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*Whether astrology is science or magic, we’re open to most things, if they may be of benefit. ~ Ed.

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Just as there are the usual suspects of planets we look to in astrology—like the sun, moon, Saturn, and that wily Mercury—Chiron is an asteroid that gives us a lot of information about important things in our lives.

When a planet goes retrograde, it pretty much slows down for a while and we get to steep in a deep dose of its teachings, which often helps us to reorient ourselves in the direction of our highest good. It allows us to surrender and work with the energies rather than struggle against them.

Chiron not only represents the wounded healer, a phrase coined by Carl Jung, but, at a deeper level, also represents the wound that never heals. It’s the place that was never loved; it’s the eye of the needle, the hard thing in our lives that offers us deep liberation into what we truly long for.

Since the idea of being wounded in a way that we can never escape from is not palatable in our society, which shuns the impact of its wounding on itself, this deeper aspect of the wounded healer’s teachings might not sit well with us at first.

What’s interesting is that in his story, Chiron was already a famous healer and teacher before he was wounded, even though he had been rejected by his mother at birth.

His wound came from an arrow covered in Medusa’s blood in a misfire from one of his students. It was the wound he received from the poison of Medusa’s blood that he could not heal in the animal aspect of his body. Which, ironically (or really, not at all), is associated with the embodied feminine, the archetypal mother or mature feminine, which was Medusa herself before she was assaulted and cursed.

Since he didn’t want to spend an eternity with a wound he couldn’t heal, and I imagine he tried everything, Chiron sacrificed his immortality for a peer (what a friend) and ended up becoming immortal as a constellation in the sky.

The wound that never heals sits in the center of our hearts, the space where our animal and divine selves merge into our human form.

The ache that never goes away is the opening to our unique path of the broken open heart.

The root of the word sacrifice is, in fact, to make sacred.

When we sacrifice our deepest pain, we lay it in the form of rose petals at the feet of divine love, and a powerful alchemy happens: our animal and our divine integrate a little more. We make contact with something mysteriously nutritive that gives us more of ourselves. We become softer, resilient, kinder, and more sane creatures.

When we make this process conscious, we don’t need to struggle so much with living in the density of it all, or trying to escape it. We get to flourish because of it, not in spite of it.

We realize that many of our attempts to heal ourselves were acts of self-aggression toward the wounded bits of our psyche that were never loved and had gone a little feral. We get to learn how to love the totality of all we are, and the particular way this ache, this wound that never heals, is our own personal path of the broken open heart—where all of our magic, power, medicine, wisdom, and creative genius resides.

We cannot live without it.

It teaches us, ultimately, about coming back home to love.

It’s a relief to know that in coming to peace, in flourishing within this space at the center of our humanity, we are moved in the direction of our highest potential. As we move from what we have known to what we came here to become, this space helps us, supports us, and gives us what we need.

We can learn how to feel good in the process of healing, while offering that which we have no control over, that which we cannot fix or manage on our own, by making it sacred.

Our relationship with the mysterious wounded healer reflects to us this deep Chironic initiation, where we meet ourselves and our relationship to life. We grieve, pray, sing, dance, dream, and we listen.

His prayer is one of longing: Let your unconditional love, grace, and wisdom transform my earthly wounds into the beauty of my true form.

His deeper teachings go against the grain of what we’ve been taught—that it’s bad to be wounded, that we must diagnose and fix our wounds, and that we cannot be happy, loved, or prosperous until we get rid of our wounds. It’s a way we oppress our own power, as if we’re on a hamster wheel that distracts us from what really matters.

We cannot cut off the part of ourselves that feeds our animal body her vitality, desire, and erotic passion for the sensuality that is the nature of all of existence. Without her, we truly become victims to that which we cannot heal in a world that, up until now, has not wanted us to be sane and connected to the power of our true form.

Here’s to making our earthly wounds sacred again. To allowing our deepest aches to be forged into the profound beauty of our truest form.

The earth needs it now more than ever.

So do we.