Chiron Retrograde 2011 – Healing Nightmares

Chiron turns retrograde at today at 5PIS29. He will retrograde right back to the shore line to 00PIS38 then station direct on the 10th November 2011.

When a planet retrogrades, it intensifies the archetypal meaning of the planet  concerned. As Chiron turns retrograde he asks us to connect with our own inner healer and come to know and understand the wounds we bare.

I look to my body. I have a scar across my right wrist. When I was five I cut a vein on a sharp piece of flint whilst playing outside. The slice was clean and didn’t particularly hurt so I was more fascinated with the blood spurting from the wound than afraid. I remember proudly showing my stitches and bandages to a neighbour. I have another scar on my right thumb where I cut it open on a broken milk bottle. I was older then and had become more afraid. I fainted at the sight of my own blood and hit my head. Unfortunately the school caretaker who phoned my mother had a speech impediment so she came to the school fully expecting my tongue to be hanging off! Another round of stitches and a large bump on head. My natal Chiron is in Aries.

I have other scars of a kind that are self inflicted. Small burn marks across the back of my hand with long cut lines. They are faded now. Back then I never saw it as a call for help, it was simply a way to relieve an unrelenting pain. Then there are scars from putting my hand through glass in a temper so violent I thought I would implode, taking the whole damn world with me.

The scars on my body have healed, leaving little reminders of what I have lived through. The scars on my heart still hurt, reminding me that love is hard and loving yourself is harder still. It’s made me more compassionate to others. I listen more, talk less. I seem to need a lot of silence. And in that silence I can connect to the space between you and me.

Pisces as a sign rules the oceans. When Chiron first entered Pisces it manifested as the gulf oil spoil prompting a very powerful need to ‘clean up our act’. It seems to me that humanity has allowed its wounds to become infected. Retrograde Chiron may well give us the opportunity to flush out these wounds and teach us to take care of ourselves better.

I find it interesting that just as Chiron was stationing retrograde, the newspapers carried a story about a movie that has been banned outright by the censors.

“Horror film follow-up featuring brutality, degradation and mutilation ‘poses a real risk to cinemagoers“.

[I decided to add a comment here – The link above is to an up-market newspaper article but it does contain descriptions of  scenes that in many ways I wish I hadn’t read. I believe in the choice to be presented with information but I also feel the need to warn you before you click on the link]

I’m not going to go into a graphic descriptions of the main premise of the film. Those are contained in the newspaper article should you care to read it but suffice is to say that it centres around living people being stitched together. It’s a sadistic and barbaric twist on the concept of ‘connection’ that in many ways defies explanation.

Bearing in mind that Neptune also is only a few days into its own retrograde period and film comes under the rulership of Neptune/Pisces, it is perhaps  a fitting example of how wounded our collective unconscious has become. Whilst I  have some issues with censorship, something about the description of this movie profoundly disturbs me. Horror as a genre fascinates me but this seems to be something so far beyond horror that it become unfathomable – a deep soul sickness. Like a dirty oily monster bubbling up from the collective unconscious, our nightmares are suddenly made real. But then nightmares serve a function. They let us know what is wrong so that we can fix it. I used to have a lot of nightmares, especially of being haunted but through that I learned to exorcise the ghosts and heal the demons.

Chiron will do what he needs to do in order for us to clearly see what needs to be healed so that future generations may be guided by those who once suffered and found a way through their suffering. Don’t forget, Chiron’s glyph is the Key and he can indeed unlock our potential. Perhaps we need to know the depths we can go to in order to visualise the heights.

For more information on Chiron in Pisces, read my earlier post