Pluto in the Gate of Limitation

The Gate of Limitation. And Pluto. That sounds cheery, right? It might not be all wine and chocolates, but it is very, very powerful and I’m going to explain how you can harness this energy in your own life.
Pluto will be in the Gate of Limitations from 16 March 2021 until 5 December 2025. His time there will be pretty tame compared to his hook up with Uranus, Saturn and Jupiter in 2020 when he was in Gate 61. But there is a lot going on behind the scenes. Pluto is teaching us something very important here.
The imagery of this I Ching hexagram – 60 – is of the segments in a stalk of bamboo. The joints in bamboo limit each segment and create strength. This idea of limitation also applies to Chinese acupuncture, finding that exact point where the meridians meet, the axis of Heaven (spirit) and Earth (body). Growth requires that we find and honour those articulation points.
The Patience of Pluto
Pluto is slow and often patient, waiting years for us to catch up with the seeds he plants. Right now we are still completing our homework from his time in Gate 38, in 2015 – 2016.
Our role in working with the energy of Gate 38 is to resist the Root Centre’s tendency to reflexive fear based reactions. When people or events seem to oppose us we can take time to reflect on how we can restore unity while honouring individual differences.
https://www.loveyourdesign.com//pluto-in-gate-38/
We are on the cusp of being more conscious of gifts Pluto bestowed on us when he was in Gate 54, in 2015 – 2018.
This Gate activates sudden shifts that put us in a completely new and unknown circumstances. Life is moving faster and we need skills that support us to live in uncertainty and create from our hearts, especially when we are creating the road ahead rather than following it.
https://www.loveyourdesign.com//pluto-gate-54-marrying-maiden/
Pluto’s 2021 Gifts
What seed is Pluto sowing in our deep consciousness in 2021?
Pluto’s time in Gate 60 – the Gate of Limitations – is less of an event and more of a masterclass in creation. The limitation thing? It’s an important new skill.
Here’s an analogy. If we are building a airplane, we have to take gravity into account, or imagine and implement ways to move beyond it. So, what current limitations have we reached, and how can we imagine and build beyond them?
Reimagining our lives out beyond the things we now take for granted seems difficult. That’s where Pluto’s lessons are most valuable. We don’t have to do it all in one go. Notice the limitations, watch for the articulation points.
As Pluto in Gate 54 explained to us, change happens slowly and then very quickly. We are at a tipping point. Pluto in Gate 60 brings the seeds of entire new structures and forms for humanity.
The Subtle Craft of Mutation
Gate 60 is in the Individual Circuitry. If you’re up on your Human Design you know this circuit is about mutation. But what does that mean in real life?

From an evolutionary viewpoint, mutations are an essential feature of life. Without genetic mutation you and I would still be pond slime. Mutations are tiny adaptions that build up, one upon the other, until a dinosaur learns to fly. Each mutation begins with one individual adapting to limitations in their current environment.
One of my favourite sayings for imagining the future is – if not this then what? That’s mutation at work. If I am limited here, what change can I imagine and implement?
Humans are inherently mutative. We are always seeking to improve, to grow beyond existing limitations. This is where Gate 60 – the Gate of Limitation – comes in. Think of it as the grain of sand in the oyster. That irritating thing that stands in the way of a perfect oyster experience! And then, voila! a pearl.
But the Gate of Limitation is not just about that irritating grain of sand, It teaches us HOW we create coherent change on the material level. We are, after all, in the Root Centre, the most physical centre in Human Design.
Root Centre
The Root Centre is a very feminine space. It contains and protects until it is time to birth. It is the dancing impulse to engage with life. It is the wait for knowing, for coherence. It is complete trust in the timing of the new. It is the capacity to feel safe enough to receive and connect.

The Root Centre is a a motor – it is powered by the stress that keeps us alive, engaged, active.
The Root Centre is pressure – it is alive with possibility waiting its time to come into physicality.
The Root Centre is the final step of our journey in bringing spirit and soul into our bodies.
Chaos and the Pulse
In your Human Design chart there is a central channel that connects the Head to the Root Centre. In the Kabbalah (one of the four ancient sciences of the Human Design synthesis) this central channel blends the two outer channels – Wisdom and Mercy. This blending is experienced as a pulsing energy, our attention going inward and then outward, gathering and integrating, moving us ever closer to the moment of the new.

The central channel in Human Design is about integrating duality, synthesising left and right, female and male, right and wrong. It forms part of the Individual Circuitry that pulses alternating chaos and order, inner and outer mutation, in a spiral of ever-increasing complexity.
We are learning that chaos is an integral part of living systems. Linear thinking/action are a single pole that makes us blind and vulnerable to manipulation. The times when we don’t know, don’t have certainty, are as much a part of the journey, and the choice, as when we do. We can’t know if we haven’t spent time in the not knowing.
As we resolve each point in our journey by synthesising the duality of the known and the unknown we are creating something new. Our addiction to the illusion of certainty is the only thing standing in our way.
https://www.loveyourdesign.com//uranus-in-gate-24/
Mutation, Individuality and 2021
When Ra Uru Hu talks about mutation and the individual process it does sound a bit Lord of the Flies.
The new age of Individuality will change the emphasis from Tribal — based in mutual support — to Individual — everyone looking out for themselves. With that approach, our civilization, and its organizations and institutions, will no longer provide the structures we’ve known.
Ra Uru Hu from You and The Program
It’s true, the tribal structures won’t stand the strain of the next few years of conscious evolution, but we will still care for each other. Our structures will change, and if anything become more caring. That is the moral arc of evolution.
Individual mutation only takes hold when it benefits the collective. Those who are in it for themselves will fall with the old tribal hierarchical structure. The Matrix of Brilliance has no place for the non-contributing, or the old lies like trickle-down and segregation.
The End of Sacrifice
There is one core shift in the move from tribal to individual, and it involves the notion of sacrifice. In a tribal structure we sacrifice our individuality to support the tribe, and to receive support in return. If you’ve ever done three jobs to support your family you know what I’m talking about. We have to sacrifice because of the nature of our society. This idea of sacrifice is beneath the whole freedom thing, and most of the conspiracy stuff going around. The need for freedom from some kind of shadowy overlord is so hierarchical and very tribal.
In the new system we are creating we don’t need freedom from an authority demanding our sacrifice (Abraham I’m looking at you there in the Old Testament!). We can shine and do good things without this level of self-annihilation. Within the new cultural matrix we have self-determination, self-authority, self-organisation. And the matrix is healthier (as are we all).
Read: Matrix of Brilliance.
The Gate of Limitation – Gate 60
Limitations, sigh. Who needs those!! Over the next few years we will learn – we do! Not the bitter unsustainable limitations we learn to place on ourselves. But the true articulations of creation.
Remember the grain of sand in the oyster? If you were the oyster you’d probably be plotting ways to get the grain of sand OUT OF THERE!!
Gate 60, however, gives us a wise word of warning about trying to grasp back control of any uncomfortable or limiting situation. We can only move out of the old stuck and stagnant energy by accepting the limitation, observing it’s impact in our lives, noticing what it stirs within us. Then, there is a magical moment – a pearl!
Limitations – good and bad
You will need to pay close attention to the moments you sense limitation. There’s a kind of sado-masochistic shadow at play here. It’s the difference between going on a really strict crazy diet (I’m only allowed to have lemon juice today thank you!) and eating a healthy amount of nourishing food (and no more than a healthy amount).
Watch for where you place unhealthy (and unnecessary) limits on yourself. You can stop doing that now. Look for what the I Ching calls ‘sweet measures’ instead. A supportive and healthy middle ground. But this is only a small part of what Pluto wants to teach us.
The more important aspect of limitations you need to be on the lookout for are where you really really want something to change but you can’t figure out how to make that happen. You might feel frustrated, bitter, even depressed and powerless.
The thing is, real change won’t come if you rush things. In our culture we’re taught that we alone are responsible for creating change and this just isn’t the truth. We are responsible for recognising the limitation, and imagining what we would like instead. If not this, then what?

And then we wait. For coherence to arise within us. We wait to become the person who can live within that new reality. Unless the limitation is recognised and fully accepted, we will never transcend it. We have to know it, experience it, understand what it can draw from our depths. It wants to show us in what ways we are limiting ourselves, reveal emergent new solutions, entirely brand new and not just band-aid measures.
This is the activation of our Global Immune System.
Of course not all Human Design types are designed to wait, but the Root Centre does require coherence, and we are growing into learning about recognising and responding consciously to life’s feedback, and this applies to all types.
Limitations are here to show us we what have outgrown and let us know something new is on the horizon, but they are not the horizon itself. Limitations are the preconditions for breakthrough.
We are not the victim in this place, but the master co-creator.
Emergent Beginnings
Gate 3 and 60 make up the Channel of Mutation. Gate 3 is potent energy – the result of combining yin and yang. I call it the Big Bang gate because it’s the energy of new creation. We tend to thing of the Big Bang as a disorderly chaotic explosion, but it was actually an exquisitely precise rearrangement of the fundaments. It gave rise to the laws of our universe that have supported the emergence of ever more complexity ever since.
The initial level of order of that emergent new world was extraordinary, and continues to be extraordinary.
Think about that. You and I live in that emergent reality, with each moment having the potential for something other than random events that may or may not support our dreams.
Emergence is all in the timing
Remember this is a pulsing energy – you have to wait through the stagnation, the entrapment, the disempowerment. You have to gather intelligence, notice old limitations, grow in self understanding, imagine the new, prepare for the shift. And then the pulse brings the mutation. You recognise it, because you have created it.

Pluto is Gate 60 is teaching us, above all, to step out of the disempowerment of being widgets in the machine. We are about to get a real-time masterclass in how to live as individual self-organising hubs within a vast living system of consciousness.
Amycus, Orius and Arawn
These three bodies are with Pluto most of the time he is in Gate 60, so we know they hold some important sub-text. Amycus and Orius are Centaurs and Arawn is a minor planet, what’s known as a Trans-Neptunian object.
Amycus
Chiron is a Centaur, and possibly the only one you’ve heard of. But there are many more. Centaurs are really important at the moment, because they hold keys to the release of a new level of individual creative originality from that deep dark shadow of humanity. They bridge the gaping chasm between good and evil to release the brilliance of human consciousness.
Amycus is about using our power against ourselves, remember the sado-masochism of self-imposed limitations? It’s about what we believe is our power source. This could be about our shift from fossil fuels to free energy, and the power those old global industries wield over all humanity. It could be shifts in democracy, or local food networks. It is most certainly about your experience of where you get your personal power. Where you hold limiting ideas that convince you the power of creation in your life lies outside of you.
Orius
This Centaur has a great love of freedom and liberation but isn’t quite sure what to do with it. There is the power to create new solutions without the moral maturity to do something positive with it. It makes me think of the morally untethered use of artificial intelligence and other technologies. When we slow down and let the old limitations inform us, we find ways to connect breakthroughs with reality.
Arawn
Named for a Welsh Underworld god how wants us to learn the lesson of patience. We have to wait through the good and the bad if we want our soul to understand who and what we are.
Arawn stimulates a search through trial and error for a complete integration of persona with self-integrity to reach the inner core at an absolute level during ones current incarnation.
Benjamin Adamah – Arawn in Astrology
Jupiter and Pluto
I’ve given you all the most important dates for Pluto’s time in Gate 60 at the bottom of the post. One of those is Jupiter in Gate 3 from 1 to 26 May 2023.
Jupiter brings a new story, and the faith to live it. Remember that Gate 3 is about the difficulty at the beginning of things, new creation and the challenges it brings. Gate 3 is breaking new ground, creating new patterns for living. Pluto will be showing us the limitations, and in May 2023 Jupiter gives us all we need to break through the old energy. Uranus is in Gate 23 – Splitting Apart – at this time, so we can be sure there will be some chaos as the new pattern arises.
Chiron and Pluto
Chiron is in Gate 3 in the last few days of Pluto’s time in Gate 60 – from 13 October to 5 December 2025.
Chiron is a centaur, and as I mentioned above, centaurs are a bridge between good and evil in humanity. They activate the deep wounds that hold us in old reality structures. Chiron shows some gift of healing and creative invention that was ignored so profoundly in our early life that it was rendered invisible. This is an area of our life where we have to blindly feel our way to wholeness. Once we figure it out we are profoundly changed and can support others to follow our own unique healing pathway.
These seven weeks in 2025 coincide with Neptune shifting into Aries (in Gate 25 line 3 in January 2026). It will reveal the way to heal wounds of power-over, to have personal power AND vulnerability and sensitivity.
Uranus in the Individual Circuitry
Uranus will be in the Individual Circuitry right through to 2025. Uranus is the planet of individual brilliance, sudden breakthroughs, radical and novel solutions to old problems. There is a reclamation here, a release of the old radical rebelliousness against the tribal hierarchies, replaced by a calm recognition of the power of the new ways. Uranus is the networker, where each person brings their individual brilliance and the party is better for it.
New technologies like blockchain create a way for us to trust each other, through networked transparent accountability rather than top-down policing. That shift will be reflected within our own psyches.
Learning to trust each other
Pluto in Gate 61 (from 2019 to 2021) has seeded the need for a new kind of trust between people. We are learning how to build collective structures based on networked rather than top-down trust. When we are not policed by an external authority we have to learn to trust ourselves to mutate and create for the highest good, and to choose our best creative allies. Pluto in the Gate of Limitations will teach us the way.
Important Dates
2021
- 16 March – Pluto goes into Gate 60
- 27 April – Pluto goes retrograde
- 11 May – New Moon in Gates 23/43 – part of the Individual Circuitry (view the interactive New Moon chart on Taraka)
- 11 June – Pluto goes back into Gate 61
- 6 October – Pluto goes direct
2022
- 15 January – Pluto shifts back into Gate 60
- 17 January – New Moon in Gate 60 line 2 (view the interactive New Moon chart on Taraka)
- 1 March – Mars is in Gate 60
- 29 April – Pluto goes retrograde
- 30 June – Mars is in Gate 3
- 5 September – Pluto retrogrades back into Gate 61
- 8 October Pluto goes direct
- 11 November – Pluto shifts back into Gate 60 (it won’t go back to Gate 61 again)
2023
- 1 May – Jupiter is in Gate 3 until 26 May
- 23 June – North Node is in Gate 3 until 27 August
- 28 August – Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto and Chiron are all retrograde
- 10 October – Pluto goes direct
2024
- 12 April – Pluto shifts into Gate 41
- 24 May – Pluto returns to Gate 60
2025
- 30 January – Pluto shifts into Gate 41
- 20 August – Pluto shifts back into Gate 60. Chiron is in Gate 3 through till 12 September.
- 5 December – Pluto leaves Gate 60 for the last time, moving into Gate 41.
References
- The Rave I Ching Line Companion by Ra Uru Hu
- Human Design – the Science of Differentiation by Lynda Bunnell and Ra Uru Hu
- Centaurs Damocloids and Scattered Disc Objects by Benjamin Adamah
- Total I Ching by Stephen Karcher
- I Ching by Hilary Barrett
- The Original I Ching by Margaret J. Pearson, PH.D.
- The Laws of Change by Jack M Balkin
- I Ching by Richard Wilhelm
- The Cosmic Hologram by Jude Currivan
- The Self Organizing Universe by Erich Jantsch
I'm Kim Gould, founder of Love Your Design. I have been innovating and taking Human Design to the next level since 2003.
Beyond Type and Strategy, beyond the keywords and rigid rules, there are Asteroids, Dwarf Planets, Multidimensional Human Design and Holographic Human Design to explore. Come join me!
Want more? Join our Love Your Design Communitywhere we break the bounds of standard Human Design and explore it's full multidimensional potential.
So inspiring! Thanks Kim.
Hi Kirsten, thanks!
This presentation appears to feature a keynote in the long progressional prelude to “The Great Change” anticipated in 2027. – Quite remarkable!
In Great Gratitude!
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I will get to do that thing I’ve been planning on 2027 soon’ish Chef!
“We don’t have to do it all in one go.” you wrote and I read, we don’t have to do it all in ego… I felt as if you were reading my chart and giving me a personal reading, Kim. The information resonates deeply with infinite truth, you have seen into the very essence of things. I was reminded yesterday, “Paradox precedes truth”, and now my heart tells me liberation and enlightenment are ours, is mine because I believe in something, me. And it sounds like doubt will be defeated by a belief in Love. My love and gratitude for who you are and what you do is immense. Thank you.
Thank you Cindy, and I love that take – paradox precedes truth, I’ve always found that to be true for myself personally. Sending you lots of love.
As always… another very inspiring read, Kim. Thank you so very much!
🙏🙏🙏
thank you, Kim
pleasure is all mine Alex <3
I don’t always leave a comment but had to here. I have Venus in gate 60 myself with progressed Mars in 3 since 2016. This was SO good! I call gate 60 the Architect. Thank you, Kim! 🌺
Hi Denise, that progressed Mars must have been bringing some changes for you! Do you know you can access the progressions within a HD context at taraka.io? I have called them the Holographic Human Design charts. All done for you, just mentioning in case you are working it out manually. Thank you for taking the time to comment, it’s great to have your contribution. The Architect, hmmm, I will think about that.
Grazie infinite🙏
Thank you for this fantastic information..
I have the Channel 3/60 in my HD chart….I came to this page from today’s blog email. It is so very, very poignant for me and so very, very supportive clarifying what I am experiencing on a profound level. Thank You, Kim!!!!
It’s powerful energy, the 3/60. I’m glad you found the post ♡
Wonderful article, thank you for you intricate depth. Don’t know how I found this, perfect for this time in my life. Thank you!! ❤️
Hi Josepha. Thank you for the lovely message. I am glad you liked my email and I hope that I’m able to help you through this. Please don’t hesitate to reach out if you have any questions or concerns. Thanks a lot and keep safe. 🙂
This is real stuff. There is no such a material on human design on internet,besides Ra. Thank you
Hi Nicolo, I’m glad you’re enjoying it!