Be a Hero, Be Yourself

Chiron is known as the wounded healer. It is through our wounds that we can come to our greatest gift, which is our own special and personal uniqueness. It is no easy task to uncover the gold that lies beneath the layers of lead. Yet it is the most important task that each and every one of us can and must do. There is no healing of the collective without a healing of each and every one of us individually.

Chiron is now at 24 degrees in the sign of Aquarius. Aquarius correlates to the collective, and 24 degrees of the sign is significant. The gift of Leo energy, the sign that lies opposite Aquarius, is to bring us to full and personal creative expression. Understanding the Leo/Aquarius polarity helps us to understand our present task.

Chiron in Aquarius correlates to a sense of being fragmented, alienated, alone and cut off from the rest of humanity. This placement emphasizes our need to experience our aloneness. As difficult as this phase and the feelings it brings may be, it is necessary. In this separation lie both the wound and the gift. Chiron’s gift to us is the support and the assurance that we can live in the wound and the healing simultaneously - with love and with joy.

If we get stuck in the wound phase, we tend to exaggerate or even glorify our separateness. We can certainly observe such a pattern on a global scale. Though we have the intellectual knowledge, and even the scientific proof, that we are connected, we remain fearfully alienated in groups designated by any number of allegiances – nation, race, religion, gender and so forth. This feeling of separateness creates so many of the ills that characterize modern life. Collectively, many of us are asking the question, “How much longer can this insanity go on?” Chiron’s response is likely to be something like, “This depth of pain has been necessary. Only when it begins to hurt this much will you do something.”

Intellectual knowledge is not enough to cause change. We have to experience the pain and its ramifications in our lives on a personal level or we will not move. Eventually the wound becomes so acute that we feel we have no choice but to begin the “ return” or healing journey.
Chiron as half man, half horse, emphasizes our dual nature and the fact that we embody both darkness and light. The wound is associated with our darkness, and it reveals itself in all our separative emotions – judgment, blame, fear, resentment, and anger towards ourselves and others - and any other that you can add to this list. The healing of the planet begins as we begin to heal our own personal separative emotions.

Chiron’s placement in Aquarius points to the techniques. Aquarius introduces the light, the clear vision offered by Uranus, the planet associated with Aquarius. Uranus encourages us to adopt an objective attitude to our pain. We ask ourselves, “Why do I need to suffer so much?” “Why do I feel so separate?” Objectivity takes us on an inward journey of reflection. This is a long process and the healing is found in the details, represented by the Virgo/Pisces polarity. As we to come to better know us, our own uniqueness is gradually nurtured and developed. Aquarian objectivity also helps us to understand ourselves through contrasting ourselves to others. We learn to enlarge our perspective beyond ourselves.

With this enlarged perspective we come to see the variety and richness of human expression, and at the same time, come to understand the many paths that individuals choose to express their humanity and to search for truth. As the healing phase continues to evolve, we not only get comfortable with this vast mosaic of differences that are a part of our collective experience, but we also come to know our own place in this tapestry. We feel that we belong. No longer do we have the need to ignore, deny or denigrate another’s different reality.

It is at this point that we can truly become our creative selves, which is Leo’s gift. The expression “be a hero, be yourself” then becomes a living reality. The collective is healed as the individuals within it are healed. There is no other way.

Healing expresses itself as lack of duality. The separation, the differences, the pain and suffering, are no longer an issue. The sign of Pisces, and its ruling planet Neptune, astrologically are associated with this sense of unity.

That is why Chiron’s upcoming conjunction with Neptune over the next 2 years is also so intimately tied with the themes discussed above. Virgo and Pisces follow Leo and Aquarius in the zodiac line-up. Attending to the details of our own personal healing (Virgo) is the way to open ourselves to unity with the divine (Pisces). Chiron’s appearance in our Solar System beginning in 1977, signaled a period of both personal and collective healing for humanity and planet Earth. But with Chiron in Aquarius, now, coming into conjunction with Neptune over the next two years, and then moving into the sign of Pisces, the opportunities for personal and collective healing are highlighted. This is a remarkable gift. Chiron will leave Aquarius and move fully into Pisces in February 2011.

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