What to bring to your first astrology consultation

Date and place of birth are easy. Time is the one people get stuck on, and it matters because the ascendant — the sign rising on the eastern horizon at your birth — moves through all twelve signs every twenty-four hours, roughly one every two hours. The ascendant sets the entire house structure of the chart, which is what tells an astrologer which area of your life a planet is actually operating in.

Places worth looking before you conclude you do not have it:

• Your birth certificate. In India the time is often recorded on the municipal or hospital-issued certificate even when it is absent from later documents.
• The hospital record, if the birth was in a hospital that still holds archives.
• A family horoscope. If a janam kundli was drawn up when you were born — extremely common — the time is on it, and an older relative usually knows where it is.
• Your parents’ memory. "Just before the morning tea" or "during the evening news" is a usable window, and far better than nothing.

The single biggest difference between a session that feels worth it and one that does not is whether the person arrived knowing what they wanted to ask. It is very easy to spend a whole consultation on interesting general observations and hang up realising you never asked the thing you booked for.

How a question is phrased also changes how well it can be answered. Questions about timing and approach have real answers in this discipline. Yes-or-no questions about the future mostly do not.

• Rather than "will I get the job", ask "what does the next year look like for a change of role, and is there a better window in it".
• Rather than "will this marriage work", ask "where is the friction likely to sit, and what does the timing look like".
• Rather than "will I be rich", ask "which periods in the chart are the earning ones, and what should I be building during them".
• Bring the decision you are actually facing, even if it feels too ordinary. "Should I take the transfer to Bangalore in March" is a much better question than "tell me about my career".

Three or four written questions is about right for a first session. If you have twenty, put them in order — the order is itself useful information about what is actually pressing.

It is a conversation, not a recital. You will not be read a list of planetary positions in Sanskrit and left to interpret it. The chart is explained in plain language, with the reasoning shown — if you are told that a particular period looks demanding, you will be told which placement that comes from, so you can weigh it rather than simply absorb it.

Sessions run in English, Hindi or Punjabi, whichever you are most comfortable thinking in. That matters more than it sounds: people describe their own lives with far more precision in their first language, and a consultation is only as good as what you are able to say in it.

You are allowed to disagree, and it is useful when you do. If a reading of a past period does not match what actually happened, say so — it is real information, and occasionally it is the first sign that a birth time needs rectifying.

Worth stating before you book rather than after, because these are the fears people actually arrive with.

• No predictions of death, terminal illness, or harm to your family. Not as a matter of taste — it is a line this practice does not cross, whoever asks.
• No fear-based readings. You will not be told something alarming and then offered the fix for it.
• No selling afterwards. No gemstones, no yantras, no pujas, no commission from anyone who supplies them. Where a traditional remedy is genuinely appropriate, you will be told what it is and left to arrange it yourself.
• No pressure to book again. If one session answers your question, that is the correct number of sessions.
• Nothing you say in a session is discussed with anyone. That includes whoever in your family paid for it.

Take the call somewhere you can speak freely — the quality of a consultation drops sharply when someone is answering carefully because a relative is in the next room. Headphones help for the same reason.

Have your birth details and your written questions in front of you rather than in another app. Bring anything you have been told previously that is worrying you, including readings from elsewhere; there is no awkwardness in reviewing someone else’s work, and that is often the most valuable ten minutes of a first session.

Session lengths, fees and the terms for rescheduling are all on the consultation pages, which are the pages that own those facts and are kept current.