Anaemia: emotional and spiritual meaning

What anaemia is

Anaemia is a drop in haemoglobin, the pigment in red blood cells that carries oxygen. Iron sits at the centre of that pigment, which is where oxygen and carbon dioxide bind. Iron deficiency is the most common kind. Blood loss, including heavy periods or bleeding in the gut, a diet low in iron, pregnancy, and trouble absorbing iron can all bring it on. Other anaemias come from a lack of vitamin B12 or folate, from long illness, or from the bone marrow itself. You may look pale, feel exhausted, get breathless on stairs, or notice a heart that races. The cause is found with a blood test. Iron tablets, B12 injections, food, and treatment of whatever is losing the blood are ordinary care. They belong with a clinician, because taking iron without knowing the type can do harm.

The emotional meaning of anaemia

Blood is read as the joy of living, as love, and as the emotions. This state sits with a lack of joy, of strength, and of depth in the love you have for yourself and for others. It sits with doubts about your ability to love with any real force or determination. It sits with discouragement, with a refusal of life, with the impression of having no worth, and with a resistance to love that ends in devaluing yourself.

You devalue the very things that carry you. Hopes. Aspirations. You live in "yes, but", with little interest, feeling restricted by everything, and so you conclude that your deepest wishes cannot be realised. You have the impression you are going to collapse, or that your life or your family is crumbling into crumbs. What used to transport you no longer seems worth much. You need other people to prop you up, because you do not feel strong enough for your own deep desires. Despair and resignation can be there. You feel undermined, weak, and you go pale from the sense of being drained. It is as if someone were drawing the blood out of you, and you are left in pieces.

You may feel you are suffocating in your surroundings, often in a family you feel apart from. The question is why you have to go all the way to exhaustion before the people you love recognise you. Life's events can be met with a great rigidity. All of this is read against a great weakness in the blood.

Two puns carry the iron. In English, iron sits beside "I run". In French, fer sounds like faire, to do. The anaemic person, in this hearing, no longer feels enough joy or motivation to do everything there is to do. There is a lack of doing, and no strength left to run after what you want. You have the impression you cannot do what the situation needs, or that what you do is not right. The questions follow. Why refuse the energy that is available to you? What are you afraid of? Se ronger les sangs is the French for eating yourself up with worry. What is doing that to you?

A deep feeling of not having been loved by your family may be there, and a conflict about the love of your clan. You have no motivation, because you do not know what, at the bottom, actually pleases you. You are not in touch with your inner life. The future looks blurred, uncertain, dangerous. Negative thoughts toward yourself drain the energy. It is as if physical reality itself cannot be taken in.

Fear belongs in the questions. So does the heart's blood, already read on the page for high cholesterol as a joy that has trouble circulating.

A gentler way to hold it

• Say yes to the energy that is ready to serve this life with love.
• Choose food with care, the food that feeds the body and the blood and rebuilds strength, alongside whatever the blood test asks for.
• Look for the joy that is already around you, in family, work and friends.
• Live your life rather than someone else's, and recognise your deep desires.
• Keep the medical plan. The blood test, the iron or the B12, and the search for a bleed stay with your clinician.