(Was I this insufferable when I was studying wine? Aesthetics of hunger? Buffy? Probably. Probably. It’s only thoughts on Chiron and recent astrology beyond this point, folks… )

Here we hang, Sun sitting in Scorpio still, at the edge of sidereal Sagittarius and feeling the last scrapes and thorns of the season. But Chiron just went direct after retrograde, and these sorts of shadows are deeper reflections than Scorpio alone tends to deal in.

Chiron is the wounded healer asking us to heal ourselves, and its natal house placement indicates where our deepest personal wounds and painful narratives reside.

Even though Chiron went direct, it’s not having an easy time, with tough aspects to Sun, Mercury, and Saturn. And when Chiron goes direct, it seems to sort of grind in its lessons from the retrograde. (If you can’t parse what lessons Chiron tried to impart through the summer and fall, check your charts to see what houses Pisces and Aquarius occupy.) Retrograde started June 30th in Pisces. Chiron went back to Aquarius, and then went direct on Dec. 5th.

Chiron asks us to do the hard work to transcend our deepest pain and what we have come to believe about ourselves or our lives because of it. Even when you do the work Chiron dredges and presents, there’s more. And meanwhile, the fears we have about ourselves create deep neural patterns in our brains, scripts we play, sometimes on repeat. That’s what Chiron wants us to fix,  the narrative that says, “I’m too ___________ to ever be / have ____________.” It’s also about the lies we tell ourselves, about ourselves — the fictions we’ve created and locked into that prevent us from growing, all born out of deep pain.

We are not meant to be static creatures. Like all living things we are meant to express natural cycles, and our environments. Whether we subscribe to faith, a greater creative force, or nothing at all, most people feel life is to be lived and encountered, and that there’s a path organically unfolding that we are to walk along.

We all know people in our lives who seem to be stalled or stuck in time, looking and being much the way they were at a certain point in their lives, unwilling or maybe afraid to change their views, and no longer growing with those around them. This is the extreme opposite of what Chiron asks us to do throughout our lives. It’s a sort of spiritual fingers in ears, head in the sand way of being in the world that causes us to never confront ourselves and our pain, and that can rule us if we let it. And when the fears and destructive narratives turn circles in our head, we simply fall to them, stuck, the same.

Chiron wants us to find all of the ways we have been lied to about ourselves and kindle old pains… how we prevent our own healing and growth and what beliefs we have about ourselves that prevent us from the wholeness we long for.

To have Chiron station direct during Scorpio season feels like a little extra salt in our wounds and pointing at the blackboard and saying, “This will be on the test.”

Be kind to yourselves and others — it’s the end of a tender season. Sun moves to Sagittarius on the 16th, followed by the new moon in Sag on the 18th. Use the courage, thoughtfulness, connectivity, and honesty Sagittarius provides to heal the cuts and stings Scorpio dealt, and to value the reflection of ourselves Chiron provided. We are worthy of love, we are worthy of our deepest wishes, we are worthy of the liberation gained in healing our pain and dismantling fears, even if we don’t feel it.

(Don’t forget that Mercury is retrograde so take extra care checking schedules and details and in communications with one another!)