“], “filter”: { “nextExceptions”: “img, blockquote, div”, “nextContainsExceptions”: “img, blockquote, a.btn, a.o-button”} }”>
Heading out the door? Read this article on the new Outside+ app available now on iOS devices for members!
>”,”name”:”in-content-cta”,”type”:”link”}}”>Download the app.
Welcome to Chiron retrograde. It’s a space of compassion, alchemy, and inner medicine. It’s a journey into your underworld, one that’s filled with reframing, reorienting, and recreating your understanding of what it means to become in the broadest sense.
When is Chiron Retrograde?
Known astronomically as an asteroid, comet, and a minor planet, Chiron begins its annual retrograde on July 30, 2025, until January 2, 2026, in the zodiac sign of Aries.
What Does Chiron Mean?
In the world of mythology, Chiron was a medicine man, healer, teacher, shaman, and alchemist. Deeply attuned to the natural world and universal law, he spent his life learning from and working with both the medicine of the earth and the medicine of the soul. Yet none of this was available to him until after a life changing event—an accidental poisoned arrow that left him wounded for the remainder of his life.
In the realm of astrology, Chiron is referred to as two different names. Perhaps the most common is the “wounded healer,” meaning Chiron was a balm for his community yet unable to heal himself. The second is the “rainbow bridge,” meaning a doorway connecting the spiritual and material worlds and relating to a concept based on Chiron’s orbit, which weaves in between Saturn (material) and Uranus (spiritual). This world-bridging aspect of the cosmic body’s influence exposes you to vaster perspectives that, ideally, you can bring into your everyday world and reality.
Chiron takes approximately 50 years to travel through all the constellations of the zodiac. Yet due to its irregular orbit, the cosmic body takes varying lengths of time to travel through each sign, varying from 18 months in Libra to eight years in Aries.
While in Aries, Chiron has been on a journey with all of us into the healing of self through building courage, confidence, self-authority, and autonomy. We have been exploring the realm that is uniquely us—the desires we hold, the fire within, the way we take action in pursuit of our dreams, the language of our inner guidance. Aries is passion, aliveness, initiation and self-leadership. These 8 years of Chiron in Aries has, and continues to be, a reclamation of the self, and a return to the spark within.
If we were able to observe Chiron in retrograde, we would witness it seem to turn and retrace its steps. However, due to the overlapping of orbits, when a planet or cosmic body is in retrograde, it moves backward only from our perspective on Earth. In the cosmos, all movement remains forward as usual. Out there, retrogrades don’t exist. Down here, they seem quite real.
Retrogrades are the medicine of perspective. A planet or other cosmic body in retrograde reminds you that your perspective defines your life. The stories that live within you frame and define your understanding of yourself and of what happens in your world. These create the lens that shapes and colors your every experience. Your outlook determines your reality.
Our experiences make us who we are. Each is an invitation to open our hearts wider, uncover more of what lives within us, let in more light, cultivate compassion, and anchor deeper into this short yet wildly beautiful human journey of ours. Chiron’s wisdom is much like the wisdom of kintsugi, the Japanese philosophy and art of repairing cracked pottery with gold, in which something becomes even more beautiful than before it was broken.
What Chiron Retrograde Means for You
In ancient astrology, when a planet was in retrograde, it was entering an underworld where it was free from the usual narratives, understandings, and frameworks. It could now begin gathering deep wisdom and insights that exist outside of the perspective usually taken.
Chiron invites us into the alchemy that is a retrograde. As you enter your own underworld, you enter a space that exists outside of your usual ways of thinking, perceiving, and labeling. Down here, you get to meet the parts of yourself that have made it through so many experiences. The experiences that hurt you. The experiences that cracked you open. The experiences that hardened your hearts. The experiences that you simply didn’t know how to tend to when they happened.
And you’re able to do so from Chiron’s perspective, which brings the knowing that within each of these experiences exists a doorway into more—more of yourself, more of life, and more medicine, strength, and compassion. You get to shift your perspective and remember not only the beauty of kintsugi but that you are your own alchemist and healer. You are innately who you are yet you are also activated by the experiences in your life.
With Chiron retrograde in Aries, you create your own perspective as you shift through acceptance and wisdom as relates to your identity, autonomy, courage, and desires. Read for your rising sign.
Aries Rising
Chiron retrograde reminds you that the medicine was within you all along. Or, perhaps more accurately, that you are the medicine that you need. By bringing your presence, acceptance, and altered perspective of what it means to be whole to all parts of you, it’s possible that you’ll create yourself anew.
Taurus Rising
Known as the doorway between the spiritual and the human, Chiron is a bridge builder. While in retrograde, it might help you discover a new doorway calling your name. One that deepens your connection to the sacred, rebuilds your relationship with the divine, and offers the kind of healing that can only come from reentering the sacred waters from which we are all one.
Gemini Rising
Chiron retrograde holds a mirror to the medicine within you. Medicine for yourself which, when claimed, becomes medicine for all. Like Chiron’s mythological journey, retrograde is an invitation to step into the role of healer and observe how your experiences—and the gold you have gleaned from them—are your offerings to the world.
Cancer Rising
There are dreams that you are here to create. There are worlds that you are here to build. There is beauty and healing that you are here to add to the world. Chiron retrograde is a mirror to the medicine that lives within you—the beauty and healing innate to who you are—and the way your dreams can only come through you.
Leo Rising
Chiron retrograde invites a retracing of your journey. From this vantage, you can discover much wisdom waiting for you. Wisdom that has the potential to vastly shift your relationship with life, meaning, and belonging. Let this be a space of faith building, trust healing, and meaning making.
Virgo Rising
Intimacy, vulnerability, and truth with yourself always offers medicine. This retrograde is no different—only amplified. Throughout these next five months, there is deep healing, wisdom, beauty, and strength found in being truthful with yourself and all that lives within you, and in offering yourself space, intimacy, vulnerability, and presence with what calls your name from within.
Libra Rising
This retrograde is a journey into all that lives within your heart, a retracing of all experiences that opened your heart, closed your heart, hurt your heart, and cracked your heart open. This takes place so that you may remember the medicine of love and begin applying your own kintsugi gold.
Scorpio Rising
There is medicine within the small steps taken each day. Within repetition, practice, habit, and ritual. These next five months are an invitation to devote time to yourself each day. To your well-being, your courage, your presence, your meaning, and your desires. Small steps when constant, will take you far.
Sagittarius
Life is an expression of the divine, a creation of the sacred. Chiron retrograde is an invitation to remember yourself as the same. It is an invitation to understand yourself as a channel for sacred energy. You are here to express, create, live and explore with this energy moving through you. Through presence, acceptance, and perspective-shifting, you can return to this way of being.
Capricorn
Chiron is a doorway between the spiritual and the human. And for the last six years, Chiron has been cracking open the foundations of who you are, so that you can remember yourself as this doorway. This retrograde invites you deep within, traveling with you down into your roots, formative years, and earlier memories. There is medicine here awaiting you.
Aquarius Rising
To open your mind to vaster wisdom, understanding, truth, and perspectives is courageous. To share one’s perspective is medicine, bridging the self and the other and healing together. This retrograde, invite your mind to open, remember your voice as medicine, and observe the healing in sharing ideas and thoughts with one another.
Pisces Rising
Belonging, safety, worthiness, and self-love are your medicine throughout this retrograde. To hold up a mirror and remind yourself through your presence, love, care, and actions, that you are worthy—of yourself, your desires, safety, beauty, and all that calls your name in this life of yours.
Explore the effects of the Moon, learn what your opposite sign means, and understand how astrology intersects with your everyday life through our astrology email newsletter.
This article has been updated. Originally published July 24, 2024.
