My journey with Chiron began in 1992 when, while browsing the shelves of the Theosophical Society bookstore in Sydney, Australia, the ultimate cliché happened: a book fell off the shelves and landed at my feet. I looked around, half expecting Shirley MacLaine to come around the corner! Not seeing her, I picked up the book and looked at the title—Chiron and the Healing Journey, by Melanie Reinhart. Not interested in asteroids at the time, I simply put the book back and went on my merry way. Little did I know at the time that this event would be the first in a series of synchronicities marking Chiron's forceful entry into my life.

Having studied astrology since the age of twelve and having practiced professionally for many years, I felt as though there was still something missing—a key that would unlock the astrology chart and bring together what seemed at the time to be a whole lot of disconnected pieces. Interestingly, I felt that my life at the time was also a collection of such pieces—disconnected, disjointed, unrelated and misshapen.

In the midst of this inner and outer turmoil, I remember calling out to whoever might have been listening in the greater cosmos: Why was my life so fragmented? Why did I feel so alone? Why did I feel like an outsider, like an alien on an alien planet? Why did I feel as though there was something missing, something that seemed just out of my grasp, something that might otherwise bring together the scattered pieces of my life?

A few weeks later, a psychic friend of mine called me out of the blue, saying that she had some messages for me from her spiritual guides. She wouldn't tell me the messages on the phone, so we arranged to meet later in the week.

In the intervening days, I had a powerful dream. In the dream, a woman was dying in my arms. It may have been my wife, my mother, my daughter or a lover—it didn't matter, except that it was female. In the midst of my anguish, she died. Nearly overcome with emotional pain, I dove down toward the pain, into the darkness of my psyche. As I approached the source of the pain, it became almost too much to bear. At that moment, though, the woman came alive again, and my pain was transformed into pure love. With my chest almost bursting with this love, I awoke, tears streaming down my face. In hindsight, I recognized that a great healing had taken place. I had recovered my disowned feminine side.

A few days later, my psychic friend came to visit. Among other things, she told me that I needed to know about Chiron and to work with its energies. She said Chiron was the "wounded healer," and that it was all about recovering and healing the lost pieces of our lives—our disowned and unloved parts.

As she spoke about Chiron, I felt some of the pieces of my life come together: the bookstore cliché, my quest for the missing key to unifying astrology charts, the feeling of being an outsider, the disconnectedness of my life and, of course, my recent dream. An underlying connection and pattern began to emerge, and, somewhere in the recesses of my mind, I felt a door open, a door to a new yet somehow ancient and more direct understanding of the living world. Although I did not know where this would lead me, I knew at that moment, without knowing exactly why, that I had found the key I had been searching for.

The upshot of it all was that, for the first time, I looked at where Chiron sat in my own natal chart—its sign, house, aspects, travel, and current transits. I was floored, to say the least! It answered many questions about the way I felt about myself and about my life—particularly in relation to feeling unloved and in relation to the way in which I expressed my woundedness.

In the ensuing months, I would also see that placing Chiron into the astrological picture would answer the many questions I had concerning how to unify the otherwise disconnected pieces of the astrology chart. What were previously collections of clinical, dry, disconnected planetary influences were transformed into living, breathing, dynamic pictures of people's lives.

Perhaps the most striking feature of this series of synchronicities, though, lay in my Chiron transits. At the time of the aforementioned meeting, a conjunction of Chiron and Mercury was transiting my natal Sun-Uranus conjunction and I was fast approaching my Chiron half-Return. Moreover, shortly after this meeting, I experienced a spontaneous and cathartic past-life memory of the loss of a loved one. When I later examined the transits, I found that transiting Chiron was exactly conjunct my natal Uranus, and transiting Venus was exactly conjunct my natal Sun. I needed no more convincing! In the ensuing years, it became apparent that Chiron had chosen me to be an emissary, a spokesman for its healing messages.

The journey of the last decade and more has been an enlightening one, with Chiron as my primary planetary guide. It has been a journey of delving deeply into my own wounds and issues, as mirrored by Chiron in my natal chart. This is only half the story, though. The other half has been the miraculous journey of healing—not only for me, but also for the many people close to me, as well as for the many clients with whom I have worked. True to its astrological glyph, Chiron was (and is) certainly the key.

As wondrous as those early years were, I did not suspect at the time how vast a picture Chiron would eventually paint. Nor did I realize how relevant (and obvious, in retrospect!) it was that Chiron was discovered exactly when it was.

In short, Chiron's discovery augurs a new paradigm, a new way of looking at ourselves and at the world around us. It augurs a revolution in consciousness and consciousness's connection to health and disease and function and dysfunction—a revolution the likes of which the world has not known in over two thousand years.