Angina: emotional and spiritual meaning

What angina is

Angina, or angina pectoris, is a tight pain in the chest that comes when the heart muscle is briefly short of blood. The Latin root is a verb for squeezing and choking, which is why the same family of words gives us anguish. It often appears with effort or emotion and eases with rest. It can be the step before a heart attack. Medicines, a spray under the tongue, and sometimes a procedure to open or bypass a narrowed artery are ordinary medical care. Cold hands and feet can travel with a heart that is struggling. They are a reason to be examined, not a symbol to decode first.

The emotional meaning of angina

The heart is read as the centre of love, and as the engine of the whole system. Angina is the anguish of that centre. Spiritually, this is someone who gives a great deal of love with attachment, until the heart is tired of the worry and the joy has thinned. Blood, in this language, is the joy of living. A flow that falters is read as that joy moving less freely, not as a feeling that closed an artery.

Life, and the things you love, are taken too much to heart. Worries and joys are both turned up too high. A situation that is not, in the end, so grave still brings irritation, sadness, and the sense of having been brushed aside. Inside the chest it feels like a war. The question is who you want held against you for good, and whether you can let them go if the time has come.

Giving, and not being able to receive

Controlling, and keeping everything, is heavier than letting the current of a life move. The empty feeling of letting go can be frightening, especially if the feelings stay hidden. Spasm and a pain through the heart are read as an alarm, a call to notice what is being carried. Great joy can open the same door onto an old sorrow, and the pain arrives then too.

A lot of what is done may be duty rather than pleasure, so the joy stops circulating. Attention sits on other people's happiness and other people's troubles, and your own wellbeing comes last. The spiritual interpretation is wary of giving as sacrifice. It asks whether you restrict the love that is offered back to you, whether help is easy to take, and whether you pass a gift on at once because you do not know how to keep it. In Quebec the heart is sometimes called a potato, and the image is a hot potato: received, and handed straight back.

The other face is the competitive one. Everything is demanded of yourself. The emotional life is set aside so the heart never gets to speak. Giving and receiving are meant to move like vessels that narrow and widen. When that exchange stops, the attention belongs back on the balance, not on another effort for someone else.

A gentler way to hold it

• Name one person or plan you are gripping. Ask what loosening would actually cost.
• Let one offer of help stay with you, instead of earning it or passing it on.
• Phrases about a heart of stone, a hard heart, or no heart at all are worth hearing as descriptions of a climate, and then taking to a doctor if the chest is involved.