Chiron, Wounded Healer: Reaching Beyond and Through Our Pain
chiron, wounded healer
reaching beyond and through our pain
There are things which appear briefly in life and then disappear, flickering away, barely felt. And then there are those things which return to us throughout time, again and again, things we carry and which are felt so heavily that the rest of our experiences come to be suspended within their gravity.
Of the many celestial bodies in the sky, Chiron has been one to continually appear to me, asking for – sometimes demanding – space to be heard and felt and healed.
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i feel.
When I look at the past several years of my life and all the experiences they have brought me (if not my lifetime as a whole), there is no question that most of these experiences have been characterised by a deep pain and hurt that returns across the years – nearly all in questions of love, self, and other.
Like Chiron, who in many Greek mythologies was cast away and injured by some of their nearest companions, I came to many of my own wounds through relationships where I least expected them.
The story (often) goes that Chiron was one of many centaurs, distinguished by their care, gentleness, and willingness to share their insights into the world’s arts – among others generally known for aggression, indulgence, and a lack of discipline, Chiron was known for working to serve others and further their potentials. For every “hero” to slay a mythical beast or make a trek across troubled seas, there was Chiron offering years of support and mentorship, years of attentive devotion to seeing others develop into their fullness.
Of all their many, many skills, Chiron’s healing arts were perhaps the most sharpened; it was said that all who came to them were able to find healing, that nothing appeared to be beyond Chiron’s ability to craft healing for another.
And yet, that is where Chiron’s healing comes to an end: with others. As the story unfolds, we find that Chiron – delivered a fatal wound by a loved one – is unable to remedy this hurt. Despite all their experience, skills, and knowledge, they find no resolution to the wound. Experiencing the most excruciating pains of their life, Chiron offers up their immortality in order to be free of this eternal wound.
Loved by many and yet alone in this pain, unable to be healed by their own hand or by any other, they find relief in being liberated from their physical body – for their earthly deeds, they are placed among the stars as a constellation.
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Although I had known of Chiron before and understood their purpose in a chart, it had never quite been something I held close in my own astrological practice. I knew them as healing, an energy of renewal and rejuvenation and – equally – of pains and trauma. But it was never something I saw as deeply personal to me or integral to my work; they were never me, of me, mine.
Until they were.
i receive.
Only a few weeks ago did I begin to observe more deeply how Chiron might be integrated in my life and only since then have I been able to receive the depths of what they have to share with me – when we are sensitive to the patterns around and within us, we are able to feel and receive more deeply, fully, honestly the many rhythms of the universe.
In fact, these weeks mark a critical transition in Chiron’s patterns: as it does each 7 years, this planetary body has recently been transitioning signs (moving from one into another).
For these last 7 years, Chiron had made a home in Pisces, a sign which amplifies sensitivity, feeling, and intuition, all things which roil our inner seas and the deeper traumas within. As Pisces comes at the end of the astrological/zodiacal cycle – which is also the life cycle – it especially represents the period of life where the spirit yearns to be freed from the physical body and reunited with the greater All. To return to spirit, to dust, to the seas – to the rivers, mountains, soil, and stars. Throughout all of life, Pisces is reaching, reaching for something beyond, which is what gifts the sign the secrets it carries of deep healing, a sense of empathy as well as a devotion to sharing healing with others. An eternal desire to end suffering and to be together.
There are few places in the sky where Chiron’s essence can be witnessed more clearly, where its story is told most honestly and in sharpest detail. It comes as no surprise, then, for these 7 years to be characterised by the myriad pains that being bound to this earth brings – as has been the case in my own life experience.
To experience abandonment by those who are said to love us. To be apart – to be torn apart. To dissolve. To find ourselves undone and broken and alone, and somehow living on. To serve others endlessly and find disappointment where we are already hurting. To give and give and give and to be unable to receive the thing we need the most, in the moment we most need it. To yearn for something else, and to feel it perpetually just beyond our reach.
To come – seemingly for ever and ever – to the same place within ourselves and to find that hurt remains there.
But there is a transition to all things: as the wounded healer’s journey within Pisces comes to a close, it opens into Aries, the sign symbolising the spirit newly manifest in a body.
i give my pains up to the sky.
In Aries, newness becomes. Something is born. There is a shift, and all which was before now takes on another shape. Here, we find fire – its warmth carrying the capacity to destroy and to restore. In these moments, we learn that we are capable of all things, and we leave behind a question of any other truth. It is within reach.
We come to know our fire, and that which has flickered dimly becomes a whole flame.
It burns so intensely that it consumes itself – then ascends.
That which has died reveals itself as undying; cinder reveals something yet alight. Crying and screaming and laughing, it shakes free from ash, as if untouched, with only a few scars to remind that something existed before. Here, light emerges, demanding to be seen and felt and known. It reaches, pushing its way into lungs desperate for the space to breathe.
It breathes. It forgives. It reaches.
May we be forever reaching, reaching deeply in and through and beyond our wounds – and liberated, may we find ourselves healed and healing.
May we find ourselves healed and healing.
Amani Michael
intuit.hue founder + guide
