Steps You Can Take When You Don't Know Your Birth Time
Image: David Stenbeck
These days it’s hard to make it past most social interactions without having your exact birth time and location memorized so you can recall it at the drop of a hat when pulling astrological charts, your Human Design, your astrocartography, etc. So what happens to those who don’t have access to it for some reason? They’re forced to just be out there raw dogging life without knowing their Rising sign, Human Design Type, and which cities their Venus line runs through?? Not if I can help.
It’s not terribly uncommon for people to not have access to their exact birth time on their birth certificate (which is needed for max accuracy in pulling most charts related to astrology) for several reasons:
An inaccessible birth certificate. Sometimes parents lose things, I get it.
Being born in a country that doesn’t record exact birth times.
Being adopted and not having access to your original records.
Documents lost in a move, marriage, etc.
While I’d say most people are typically able to find theirs, it’s hard to think of leaving anyone out of the knowledge of these systems because of any of the above reasons. Fortunately there are multiple steps you can attempt to recover a lost birth certificate or an unknown birth time. See below:
Start by checking the family safes or photo albums to find your original birth certificate. As much as we love our Moms (thank you for birthing us!!) and want to trust their memory, please try to fact check their recalled time of birth for you (I can’t tell you how many times these guesses end up being off).
If you know for sure you don’t have your original birth certificate, or your duplicate one doesn’t list your exact birth time, you can request a new one. Try contacting your birth state or territory’s vital records office. You can also go to sites like nationalrecords.org or ancestry.com to search for them there.
Try contacting your birth hospital to see if they have your birth time details on record. Especially if you were born in a time of decent technology, there’s a good chance it’s recorded and stored digitally somewhere.
If you call somewhere like the vital records office or birth hospital, sometimes they can just verbally give you the birth time without needing to request a new birth certificate.
If you absolutely can’t locate your birth certificate or were born in another country where they didn’t record exact birth times, you can try relying on a parent’s account of it, or you can look into getting a birth time rectification. This is performed by a Vedic Astrologer and you can read more about what the process entails here.
A rather unconventional (and possibly inaccurate) method you can try is using a pendulum and asking it to narrow down your birth time by giving it different time options. You can read more about the pendulum divination process here.
If all you have to go off of is a loose time of day (i.e. early morning, or “sometime around 10am”), we can try pulling your Human Design chart using a close enough time and ask a couple of clarifying questions to see if your Design is resonating. Please reach out to me directly and I’ll work with you as best I can!
Similar to the Enneagram, I think it’s possible to look at the different Energy Type descriptions in Human Design and choose which one resonates the most with you (specifically noting the Not-Self and Signature feelings). Since your Type is the most important and impactful element of your chart anyways, if this is all you have to work from and you don’t get access to the gates, channels, etc, I still believe this would be incredibly impactful for you.
Trust the information and insight that is meant for you will find you. Not knowing your birth time or your full astrological chart isn’t going to alter the course of your life. These are tools here to help provide insight into who you are and how to best navigate this life, but only if they’re actually serving you and giving you confirmation to the things you’re already feeling in your soul. I fully believe we all have access to divine wisdom and direction inside of us, and following that over everything is what will lead you to what’s right for you. If you find a system or tool that supports you in that, great. But it is in no way required to live the most full and whole life you can dream up and create for yourself.
I hope some of this was helpful for you, and if you have any questions or want me to walk you through some steps to see if we can determine your Human Design without a birth time, don’t hesitate to reach out to me directly to ask.
And if you do have access to your birth time and would like to dive deeper into your Human Design, you can order your fully customized Human Design Guide here, or book a 1:1 Human Design Reading here.
