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One of the foundations of evolutionary astrology (EA) is a specialized and in-depth treatment of Pluto.  Its basic signification is that of the soul’s deepest desires and intentions, as well as the soul’s deepest wounding.  The former is an idea from Jeff Green’s style of EA, the latter from Steven Forrest’s.  I combine the two, seeing both present in the Pluto configurations (and lives) of my clients.

I liken the internal stuff related to most people’s Plutos as a shiny, magnificent, golden ball of wonderful goo that’s covered over by the crust of experience.  When we do healing work on our Pluto issues, we can gain access to the shiny golden fantastic ball of goo, which is accessing our core sense of power and purpose.  Why would anyone want to deal with that crust?  Because the feeling of aliveness following healing Pluto issues is unparalleled.  Don’t you want to inhabit your own personal place of power?  Sounds like pie in the sky stuff to some, but it’s completely within the reach of us all.

The road to that access requires that we confront deep fears – on one level Pluto represents the subconscious, the place we stuff things that seem too hard to deal with.  Transits to and from Pluto are dreaded - and both tend to be misunderstood.  Pluto times have in common the fact that things must change, and the deeper, the better.  Your deepest fears are likely to be have a spotlight thrown on them (if not realized), all in order (from the EA perspective) for you to see how you allow yourself to limit your life because of your fears.  Pluto work is about facing fear and learning to reach deep into and heal ourselves to access our power.

If Pluto is the deepest wounding of our soul, Chiron is the set of scratches we got on our cheek after being tripped in the school bus aisle when we were thirteen.  Pluto is the wounding of the innermost you, and Chiron is in a sense a temporary flesh wound that we internalize and reify because of the certainly painful psychological effects.  We were embarrassed, shamed, laughed at, and that sort of thing can be pretty damaging to our fragile egos.  While I’m obviously downplaying the intensity of Chiron wounding, I don’t mean to rob it of all importance.  I simply wish to impart that next to Pluto, it’s a flesh wound.  It can occupy a central place in some of us, and therefore seem more serious than Pluto wounding.  People seem to share a vocabulary for Chiron wounding, while Pluto wounding can challenge us to the point of avoiding acknowledging it.

The pain of Chiron has a great deal to do with perception.  At some time there was a wounding event which did in fact leave marks, but from then on a part of us makes a big story about it and is just waiting to be hurt again.  We can find evidence everywhere to support its expectation of hurt, and each of our Chiron parts has access to a wealth of stories supporting the paranoid thesis that such hurt is probably about to begin again at any moment.  Until our Chiron parts mature, we’re ready to be hurt again – we can expect to be victims.

Maturity with Chiron comes when the perception shifts.  I think of this part of ourselves pivoting on the balls of its feet in that moment of change.  We hear all the time that the wounded becomes the wounded healer, and while this soundbite is woefully reductionary, it reflects the 180 degree turn that’s made when the Chiron in each of us matures.  We see that we can help other people with the same hurt that we have.  The onset of maturity relative to Chiron is a willingness to give to others even though we have our own pain and could use some help.