Mercury conjunct Chiron – the Gift inside the Wound

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On April 9th, 2021 Mercury is conjunct Chiron at 9° Aries.

Mercury conjunct Chiron is an opportunity to take a close look at our wounds, and discover their hidden treasure. When we have a Chiron transit, the gift is ALWAYS found in unlikely places: deep inside the wound.

Chiron is known as the “Wounded Healer”.

Wounded Healer is a metaphor initially used by Carl Jung to describe therapists that want to become therapists PRECISELY because of a personal wound they are continuously trying – but are unable – to heal.

This unhealed wound draws them to people who share the same wound.

However, Carl Jung (and later, other psychologists and scientists) also discovered that unless we heal our wound, we cannot truly help others. We will, at best, sympathize with the wounded.

We will, at best, hold space and give others the opportunity to explore their wound from different angles.

However, a wounded healer also risks projecting their personal wounding process onto others, and ultimately, giving bad healing advice.

Unless we heal ourselves first, we just don’t know what works and what doesn’t.

You want business advice from people who have successful businesses, not from people who are eager to help (but lack experience). You want legal help from lawyers who have a track record of winning cases (and not just a passion for helping their clients).

You want nutrition advice from people in good health. And you want healing from someone who has healed themselves first.

Coming back to Chiron. Chiron is not ‘just’ a Wounded being trying to figure things out.

If we go back to the Greek myth, we learn that Chiron was a wise centaur that HAS figured things out, becoming the greatest teacher and healer of his time.

Unlike other Centaurus, who were untamed and troublemakers, Chiron was wise and level-headed.

Chiron has reconciled his animal nature with his divine nature, taking the best of these two worlds, and becoming a holistic teacher and healer.

Chiron And Wholistic Healing

How did that happen? What made Chiron different?

Chiron was born half-man, half-horse. Disgusted by his appearance, his mother abandons him at birth. This was Chiron’s primal wound – the wound of rejection.

Thankfully, Apollo (the Greek counterpart of the Sun) adopts Chiron and teaches him ‘Solar’ skills, such as prophecy and poetry.

This, combined with Chiron’s half-horse a.k.a animal and instinctual nature, gave Chiron a unique advantage, and helped him become a revered and respected teacher.

He understood both the workings of nature and the workings of the divine, and became a Whole-istic healer.

IMPORTANT: If Chiron was not abandoned at birth, he couldn’t have been adopted by Apollo, and he wouldn’t have had the chance to bridge the gap from nature to spirit. This initial abandonment, this initial wound, was precisely what made Chiron so special.

Our Chiron wound is the “initial condition” – what we need to not only accept, but also integrate, and use as a catalyst for growth.

Chironic healing is not just the process of finding relief from pain – it is the process of reconciling what is otherwise incompatible or unacceptable within ourselves.

When we bridge these two otherwise conflicting worlds, we ‘heal’, and discover our unique gift.

The Chiron wound is that quality you have that is initially seen as “unacceptable” because it is odd, non-ordinary or goes against the social norms. How can a horse also be a man? How can a man also be a horse? How can a black person have light skin? How can a boy behave like a girl?

But it is precisely this reconciliation of these opposing natures that not only ‘heals’ our wound, but also becomes our unique advantage, our ‘value proposition’, our greatest gift.

Mercury Conjunct Chiron – Becoming Aware Of What Hurts

Let’s come back to Mercury conjunct Chiron.

Any Chiron transit will stir the Chironic process we described.

With Mercury, it’s words, thoughts, and memories that will trigger our old wounds and hurts.

When Mercury is conjunct Chiron, we often recall some hurtful things someone has said to us. Parents or siblings that bullied us, teachers that undermined our self-confidence, colleagues or peers that made us feel odd or inadequate.

Mercury helps us “see” and understand what is otherwise difficult to grasp. When Mercury is conjunct Chiron, we can finally acknowledge our primal Chiron wound of inadequacy.

Chiron Healing Approaches

Let’s say you stuttered as a child, and your colleagues bullied you.

What do we do when these hurtful memories resurface? Most of the time, we take one of the following two approaches:

1) the most ineffective approach: the memory is so hurtful, that you reject it, and choose not to process it. You numb it down, either by thinking of something else, or by consuming substances. Even yoga and meditation, otherwise excellent practices, can do more harm than good when used to numb down our wounds.

2) less ineffective, but with no true growth potential: you process the emotion, but try to convince yourself that there is nothing wrong: “My voice is beautiful”. Or “It doesn’t matter if I stutter, I also have many other qualities, nobody’s perfect”. Or “Bullying says everything about the bully, not about me. I am so over it”.

However, there is another way to deal with the wound: you not only acknowledge these past hurts, but also seek the treasure behind them.

If it still bothers you, chances are there is something in there that requires your attention.

If it’s still there, it means it has already influenced your life in a profound way.

In your attempts to overcome the ‘handicap’, you have found alternative ways of dealing with it, and developed some skills you would not have otherwise developed.

Perhaps your awareness of your stuttering made you pay extra attention to what you say, and as a result, your communication is now more clear and articulate.

Research has shown that people who stutter are more aware of the mistakes they make (not only in speech), and are ALSO more eager to correct their mistakes. This makes them perfectionists, which is a great skill especially in professions that require error-free operations, e.g. medicine or engineering.

Sometimes the link between the wound and the gift is quite obvious: the child who stutters eventually becomes a singer or a communication expert.

Other times the link is less obvious: the child who stutters later becomes a great aviation engineer, thanks to their discipline and attention to detail.

Mercury Conjunct Chiron – The Gift Inside The Wound

The gift inside the wound may not be very obvious at first, but a Mercury-Chiron transit is one of the best opportunities to become aware of the relationship between the wound and the gift.

When we have a Chiron transit, healing the wound doesn’t only mean finding relief from pain – it means digging into the wound until we find the deeper meaning behind it.

If there is something about yourself that is still bothering you, chances are there is a gift there to be unveiled. A potential that is yet to materialize. That wound is the KEY to something much greater. That wound will continue to bug you until you recognize the gift behind it.

Mercury rules over our communication – not only our communication with other people, but also with ourselves.

That voice inside your head (which we call thoughts), is nothing else but Mercury having a conversation with you. It is Mercury trying to tell you something, trying to get your attention on something that needs to be understood at a deeper level.

Mercury brings clarity. With Mercury conjunct Chiron, it is easier to articulate and acknowledge the wound, and most importantly, to become aware of the gift inside the wound.

Astro Butterfly

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