Hearing loss: emotional and spiritual meaning

What hearing loss is

A smaller drop is a reduction in how sharply you hear. When sound fades a great deal, or goes, it is deafness. Age, noise, wax, infection, and some drugs are common causes. A loss that arrives in one ear over hours is urgent. Hearing does not decide to leave because a sentence was unwelcome. An aid, a clearing of wax, or treatment of an ear infection can bring sound back when the cause allows it. Tinnitus often travels with the same ear.

The emotional meaning of hearing loss

The old line is: better to be deaf than to hear that. Spiritually, this is a closing off from other people. Rejection is felt easily, so the ears are stopped, in the phrase, because the bother is too much. Not knowing how to answer becomes a deaf ear. Fear of being manipulated, and a refusal of criticism, build a wall. You will not hear reason. Isolation grows. Stubbornness keeps the wall up. Like a wounded animal, you go to ground inside yourself.

What was heard, or what you discovered about yourself or about someone else, left you stunned. The same things seem to be repeated forever. You are very sensitive to what people will say. The racket around you feels like an attack. Unfinished problems do return, and they still have to be faced. The tendency the spiritual interpretation names is to settle everything alone instead of asking for help. Closed towards others, the question turns inward: are you listening to your own feelings, your frustrations, and in the end your inner voice?

Anger grows, and there is a fear of letting it show, because you do not know what it would do. Direction is unclear. Obstinacy makes a deaf ear because you want your own way, and you will not be told what to do. The pages ask you to notice the particular difficulty. High sounds or low ones. Hearing that improves and then drops. Men or women, adults or children, a particular accent. Loss is not one flat thing. It varies, and it differs from person to person. Some sounds are blocked before they reach the brain and disturb an inner quiet.

Water in the ear is read as feelings that gathered around what was heard, and as a way of not speaking so that other people are spared what might come out of your mouth. Fluid is also a medical finding. It needs looking at. It is not a store of emotion you placed there. The result of these different losses is loneliness. Distance feels safer, because any choice might be the wrong one.

A child who hears quarrels, reprimands, shouts, and noise can reach a point where it is too much, and the need is to be cut off from the racket. That is a reason for the adults to lower the noise. It is not a choice the child made to be deaf. Living in fear that an alarm will sound, literally or as a warning of danger, brings tears, and not hearing seems kinder. The step the spiritual interpretation offers is to lean in, to listen to the inner voice, and to open the heart towards other people. Calm is looked for inside. The test and the aid still belong with the ear.

A gentler way to hold it

• Name one thing you have been refusing to hear. Say whether it is outside you or inside you.
• Ask for help with one problem you have been carrying alone.
• Book the hearing test. Listening inwardly does not replace what the ear can no longer catch.