Hair loss: emotional and spiritual meaning

What hair loss is

Baldness is a partial or total loss of hair. It is more often associated with men, and more and more women are affected too. The common pattern, androgenetic alopecia, is largely hereditary. Other patterns have other causes: thyroid disease, iron deficiency, childbirth, severe illness, some medicines, alopecia areata, and traction from hairstyles. A dermatologist can often tell them apart. Treatment depends on the type. No change of attitude makes a hereditary pattern reverse on demand, and this page does not claim that hair returns if you let an idea go.

The emotional reading below treats hair as a mirror of inner strength and of roots. The hair and nails page holds the wider picture. Brittle nails are the neighbouring sign.

The emotional meaning of hair loss

Hair is the mirror of a certain inner strength, and of your roots. The story of Samson is the one this reading remembers: cut the hair, and the strength goes. Hair represents the link between the physical and the spiritual, what connects you to a larger energy. It is often compared to an antenna. Heredity is said plainly to be the principal factor, more frequent in men. Among the patterns, one is associated with a person who uses the intellectual faculties more than the emotional ones.

Loss of hair, also called alopecia, is read as having moved away from what is divine in you. You are a person oriented to the material plane rather than the spiritual. You may have a great deal of intuition, and prefer to stick to what is more material, more rational. Often, if you lose your hair, you are living one or several situations where the tension is so great that you "tear your hair". Several stressful or even traumatic experiences can accelerate the process. A birth that is a source of fear or worry, a serious emotional shock, a separation, a great deal of tension at work or at home, the taste for surpassing yourself on the material plane, or a loss of value on the intellectual plane. When you live a crowd of worries and great fears, you lose contact with your inner power.

What you are afraid of losing

Since the hair is going, what have you had the impression of losing in your life, or what are you afraid of losing in the future? It can be something or someone. You can revolt. You want to free yourself from this pressure that is smothering you. You want to be yourself and stop living according to outside obligations. In losing your hair, you deliver yourself from what imprisons you. You probably received little softness, notably from your father, and you tend to revolt against authority. You are rather materialistic, and spirituality is a very small part of your life. You try as much as possible to control everything, because you are afraid of opening and of losing control. You imprison yourself in rigid structures, obligations that have no reason to be. You are scattered. Your thoughts are tangled. You are so exasperated by a situation that you tear the hair from your head. You live an inner tearing, like an ordeal.

You do not want to fail your children and, by that, lose their love. You tend to devalue yourself intellectually, and you live injustice. If you had a facility or a gift for an activity you excelled at, and that performance starts to change and decline, the hair is read as falling too. You refuse the basic functioning of life, claiming you can do better than it. Any inner fear brings an inability to act, despair, and tensions that catch you unprepared. It is an illusion to believe you can do better than life itself. You do not have to fight life. It is with you to support you, if you listen and if you stay open.

A gentler way to hold it

The inner direction is to make the changes that free you from an extra load you agreed to carry and no longer need. You trust that things can turn out well. Instead of going to fetch your power outside yourself, which the hair is said to symbolise, you go to the bottom of yourself and draw the strength and the courage that are there, so you can go forward and pass to a new stage. You learn to include the laws of a life in a harmonious way, knowing they exist for your good, personal and collective. You ask quietly. You trust your inner being, and you look for solutions, because they exist. The world is there to help. That is a way of standing inside a change of appearance. It is not a prescription for regrowth.

• Have a sudden or patchy loss examined. The pattern matters more than the story.
• Ask what you fear losing. A person, a place, a capacity.
• Name the tension that makes you tear your hair. Work, home, a shock, a separation.
• Look at softness that was missing, especially from a father. Revolt against authority sits beside it.
• Notice control. Rigid obligations are the prison this reading describes.
• Keep hereditary thinning in proportion. It is common, it is medical, and a decline in performance is not a moral fall.