Chiron Tales
With the New Moon conjunct Chiron and Mercury in Aries, it is a good time to talk about Chiron. I don’t like to talk about Chiron, not because I don’t believe it is a powerful symbol, but because the dimensions of experience it points to really cannot be summed up in words. It somehow cheapens the experience to frame it in concepts. Plus, it is not always clear how Chiron’s influence differs from that of planets like Saturn or Pluto. But, with verbal Mercury conjunct the New Moon in the daring sign of Aries, I will try to spit a few words out.
As an astrological symbol, Chiron points to a process of coming to terms with the painful realities of being human– of being celestial and terrestrial, spiritual and animal, infinite and limited. Suffering, brokenness, and the quest to heal are part of the Chiron equation. Healing relationships and mentors come with Chiron, as well. Chiron leads you to your teachers, and later to your students, in whatever form these appear. Along the way, you learn to feel more deeply and give more freely. And you tell yourself stories– stories of suffering and overcoming, stories of being lost and found. This is where Chiron gets tricky.
Stories are integral to our survival, helping us successfully navigate life on Earth. They give our lives meaning. They reveal aspects of reality that we otherwise would not be able to see. But they also limit our reality, since we cannot see anything that does not fit our paradigm. The stories we generate under Chiron’s gaze are particularly powerful. Deeply meaningful and charged with emotion, they can consume our identity and define our very sense of reality. (By the way, this is true of all of the planets– the difference with Chiron is that it specifically refers to the process of distilling wisdom and compassion from pain). Some of these stories help us, some of them hurt us, but at a certain point all of them limit us.
Think of a good story as a trapeze bar: something to hang on to for a period of time, so you don’t fall to your (final) death, and something from which to launch yourself into empty space. Each letting go is itself a kind of death: you die for a moment into perfect freedom, suspended in midair. Then you grab another bar, hang there a moment, and let go once again. Each letting go represents an initiation on the path of healing and awakening. Each successive cycle establishes you at a new level of awareness, where a new world of experience opens to you. And each passage demands its pound of flesh– some prized piece of identity you desperately wish to cling to. When we actively choose a path of initiation, we choose to deliberately relinquish one prized story after another, to strip away layer after layer of identity and experience more of bare, naked reality.
Chiron becomes a magic key when we understand that we can feel fully and yet not identify with our feelings. Finally, the energy itself can move and flow into new states. There is no more analysis required. No more probing into the conditions of your conditioning, because you realize that none of the content of these stories matters. You learn to let go of the trapeze bars more easily and spend more time in blissful, free-falling existence.
Chiron can take you beyond healing and into awakening, if you stay with this process. Powerful inner work under powerful Chiron transits can reveal the truth that you are the sole architect of absolutely everything in your life, including everything, every moment of joy or sorrow, inflation or deflation, darkness or illumination. The whole precious, meaningful journey, is really a circus created by you and for you, to bring you to the realization that you are IT. At a certain point, the whole tent comes down and all that’s left will be YOU, as you really are, which is something you will never, ever be able to tell. You can only be it.
