What hurts? What stings, is making you sad, frustrated or grumpy? It’s in the air…

Today, Chiron in Aries moves retrograde.

This offers many of us the chance to reflect on Groundhog Day type wounds. These painful patterns repeat because we are only halfway to understanding how to soothe the ache, or stop the pattern from creating suffering in our life.

What to do? INTEGRATE.

Integration is the process we undertake; we actively engage in self awareness, identify where we are in conflict, where we are engaging in blame, and become courageously willing to more truly see where we are separating from ourselves, where we are splitting off from deep wounds that want to be named, valued and felt (where we feel: abandoned, rejected, violated, denied, neglected, unloved).

Through deeper acknowledgement, by courageously feeling the pain and telling the truth about it, we embrace those self parts and include them in our identity. This is how we become whole. This is how we stop re-enacting a repetitive and painful cycle of suffering.

Chiron and the Healing Journey is the BEST book about Chiron. Chiron is stationing on my natal Moon-Chiron conjunction, so you can bet I’m feeling this right now. I’ve been curling up with this wonderful book, and journaling my reflections in my JUST LOVE journal.

Here’s more of what I’ve been personally re-exploring:

-Chiron holds repetitive patterns that feel we can never quite get healing resolution around.

-This repetition cycle enacts a wounding cycle where we are aware of a hurt or pain but feel unable to stop it from re-occurring.

-These wounds feel compulsive, and very difficult to sort through for a variety of reasons.

-Once we learn we cannot get these needs, desires, wants met, we may stop asking for this from our Self (Aries), or we simply don’t know how to do this for our Self because we weren’t shown how- which creates inner conflict and suffering.

-In this area, described by Chiron’s placement, we may feel unappreciated, rejected, neglected, abandoned and/or different.

-We tend to easily get stuck in cycles of blame in this area, mistaking the symptom for the actual CAUSE, we blame the person/thing/issue/conflict/difference instead of seeing the REAL problem — which is actually an internal psychological complex we are carrying with us from childhood. More deeply, we are trying to heal/address/fix a childhood wound. This is why we keep re-experiencing suffering. This requires both courageous truth-telling, and courage to feel the pain.

-If this wound involves a lot of defenses to the feeling/naming of it, we may have to more gently “take down our walls” over time.

-You may need to engage a number of healing tools and techniques in order to understand and heal this.

-The entire process at work is to allow the pain, and your limited understanding of it, to goad/irritate you to a place of greater understanding, self-awareness… and therefore freedom of choice. You can get to the place where the issue no longer compulsively controls your life and causes you to suffer, even if it keeps reoccurring. Commit to: feeling the pain (remember: it’s only pain, it won’t kill you), and then investigating it with more honesty and compassion, and you will get there.

-A hard truth that can free you is: This painful thing may not entirely go away, if ever (a chronic illness, terminal disease, difference, disability, for instance)… but your suffering around it can. Your WILLINGNESS, to figure out how to do that for yourself, is key.

-Those of us who have a strong Chiron signature in our natal chart often become healers and teachers. For us, the pain/difference is not just temporary, it is a lifelong PATH — and constantly working on this is a way for the Soul to self-actualize and feel fullness.

-Eventually, this process blooms into wisdom, self-love and the satisfaction of leading a self-aware, authentic, WHOLE SELF life.

Love yourselves, friends. ALL parts of you!