We all have wounds
It is essential to remember that all pain is valid no matter how huge and complex or how small and minor it may seem when compared to another’s lived experience. We all signed up for different karma in this lifetime and all of our pain is relative. There is nothing to gain from minimizing a lived experience or suppressing the pain that you have felt. In fact, belittling your pain can have very bad consequences on your psyche. Just because you weren’t abused does not mean that you were not neglected or made to feel unworthy at some point in your life. The idea of putting on a “brave face” has been over glorified in our society. It is much braver to feel and process your pain. This helps people with connecting to others. Sharing our pain and vulnerabilities with another can be a huge bonding experience. By sharing your own pain you may help someone else with theirs that are too afraid to express.
The myth of Chiron is not soley about the arrow in the centaurs foot that can never heal. His original wound was the rejection and abandonment from his parents. Beyond that, he also had the wound of being seen as the product of a rape. Chiron felt unworthy of love and like he was disfigured because he was half horse and half man. This was because his mother had turned herself into a horse to escape Zeus and he then transformed himself into a horse as well so that he could mount her. Ancient mythology is full of awful stories like this one. Chiron’s wound is much deeper than physical pain. It is the wound of unworthiness and rejection. He himself became a great teacher who passed on knowledge of healing to others. That is what those of us with strong Chiron signatures also may wish to do once we become healed enough to alchemize our pain into a gift for the world. We then can strive to help others so that they never feel unworthy the way that we have.
Astronomically Chiron is about bringing what is unseen into the the realm of the seen. This is because Chiron is in a special classification of space objects called a Centaur. Chiron is not an asteroid because it does not orbit between Mars and Jupiter in the asteroid belt nor does it orbit beyond Neptune in the Kuiper Belt like a comet. Chiron orbits in an elliptical fashion that sometimes reaches beyond Uranus and at other times is inside of the realms of Saturn. Saturn represents the limitations of reality. Beyond that, is the realm of the outermost planets where our subconscious lies. Chiron quite literally goes into the darkness where it cannot be seen and then brings back themes to be enlightened in the area of the solar system that we can perceive. Chiron is the brave traveler between these dimensions.
Your Unique Chiron
Chiron will express very differently in every sign and every house. Its meaning will also be modified by any aspects that it makes to other planets or points in a birth chart. This gives each person’s Chiron its own unique flavor and perspective which has the potential to become their special gift in helping others. Only you will ever fully understand the circumstances that you have faced in your life and how you have grown to overcome them. You can use your lived experiences to help others by sharing your stories and empathizing with others who have been through similar situations. For example, a Chiron in Gemini may carry a wound where they feel like they cannot express themselves correctly or that what they say is often not understood fully by others. At some point, they may stop trying to express themselves all together out of frustration until that wound is addressed. Once this person begins their healing journey, they can unlock the gift of helping others to find the words to express their grief, hurt, and frustration. This is a powerful step in healing because naming our pain helps to bring light to the wound and pulls it out from the shadows.
Chiron is considered strong in a chart when it is conjunct an angle, another planet, and when it makes a lot of tight aspects to the rest of the chart. The more aspects and the tighter orbs of those aspects, the more complex the wound is likely to be. This wounding can be especially painful when those aspects involve the sun—our source of light, or the moon—our raw emotions. The sun and moon can sometimes represent our father and mother which can signify that our wounds are stemming from them. There is nothing quite like wounding from a parent. As children, we do not know better than to take blame for however we have been treated and we often assume that we deserve whatever bad treatment that we received. We then internalize the treatment and think that we deserve it.
Having Chiron prominent in your birth chart can feel like a huge burden in your life if you haven’t yet transcended and transmuted your pain. If you are still actively running from your pain and refuse to look at it, you will simply keep running into it unexpectedly over and over again. Those who have faced their triggers and have looked their demons in the face can begin to let go. The monsters that terrorize you never fully go away but you can learn to make friends with them—to tolerate them and find peace. Having the words to say to a loved one ‘I’m feeling triggered right now” can drastically change a situation. When we push things down and refuse to acknowledge them, we turn ourselves into a pressure cooker. The only way out is through. You have to work your way through your pain. You have to shine a flashlight on it because it needs to be illuminated. This is exactly why this endeavor is called shadow work. Things become less scary and can be worked on when there is light.
Ignoring Chiron
Wounds that are left untreated can fester and become bigger and bigger just like an infection. Traumatized people can often recreate their trauma on a subconscious level by playing out their old familiar patterns over and over again. This happens because it might be all that they have ever known. People can also be drawn towards toxic friendships and lovers because those are the people who feel familiar and “like home” to someone who grew up being treated poorly. When you have poor self esteem getting treated nicely can feel foreign and uncomfortable. It can be hard to let the good in when all that you are used to is bad treatment. This is why so many people get stuck in the dark and feel cursed and like there is no way out. The only way out is through— through feeling and expressing. We cannot simply “let go” of our pain. It takes a lot of work and looking at things that make us uncomfortable to fully heal.
Healing your Chiron is forever a work in progress. What triggers you will always remain but it will get smaller and smaller and it will begin to hurt less when the wound is touched. As we work on our healing we begin to grow a different gift, one that we want to share with others. We learn empathy and gain understanding from our pain, and with that we grow the urge to shield others from experiencing the same pain. We’ve taken the incredible journey to understand ourselves and the circumstances that have led us to experiencing that pain over and over again and we want to hold the light up for others so that we can help them in their own illumination. Chiron does not just signify the source of our pain but also the source of our desires to help others. That is what the Chiron journey is all about.
Becoming the healing teacher
Love and compassion create community and a sense of belonging. That is what we all really want and need. When we can hold sight of that, we can heal together and raise each other up. We can inspire one another and all be stronger together. We also will be our happiest when we realize that those who are lashing out at us, are actually lashing out at their own wounds and are stuck in their own repeating cycles. Nothing anyone does against us is ever personal. People project their unprocessed wounds onto other people and play out the same dramas over and over again until they become aware of what they are doing. All we can do is stay out of their way and do what we can do to gently try to help them wake up. Until they are ready to wake up, they won’t. After we begin to face our own pain and subconscious cycles we can begin to recognize them in others.
Another gift of healing an especially painful Chiron can be the perspective that you can gain from it. After going through a trauma and successfully processing it you may be better equipped to handle other disappointments in life that can now seem trivial in comparison to what you have previously been through. For example, nothing can ever hurt you as much as the betrayal of a parent. If you have experienced something like that, everything else feels so much smaller. On the opposite note, someone who has always lived a pleasant and sweet life will feel a betrayal as something life shattering and monumental because they have not felt something like that before. It can catch them off guard and they will not not know how to process it. Having been through a similar situation allows us to support them and do what we can to ease their pain.
Being able to use your past wounding as a force for good can bring you an incredible sense of peace. Feeling like their is a purpose to your pain and suffering can feel validating and may make it all feel worth it (that is up to you). Understanding that your soul signed up for challenges to be able to grow and help the collective can give you a fulfilling sense of pride. It can help to make sense of everything that you have been through if you can have the frame of reference that everything happened the way that it did for a purpose. It also helps to have faith that their is more to the story that we are not yet able to understand. We are all still writing our stories as long as we are alive. You have the choice to alchemize your past into a future filled with grace, compassion, and understanding for others. You can be a healing teacher too.