Intermediate 1: The BodyGraph (Centers, Channels & Gates)

Most people meet the BodyGraph as a colorful diagram with their Type written above it. This path is where the diagram turns into anatomy. Jovian Archive has gathered Ra Uru Hu's lectures on the building blocks of every chart into one curated compilation: 31 lessons and about 39.5 hours, delivered as audio, video and an ebook.

The subjects run in the order a chart is built. Centers are defined or open, and that single fact changes how a person experiences the theme a center carries. Channels are what define centers: both gates of a channel have to be activated before the channel is defined and the two centers it joins become consistent. Gates on their own are activated or not activated, and a hanging gate carries a pull toward whoever holds the other side of its channel. Definition, circuitry and the streams that run through the graph tie these pieces into one connected system.

The path also covers ground that many introductions skip. Ra treats the channels as the life force of the design, looks at the format energies that set the underlying rhythm of a chart, and spends time on melancholy and fear, two experiences that make far more sense once you can see where they live in the mechanics.

This is the vocabulary everything later in the curriculum depends on. A student who is vague about what makes a channel defined, or about the difference between an open center and a defined one, will stay vague in every layer that follows, however advanced the material gets. The first time through, most students are matching labels to shapes. On a second pass, the chart begins to read as energy and awareness moving through a body, with open centers as places of learning and conditioning and defined centers as places of reliability.

Keep your own chart open while you work through it. Each lecture lands differently when you can find the center, channel or gate in a design you live in every day, and check what you hear against your own experience of it.