Column: Chiron and Healing from Pain

I can’t remember when I realized that Chiron was an astral body in my birth chart. Astrology had been a part of my life since I was nine, as part of the metaphysical blossoming present during the 1970s and early 80s. I read my horoscope in the Sunday paper and fashion magazines my friends might leave around. Chiron was never mentioned. My focus was on love and career: when might the love of my life appear? Was I headed in the right direction, career-wise? Was I making the right choice as to where I would settle down? These were the main foci of what I sought via astrology. Pain, wounds, and discomfort were not areas I sought to find in my natal or progressed chart. However, one of the greatest teachers in life has been a stronger understanding of Chiron, its chart placement, and its teachings on healing life’s inevitable wounds.

Chiron’s discovery as a body in 1977 added to the broad tapestry available for astrology buffs. Named for the centaur Chiron in Greek mythology, the astral body Chiron in the natal chart represents the deepest wound of the individual. Throughout the years of exploring astrological charts, Chiron’s placement and meaning were a mystery to me. To understand astral Chiron is to willingly explore the area of where the deepest pain and wound resides. This is the exact opposite of what normally gets the most exposure when talking about astrological charts.

The immortal centaur, Chiron, is revered for his teaching and his willing sacrifice. Despite his healing abilities for others, he was unable to heal himself. Like its namesake, Chiron the astral body represents both the area of the wound and where we must focus to attempt to heal the wound. Although Chiron was not able to heal himself, as humans we spend a great deal of time trying to figure out what isn’t working, what has gone wrong, what hurts, and how to fix it.

Recently, after more than 12 hours of agonizing pain, I rushed to the emergency room in a desperate effort to find out what was wrong with my body. It was just after eight in the evening. For those who have ever been to an emergency room at a hospital, the nightmare is waiting for hours while various medical personnel poke, prod, and test to find the root of the problem. This is especially true on nights and weekends. I found myself signing papers for exploratory surgery two steps from the operating room just after midnight. It was less than four hours from arrival. I had to put faith in the gods and into the hands of complete strangers that they would do whatever was necessary to keep me whole and alive.

While Chiron covers spiritual wounds, I was in a hospital, dealing with real wounds, and the spiritual and the physical become one. I do not remember anything I said at 6:30 in the morning despite indications on my hospital chart that I fully understood that I had surgery and that it had gone well. Thankfully, I’d brought my tablet to the hospital with me.  I took a picture of the big white bandage where someone had outlined what had been the placement of my missing body parts. The dark shadows beneath the white overlay showed the blood seeping through. I look at it now and wonder how I remembered to even ask for the tablet.

What I do remember is waking up briefly in a hospital bed, thanks to someone poking my arm to measure my creatinine, an unpleasant procedure that would be repeated around six in the morning for the next six days. The second thing I remember were the near-constant questions about my level of pain. The questions, I am sure, made sense to the nurses or nursing assistants asking them, but before I could respond about whether I was in pain, I first had to figure out “me” and who I was.

The person who walked around grabbing her belly and struggled to lay still on a gurney at eight o’clock at night because the pain was so intense was not the person who lay on a bed 12 hours later. While a quick body scan did not seem to indicate any changes, other than the pain being gone, I felt an emptiness that I could not fully identify. It was not until I lifted the blanket and saw a large white square bandage across my body that I wondered what exactly happened. I forgot that I had taken a picture. I just wondered if I still had a stomach.

In those early moments, through the haze of dilaudid, I realized that pain is not necessarily just the signal carried via my nervous system that something is wrong. Pain can take on a larger context. I did not know at that time what might have been taken from my body, but I did know that I was not fully myself. Taking time to wiggle fingers and toes helped, but it did not confirm the emptiness that I interpreted as pain. Pain, as the nurses would describe it, was less of an issue. I wasn’t even sure if I was a whole person.

My first indication of what had actually happened was when I attempted to sit up and get out of bed only to have two people rush to make sure I didn’t cause a potential lawsuit by falling on the floor. A searing pain ripped through both sides of my belly. It came out of nowhere, or so I thought.

I was angry with my body and how it let me down. Pain was the cry of frustration for a situation that came at the worst possible time.  If I could not really get out of bed without help, how could I go back to work, engage with others, or do the zillion other things that everyday life required of the average working person? It was in those moments that my healing began.

Healing has a dual track: physical and psychic-spiritual. Medical interventions, like surgery, cover the physical ailments. Spiritual intervention is what covers the rest.   Chiron’s placement helps to indicate where the non-physical wounds are located and where it is possible to gain strength from those same wounds. With my Chiron being in Pisces, my first thought was faith.

Did I have the courage to remain open to healing in whatever form it arrived, or would I want to control and manipulate the process? Chiron in Pisces often remains for seven years, just as it currently sits in Aries for seven years until 2026. The inborn irony is that those with Chiron in Pisces are often the healers who attract those who need healing, yet like its namesake Chiron, these are the very people who have trouble taking care of or healing themselves.

My healing began with admitting that whatever brought me into the hospital, I would need to slow down and look at being there more for myself. And if I forgot, the metaphysical and physical pain of post-surgical healing would remind me.

Currently, Chiron in Aries retrograde (July 15 – December 19) pushes the individual towards finding, recognizing, and acknowledging emotional pain and then releasing it. In many ways it is an internal purge. Surgery falls right into this acknowledgment. It forced me to look at what I had not seen internally because I was in a place where I could not simply get up and leave. The pain was too great at first. Thought the haze of pain, the serious questions come and demand both attention and answers.

The benefit of working through a retrograde Chiron for healing is that the focus is very much on the internal. At two in the morning, alone in a hospital bed, there is no one to stop the questions and the search for answers. Three surgeons assured me that there was nothing I could have done. But I look at the ways that I failed myself: I should not have eaten the sugar-free Vitamin C drops early in the morning. I should have insisted on going to the emergency room earlier instead of trying other options all day. I looked at how my overbooked 27 hour a day schedule could be lightened. Everything that was “important” suddenly fell into a new examination. Was it really necessary to complete X or to attend Y? Would I really be able to enjoy either X or Y if I could be present?

I was afraid of the truth: I was out of commission. No, I did not know for how long. The internal work to address pain during the Chiron retrograde meant being open with those around me, including family, co-workers, and community members. In modern American society, busy-ness remains a norm more often than an option.

Part of the healing that Chiron forces on the internal is the acknowledgement of human frailty and the acceptance that sometimes things just happen. No one is invincible. No one is irreplaceable. The body’s needs often force a truth that the mind and spirit may not wish to hear: rest is a requirement, not an optional component of life. For those with Chiron in Pisces, this is a hard reality. We heal, we rescue, we are the generation that races in to help whether it is truly needed or not. While not all who carry this astrological designation follow the path, I know that at times, I did.

For seven days, I focused on figuring out what to do with a large wound in my belly and the emptiness that came from not “doing” anything.  Doctors and nurses would knock on the door, say hi, and then whip out a stethoscope to listen to my digestive system to see if it finally was waking up. I had an angry wound and no one to blame. I was no longer in charge of my body. My body got to choose how long I would be out of it.  No drugs or physician could change the timetable. Looking back, the constant urge to sleep was the best thing that could have happened.

One of the lessons Chiron teaches is that the need to shut down to heal does not always apply to just physical ailments. The mind and spirit need time to remain inactive to promote healing as well. I found that some of that can happen when the body is silent forcing the mind and spirit to do the same. Some of that can happen consciously looking at what matters and what does not matter from a mental or spiritual perspective.

The hospital stay resembles respite in a cave. It is a time to look a healing, both on the internal and the external. The only demands within its walls are that you attend to your body’s needs. Pain or less pain, mobility, and increased bodily function are indicators of successful healing on a physical level.

On a mental and spiritual level, a feeling of refreshment and sense of renewal mark the start of a type of healing. While the surgery was quick, the challenge faced via Chiron is to look at the trauma in my life. Trauma can come in many forms including past relationship struggles, work misunderstandings, family drama, self-esteem issues, and anything that leaves a mark on the psyche.

My work and struggle with Chiron for healing intensified with the October full moon in Aries, as I was in the hospital. I remember that night being both ready to “go, go, go” and also knowing that my healing was just beginning. The work of the hospital is to get the individual out of imminent danger; the work of healing by the individual starts when the danger is over.

My introduction to healing post-hospital stay started with a hospital grade 3M V.A.C. Ultra Therapy Unit attached two days post surgery. This is a wound vac that uses negative pressure to continue the progress begun in the hospital.  Once attached to my wound via a plastic tube, the wound vac provided continuous suction therapy while attached to the same pole as my I.V. bags.  Every now and then a pain would pop up in the area of my missing right colon mirroring the turbulence on the left side of my belly.

On the day of discharge, I switched to the portable 3M – ACTIV.A.C. with strict instructions to take Tylenol one hour before coming to the wound change appointment. In the meantime, my healing survival depended on following a few simple instructions: eat protein, stay super hydrated, rest, and walk.

At home, healing using Chiron meant re-examining boundaries, relationships, and dreams.  My challenge took the form of maintaining the increased willingness that I found in the stark hospital room to be real with myself while acknowledging a zero tolerance getting rid of what no longer worked in my life. The more that I looked into discarded or past trauma, the more the emptiness started to disappear.

On the physical side, my healing with Chiron was represented by the change between the large oval dinner plate sized wound on my belly that slowly evolved into a smaller saucer sized circle. Each trip to the wound clinic offered the same steps.

First, the therapist or technician clamped the tubes to prevent leakage and  turned off the wound vac.  Early on, I preferred that the therapist remove the plastic drape that held the sponge and tube in place due to extreme skin sensitivity. After a few weeks, I began to remove the drape myself to avoid the sharp pain that came from the edges of the wound that clung to the black sponge. While the therapist added lidocaine, I never thought it helped.  I simply gritted my teeth while simultaneously wishing she would rip off the sponge quickly and slowly remove the sponge a millimeter at a time.

Once the sponge was off, there was the check for healthy red new granulated tissue, wound debridement, and a cold saline rinse. No matter what anyone says, room temperature saline feels absolutely freezing on an open wound.  Every week or two, the therapist measured the wound.  I was so surprised by how quickly the platter became a smaller dinner plate, then a salad plate, a bread plate, and finally a saucer.

The fun part was watching the therapist play arts and crafts with the black sponge, cutting it and turning it this way or that before gently settling it over the open wound.  No two therapists had the same method. They all treated the wound in their own ways.

Likewise, under Chiron retrograde, there is no one “right” way for healing by addressing previously hidden or unaddressed traumas.  During the physical wound healing, I sought to heal some relationships by being more open in a way that I had not done previously. I used ritual to discover which areas were the most serious and the most likely to benefit from great internal examination.

In a manner similar to the therapists, I would need to remove the barriers covering my trauma. Deep breathing, journaling, paying attention to my dreams, and long conversations with the gods each would to help do that. Some nights, I did not want to simply rip off the sponge that covered my pain; other days, I felt strong enough to face the trauma head on. I say nights because my willingness to do the work would come at night, after a long afternoon nap or late at night when I woke up at 2 am and could not go back to sleep.

Chiron in Aries, in its current retrograde phase, calls for healing through self-examination, finding our traumas, and eviscerating them. My Chiron in Pisces makes it easier to spend time swimming in the emotional realm to heal the traumas I have there. Healing physical surgery forced me to address a toxic pattern of overwork and busyness. Overall, the healing that I have found really does match the same instructions that the wound care physical therapists gave after every wound change: eat protein, increase hydration, get plenty of rest, walk, and keep life simple.

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