The Chiron Collection
Updated: Sep 9
Sappho knew it. Toni Morrison’s most celebrated work, “Beloved” was based on it. Some of the most exquisite and profound literature produced stems from the psychological, physical and/or emotional wound.
Philosopher Hélène Cixous called this school of writing écriture féminine. Here, we explore it.
I am launching a new video series—The Chiron Collection.
In Greek mythology, Chiron was a centaur — half human, half horse; he was arguably the greatest healer and teacher of the ancient world. Chiron mentored heroes. He dispensed wisdom. But more importantly, he deeply understood suffering. His strongest resonance with suffering was born of a wound that would not close. An arrow, dipped in poison, that struck him and manifested in a wound that might never be healed. Chiron dispensed medicine to others and healed them, but could not heal himself.
For these reasons, Chiron is known as the Wounded Healer. The one who tends to everyone else’s pain while living inside his own.
In an individual’s natal chart, Chiron marks the place where the individual carries a wound of similar quality — the one that does not resolve. But over time, with wisdom, the wound becomes the source of the deepest wisdom and gives the aggrieved the greatest capacity to heal others.
Over the coming months, I will be profiling sixteen women writers through the lens of their Chiron placement.
In this series I will explore and excavate the wounds chronicled by Sylvia Plath, Maya Angelou, Margaret Atwood, and bell hooks, amongst others.
My series is born of the philosophy of Hélène Cixous and écriture féminine—this understanding that women have processed themselves and their lives through pain. The idea isn't a novel one.
From Sappho to Audre Lorde, from Anna Akhmatova to Toni Morrison. Women have always written from this dark and haunted place in order to exorcise pain. Écriture féminine simply gave that tradition its name.
The first episode, featured below, is on Maya Angelou.
Writing Wounds into Grace is a self-paced online audio course I built from this philosophy. The course helps women write the stories they have been most afraid to tell, through gentle hypnotherapy, guided meditation, and thirty days of writing prompts that take you beneath the surface story, and into the truth of it.
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