As we know, the healing journey doesn’t come with a final destination because it twists, spirals, and evolves with us. Chiron, the wounded healer, goes retrograde on July 30 2025 until January 2 2026. But there comes a crucial turning point where we must begin to see ourselves beyond the wound. We’re not meant to live permanently from the site of our pain. Chiron in retrograde, especially in the fierce and self-defining sign of Aries, invites us into that shift. It turns the mirror inward and asks: who are you without the injury being your identity? Can you carry your wisdom without clinging to your scars? This transit doesn’t just dismiss as if the wound never happened, but we can reclaim the part of you that knows you are more than what hurt you.

The Chiron retrograde is a time to recognise others' pain as a path to compassion

An often unspoken power of being your own healing guru is how it sharpens your vision both inward and outward. Once you’ve met your own pain with tenderness, you begin to recognise the silent signals of suffering in others. You start to understand that harshness often masks hurt, and that behind sharp words or closed-off energy might be an unhealed wound, not ill intent. If you’re a The Walking Dead fan like me, then you’ll remember Carol Peletier. She was literally reborn from a soft-spoken woman into a warrior. Her stoicism was forged in trauma, but beneath it always remained a deep capacity to care. Her relationship with Daryl, for instance, showed us the audience what it means to extend grace to someone even when they’ve emotionally shut down. Simply, because you've seen where they’ve been. This is how real empathy grows: through experience, reflection, and the choice to respond from a deeper well of knowing that sees the pain behind the mask.

This Chiron retrograde, transform your pain into creative power

With all the great artists and geniuses in the world, they have an incredible knack to turn their rage and sometimes sorrow into something bigger than them. But within that heat is creative fire. To alchemise your pain is to give it a new form. Choose a medium that fits you in your season of your life, it could be writing, or even clothes making or design. Healing is a generative process. You begin to create not just from inspiration, but from survival, transformation, and truth. When you realise your pain can have purpose (not in its cause) but in what it becomes you begin to reclaim authorship of your story.

Remember: You are more than what hurt you

There comes a moment in the healing process when you realise: I am not what happened to me. I am not just the person who was betrayed. Or, the one who was abandoned. Pain shaped parts of you, yes but it does not define all of you. It’s impossible. Your identity is larger, more radiant than your suffering. When you begin to see this, a new self starts to crawl out of the cocoon with a desire to live and to be alive. One who dreams, loves, builds, and expands.

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