Ajna Center in Human Design

Mental Consciousness • Mental Processing • Investigation and Research • Conceptualizing • Categorizing • Analyzing Life • Experiencing and seeing our mental fears through anxiety • Inner Vision and Outer Vision

Biological correlation: Anterior and Posterior Pituitary Glands
Type of center: Awareness (Mental Fears, Anxiety)

The Ajna is the place where our mental awareness and consciousness is located. Together with the crown center (also called head center, which is responsible for mental pressure, input and inspiration), it forms our mind. The crown center offers acoustic noise that holds the potential for insight, and it offers imagery of the past and possible future. By doing that, it pressurizes the Ajna to think and to conceptualize. The Ajna is a very important processing hub for transforming our comprehension and awareness. Unlike the awareness of the spleen center, it is not bound to the Now. The Ajna operates over all time. We can mentally process the past, look at the present, and project into the future.

Since the Ajna is an awareness center, it comes with fears. These fears are about dealing with mental pressure, about finding mental concepts, and about communicating these concepts to others. The Ajna fears express themselves as mental anxiety. This anxiety drives us to find a better understanding and to make ourselves better understood by strengthening our language and communication skills. Whenever understanding or communication fails, anxiety can be triggered. If we act upon our anxiety, it disturbs the flow and easily leads to problems and resistance in life.

The one important thing to recognize is that fear-based or not, the mental concepts of the Ajna are not meant for us to act upon. We are very tempted to make decisions from our mind, and most humans do so - but this is not leading us towards fulfilling our life purpose. Decisions that are purely rooted in mental reasoning and "because of" won't manifest properly and bring us a lot of resistance. From a mental perspective, we can have a lot of ideas, but never our absolute truth. The Ajna can offer us interpretations, ideas, and concepts of what the future might bring, but it can never truly decide upon them and bring them into life.
Neither the Crown nor the Ajna is a motor center, which means the mind has no energy to manifest its ideas into the life. Only the body can provide the energy to manifest something. If we conclude that we "have to do this" and we "have to do that", the energy to do it will only be available if our body supplies us with energy for the "this" and the "that". What our body provides energy for is dependent on our inner authority. The mind can never be an inner authority. This is why people get so frustrated, bitter, angry, and disappointed when they try to manifest their mental concepts and fail to do so.
Your mind can help you to figure out which bus to take in order to get to a job interview. But it can never decide for you to go to the job interview if your body says no to that. Your body has to be in it. The mind has to be in service to the body.

We have our minds for one purpose: to observe and to process life and its flow, so that we are able to share and communicate our unique perspective and our findings to each other. Mind is meant to enrich our journey and our experience, it is not meant to navigate us through life against the wisdom of our body. When we let go of making mental decisions, our mind slowly starts to become of true value to us and to others.

The Ajna also helps us to tune in to ourselves. Not for figuring out what to do, but for developing a better understanding of who we are. The better we understand who we are, the more we allow ourselves to align with our own unique and authentic frequency. Our frequency determines what gets manifested in the world. The more authentic our frequency is and becomes, the more our whole being automatically moves toward our life purpose and attracts the things necessary for doing that. Mentally, we get more in tune with what that purpose really is, instead of interfering with false concepts. From that heightened frequency, we will be able to attract and manifest what our true purpose is, but we don‘t manifest it through the mind. We manifest it through the body. This is how the law of attraction really works. It doesn‘t work by projecting your mental concepts into the world. It works only when you find yourself. When you live yourself and when you do the mental inner work, your frequency changes. Your body will automatically attract the input, the hints, the knowledge, the experiences, and the material opportunities, that further you on your path and that provide you with what you need next. The more conscious you are, the better you can seize them. The more conscious and self-reflected you are, the better prepared you are to meet the other person, to consider their different and unique perspective, and the less likely you are to mess up your relationships through what and how you communicate and act.
This is the law of attraction. There is no real choice, and what we could and would choose would never be as enriching as the path that the divine holds for us. When we stop to resist the divine flow, it leads us onto a path of least resistance. Those thoughts that are coming to you because they are meant for you to be manifested, you will manifest. But you won‘t do it through visualizing them, you will do it through letting your inner authority decide and letting your body be moved by divine will. There is nothing for you to do, but to watch and to keep your authenticity, to keep your vibration authentic. In this undertaking, your mind can be your most powerful ally. If you change one parameter in an interconnected system, the other parameters change as well. Mental awareness can heighten awareness in and of the body, it can help to heighten receptivity to source.
In this world where disturbing frequencies are everywhere, the awareness of the Ajna is essential for the process that aligns us with manifesting our life purpose from our bodies and stepping onto our incarnation cross (our purpose) when it‘s time.

Maybe we can gain a better understanding of this concept by looking at the functions of the pituitary gland, which is the biological correlation of the ajna center. The pituitary gland regulates a variety of systems throughout our whole body:
It regulates among others the thyroid (throat center), metabolism and growth, blood pressure, stress (root center), certain functions of the sex organs (sacral center), lactation, water/salt regulation of the Kidneys (solar plexus center), temperature regulation and pain relief.

Defined Ajna (active life force, impacting)

51% of humanity has a defined ajna center.

The defined Ajna has a fixed way of thinking. It has a fixed way of conceptualizing and investigating, which is fixed by the Ajna channels that are activated. With a defined Ajna in a birth chart, someone's mental process of thinking things through always follows the same patterns and it is not influenced by other people. Their mental process is steady and reliable. In case someone's crown center is open, the inspiration that pressures them to think changes, but the way in which they process that inspiration stays the same.

Shadows of the defined Ajna

You make mental decisions and end up feeling bad for not following through. You obsess about your thoughts and decisions. You try to silence your mind and you try to run from it.
You think your truth needs to be everyone's truth. On the other hand, you might feel inadequate because you can't switch to another way of thinking, but you were misled to think that this is needed of you. For example, a child with a mind that is built to analyze the past might have a difficult time with understanding math and other logical systems, but it might be great at history. If individual predisposition is not recognized and fostered during childhood, later in life there might remain a feeling of being out of place or being inadequate.

Potential of the defined Ajna

Your mind is reliable, you have no mental holes and gaps and moments of blankness. You enjoy research, you enjoy the creativity of the mental process. At times, when your mental process is really heavy, you still know that things are ok and will finally resolve. You do not try to shut off your mind and your fears with the help of substances.

Open Ajna (receptive, perceptive)

49% of humanity has an open ajna center.

The open Ajna has no fixed way of thinking, conceptualizing, and investigating. The open Ajna has no defined way of handling the thought process. It has a very open and flexible mind and it can think things through in many different ways.
It also has no defined and reliable way of handling the amplified and magnified anxiety that comes with the mental fears of the Ajna.
If you have an open Ajna, you automatically have an open Crown as well. You are not constantly busy remembering, conceptualizing and thinking things through, as long as you spend a good amount of time in your own company. You have periods of mental rest and relaxation.
When you take in other people's definition, you amplify it. This can make your mind very busy conceptualizing certain things in certain ways, especially if the Crown is being activated at the same time. It will temporarily lock you into other people's way of receiving information (crown center) and processing it (ajna center). Dependent on what channels are being activated, it might be more acoustic or more visual. You are going to take in information like a sponge.
You can also be very good at picking up people's thoughts. Much of what you are thinking when being in company might not be your own thought impulses.
You also amplify the anxiety of others and, in addition, your own anxiety gets activated and drops into the mix. This can be very overwhelming. Still, you have no inbuilt way of handling anxiety, it is a huge learning theme. Sometimes anxiety and the learning theme is there, sometimes it is not.

The same applies for your mind in general. It is not fixed, it is not consistent, gaps in the middle of a thought flow can happen. Your mind can fluctuate from overcrowded to totally blank, from laser-focused to being unable to concentrate on anything. All is possible. There is nothing wrong with being mentally inconsistent. You just don't have that reliable and consistent mental flow, but instead, you have a huge diversity when it comes to processing thoughts.

Shadows of the open Ajna

In the shadow frequencies, you have not yet found a healthy way of living with your open Ajna. You have a deep fear of mental uncertainty. Because you amplify other people's anxiety, you easily get lost in the worries of other people. This anxiety drives you to mentally figure out what to do, instead of tuning in to your body and following your inner authority.

You take your mental concepts too seriously and you feel as if you need to come up with or have an answer to everything. When you don't have an answer you feel uncomfortable, so you grab the first one and shout it out. The definition coming from outside makes you feel overly certain. To others, you can appear like a "know it all". Also, you might not be fully present and listen to what the other says - because you are distracted with developing an answer. Sometimes this answer might be based on what you think people want to hear so that you look smart.
Or you might impatiently interrupt the other trying to finish their sentence with what you think they will say that you picked up on.
Once your Ajna is back to itself and no longer defined from the outside, you feel inconsistent again.

When you are with someone who doesn‘t want to hear what you say or when they have a racing mind, you can perceive this as a mental blockage. It's hard to think straight. It's easy to perceive that blockage or your own mental inconsistency as if something is wrong with you. But it's not. Why do you think so differently today, when yesterday you were so certain? This can cause a great deal of insecurity. Nothing seems tangible and reliable. And our environment transmits that idea to us that we should be consistent. The unconscious coping mechanism is to compensate this uncertainty by being overly fixed and by applying that fixedness to the way in which we carry our mental concepts into the world. You might like to think you are certain about some of your mental concepts when in fact you can never be 100% certain. There is always a chance that everything might be different. But when you don‘t give room to that uncertainty, you can really fall prey to ideas that lead you nowhere.

Questions for the open ajna center to become aware of the shadow aspects:
- Are you feeling overly certain about your mental concepts?
- Are you trying to convince others that your ideas and opinions are true?
- Do you cling to belief systems that do you no good?
- Does the thought of not-knowing scare you?

Potential of the open Ajna

You have an open and flexible mind. You do not get caught up and attached to beliefs and mental concepts. You know that all insight is a temporary conclusion. You do not feel a need to be mentally consistent, you enjoy uncertainty and mental play. You have no need to look smart and you don't mind if you look like a dumb idiot to others (to clarify: you do not mind when people think that you are dumb. That does not mean that you are dumb. When people think that others are dumb, that does not automatically make them dumb. It rather says something about the people who judge than about the people who are being judged).
When you take in other people's concepts through your open crown center and ajna center, you have a clear perception and evaluation of which of those concepts matter and have value, and which don't. You can discern the pearls from the bullshit. That leads you to think about things that actually do matter in a very flexible and creative way.
You can clearly recognize the mental flow or blockage that people carry with them and you do not identify with it.