The Wisdom of the Centaur, Chiron

A few months ago, I wrote a post about how we teach children to “manage their emotions” instead of “feel” them.

Maybe this should have been obvious to me, but I had my own revelation in that moment.

A full bodied aha moment about the whole industry of “health and well-being.”

And how all of these modalities, systems, and 5 step approaches, were about “control”. About keeping us upright and functional. Productive.

After all, breaking down is inconvenient, and expensive. Most people simply don’t think they can afford it. I can totally understand that outpicturing.

I’ve had several sessions recently in which clients mention offhand how they are trying to power through their healing without having a breakdown.

And I know that we in the West are oriented that way. That not falling apart completely in the midst of a crisis is considered admirable.

I want to take advantage of this big Venus, Jupiter, Chiron, in Aries moment, to say a few things… For those unfamiliar with Astrology, let me explain why this planetary combination can show us something about healing. Chiron represents the wounded healer. Venus points to our heart, and Jupiter tends to magnify things. In Aries, there is this tendency to want to conquer reality, rather than be with it.

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First of all, there is no real alchemy without falling apart. No transformation without radical movement between poles. Ups and downs.

Falling apart, chaos, loosing our identity, dissolving, etc. This IS the path of healing.

It will be messy, we will fall apart.

We will either lead the journey down internally, and of our volition. Or, an outside event will force it.

It’s our choice.

We already intuitively know this.

There is so much fear in the “wild unknown” of “falling apart”.

I once spent three years avoiding the underworld.

Instead I suspended myself just above the entrance.

I had the clear vision in my kitchen in Texas, that my body was a glass vase, and the answer to all of my pain was to throw it on the floor, allow it to smash into a million tiny pieces, and feel it all, so that it could eventually be re-formed in a shape that was true.

And yet for three years I fought against it.

If you hear nothing else, hear this next part….

It was the tension against falling apart that almost killed me.

Not the actual falling apart.

I took the hard road.

I held myself together until eventually the universe forced the vase to the floor.

The other path, the path of least resistance, is the path of surrender.

Honoring what our body/soul is asking of us. If it is asking us to go under, if that’s what is true, can we have reverence and submit to that?

Can we enter the grief and pain that exists here?

I learned so much in that Underworld a decade ago.

I learned that tending to this system of ups and downs. Coming together and falling apart was an absolute must.

It can be like keeping house.

If we tend to the mess when we first become aware of it, it doesn’t take long to feel at home again.

But, if we let it go. If we allow things to pile up…. You get the visual.

Now pull that visual out by three years, or a decade, or more.

We are talking infestations, leaks, rot, stasis, clogs, etc.

Nowadays, when I feel called to “fall apart” I just do it. At the first sign… fu$k it.

I know I can hold myself through it. So I just go into it.

I take a few hours, a day, or two, or whatever.

Feel what’s there. Rage, cry, maybe even feel sorry for myself if some small part of me is needing this kind of acknowledgment.

(When I say feel sorry for myself, I mean acknowledge that the situation well and truly sucks)

What I don’t do, is take a few days to “chill”. To “reel” the “out of control” feelings back in. To “manage” them.

If I’m “taking a day”, I’m going to be actively feeling for some part of it.

This is part of tending to ourselves.

The other thing I don’t do, is identify with the stories that bring me to the threshold of falling apart.

In fact, the stories are usually the thing that clues me into the fact that something underneath is begging for breath. Begging to move and be felt.

I just move the stories out of the way, and go straight into the lament.

I cry for my inner child, or the mother who lost her boy, or the woman who desires a love she doesn’t currently have.

None of these “identities”, orphan, single woman, bereaved mother, are “me” (Soul) But they are part of my humanity.

In seeing from this vantage point, my body becomes the vessel that moves the complexity of being human through.

Feeling the grief reconnects me to life.

Bracing against the grief keeps me separate from it.

Bracing against what is real is what pins the mask in place.

Bracing is what keeps us from the deeper thing that most of us want.

Healing is a messy process.

We must relinquish control for the authentic transformation. So often it takes us out the grind for a bit. That’s ok. Allow it.

* I love this artist. Igor Morski. He uses the power of his art to point to the deeper thing. Check him out.