Meet Shannon Walton
Hi! I’m Shannon Walton, your transit journey guide!
I’m also a human design reader, mentor, and creator of the Motion Chart. I’ve been in my experiment with human design since 2018, when I encountered the system while doing podcast research for my dissertation on the rhetorics of mental health, neurodivergence, and disability.
To be honest, I was researching these topics because I was desperately struggling with my own physical and mental health and was not finding relief through the normalized pathways of Western medicine, despite all the access I had to top university doctors. I wanted to learn about how others were navigating similar struggles, to explore ways of talking about my struggles without using medicalized language, and to be part of a community where others were experimenting with alternative approaches to understanding the challenges they experienced navigating late-stage capitalism as people with unruly minds and bodies.
I never expected to leave academia after six years of dedicated study, teaching, and research in my PhD program, but in 2019, I did exactly that. After less than a year of using my Human Design BodyGraph as a map for understanding myself, I realized I was living a life of “shoulds,” trapped in a pattern of saying yes to things I didn’t really want to do, and putting my mental ideas of what a good life should look like over the reality of what I actually needed to feel well and thrive as myself in this body.
Since that point, my life has taken many twists and turns! As I learned to hear and follow the intelligences of my bodymind, I realized I needed to eat differently, to sweat, to sleep more, to take time to be still and quiet, and to allow myself to do the things that naturally energized me. As I began saying no to the things that depleted me, my life became more joyful (though not entirely without discomfort or struggle). And as I learned to trust my embodied Yes and No, my health and relationship with my body greatly improved, I began having more good days than bad days, my friendships grew stronger, and I became more confident that I could trust myself to make good decisions.
Of course, the cost of this newfound joy and confidence was letting go of all of the things I thought I’d wanted: the marriage to my high school sweetheart, the career in academia, being a homeowner, having a retirement plan – you know, all the stuff the American dream is made of.
From where I stand today, my life is much simpler. I have a small human design business I run by myself from my home; I listen to and take good care of my body; I have a devotional spiritual practice that I attend to every day; and I have many deep and fulfilling relationships, not just with the people in my life but also with the planets whose lives we are all part of. Once in a while, when the energy arises, I create a new tool or collage, write an article, share a nodal season analysis, or run a workshop.
My approach to human design is relational. What interests me most about a person’s design is the hanging and dormant gates, the parts of you that connect with the outside world electromagnetically. That’s why I created the Motion Chart and Transit Journeys — to help you to consciously experience your most relational parts in interaction with others and awaken to the ways you’ve been in relationship with the transiting planets your whole life.
For me, being in intentional relationship with the planets looks like tracking the transits and observing how my inner landscape shifts with their movements, journaling my experiences, researching astrology, learning the nuanced differences between what it feels like to be in a Mars transit versus a Venus transit, creating altars and composing collages, doing magick ritual and meditating with the planets during electromagnetic transits, and experimenting with planetary parts work to better understand how the inner world of my psyche moves with the outer world of the cosmos.
If you’re interested in developing deeper relationships with the planets and your relational planetary parts, and would like to explore what it might be like to take a journey with me, book a free 20-minute session! I’d love to connect! If you want to learn more about my human design philosophy, check out my article, “Transmission to Type.”