If you’ve been looking at our posts and pages here on A Cauldron of Crones, you have probably guessed by now that we both use the Gene Keys in our inner work. We have both been seekers for decades, looking for ways to understand ourselves more, and ways in which we can grow as human beings. We both found our way to Hayley Curtis’s membership on the same day in 2022. At that time it was called “The Journey Home”; since then, it has transformed into Gene Keys Unleashed with Hayley Curtis, as Hayley herself has fully embraced her role as a Gene Keys Guide.

So, we thought you might like to know a little bit about why we love the Gene Keys, and we thought our fellow Gene Keys geeks might enjoy seeing our individual charts!

To the Banks of the Eternal

Meghan … Why I love the Gene Keys

Seeking… trying… yearning… failing… hiding… escaping… looking for answers… always trying to fix myself… punishing myself… despairing… stiving… defending… blaming… pushing… giving up… always tired… then always ON… hateful self-talk… addictive behavior… blaming others and situations… laughing instead of crying… weeping instead of fighting back… being inspired… then losing the creative impetus… deep self-hatred… false grandiosity… up… down… capable at my job… but not the job of my dreams… married, divorced, remarried… but not to the man of my dreams… the chaotic list is endless because it goes around in circles.

This was the pinball machine of my inner self, my thoughts/emotions/body responses, before the Gene Keys. My inner life was chaotic and painful, even if my outer life looked normal. I had a husband and family, a good job and decent health. But inside I was a mess… I suffered from bi-polar disorder, and an eating disorder with body dysmorphia. I was separate from nature and my own inner rhythms and yet I thought I was doing all the things that our culture expected of me. After my first husband died and I finished raising my youngest son, I remarried and was able to retire. With retirement and the gentle love of my now husband, I began a creative practice that slowly started healing my soul. And when hubby and I moved here to our woodland home in the mountains, nature began resetting my essential rhythm.

Yet I was still unsettled in my inner life… this is when I was driven by osteoarthritic hip pain to seek more deeply. I had had one hip replacement and now was suffering so much chronic pain from the other hip that I surrendered to truly looking within. I studied with Carolyn Myss and learned to look at my own shadows as part of the human condition. I worked with a spiritual teacher to begin to see the light within my own soul and do some inner child healing. I stopped taking my bi-polar meds and began eating better and cultivating a supportive movement and resting rhythm. And I learned to meditate to help to sooth my restless mind and teach me pain relief techniques (thank you Andy at Headspace!).

Then I stumbled over Human Design and spent some time deciphering my own chart… the biggest takeaway for me from HD was that it’s ok to feel my emotions as I am a Manifesting Generator with an Emotional Authority. But HD never coalesced for me as a teaching. It kept me in my head which was already too busy!

Luckily for me an online friend saw the difficulties I was having with Human Design and suggested I try out something called the Gene Keys. The minute I landed on the Gene Keys website in late 2020 and read the intro, I knew this was the teaching for me. I jumped into the Activation Sequence and began my first time around the Golden Path (I am now on my third time through having done the Activation Sequence five times). I have done multiple online retreats with the Gene Keys and richly enhanced them with the Dream Arc when it came out in mid-2023. My personal journey was elevated when I started working one-to-one through my Golden Path with Hayley Curtis in February of 2023. I found my teacher. The intimacy and ability to speak my inner work journey has been magical (Hayley does her guidance and programs on Zoom and in Voxer).

Let’s see if I can list all the reasons I love the Gene Keys and know that it is a transmission I will spend the rest of my life with…

I LOVE:

• the gentleness of the teaching. I resonate with all of the core tenants of the Gene Keys: gentleness, patience, inquiry and contemplation. I was brought up with harshness and my inner critical voice had been bullying me for my whole life until I started the Gene Keys work. How lovely it has been to be held with tenderness by this guidance, as I heal my lifelong wounding.
• the patient nurturing of my self-esteem that has occurred as a byproduct of working with my shadows, gifts and Siddhis in my Gene Keys chart. I had never experienced a teaching that made me feel more esteem, inner stability and a sense of core virtue like the Gene Keys have.
• that the Gene Keys are a transmission to help us reclaim our feminine aspect. Our culture has been led by the masculine for hundreds of years and the feminine has been relegated to a position of (false) weakness for too long. Through my own inner work I’ve been able to honor the feminine aspect within me and benefit from that mysterious wisdom.
• that I have my very own personal map to my wounding and to my gifts (see my Gene Keys chart). I remember in my younger days laughingly wishing I had instructions on how to be human… now I do. The entirety of the Gene Keys book is a manual on how being human works… the good the bad and the divine. And my chart is my personal manual.
• knowing that Richard Rudd, the author and the man who the transmission is still working through, is just a regular man. He is real and approachable, flawed and foibled and humorous and wise. He’s just like me.

I also LOVE:

• that the Gene Keys give me the information about my (free) personalized chart/map AND they give me a pathway to follow to activate and illuminate, initiate and translate my own genius. The information is in The Gene Keys book (and courses) and one of the pathways I have followed is the Golden Path. Other pathways are the Dream Arc, the Seven Sacred Seals and The Star Pearl (more are available, but I have not done them personally).
• that by following my map and pathway to personal growth I have had many insights, epiphanies, ahas and actual changes in my outer experience. I feel like there is now a through line in my life instead of the incessant circular pinball machine I described earlier. I am grounded in who I am and aware of my negative patterns and my delightful gifts. I have moved from blaming others and situations to radical responsibility. I have left my bi-polar illness behind by deepening into my innate sense of equilibrium; moved past my eating disorder by healing childhood wounding patterns and lovingly holding forgiveness when I forget; and my relationships are constantly being reinvigorated as I learn more and more about how to graciously own my own feelings and letting others own theirs.
• that I have become heart centered instead of intellect centered by exploring my own wounding, unwinding that wounding and alchemizing it into purpose and higher service. All thanks to my commitment to myself and my inner work using the tool of the Gene Keys. Now that I have tenderly explored my own darker nature and am in the process of transmuting the places of deepest suffering, I can bring compassion to my day-to-day interactions with strong boundaries and cheerful equanimity.
• being part of a community of people who understand the nature of suffering and the gifts of grace that come with being a human being… a human being who is truly embracing their genius and finding ways to bring that elevated frequency to our planet for the benefit of the whole. It is not an easy path and yet it is soul satisfying and I’ve never felt so alive.

Thank you for sticking with me through this exploration. Writing about why I love the Gene Keys has helped me to focus my devotional energy even more on this incredible set of instructions on how to be the best human I can be. May I see you in our community soon, you will be welcome with loving tenderness.

Lizzie … Why I love the Gene Keys

I have been on this journey of the inner work since 1998. It all started when I was handed a copy of The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron, and that kind action by a concerned witness to the trainwreck that was my life started a ball rolling that just never stopped. For twenty-five years I continued to show up at my journal every day, trying to understand myself, trying to find the “fixes” for my issues of self-loathing and lack of self-belief. And I did some good work in those 25 years. I wrote myself out of several “bad” situations, and I wrote myself into a life where I was content to be by myself, growing my garden and raising my son.

I tried a lot of different healing modalities on that 25-year quest, everything from Native American medicine teachings to homoeopathy, hypnosis to EFT, metamorphic technique to cranial osteopathy. I devoured self-help books and New Age teachings, but nothing gave me the answers I sought; nothing but me, my pen and my journal.

Then I encountered Hayley Curtis and her Soulful Journaling Instagram page and I knew, here was a woman with something to teach me. When she offered a free week inside her Journey Home membership as part of a week-long journaling challenge, I leapt at the chance. I was at home from day one. My dear friend and fellow Crone, Meghan, joined on the same day … you could say this was written in the stars!!

I knew nothing about the Gene Keys, I hadn’t even heard of them, but after a couple of months in Hayley’s world, I felt a tug on my heart to find out more. So I booked a one-off session with her, and my head just about exploded. We talked about my whole chart (well, Hayley talked, I sat in open-mouthed shock), we talked about my Life’s Work Gene Key, and it was as if Richard Rudd had written the story of my life. I was in … I was all the fucking way in!

I have been working with the Gene Keys since Spring of 2023, and as I write this I am currently on my second time through my entire Golden Path (I’ve actually done the Activation Sequence three times). I have learned so much about myself by working through my Golden Path, and it is work that I know I am going to be doing for the rest of my life, because I know there is always more … more to learn, more to understand, more to heal. And I want more. I want to dive deeper; I want to peel back more of the layers of protective self that I’ve built around myself. I want to truly heal and to do that I need to truly see the wounds.

And I know that there is more … I know that I have only scratched the surface of some of my Gene Keys; I know that there are places in my Shadows that I haven’t dared to look yet; I know that there are aspects of my Gifts that I’m just not seeing yet.

And know without a shadow of a doubt that this is what I am meant to do.

Since I began this work, I have travelled really far on this inward journey, yet so often, I have felt that I am right back at the beginning. Again and again, I have felt as if this is a spiral path that always brings me back to the start of the journey, only deeper, with more insight about myself.

When I first started my journey with the Gene Keys, I knew nothing about them, but I dived straight in, and I discovered that they have given me the perfect road map into myself.

Working with the Gene Keys has given me the language and the tools to be able to go ever deeper into myself. The more I learn, the more I know that there is bloody magic in my profile, and I know too that if I just trust … myself, the Gene Keys, the process, my inner compass … then there is no end to the transformations I may experience.

When I travelled through my Golden Path first time around, I had some incredible breakthroughs; I shifted some massive obstacles and let go of some heavy shit. Now, as I am travelling the Path for a second time, I am finding there is even more for me … more breakthroughs, more letting go, more understanding of the breakthroughs I already experienced. The more work I do, the more readily I am able to integrate those breakthroughs into my every day, ordinary life, so that I don’t forget and slip back into old thought patterns and limiting beliefs.

Some breakthroughs are so blinding, so bright and all consuming, that they can never be “forgotten” or “unseen”. But I feel as if my personal growth is like a muscle … I have to keep working it, I have to keep making it stronger, and that means I have to keep doing this inner work.

I look at myself now, and I feel like a completely different woman to the one who started this Gene Keys journey. But I had 60 years of the “old” me before that! Sixty years of wounding and negative self-belief. Yes, there are epiphanies that fundamentally changed me in an instant; but I know that most of my breakthroughs came after dedicated work.

The Gene Keys are not a quick-fix. You can’t just look at all of your Gene Keys once and hey presto! You’re a new woman! Although that has happened, I have had epiphanies that have fundamentally changed me in an instant. But I also know that this is a life-long journey I am on.

You see, despite all those breakthroughs, despite all the inner work, despite the personal growth and transformations, I still have work to do on myself!

I still have wounds to accept and to heal.

I still have a lack of self-belief to transform.

I still have moments where I feel that I am not enough.

I still have more self-love to find. Self-love is a journey, and I have come such a long way on that journey since I started working with the Gene Keys. But in many ways, I am still right at the beginning. Which is why I say that this is life-long work.

I really believe that this is what I HAVE to do, that this work is what I am MEANT to do. This is my calling.

I know that this inner work is the most important thing I can do with my life. Everything else flows from this … my self-belief, my self-love, my relationships, my creativity.

I know in my heart, in my bones, that I am meant to do this. There is more for me to do in this world. And I will only find out what that is by diving deep inside myself. I am meant to dive into the Void; I am meant to go as deep as I can go.

The Void awaits me. I hear its call; my blood is singing in response.

There is nothing more important than this … to find my piece of the great collective tapestry, to follow my own thread back to the source and find out why I am here.

If You’re New to the Gene Keys …

… but would like to explore them, you can get your free Gene Keys profile here!

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Addendum … Because You Might Be a Gene Keys Geek Too …

If, like us, you’re a bit of a Gene Keys Geek, we thought you might also like to see our Star Pearl Charts.