Chiron: the Teacher of Being Wounded

Apr 22

The Story of Chiron

The Centaur Chiron served as a wise and powerful guide to arts and medicine in the ancient Greek mythological imagination. Adopted by Apollo, Chiron taught generations of Greek heroes the craft of traditional medicine, sacred creative expression, and divine prophecy. As an immortal half-man and half-horse, he lived between realms, privy to divine and terrestrial wisdom.

The beautiful wooded slopes of Mount Pelion were Chiron's vibrant paradise. In myth, this area was a magical forest where gods and mortals came to be healed, cavort with nymphs and muses, and experience ritual transformation.

In modern times, Chiron is known as the "wounded healer" due to the way he died. Hit in the foot by one of Hercules' poisoned arrows, Chiron suffered the pain of a mortal wound that could not actually kill him because he was immortal. Eventually, he could not endure the torment of this wound any longer, and petitioned Zeus to give up his immortality in order to escape his eternal punishment. (Prometheus took Chiron's place as an immortal.) After dying, Chiron ascended into the heavens as the constellation Centaurus and today has an asteroid named after him.

Curing the Pain

In Western culture, we approach healing from the outside in: we seek an external solution to disease (otherwise known as inconvenience, discomfort). Usually, the cure for a malady doesn't involve any effort on our part. We think it normal and natural that there should be an external remedy for a specific problem, symptom, or pathology. And frequently this model of healing "works" to solve the particular issue at hand. In our modern world who hasn't taken a pill to cure a headache, tummy ache, or depression with mostly positive results?

Yet this model doesn't really incorporate the psychological dimensions of healing. Western medicine does, however, acknowledge the question of belief in a particular treatment with its term the placebo effect. For the placebo effect to "work," the patient needs to believe that he will be cured, regardless of whether the medicine administered is truly designed for the patient's illness.

The Chiron archetype of the "wounded healer," on the other hand, removes the question of a permanent cure. In Chiron's myth, there was no possibility of healing the wound and getting on with life. Chiron's dilemma is to live with tremendous pain or transcend the pain. It turns out that both choices are possible and lead to healing, acceptance, and joy.

Chiron: the Teacher of Being Wounded

Chiron teaches us to face the question of healing from the vantage point of our own unavoidable “woundedness.” The first step to embodying the Chiron archetype is to stop viewing ourselves as a collection of symptoms but rather as uniquely and authentically flawed, wounded, or ill people.

Next, this wound that is unique to you as your own fingerprint or DNA must be faced, examined, and embraced. This requires deep, long-term engagement with your own story and how it has felt to be you. Returning to yourself and your trauma takes guts— literally, stomach-churning bravery practiced over and over again.

Once you get some momentum, you find two things happen: facing yourself gets easier and you have more energy for other feelings like inspiration, love, hope, and joy. Learning to truly live side-by-side with our pain is the ultimate gift because it no longer requires a superhuman effort to try and ignore it, fix it, or hide it. But also living with and integrating our own pain transmutes and transcends the initial wound, turning it into our superpower.

As Carl Jung and others have pointed out, this is the process of becoming a healer both for yourself and for others. Strength and a desire to help others flows from integrating our wounds and illnesses into ourselves. This is truly embodying the Chiron archetype.

I have been reflecting on the process of embodying Chiron in my own life. Last week I wrote the following statement to myself in my journal:

The Chiron Archetype: I had to be wounded to become a healer. I had to bring the trauma to consciousness in order to transmute it. My higher self needed to own the authenticity and truth of my trauma. The transmutation process burned my resistance and pain in the fires of fierce compassion for myself. And the by-product of this transmutation process is a fierce compassion for myself and the other beings on this planet. If I possess any skill in healing others, it is because I am continually healing myself.