Breasts: emotional and spiritual meaning

The breasts are glandular organs on the chest. They can make milk, and they respond to hormones across a life. A new lump, a change in the skin, or a discharge from the nipple needs a clinician. Most changes are not cancer. The ones that might be should be seen, not interpreted away.

In the emotional reading, the breasts represent the awareness of who you are, and your generosity toward yourself and toward others. They are the symbol of maternal beauty. Their condition is read as the balance in your life between giving and receiving, and between your feminine side and your masculine side.

What the breasts represent

A good exchange, the source says, makes you truly fertile, and in every aspect of life, not only in having a child. Your feeling life is then in harmony with your rational side. A person with large breasts, woman or man, is often read as someone who from a young age felt obliged to mother other people in order to feel loved. You may be skilled at looking after others, and still be doing it because you fear rejection. Admired for that side of yourself, you attract recognition. The question the entry asks is whether you are the one who needs to be mothered.

Small breasts are read, at the other pole, as a doubt about your capacity to be a mother, and a constant need to prove that you can be one. The left breast is the more emotional, affective aspect of the maternal side. The right breast is associated with the woman's role and responsibilities in the family or in society. Soft, hanging breasts are a prompt, in this reading, to become firmer in the way you speak and act.

The breasts also represent femininity and seduction, and they are often admired out of all proportion. Their appearance is equated with becoming a woman, and that provokes many reactions. You can fear becoming a sex symbol, or being ridiculed. You can live in shame and embarrassment, and feel lowered. You may not want a child because a child reminds you, consciously or not, of something you have not finished with. The source is describing a fear and a memory. It is not a judgement on the size of a body, and it is not a claim that a breast's shape is a moral report.

Caring for the breasts from the inside

Hormones, cysts, infection and, sometimes, cancer change breast tissue for medical reasons. The emotional perspective adds a question: where is the balance between the care I give and the care I am willing to receive?

• Ask who is mothering whom. Looking after everyone else can be the fear of not being loved.
• Notice the need to prove it. Doubt about your capacity to nurture is the other pole the entry describes.
• Separate left and right in the story. Feeling, and the practical role, are the two sides it names.
• Be firmer in one sentence. Softness, in this reading, is also a way of not saying what you mean.
• Set shame next to the fact of a body. Admiration and embarrassment are both reactions the source records. Neither is a diagnosis.
• Have a new lump examined. Meaning does not replace a clinical examination.