No. 43 — What is a Radical Experiment?
In this Solo InSight, we explore what a “radical experiment” actually is — beyond the dramatic narratives of quitting, leaving, or uprooting your entire life.
Using Human Design Variable theory as a framework, I walk through how real transformation often begins with much smaller, quieter shifts: changes in environment, rhythm, responsibility, and daily movement that force us to behave differently without relying on willpower.
This episode looks at experimentation as the missing bridge between theory and embodiment — and why awareness, not intensity, is what creates lasting change. I share a personal, current example of how introducing new energy into the home reshaped my days, my nourishment, and my sense of orientation — without changing where I live, who I’m with, or what I do for work.
This InSight is an invitation to reflect on the radical experiments you’ve already lived through, and to consider where subtle adjustments may be more powerful than dramatic ones.
In this InSight:
• What “radical experiments” mean in Human Design Variable work
• Why not all transformations require big life decisions
• The role of environment and lifestyle in supporting nourishment and health
• Why experimentation should remove reliance on willpower, not increase it
• How new energy in your space forces new behaviour and new rhythms
• Looking back at past lifestyle shifts to understand health, vitality, and breakdown
• Training awareness to recognize when change is already happening
Vaness Henry (00:00.472)
Hi, I'm Vaness Henry and welcome to my latest insight. If you're a human design lover like me, you may have heard of a concept called radical transformation. A radical transformation, going through something dramatically life altering that completely changes who you are and you're a different person. When you're studying the human design variables, those four arrows that flank the head of your body graph, there's a concept called radical transformations where you go through these four transformations across the four variables that affect your body and your personality. But oftentimes we don't really know what a radical transformation is in practical reality. It's not always like leaving the person you're with romantically. It's not always changing and quitting your job or it's not always moving away to some faraway exotic location, totally uphauling, overhauling, excuse me, your life. Although it absolutely can be that. It absolutely can be that. Sometimes that is precisely what's necessary and what's needed to happen.
But not always. Sometimes you're just feeling a little sluggish or slow or like you're moving through molasses or things just aren't clicking anymore. And you need to put yourself into some type of little experiment where you can make these adjustments. So when you are experimenting with human design or you're studying human design, how it begins is you're taking in a lot of information and a lot of theory. And sometimes it can be hard to hold or hard to understand because it might go radically against how you've been living.
Especially if you've been conditioned to behave or live or exist in a certain way that is really unnatural to you or unhealthy to you. So when you're coming into this information, there's a moment of taking it in and ingesting it. You're taking in some type of human design concept about absolutely anything. There needs to be this process of digestion where that is seeping into your system. And then you need an opportunity to try something different to see how this information now might adjust or might affect your everyday life. So you try a little experiment. It either goes well or it doesn't. You trial and error, but either way you're going to get really valuable information of either something that works for you or perhaps where you need a boundary in place or you've reached a limit or maybe you just got information of like, this is definitely not for me. And that's really, really valuable information. In fact, when we look at the personality variables, we see that's exactly how some people learn. Some of us out there only learn by seeing the imperfection first before
Vaness Henry (02:26.57)
the cool new thing that were the cool thing or the cool potential that we're looking for is actually revealed. Sometimes you'll find something that works really, really well for you and you'll start to practice it. You'll start to implement it and you're gonna experiment continuously with that thing until you develop a practice. And once you're developing a practice with it, you'll reach a point where it naturally just becomes embodied. Your lifestyle adapts or your dietary regimen adapts or the way you see things has changed or the way you've existed has changed.
So when you're going through the four transformations, the very first transformation we can have classically is in our dietary regimen. This is the top left variable in your body graph, the determination variable. It reveals the way you ingest your life experience. You take in nourishment, you take in food, and there's multiple ways that we can ingest information. Now, classic human design says this is the first transformation. This is the place once you overhaul your diet or have this dramatic change to your diet, maybe even expand the way you understand food and nourishment. Once you go through that type of transformation, going through radical changes and experimentation there sets you up to flow through the four variables where this change can kind of happen naturally and organically. However, another parable in human design lore is that you cannot feed yourself properly if you're not set up to be nourished.
So the environment variable, your habitat, your lifestyle becomes crucial to experiment with if you're wanting to be well-fed in life, if you're wanting to be nourished by your life experience and grow instead of rescind or contract. A lot of the work that I specifically focus on is targeted to the environment variable because if we need to be well-nourished and we need to be well set up in order to be nourished, to me, that should be where a lot of the experimentation happens. So this isn't, again, necessarily blowing up your life to do these big radical changes.
Sometimes it's rearranging your home office just so that you move into that space differently. This is where some Feng Shui really can come into play. When you are moving the energy or you're paying attention to how the energy flows through your home, you'll notice that every once in a while or periodically or seasonally or annually, things start to change or feel stale and you're just needing to switch it up. Well, what this is actually doing is forcing you to move through your environment differently.
Vaness Henry (04:50.914)
So what are things that we could do to move through our environments differently and they're not breaking up with someone, they're not moving, they're not taking a different job, they're not these huge life altering things because maybe that's not actually where we need change. Maybe we're just needing to shake things up, maybe we're just needing to move the office around, maybe we're just needing to make a more subtle change that can have a dramatic effect. So what are some things I can do to experiment with my environment to force me to move through the space differently. If I move through the space differently, I'm literally very practically operating differently every single day when I move through that space. So to me, a really great place to be experimenting when it comes to intentionally building your awareness, wanting to actually like apply some of these theories that you're doing, is to make an experiment in your environment. Make an experiment, a radical experiment in your lifestyle.
So for example, I want to tell you about a recent radical experiment I did that wasn't one of these big three scary things. I didn't go through a breakup. I didn't change where I live. I didn't change my career. But what I did do was bring a puppy home. And when you bring a new energy into the home, whether that's a new family member, such as parents giving birth and bringing a new person home, or somebody moving in with you or cohabiting with you or getting a new roommate or getting a new puppy, like I did in this case, it changes the way you live in your day to day.
So for example, there's a rhythm that happens when you have a family pet. And as somebody who grew up with a dog, there was this rhythm to the day where you get up and you take the dog out. So you're getting outside right away. Or perhaps you go into the ritual of feeding the dog or playing with the dog. There are certain activities or actions you do that orient with the animal. That's how you exist together.
And when I lost my dog a few seasons ago, was really, I really felt the lack of rhythm, the lack of flow. What should I be doing? There was this aimlessness that happened because there was just so much change in how I existed in the day to day. So that showed me, okay, well, that's a really radical experiment. That's like changing the energy in the environment, changing up the relational dynamic in the space that I'm existing in, even if it's not between two people, but it's between you and a living thing. So when we brought this new puppy home,
Vaness Henry (07:09.708)
We totally needed to exist differently in the space. We needed to barricade off certain things. We needed to get back on a very consistent rhythm because a schedule is one of the best things that you can do for a puppy. And when we fall out of that rhythm or we're still establishing that rhythm, it can be really hard to get into a flow. there's all this like reworking that has to happen. Well, now my mornings look different. How I wake up, what I do is different than it was say just a few weeks ago.
When I take breaks throughout the day is really different than it was maybe a few months ago. So bringing in this new energy, a puppy, is a radical experiment. It's radically altering the energy in the home. Even something like I came on the second floor, which our dog isn't allowed to go there yet, or she couldn't necessarily climb up the stairs to get there yet, but when she figures that out, how are we gonna be handling that? And I came out of my bedroom one day and kind of looked up the hallway threshold and all the doors were closed.
This door was closed and that door was closed and this door was closed and that door was closed. And usually I can see through the space. I can kind of see through into each different room and it was all closed off. The home felt very cavey and I live with two caves boys. And the dog, the little reflector dog has some very interesting behavior when she maneuvers the environment. So we wanted to block her off. if she happens to come upstairs, she can't get into any of these rooms, but it totally changed the energy of how it felt to be upstairs.
To come out of my room — right, everything was just a little bit more closed off, tucked in. Things that are usually left out are changed or found a new home. You can't leave your shoes on the floor by the front door. I hung my moccasins on a stick in the corner, because I keep taking them and I don't want to keep getting them out of the closet and making all this noise. So I hung them on a stick. Works great, love it. And just like a newborn, a puppy or a new family pet goes through stages of development and growth.
Where something's working for a while and then something, a development happens and a change is needed. Maybe a certain style of training isn't working, an adjustment needs to happen. So there is this aspect of needing to approach life differently for a few seasons as you're living into this new lifestyle. Do you have any examples in your life that you think back where you went through a really big radical change in your environment, radical change in your lifestyle?
Vaness Henry (09:33.238)
Maybe you got a family pet. Maybe you started dating someone new. Maybe you had a new job. Maybe you moved somewhere. Maybe your friend circle changed. Whatever was the, if you could look back on your life and find some type of shift, some type of, or some type of lifestyle adjustment that you went through, what were the big changes that you actually noticed? And can you think of subtle ones that aren't always so big and dramatic? And more importantly, when you look back and look at these things, was there any changes to your diet?
Because we know in human design, the first transformation happens in the dietary regimen. It happens in what you take in. But we know it matters where you're located, how you're set up in life, what your environment is before you can be properly nourished. So you could give a certain plant all the food and, or excuse me, all the water, all the sunlight and soil requirements that should work for its development. But if you've planted it in the wrong zone in the world, it's simply not gonna grow.
And people are like this too. People have certain requirements that they need to have in their lifestyle, in their environment, in their habitat. And if they don't have these things, everything is just a little bit harder or it's not working as easily and effortlessly as it could. And there are people who live their whole life this way, pushing up against barriers and growth being hard or people betraying you or you having opportunities that just go horribly wrong for you.
This is where environment really comes into play. So if you're looking at these times in your life where some type of big change happened, or you went through some type of radical transformation naturally, because these will always be kind of happening organically throughout our life, we just wanna train our awareness to recognize them. And when our awareness reaches a point, yes, we can consciously experiment with making radical adjustments, have radical experiments happen in our everyday life. So getting a puppy is my example of a recent way where I had to live differently within the space. Even though I'm in the exact same environment I'm always in. Nothing has changed in that way, even though some of my furniture maybe has moved around, maybe I'm picking up after myself differently, maybe I can't leave certain things out. So my responsibility in the way I navigate my environment and communicate with the people in my home has changed. There's been a shift. So I have to behave differently, but every other person in the household also is behaving differently.
Vaness Henry (11:57.154)
So everyone's energy dynamics are adjusting, all because there's a new energy that came into the home. So when you're looking back on your life and you're noticing these changes, you're noticing something really big changed in your environment. Did anything happen to your diet? Did you lose weight? Did you put on weight? Did you get a new illness? Did you enter into some type of recovery? Were you the healthiest you've been? Another way you could approach this looking back experiment is think of a time where you were really healthy or really unhealthy, or perhaps an ailment found you. And pause there on that memory and zoom out. What was going on in the wider scope of my life? Who was I hanging out with? Where did I live? How was I spending my time? What was my lifestyle? And those things that reveal themselves are the specific areas where you would want to intentionally, radically experiment with your environment.
Because if you see some of those things you were engaging in were unhealthy for you or your health was suffering in that time, you know you likely need some type of boundaries or limits when you're engaging with whatever was going on in that type of lifestyle. Not everything is for everyone. And when you recognize some of the things that are for you, how can you continue to choose those things while also building your awareness of the things that are not for you? And only when you start experimenting with the lifestyle intentionally, of course you're making healthy choices.
Only then will there be a dietary adjustment that happens. Only then will there be some type of transformation in how healthy you feel and what you're nourished by. And if you're suddenly planted into a type of rhythm or a type of experience that's more nourishing for you, the body's designed to heal. That's when all this movement and flow and health restoration can happen to you. And when it's in the case of if you're already really, really unwell,
Experimenting with your environment variable isn't necessarily going to cure you overnight, especially if you have a very serious illness, you know, that is, you know, being deemed incurable or something that you're gonna have to live with forever. Okay, well, how can we set you up to be most comfortable so that your body can do its best in being properly nourished in whatever way that you are designed to be nourished? Okay, so what is a radical experiment? It's when you change something
Vaness Henry (14:15.542)
or you experiment with something in your everyday life and it forces you to behave differently. I have some terms that I like to recommend around this. Not all of us have willpower and sometimes we want to make a radical change and we're like, I'm going to get up every day and I'm going to hike. And we don't want to set ourselves up for failure. So sometimes making the radical change is something that is a little bit more dramatic. It doesn't call on your willpower reserves to function. Especially if you're somebody who has an undefined heart and you have nothing to prove and you're not necessarily engaged in consistent willpower. Why would we set you up to fail? Why would we set you up to do this thing that you're gonna commit to and have to live differently for this set of time, blah, blah, blah? No, I'm not super into that. But doing it some type of experiment where it just, it simply forces you to change. There is no other way. So for example, let's say you bring a puppy home. I suppose.
You could get out of that. If the puppy is really not a good fit for you, you could find the puppy another home, but I'm not of the mind of doing that. You adopt this family member, you figure it out. You bring them home. You could in theory get out of it, but it's much harder to change your mind, I guess you could say, or change your route after that. So you're forcing yourself, you're not calling on your willpower to force you to get up every day. The puppy is gonna do that for you in this example.
And the puppy is just an example. I'm not saying that everybody should race out and get a family pet, but I do want you to share below if you're watching on YouTube, I do want you to share with me what some radical experiments are that you can recognize you've been through if you look back on your life where something really dramatically changed. And maybe you noticed a health enhancement or a health decline after that changed happened. Just notice, look back on your life and just notice what was going on in my lifestyle and were those things healthy or unhealthy for me. Then once you start to recognize that and you're wanting to take your human design theories out of the formless land and into the practical, you need some type of fun little experiment to try. And if you want to be radical about it, don't call on your own willpower reserves. Set yourself up for success. Don't set yourself up for failure. Make it hard for you to not live by that lifestyle change. For example, if you move, right? If you do something really dramatic and you move to another country, you
Vaness Henry (16:41.134)
could move back to wherever you were before, but it's much harder, right? You're doing something that doesn't call on your willpower. You're doing something that's forcing you to live differently. Bringing in new energy into the home, into your life is a really great way to switch things up. Sometimes just like getting a new coworker. You didn't do anything about that, it just happened. And it is gonna force you to behave differently in the workplace. New energy coming in is always gonna be a way to switch up how you're living or what your lifestyle is.
A new neighbor moving in, any kind of change in new energy, even new projects, you know, or new places opening up. Any type of new energy can definitely give you something very practical to play with and engage in. And after you're experimenting for a while and you're recognizing what works and you're recognizing what doesn't work, you then put that into practice. You try again and again, you get more information, you get more data, and you start to live by these things until that Practice becomes just natural embodiment. And the next thing you know, you look around and, my gosh, I live in a totally different place. Or, my gosh, my friend's circle looks totally different. Or, my gosh, suddenly I have a full grown dog who knows all these tricks and is so well trained. Manifestation. So I want to hear from you. If you have a radical experiment, something that you've done that dramatically altered your lifestyle, whether it was a big change or a subtle change, share it with me.
That gives people who are reading something to respond to, inspiration and ideas, or maybe even just the capacity to recognize a change they've already made in their life. Or if you're thinking about a change or there's a radical experiment you're wanting to try and you're just looking to get a little bit of courage, listen to your body. I'm not gonna tell you to go do it, even though I will and I could. Go do it, do a radical experiment. It's more important that you're not listening to that, but listening to yourself.
What your body is saying and listening to your inner authority is gonna be the way forward throughout 2026 and beyond. And we're gonna be challenged this year with many opportunities to experiment with that. So if you're wanting to do a radical experiment, this is a little brief kind of outline that you can play with, try on, see how it works for you. And don't forget to subscribe to my channel and let me know in the comments below how you are radically experimenting in your life.
