High cholesterol: emotional and spiritual meaning

What high cholesterol is

Cholesterol is a fatty substance the body uses to build cell walls and to make hormones. The liver makes most of it. Food from animals, meat and dairy especially, adds more. In the blood it travels in packages. LDL is the fraction often called "bad", because a surplus settles in artery walls and slowly narrows them. HDL is the fraction often called "good". A high LDL, over years, raises the chance of a heart attack or a stroke. Diet, weight, genes, an underactive thyroid, diabetes and some medicines all change the number. Care is a blood test, food and movement, and sometimes a statin or another medicine. That medicine is a clinician's decision.

The emotional meaning of high cholesterol

Blood is read as the joy of living. Cholesterol belongs to that blood. When there is too much, and it settles and narrows the vessels, the question is where the joy stopped moving. Inwardly you may believe you do not deserve to be happy, or joyful, so the joy circulates badly.

French hears two puns here. Se faire du mauvais sang is to worry yourself sick, to make "bad blood", and the cholesterol fractions are themselves called good and bad. Sang also sounds like sens, meaning. The question becomes whether life is going in the direction you want.

Worry is often in the picture, especially worry about a mother and a family. A level can be read as rising after a particular event. Retirement is one. The joy that lived with workmates, and with the people the job put in your path, is gone. Another is the departure of someone you loved, who brought joy with them. The reading sets this beside diabetes, which it reads as a very deep sadness. Here the event is read instead as a lack of joy of living, and the cholesterol is what climbs. The loss of a pet can sit in the same place, and so can any situation, noticed or not, in which the joy of living drops. Insecurity is often there too. You live the situation as a drama.

It can be a project you care about, something you want to build, with no help from anyone. You can count only on yourself, and that weighs. When joy thins, love is what the reading hears thinning with it, which is why the heart is the organ this lack of joy is said to reach.

A high level also asks whether you can really take part in life. You may feel like an actor in a play. You are in the piece, and you do not fully own your emotions. You play a role to please others, when the pleasure was meant to be yours. You became very giving so that nobody would call you selfish. Dreams feel unrealisable, unacceptable. You are looking for an identity. You no longer recognise yourself in a family you see as dismantled. That family may be the one you were born into, or a group you belong to, or the people you work with. You want them close and in harmony, and you feel unable to step in.

Food has a place in the reading as well as in the medicine. Rich food can be a private satisfaction of appetite, a moment of feeling good while the surplus is left unthought. The question is whether you are pleasing the body, or bypassing it. The reading asks you to look at whether self-love has tipped into a self-concern that denies the ordinary joys, and whether this discomfort is really what you want.

When the joy left

The reading distinguishes a few moments when a level is understood as climbing.

• A retirement, when the joy of colleagues is no longer part of the day.
• Someone's departure, a person who brought joy, or a pet.
• A project with no help, where everything rests on you.
• Any quiet drop in the joy of living, noticed or not.

A gentler way to hold it

• Let joy circulate. The image is a child still amazed by what is beautiful in a day.
• Question the fear of being happy. Joy is allowed to be part of the life.
• Be yourself, and let a dream be yours. Playing the part for other people can wait.
• Taste the moment. You have the right to be happy.
• Keep the blood test and the medicine. Food, movement, and a statin you were prescribed stay with your clinician.