I believe we need to expand the definition of the astrological Chiron. Yes, it’s our wounds, especially that primal one that lives in the core of our Being. And it holds that special gift, that thing we can do like no one else. Chiron also shows where we can offer healing to others–and my own personal theory, that since 2012 we’ve been able to offer that healing to ourselves–that year didn’t bring the end of the world, it brought the end of a world where we weren’t able to give ourselves, to do for ourselves, that soothing and knitting together we’d wished to have but found we could only pass on to others. Now we can give that healing to ourselves, provided we can access our Chirotic energies consciously. So, Chiron covers a lot of vital ground, and I’m not proposing a change in what it signifies so much as a shift in how we think of it.

My recent work has been pointing more and more to the isolating way we’re thinking of Chiron. It hurts! It’s over there! It’s tricky to understand, to access! We’d rather not think about it, probably because Chiron in healed form asks us to be thoroughly responsible for ourselves–and most of us would rather leave a little room for excuses, blame, and a wee bit of slack–and I don’t blame anyone for that.

I’ve concluded we need to think of Chiron not as the wound or the gift or that special healing energy, but as the sum of all experience–because what informs our remembrance of things past as thoroughly as those things that wounded us, or that healed us, or that we excel at? Those are all core components of unique identity, a kind of anti-karma: it’s not the total meaning of what we do, it’s the total meaning of what we undergo, the times we bump up against the world and the world bumps back, leaving a mark, changing us through hurt, through helping define our particular talents, or through a growing understanding of what it takes to recover and go on.

I ask you, then, to think of Chiron as a collection of results, gleaned from experiences that shape us. They feel like facts, like things we’ve been presented with, whole, but they are actually malleable, changing with our changing exposures and interactions. Chiron needs to be seen as the sum of all experiences that change our core concepts of our weaknesses (the hurts) and strengths (original talents and gifts). In that sense, this body informs us, in very clear terms, about where we might be susceptible to pressure that skews our motivations and perceptions (to protect the wound) and where we should hold an unusual amount of confidence (when utilizing our very particular talents), and it shows us precisely where we have a kind of magic touch when it comes to helping others. And those are all pretty useful things to know.

See my Chiron workbook here—I hope you’re having a great week—or as good as can be had, in the world today.