If there is anything you take away from Human Design when you first begin working with it, it should be the following 3 things. You don’t really need to know anything else. If you were to only work toward understanding these three elements of yourself, the rest of your design will unfold as a natural result.
Your TYPE is your “vehicle”.
It tells us how your energy shows up, how that energy is best used, and the way it interacts with the world and the other people around you.
Your type will tell you:
• Are you here to initiate and get things started?
• Are you a slow and steady, masterful builder?
• Are you a sprinter who’s adept at pivoting?
• Are you here to sense and guide other peoples’ energy?
• Are you here to evaluate and mirror the state of people, your environment, and the world?
Your type provides a framework (known as your Signature & Not-Self Theme) to inform you of when you are in alignment or out. It is a felt experience. Are you here to experience satisfaction, recognition, peace, or delight? Are you constantly experiencing frustration, bitterness, anger, or disappointment instead? This framework helps you identify when and how you have gotten off track.
Your STRATEGY is your “GPS”.
It tells us how you are designed to interact with and navigate through people, opportunities, and experiences in your life in order to minimize friction and maximize ease. Your strategy is your way of understanding and protecting your energy.
• Are you designed to just go for it, initiate, and inform along the way?
• Are you designed to wait to respond to things that come to you before committing your energy to them?
• Are you designed to wait to be recognized before sharing your gifts?
• Are you designed to wait a lunar cycle before making big decisions?
Your AUTHORITY is your innate and reliable decision-making process.
It explains how to make decisions that are in alignment with your energy. Knowing your Authority can clarify:
• Should you be following your first instinct? Your gut?
• Should your decision-making be more spontaneous and in the moment?
• Should you sleep on it and get clarity over time?
• Do you need to hear yourself talk it out before making a decision?
Your Authority is how you decide what to actually commit your energy to. It is there to help guide you to those things that you actually have the energy to pursue (instead of all the “shoulds”).
Applying Human Design To Everyday Life
Discovering Human Design and using it as my own personal, energetic, and psychological operating manual has been absolutely invaluable on my journey over the last three years as an entrepreneur, coach, partner, and human being.
It’s helped me to understand how I am designed to work, rest, learn, harness my energy, share my gifts, understand others, and help others. But it doesn’t end there!
Here’s what else I’ve gained as a result of following my unique Human Design:
• I’ve stopped chasing opportunities and wasting my energy trying to force things to happen. Instead, I’ve stood tall in my value, remained visible, and allowed the most exciting and aligned opportunities to come to me - and they have! (#projectorlife)
• I’ve discovered that I operate best when in a position to guide other people rather than “doing all the doing”. No more burning out, and no more pushing myself past my natural energetic threshold.
• I’ve learned how to make truly self-honoring decisions (most of the time!) instead of succumbing to mental or peer pressure.
• I’ve learned that people receive my energy, insights, and perspective best when I am first recognized and invited to share them.
• I’ve owned and accepted that I am not designed for a regular 9-5 job. I require a bit more rest than some others types, and that is OK. No more shame here. Bring on the naps!
• I’ve learned that my routines are meant to be somewhat fluid and flexible with options instead of rigid structure. This confirmed how I’ve always felt, but had been told was “wrong”.
• I’ve discovered that I’m here to share my perspective and guide others with powerful questions, but only by those who recognize and value my insight.
Learning about my Human Design has helped me relax into my natural way of being. It has given me tools to understand my energy and its best uses. It has confirmed for me things that I’ve always known and felt about myself, but had been conditioned to not accept.
I no longer feel like I’m swimming upstream. These days, I am flowing with the river.
Human Design is a system that helps you uncover your path of least resistance so that you can move through life with greater ease.
And it is completely unique to YOU. Instead of swimming against your natural current, you learn how to surrender to the flow of your personal river.
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:
1. An inaccessible birth certificate. Sometimes parents lose things, I get it.
2. Being born in a country that doesn’t record exact birth times.
3. Being adopted and not having access to your original records.
4. 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:
1. 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).
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. 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!
7. Similar to the Enneagram, I think it’s possible to look at the different Energy type description 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.
8. 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, I would love to connect!
