius at the end of March.
Session Style: Readings with follow-up coaching/tool-development sessions as desired.
Q: Can you give us a brief crash course on human design?
A: The most basic way I can describe it is that all humans work in a circuit. We have our own individual roles in that circuit and we have a greater circuit that we're all a part of. When we start to work with our strategy and authority, we understand that we're all emanating a certain auric signature. Our auras are influencing each other’s auras. And when we start to identify how we bring in information through our open centers and how we influence others through our defined centers, this is where we start to understand how humans work mechanically. So the easiest way I can describe human design is the mechanical and fundamental operations that humans work in, and how we work together as a society, unconsciously, in working with this circuitry.
Q: Why do you pair it with astrology?
A: Well, at its core, human design is astrology. Our I-chain codons, in other words are our gates and our channels, are defined and activated by the planets in the sky roughly three months before we were born and on the day of our birth. I like to put them together because human design is very black and white and very mechanical, whereas astrology is very full of color and interpretation. It's very much about character and timing. So when you put them together, you get a very good black and white understanding of how someone works mechanically, and then what sort of timing and character is going to function within those mechanics. I don't like using one without the other because I think it gives a broader picture to the black and white, as well as the color that we're all working within.
Q: What’s your conception of the universe and what we’re all doing here together?
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