Psychospiritual Growth: Chiron, the Wounded Healer

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Psychospiritual growth will inevitably include an encounter with Chiron, the wounded healer archetype. Chiron the asteroid is retrograding through Aries for the next few months (July 2021 through December 2021). This brings the energy of the wounded healer archetype to our collective field. This is an opportunity to review, revisit, explore stories (narratives) around wounding, healing, and teaching. Where in your life does this constellation of experience emerge?

Take some time to read this blog, then write out a reflection about what resonated with you, what didn’t resonate, and where you are in your journey, especially your relationship with Chiron. An archetype is a pattern of thoughts and behaviors. Chiron’s placement in a chart reveals the thoughts, patterns, and potential for deep healing and learning in an individual’s life.

Chiron moving through Aries (11th house) is, on a collective level, the potential to initiate deep learning in our society. What are the collective wounds of being and belonging in a group?

Chiron sits in my natal chart in Taurus (12th house). This placement brings up wounding around self worth, fulfillment, and security. I often feel like I exist in two worlds. I am mentally healthy, although at times in my life I have not been. Periods of depression and extreme mood states made me insecure. I had trouble establishing routine because I didn’t trust myself to show up. Now, my life revolves around a self care practice—a culture—that helps me cultivate stability through dedication to lifestyle, diet, and behavior awareness coupled with a practice of reflection, creative expression, and a spiritual worldview. I feel good. My relationship to mental health, wounding, and purpose changed.

The myth of Chiron, the wounded healer, tells us that he was a centaur—half human, half horse. He existed as a creature in the world of humanity and the world of animals. He was immortal, but wounded by a poison arrow launched by Hercules. Death, to abate the pain of the wound, wasn’t available to him. He couldn’t cross the final threshold and be relieved of the pain. In order to transform his situation—an eternity of pain—he offered his immortality to Zeus.

Death is a threshold, an exit from pain.

In 2017, when a friend’s sister committed suicide, I found an activation of the medicine of my Chirotic experience. Her family was in mourning. The healing they needed would come from finding meaning in the illogical—that their seemingly happy family member would take her own life.

I arrived to the funeral. It was a bitter cold night in January. I entered the funeral parlor, turned corner around the row of chairs, and then my friend’s mom saw me, and she broke out in tears, so I broke out in tears, and my friend saw her mom crying and then saw me and then my friend broke out in tears.

Sounds suddenly got louder. Choking breaths of airs between sobs were bombs going off.

“She wasn’t as strong as you,” said the mother of the deceased between tears.

My friend and her family knew about my own mental health struggles. But hearing those words unleashed a shockwave in me. My mind went blank. My heart opened. I remembered the time in my life I felt utter desperation. I held that in me, and held that feeling as compassion for my friend and her family. That’s what I radiated that night. That was my healing transmission.

I remembered my own suicide attempt during my early twenties—anything to get out of the pain of being human. I walked into the sea one day with no intention of coming back. I remember blacking out and then seeing a bright white light and waking up on the beach, wet and covered by sand. I felt, for the first time, a deep seated knowing that there was something I had to do in this life and that the pain was part of it.

I made the conscious choice to explore the experience of insecurity in myself through mental health challenges, the likes of which make me feel like I am at times in two worlds—somewhere between sane and insane. I’ve learned that I can trust myself and manage the experience, and that it is important to share my experience. It is from that orientation that I write my story around mental health challenges. The story doesn’t write me. I hope to galvanize further conversation around a taboo subject (mental health) and reject the stigma around talking about it in the public sphere. These steps will, I hope, open space for collective healing in the conversation around mental health. I hope the perpsective that a teaching is in the wounding around mental health distress, that this idea reaches our global culture, and that we might hold each other with compassion when bearing witness to individuals who are at different points in their journey with mental health issues.  

The conversation broadens when we connect to our experience of being human in the cosmos. Archetypal language, that which we speak when we invoke evolutionary astrology and muse on “the Chiron in our charts” translates myth to the mundane. Chiron, and my engagement with the archetype and energy, taught me that if I surrendered to that which caused me pain, it caused me less pain. Chiron taught me to consider the idea that the wound could be a teaching. I stopped fighting that which was fighting me. I gave in. I give in. I’ve learned to find hope, even in the thick of anguish, because part of the anguish is feeling utterly alone in the inner world. Feeling as if you are the only one going through something is pain. So whatever gets me to the threshold, through the pain of the wound and the pain of being, and to the other side, is what I do. I don’t want out. I want in and through.

I was reminded at the funeral, as I am now, of the importance of inner work and sharing stories. Doing the inner work is writing your own story. I have a tattoo on my neck—the key glyph that represents Chiron—so that each time I look in the mirror, I remember who I am. I am a survivor. I reflect back into the world the light and integrity of my own inner journey. I am writing my own story. I have been in the position of holding the wound, and I’ve gone through a deep a healing process. Now I can articulate some of my lesson, and that lesson has value for others. The wounding, the healing, and the teaching are one in the same, even though we experience them at different points in our journey.

Go in, go through. Trust yourself and trust the process.

The ability to stand in the wound without reacting to it is the most exalted form of the Chirotic lesson. Chiron represents our wound, our medicine, and the teaching for all.

Om lokah samastah sukinoh bhavantu // may all beings be happy and free

***

Hi there! Thanks for reading. I’m a writer, editor, and transpersonal guide who explores psychospiritual growth.

I write my own story. In that light, my writing is service–the stories I share about my own psychospiritual growth, the process of self exploration & self transformation, and the way culture affects us are my gift to the world.

I share the knowledge and processes that anyone can implement to achieve inner peace. This is a transpersonal point of view and embodied transformation through creative writing.

And, I explore the deep stuff–what we do when we recall past life experiences; how we engage the archetypal resonance of embodied experience; when to call the “weird stuff” you’re experiencing a spiritual awakening and when to call a mental healthcare practitioner.

  • If you are a mental healthcare professional who would like to work with me on your journey of psychospiritual growth or integrating transpersonal psychology with your client practice, go here 
  • If you are a GenXer who wants to learn about a transpersonal worldview and write your own story in a group setting online, go here
  • If you are interested in my work with language and changing the mental healthcare narrative through transpersonal psychology, I invite you to read the curated pieces from my portfolio that are on this website and reach out

BTW: I love tattoos and coffee.

***

Curious about seeing the world and the mind as multidimensional? What does that mean for science?

  • Check out Public Parapsychology. Learn more about what psi is and why psi belongs to everyone. Join other seekers and citizen scientists who are exploring parapsychological phenomena for the benefit of understanding the spiritual nature of the material world.
  • Also consider joining The Parapsychological Association. Support an organization of professional scientists and independent researchers who are pushing the boundaries of our current understanding of the mind. Programming and publications include excellent resources for mental healthcare practitioners and healers who support individuals with transpersonal experiences. 

Performance Art: The Crown Cycle

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This piece titled The Crown Cycle was completed during the week that contained summer solstice, transition to Cancer season, Capricorn full moon. The energy is full of considerations of the masculine, feminine, emotions and permission to express, connections to patriarchy, the old identity structure that makes a woman’s identity only visible through a male’s gaze—his terms, his shapes, his boundaries.

This piece addresses my desire to redraw boundaries between for feminine energy. Often, those boundaries are drawn through what isn’t able to be expressed. We exist in constricted shapes created by heavy emotional burden. I need a ritual to honor the cycle of a woman’s experience—as a child full of vivaciousness, a woman full of vitality, a crone full of wisdom—in it’s pure unadulterated state.

The Child

As a young girl, I spent hours planning what I would wear. Time was forever and planning outfits was the most important thing because I wanted to make sure to express who I was through the way I dressed. My mom drew pictures of my clothes on small cards so I could have an inventory. She was incredibly creative and had a talent for art and drawing. This is a cherished memory of mother-daughter bonding. But vivaciousness turned into internal turmoil. There painful memories reflect that the household in I grew up in was unstable. I didn’t receive the emotional nurture I needed. My dad implied her problems were all in her head. She was never really seen by her husband, my dad.

The Woman

I’m named after my maternal grandmother Anastasia. I seen pictures of her from her early twenties, wearing fashionable clothing and hanging out in Branch Brook Park in Newark and posing in photo shoots at a studio on Newark Avenue in Jersey City. With those images, I conjure up a zest-filled woman. These are cherished imaginations. But my mom didn’t know her mom like that. The vitality of womanhood was snuffed into depression–my mom remembers her as a fearful woman who wouldn’t leave the house. Anastasia lived in the shadow of my grandfather’s mercurial moods and bursts of rage. It was best not to be seen. She grew old, never learning to drive and being allowed to manage her money. The potential for wisdom from a life well-lived became a subtle bitterness.

Anastasia died in her early 60s; my mom was mid thirties. I was 7. Child, woman, crone.

When do we change from the carefree child to women with too much burden? When does my grandmother’s problem not be my mom’s problem, and when does my mom’s problem not be mine? We pass them along to each other in body and mind. The crone came to the woman and the child before her time.

When I was in my mid thirties, I recognized a pattern. I dated men from hetero culture who had expectations of who I was supposed to be. The inability to express myself, or, the lack of permission that they set up, was a huge burden to me. So, I set up strong boundaries. I ended or didn’t pursue relationships based on what I needed to feel seen and be expressive. I found myself more often single than in partnership. It was the lived experience of just how strongly the patriarchy has a hold on how women are seen—women’s identities are seen through men’s reflection, that is, what they see as permittable and valid.

The Crown Cycle: I am inside

I created the piece “The Crown Cycle” to honor the cycle of child-woman-crone, the stages of a female experience. Who we are (and were), how available we were to each other, how we took care of ourselves and beyond that, each other. The transition of child-woman-crone has not been straightforward. I wanted to see us clearly. 

I just entered my woman full-moon, mid-life stage. My mom has entered her crone stage. I have watched her heal, and become young again in her older age. I have healed and grown up into a woman that I am proud to be: happy, healthy, and free from thinking that I should be anybody but myself.

My mom and I worked on this project as an exploration of healing across generations. Mom painted the paper-mâché heads, and I attached flowers that are reminiscent of spring, summer, fall/winter, symbolic of child, mother, crone. Anastasia, my grandmother, was always with her rosary. I added one, plus 3 silver-painted quartz shards to evoke a cemetery-stone image, at the end of life. The eyes are absent from the skull heads but are present. Anastasia is absent in form, but always watching; I as a child was always watching the adults; my mom is always watching memory. And we are all women who had different levels of visibility. I at times want to be unseen, like my mom, and Anastasia, through her agoraphobia, was literally unseen—a far cry from the smiling face of her youth that was always posing for cameras.

The candle is reflected in the mirror; it is lighting the way to transformation.

I asked my mom why she made skulls with half hair, half skeletal attributes. She said the “the skull is the vessel of the brain, the part of us that perceives and translates the exterior stimuli. Hair is so visible and SO much an exterior judgement factor.”

The performance was done in front of a mirror as I wore the child-mother-crone crown and reflect. I reflected on the image in the mirror and also memories of me, my mom, and my grandmother. I recited “I am me, I am she, I am her” and rotated the heads, passing through the stage of child, woman, crone.

My mom and I are not in current geographical proximity, so I offered the performance to her online. I share it now with you. The performance is a healing transmission across my matrilineage and honors the cycle for all women who constellate the seen/unseen child-mother-crone.

***

 

Psychospiritual Growth: The inner journey, language, and breakthroughs

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Psychospiritual growth is supported by creative expressive practices. Writing is one of them.

One day, I sat at a library and re-read a hardcopy essay that I had been working on for a while. What I was trying to say wasn’t coming through.I had to open the conversation up—ask what the words wanted from me.

Visionary artist Allison Grey’s work, including her work that conveys her the origin of her worldview: chaos, language, and secret writing

The essay was about the journey inside to inner space—extolling the virtues of personal evolution. It’s part of the process of understanding “higher purpose.” But my essay was falling flat. Phrases like “finding myself,” “knowing myself,” “higher purpose” felt deflated. They lacked force. A reader could get a sense of what I was referring to, but couldn’t feel the electricity in my experiences, which is what gave me the enthusiasm to write about them. I couldn’t activate the experiences for the reader—which was what I was trying to do. I wanted the essay to convey a feeling of motion, transformation, which translates to excitement–this is what my journey inside had given me. I wanted to convince the reader to embark on theirs.

I started play with the medium, the language, by going in and out–shifting my awareness of shape of the letters on the page, focusing and unfocusing my vision, moving from words to shapes words strung together made, and then back.

This became dharana—meditation—on the words. I was singularly focused on them. My field of vision started to blur. My peripheral vision blurred, too, and the library bookshelves turned into cases full of neon beams of light, and the books on them became crystals. The idea of the interconnectedness of all of the ideas, writers, and me to them became apparent. It registered in my mind as a felt sense registers in the body. And then I had a fleeting thought I was a medium, a part of this vast network who, through the act of writing, pulled ether into material and with that, create our world because information is our world. I felt a deep sense of satisfaction in the core of my being, then, and the vision vanished. The meditation was broken.

I left the library, touched by the experience, activated to another level, and fulfilled. Part of my higher purpose was being in dialogue, literally, creating words. I trusted that the words to share this experience would come to me. They did when I applied astrological insight.

I checked my natal chart for transits, which are contacts of placements (and noted through the shapes of the angles that the placements make). The universe is in constant motion. The celestial bodies are dynamic. The sun (creativity) was in Scorpio (transformation), making a contact to my Uranus in Scorpio. Uranus is the planet that represents higher consciousness and breakthroughs. The correlation doesn’t mean causation—the sun contacting Uranus didn’t “make” me have that momentary lapse in reality. But my awareness of the motion, the contact was power; the knowledge allowed me to engage with the cosmos in a meaningful way by starting a reflection (in my mind) on breakthrough and transformation, while noticing how the reality unfolded breakthrough and transformation around me.

Visionary artist Alex Grey’s work, a painting titled “Universal Mind Lattice”

The essay I had been working has since been broken up into many smaller pieces. Lines of it appear on my page about the energy work that I do. The essay became the creation, the practice through which I facilitate an individual’s exploration of their inner and outer lives, and ultimately, personal evolution. Conversations on these subjects open up worldviews and offer new ways to interpret reality.

I hope my excitement comes through here. I hope the power in my words reaches you.

As a I writer, I am a node on the network of words. Letters, words are power. My higher purpose—that which I seek so that I can offer to others—is to be a conduit for expansive conversations, ones in which words become a key to unlocking pathways toward transformation and breakthroughs that serve us on our individualized journey inside.

May all beings be happy and free // Om lokah samastah sukinoh bhavantu

***

Hi there! Thanks for reading. I’m a writer, editor, and transpersonal guide who explores psychospiritual growth.

I write my own story. In that light, my writing is service–the stories I share about my own psychospiritual growth, the process of self exploration & self transformation, and the way culture affects us are my gift to the world.

I share the knowledge and processes that anyone can implement to achieve inner peace. This is a transpersonal point of view and embodied transformation through creative writing.

And, I explore the deep stuff–what we do when we recall past life experiences; how we engage the archetypal resonance of embodied experience; when to call the “weird stuff” you’re experiencing a spiritual awakening and when to call a mental healthcare practitioner.

If you are a mental healthcare professional who would like to work with me on your journey of psychospiritual growth or integrating transpersonal psychology with your client practice, go here 
If you are a GenXer who wants to learn about a transpersonal worldview and write your own story in a group setting online, go here
If you are interested in my work with language and changing the mental healthcare narrative through transpersonal psychology, I invite you to read the curated pieces from my portfolio that are on this website and reach out

BTW: I love tattoos and coffee.

***

Curious about seeing the world and the mind as multidimensional? What does that mean for science?

Check out Public Parapsychology. Learn more about what psi is and why psi belongs to everyone. Join other seekers and citizen scientists who are exploring parapsychological phenomena for the benefit of understanding the spiritual nature of the material world.
Also consider joining The Parapsychological Association. Support an organization of professional scientists and independent researchers who are pushing the boundaries of our current understanding of the mind. Programming and publications include excellent resources for mental healthcare practitioners and healers who support individuals with transpersonal experiences.