The Rise of the Wounded Healer

Deep Memory Process

The body holds trauma from one lifetime to the next, and carries this trauma through our thoughts and emotions. For instance, fear, anger, and despair can be lodged in the throat, blocking this chakra.  Phrases like "I never should have said it" and "They won't listen" may be repeated at the moment of death and then prevent one from speaking one's truth in this lifetime.

The shoulders, for example, hold guilt and the feeling of being burdened. Guilt and the overwhelming feeling of responsibility appear in thoughts/statements we repeat throughout our lives such as "I can never do enough," or "It's all up to me." So the physical shoulder pain is connected to the emotion of guilt and the thought of not doing enough, and as we enter through any one of these places, a particular story and character will emerge.

Wilhelm Reich, the pioneer in somatic psychology, realized that we can locate the unconscious in the body. The goal in Deep Memory work, like aspects of shamanism, is to retrieve the lost and fragmented parts of the soul. The "unfinished business" from various lifetimes continues to haunt us in this incarnation, for we embody all of our soul's history.

We must allow the psyche to dramatize these unresolved, inner characters to uncover how the trauma we are carrying today first formed. This ‘psychodrama' cathartically engages the past life story, the wounds, the dying thoughts, and then the necessary healing and resolution work in the bardos, the interlife realms of the spirit world.

Evolutionary Astrology is a map that reveals the psyche and its conscious and unconscious scripts, which we are then able to process through experiential therapy in this form of shamanic regression healing, Deep Memory Process.

Chiron: The Emergence of the Wounded Healer

In 1977, the year of the Serpent and our favorite shamanic myth, Star Wars, a heavenly body was discovered slithering its way in an obscure orbital path between the last planet visible to the naked eye, Saturn, and Uranus--the first planet discovered with our visual appendage, the telescope.

Because of its obscure orbit and location, the body was named after the wise Greek centaur. Chiron's physical location and orbit leads us from the known to the unknown, from the seen to the unseen. He is the trance-dancing shamanic harbinger of mystery. And Chiron is the Wounded Healer.

Three Wounds

Chiron is wounded in three primary ways, which each of us will feel woven within our own individual mythos. First, Chiron is a centaur. He is born out of an illicit affair between Saturn/Chronos and Philyra, a sea-nymph. The two of them turn into horses in order to not be caught, and they mate in this way, conceiving Chiron. He is a bastard child, rejected by his parents for being too ugly; thus, he becomes orphaned, and represents the rejected, exiled parts of ourselves.

Chiron is affiliated with a tribe of creatures who symbolize wild, instinctual powers. The Centaurs were always described as crazy and raucous beings, unconcerned with cultured, rational ways of behaving.  (We can reflect here upon the shadow expressions of the unconscious Uranus--a full throttle surge for freedom with often chaotic and traumatizing results.) But Chiron separates himself from this behavior. He is civilized and wise and fulfills a duty to serve humanity.

Therefore, Chiron's second wound involves an identity crisis: he is neither totally wild, nor totally civilized. He is a demi-god and a hybrid being and so reflects that struggle within us towards integration of our human, animal, and divine natures. Like shamans across cultures, Chiron must negotiate the worlds. He spends much of his time alone in his cave, communing with Spirit.

Importantly, his solitude allows him to develop his creative and healing gifts, which include the studies of astrology, astronomy, herbology, and weaponry. When he interacts with others, he is usually teaching or mentoring.

The Shamanic Artist: The Wounded Healer

With his third wound, Chiron is poisoned accidentally by an arrow from his own student, the hero Hercules. As an immortal, he cannot die so he suffers continuously. The only way Chiron can free himself from the chronic wound is to sacrifice his immortality, which he does in exchange for the life of Prometheus, the Titan chained to a rock for stealing fire from the gods and gifting it to humanity.

If Chiron allows his own death, humanity will be liberated, and his suffering will end. Because of his compassion, Chiron sacrifices himself. Because he elevated his suffering through the act of service, Chiron became one--some say two--of the constellations above--Sagittarius or Centaurus.

This is an important message for the artists and healers of today.  For our arts have become modalities to instruct and heal. And our healing work continues to inspire the next level of creativity. By death, we can ascend to even greater heights, becoming a constellation as Chiron did, shining and guiding others.

The Chiron-Neptune conjunction has helped each one of us activate our inner mentor, invoking the teacher and creative within, but only to the extent that we allow our willing transformations. For, like a zen master, Chiron continuously modifies and tweaks our consciousness, demonstrates what is lacking, the skills undeveloped, the lessons not integrated, the unhealthy practices.

Chiron whispers at us from within, that voice that says, "If I don't do my yoga today, then I'm going to be unbalanced for the rest of my day," or "I need to move this negative emotion through some breathwork or dance."

When an experience repeats in our lives, and especially when we suffer due to this experience, we naturally apply the magnifying glass to discover the causes of our suffering condition. When ploughing the depths for the causes of our suffering, we must gallop, like the centaurs, straight into the heart of the Dark Forest.

We weave through our labyrinth arriving back in the traumas of childhood or other lifetimes, or in unresolved relationships, and notice there a pattern of the sacred wound, etched into our souls.

With Chiron, we wonder, "Am I ever actually "healed" or am I required to persist in healing?

Healing is an active verb, a constant process, unfolding, hopefully from ever wider circles of holistic awareness and integral wisdom, wherein the wound is experienced with less suffering and perceived as a necessary teacher.

We know that we are Avatar, we are the chose ones. But often, knowing our power as creators and healers, we are overwhelmed with our multidimensional awareness, our abundance of gifts to share, our desire to expand our auras into their infinite potential. This can challenge us to make decisions about where to apply our creative energy and how to develop our healing gifts.  We wish to be of the highest service, but HOW?

The HOW is of the linear Mind, and the ego can't help but get involved, muddying up the trust, faith, and surrender of our intuition. And intuition does seem to flow most when we do that which sustains the vibration of bliss.

Ananda, or bliss, is a state experienced NOW, when Consciousness is aligned with the Truth of the present moment, not a projected future perfect state. The future always arrives with its own set of challenges.

Fellow astrologer, Rob Brezny, reminds us to "Dream of all the masterpieces you'd be thrilled to create, but work on just one at a time." This quote reminds us that we must be patient with our pathways of transformation.

Thus, as the Wounded Healer, the Shaman-Artist, by magnifying our apparent deficiency, we discover the very modalitiy, artform, or skill that will be our greatest service towards others.

This is by nature an alchemical process, whereby we shapeshift our pain and separation into its glorious gift to the world. This means we smile through the tears. In Sanskrit, this state of supreme awareness available NOW is called Sat-Cit-Ananda--Truth-Consciousness-Bliss.   

This article originally appeared on SoulAlchemyAstrology.com 

Image by arenamontanus, courtesy of Creative Commons license.