Diarrhoea: emotional and spiritual meaning

What diarrhoea is

Diarrhoea is stools that are looser or more frequent than usual. Food can move so quickly from the stomach through the intestine that it is not fully absorbed. Water and salts leave with it. A short bout is usually a virus, something you ate, a medicine, or a period of stress. It often settles in a few days with fluids and rest.

When it lasts more than a few weeks, or keeps returning, it needs a proper look. Infection, inflammatory bowel disease, food intolerance, an overactive thyroid and some medicines are among the causes a doctor will consider. The emotional reading does not decide which of these is present.

The emotional reading below does not replace this. It offers another layer, for those who notice that their bowel also reacts when life moves too fast to take in.

The emotional meaning of diarrhoea

Where constipation is often read as holding on, diarrhoea is read as letting go too fast. The source links it to fear, or to a wish to avoid or flee a situation that is unpleasant, or simply new. A flood of new ideas arrives, and there is no time to integrate them. You want certain things in your life to go faster. Impatience follows.

Trapped by something new

Something new can leave you feeling caught. Inner sensitivity is turned upside down. You may feel trapped by obligations, even by the law. You turn against yourself. You feel desperate. There is the sense of having been fed something foul that you cannot digest, and of preferring to expel it at full speed. You felt grabbed in the gut, petrified. On top of that, your image of yourself in this moment is a poor one. Guilt follows. Events have overtaken you.

What the body evacuates instead of words

It is not only food that no longer suits you. The source says it is your thoughts. You want to eliminate something that feels dangerous or dirty. Because you cannot evacuate it in words, the body speaks another way. Feelings of rejection, the fear of being rejected, or the wish to reject others, and any situation in which you feel trapped, are the climate in which this reading places diarrhoea.

You may feel so overwhelmed that you want it finished as fast as possible, and the unpleasant emotions attached to it leave at the same time. Powerlessness prefers flight to having to "face the music." Saying no, and respecting yourself, is difficult. The intestine refuses the digestion and sends straight out what you wanted to keep outside yourself.

There can also be a search for an identity that would match what your parents expected. And, when life gives signals that are not listened to, the source says a sudden bout can be one of the ways the body insists.

In close relationships, the same speed can show up as difficulty accepting love, tenderness and kindness. Dependence leaves you powerless to act. You need something different. You need a change of air.

Traveller's diarrhoea

Traveller's diarrhoea has ordinary infectious causes, especially a change of food, water and microbes. The source adds a reading for the traveller who is suddenly faced with great poverty and misery. The heart opens, and the mind is disturbed as much as the gut. It can be an unconscious reaction that shows how attached you are to a certain comfort, a certain rhythm, a certain kind of life. The infection is still an infection. The question is simply available if the trip has shaken you.

A gentler way to hold it

The aim is not to blame yourself for a bowel that is moving too fast. Infection, food and illness are real, and the warning signs above need a doctor. The emotional perspective invites you to notice what you are trying to get rid of before you have taken it in.

• Slow down enough to see. The source asks you to take time to see, to feel and to listen to your heart, so that situations, including the past, can be integrated rather than rushed through.
• Notice what you pass by. When you really slow down, you may see that you have been missing the goodness and the beauty of your life, just as the food was missing absorption.
• Say it, if the body is saying it for you. What have you been unable to refuse, or to name as "I will not take this in"?
• You are supported. The body, in this reading, is warning you to trust life, and to remember that you are not without support.
• Claim your own space. You deserve happiness, and a place where you live in respect for yourself and for others.
• Replace fluids. While you listen, drink. A short bout still needs water and salts more than it needs a conclusion about your life.