The Wounded Healer

 I've been learning a lot about astrology lately and one of the more significant ideas I've come across is that of Chiron.  It's called the "wounded healer" because it represents the areas of life and experiences as reflected in the birth chart that can lead to self-discovery and self-healing.  These areas and experiences, often called "issues" must be resolved in order to achieve personal growth and are reflected in Chiron's sign, house and aspects to planets and angles.  It is also linked to shamanism, an ancient practice of using intuition to heal. 

I found all of this very interesting because of the journey I'm on personally in my life.  When I started having severe health issues a couple years ago, my whole life was turned upside-down and I was literally forced to reassess just about everything in my life; my values, belief system, friends, ideas about how life "works", etc.  The concepts of self-discovery and self-healing have become an every-day occurence in my life, so "figuring out" what my "wounds" are and how to heal them seemed like a really good way to move forward on my journey. I found the following information to be a great overall lesson in dealing with the challenges in my life and you really don't have to know anything about astrology to understand and use them.  I found this information on Karyl Jackson's site, Alpha Life trends.  She also has a lot of really great information on the planets Uranus and Pluto and how they affect transformation and sudden changes in our lives.

http://www.alphalifetrends.com/index.html

Chiron portrays a forced savings account from our efforts. On our road of life, each of us are given pot holes from one challenging situation or another. The tendency is to blame others for these pot holes, or to blame situations for these deep challenges and scars in our life.  The Truth about Chiron is that it points to the type of qualities and the area of our life that is designated to give us the opportunity to understand selfless giving and to grow through our chosen responses to these potholes. Within these challenges, we are given the deep hole of experiencing unfair situations that we must accept, deal with, understand and ultimately bless. This is a very tall order, however, our life, our path is sprinkled with them.

Chiron takes 50 years to make one complete orbit, so that we have to provide 50 years of effort that may not be rewarded until Chiron connects with where it started out in our charts. Chiron is the ultimate of giving us challenges to see how we will respond to them. They usually take the form of unfair situations, being the target of ill-motives, blame, displaced power, etc. It is easy and the most popular response to be angry, to blame the situations or the people involved, something outside of ourselves for creating these pot holes. That may be true, however, the most important part is not the fact that others or outside circumstances created the pot holes unfairly. The important part is the quality with which to fill up these pot holes. 

There are five qualities, each of which has its own level of (spiritual) awareness with which to fill up the pot holes of challenges;

First, there is tolerance. We can tolerate the situation with patience and those that have created this pot hole with patience as well.

Second, there is acceptance. Ultimately we have to accept that this is the situation we are given, whether it looks like it was unfairly given to us or not, and not continue to point outside ourselves as an excuse for not seeing the opportunity within the situation. Our inability to look inside and find something to fill up these pot holes with determines that we will continue to point to the unfairness, become angry, and blame others.

Third is understanding. We may not be able to understand why everything had to occur and had to bring us to the depths of our soul. But the reward for having acceptance of the situation, is to bring us understanding.

Fourth is appreciation. To be able to appreciate the situation, to see the positive side of the circumstances. We can see the opportunity to fill up these potholes with something wonderful, finding the Divine Gift of growth. We can look to the new level of understanding and knowing that these potholes have brought us some incredible circumstances.

The fifth is to be able to see situations through love and the ability to see these potholes as something wonderful and good to help us to grow. We have the opportunity to respond to circumstances differently than those individuals who created our potholes and to take action instead of just reacting to the situations. This expands our understanding of the completeness in our Cosmic Savings account and the Divine Plan.