Be Yourself No Matter What They Say

Note to Readers — This article is a slightly reworked gem from 2018, introducing the idea of Chiron in Aries (spanning early 2018-early 2027). That transit reaches a major peak with a total solar eclipse less than one month from today. I think it’s interesting to contrast my ideas at the beginning of an outer planet run with what actually developed. Most of this is as-written; I have made some edits to the Aquarius section. It’s a little long for a Planet Waves essay by today’s standards. — efc

---

Dear Friend and Reader:

Chiron is now in Aries. Its eight-year trek through Pisces is over, and a new era in astrological history is beginning. By any metric, the theme is individuality.

I don’t mean individuality in the sense of being a member of a tribe, or a movement, or an organization, or a TIKI-torch brigade. I don’t mean drinking Pepsi, which makes you different from someone who drinks Coke. This is not about something you tattoo onto your skin, but rather the cultivation of your soul.

Chiron in Aries can be summed up in one idea: self-actualization.

This is usually defined as a noun, which is a thing: “the realization or fulfillment of one’s talents and potentialities, especially considered as a drive or need present in everyone.”

I think of it more as a verb, a process, and both a journey within oneself, and the experience of growing, and bringing what you contain outward to the world. This process and the natural impulse that drives it are often buried beneath thick blankets of denial and hazy self-awareness, lost in habit, and worn down by resistance.

Perhaps most of all, the desire to self-actualize is often sacrificed to what seems like a more primal need to conform to what others expect of you, or what you think they expect. This style of conformity is propagated in early childhood, by what Wilhelm Reich called the miniature authoritarian state, the family. Usually, curiosity is its first casualty; independent-minded people are always curious.

Why This is About Chiron in Aries

Aries is the primary sign related to self, to identity and to self-concept. You can take it on many different levels, from vanity to the quest for being. Part of what determines one’s particular style of experiencing Aries are the planets placed there.

In many ways, Chiron is the very symbol of self-actualization. It was discovered in 1977, at the peak of what was called the Human Potential Movement. The concept “holistic” was finding its way into culture, and this is another idea represented by Chiron. Holistic means being a whole person, a meta-theme of Chiron.

The first keyword for this new planet came from its discoverer, Charles Kowal, who declared, “This thing is a maverick!” Old Samuel Maverick (1803-1870) was the rancher who refused to brand his cattle. Hence his name became synonymous with someone who refuses to conform.

This turns out to be one of the most practical delineations of Chiron: People who have it prominently placed tend to stand out whether they like it or not. They’re unlikely to do as told unless it suits their own purposes. If you have a prominent Chiron (which you can only tell from looking at your natal chart), you need to make peace with being different, and master the art of doing so.

Chiron is now prominently placed for everyone, hanging out near the first degree of the zodiac, called the Aries Point. The Aries Point is the location of the Sun on the day of the vernal equinox, when it enters Aries. The Aries Point’s energy extends out to all of the cardinal points (the first degrees of Cancer, Libra, and Capricorn, where the seasons begin); it’s the big intersection between the personal and the collective.

Said another way, what happens involving the Aries Point can be multiplied over a large population, and also manifests in deeply personal ways. There can be seemingly external events with wide-scale but unusually personal impact. Waves can course through society and give the effect, or the reality, of significant change and progress.

Self Awareness and Drive for Distinction

Consider Chiron’s hyper-self-awareness, its drive for distinction, and its ability to put a lens in front of anything and magnify all the details.

And Chiron often arrives with one other thing: a healing crisis. This typically happens when one makes a commitment to get well. You might think of it as the “things get worse right before they get better” phase of the process—and it is the getting worse that many people resist, and therefore avoid embarking on their healing journey.

Waking up to oneself, which is the only waking up there is, is not all sweetness and starlight. If you have reasons to stay asleep, awakening can be messy, though there’s plenty of anticipation anxiety. One of the first things someone may have to admit is the extent of their pain and unresolved material; their still-unpacked personal baggage. It may seem easier to drag around, though this has a natural limit.

As for self-awareness, most people associate this with being self-conscious, which means feeling awkward. Thus the whole “raising awareness” thing is not necessarily a big seller, seemingly for this reason. However, like learning how to dance, do yoga, play music, or write with a pencil, you must go through the awkward phase to gain some dexterity and get the rewards.

The Rage Problem

One situation society is facing at the moment is a rage problem. Many people are, at the least, frustrated, let down, and pissed off, and many are packing some serious, unprocessed, and unmanaged anger. Many are depressed, which is another way of staying angry but not giving it a voice.

Anger and rage show up in various forms, from hostility to road rage to domestic violence to taking aggressive and self-righteous positions on issues, such as taking the children away from migrants and refugees.

Consider how many people are shot every day in the United States. Consider how many shoot themselves. That is symptomatic of anger. Mass shootings are about anger. So, too, is thinking you need to have a gun.

The bullying problem that we’re seeing on every level of society: There’s a good example of rage, and it takes many forms that do not discriminate by race, sex or gender. It seems to be expanding rapidly into many dimensions of society.

I think that most people want to get along, and a few hyper-competitive people make life difficult for many others. Rage is often a mask for the feeling of wanting to dominate others, or for jealousy.

Self-Righteousness as a Drug

In his classic 1988 work on recovery, Healing the Shame that Binds You, John Bradshaw astutely describes self-righteousness as one of the most addictive “drugs” in existence, which must be factored into recovery plans.

“The feeling of righteousness is the core mood alteration among religious addicts,” he wrote. “Religious addiction is a massive problem in our society. It may be the most pernicious of all addictions because it’s so hard for a person to break his delusion and denial.”

If it happened, imagine the creative and loving energy that would release. Yet there seems to be little interest in either harnessing this energy and using it for something productive or healing it. To make the commitment to heal wounds require first admitting one’s anger, and maybe declaring a truce. Then the next step is to be introspective and consider the root of one’s feelings.

There is an idea going around that the solution to everything that makes us angry is to be more angry. Yet that is like trying to smooth out the surface of water with a canoe paddle. The “blow off rage” approach is likely to make matters worse, and to further damage the trust in one another that we need to do anything positive.

Aries is ruled by the planet Mars, and has many resonances with it. Mars is a kind of omnibus planet that addresses matters of desire, assertion, aggression, anger, warfare, and other forms of violence. At the outset of Chiron in Aries, Mars was retrograde in Aquarius (from June 26 to Aug. 27, 2018). This was a shaking-out or revealing of some of the material contained within both Mars and Aquarius. It was a kind of catharsis of the territory where the individual meets the group.

And Now We Have Pluto in Aquarius

Today, we have Pluto in Aquarius. Pluto used to be called “the higher octave of Mars,” which is something we might want to re-introduce to astrology. As such, it would potentially represent the growth opportunities that might go unnoticed in the midst of conflict.

Aquarius is the sign of groups, social patterns, cultural patterns, and the technology that binds them. Aquarius is not really the public, but more a highly selective subsection of the public that includes your circle of friends and the people they know. It involves organizations and informal associations, and the social patterns that they create or enforce.

Aquarius is also about the patterns and rules of civilization, whether helpful or not. It is where the individual meets with the group. Pluto in Aquarius is going to push this relationship in many strange directions.

Most astrologers would tell you that Aquarius is the sign of groups. Yet most things that we think of as groups are really something else. Only individuals can form a group. Most people have not individuated; rather, they have submitted themselves to a kind of tribalism. This swallows individuality in a time when people need it more than ever. Rather than groups, what we have today are electric tribes. It may feel good to be part of one, until you realize you don’t have a right to an opinion.

We also see many situations where people form a mass, a crowd, a mob or a collective — which is not a group. Once people have individuated, they are capable of connecting on the level of group consciousness, which is different from mass consciousness. The thing about group consciousness is that it’s so rare, most people would be pleasantly surprised if they experienced it: it would be a new thing.

The Issue with Being an Individual

Asserting oneself as an individual comes with risks. There are challenges to individuation and self-actualization, which are not often mentioned by those who proffer these ideas. Being an individual means standing out: Your life is your own, you make your own choices, you have your own opinions, and you do things your own way.

This comes with a level of vulnerability, meaning, making oneself a potential target or subject of judgment.

There is, necessarily, the ingredient of, “I don’t care what others think” involved in the process, and that alone can make people angry. No matter how polite you are about this, it’s still possible to annoy people merely by being who you are. This is why being a conformist is so popular, and why so few people express their honest opinion: They “stay out of trouble” by being quiet. That, however, is not self-actualization.

Yet responding to both Chiron in Aries and to Pluto in Aquarius will call for asserting oneself, standing out, being different, and addressing the results. This takes courage, which is the opposite of conformity.

We live in times when everyone is expected to make everyone else feel safe, secure, and this odd thing called comfortable. Yet this does not work together with people asserting who they are against the norms of society, or their micro-culture. We have to choose: We either welcome or tolerate difference, which means tolerating what we don’t like; or everyone is expected to fall in line.

As someone learning, growing, and self-actualizing, the comfort of other people is not your business, and it cannot be a factor that hinders your progress. For example, if a person is coming out as trans, how other people feel about that is not the point. The point is they are doing what they need to do.

Within the bounds of civil conduct (acting lawfully and with basic respect of others), you are free to conduct your life as you wish. You do not have a responsibility to protect the “comfort” of others or to ensure that you don’t make them “uncomfortable.” You are only required to respect their legal rights.

Even a mainstream program like Alcoholics Anonymous teaches that you cannot control what other people feel, so there’s no point in trying.

Nobody Has a Right to Define You — Unless You Say So

Nobody has a right to tell you who you are, what you should wear, who you should associate with, how you’re supposed to act—nor, most significantly, how you’re supposed to think. But you can be sure that someone will: When someone asserts their individuality, there is almost always some pushback, and sometimes a lot.

The most important place to watch for this is in your personal relationships. Within a couple situation, one partner will often be threatened by any sign of growth or awakening consciousness in their partner. Any time the identity of one person in a relationship begins to shift, the mental structure of the relationship can be threatened. This can lead to jealous episodes.

Unless you’re someone who has an agreement with your partner to grow and to honor one another’s individuality, there is likely to be some flak. This can involve resistance to anything from going to community college, to having opposite-sex friends, to wanting to take a trip. People can resist when you want to deepen your spiritual path or evolve your political thinking.

This puts pressure on many people in relationships to suppress change, growth, their opinions, their deeper needs, and their desire to be an independent person.

This scenario also happens in families, where people are under all kinds of pressure: to do what their father did for a living, to be in the family business, to stay in the same town, to get married, to be straight, to not go to college—or just to be miserable like everyone else.

Sting summed it up beautifully in the song “History Will Teach Us Nothing.”

If we seek solace in the prisons of the distant past

Security in human systems we’re told will always, always last

Emotions are the sail and blind faith is the mast

Without the breath of real freedom we’re getting nowhere fast

Or as he offered in another song: Be yourself, no matter what they say.