Kidney problems: emotional and spiritual meaning

What kidney problems are

The kidneys filter the blood, balance fluids and salts, help control blood pressure, and take part in making red blood cells. Kidney problems range from a passing infection to stones, to a slow loss of filtering that needs long-term care. Pain in the side, blood in the urine, swelling and a change in how much you pass are reasons to be examined. Some people need dialysis when the kidneys can no longer clear the blood. That is a medical treatment, not a metaphor.

The reading below does not replace that care. It listens to fear, and to what has not been allowed to leave.

The emotional meaning of kidney problems

In this approach the kidneys are the seat of fear. They are also a filter. They clear waste, and, figuratively, old anger and old sorrow. When they work poorly, the source reads a retention of old emotional patterns, or of negative feelings that are asking to be freed. Partnership is often disharmonious. You feel vulnerable, and you look to other people to make you happy. You can feel liquefied, as if your strength had been taken. Sexuality may become a way of fleeing the problem.

Nothing left

In French, rein sits beside rien, "nothing". The source uses that for the sense of standing in front of nothing: the world has fallen in, everything feels lost, you are no longer happy in your family, deep vitality has gone. You fear you cannot face life, so you cut yourself off from your own feelings. Kidney trouble is often placed after an accident or a shock in which you were afraid of dying.

If filtering stops, the body is read as trying to keep its liquid, from fear of losing it or of running short. The questions are concrete. Was there a fear tied to water, such as nearly drowning? To a toxic drink? To money, because people speak of liquid cash and of liquidating debts? The collecting tubes are touched, in this reading, when you feel you must fight for your existence and you feel dispossessed after a marking event.

Two extremes

You tend to live at an extreme. Very authoritarian, quick to criticise. Or submissive, indecisive, powerless, one disappointment after another. Life feels unjust. It is hard to decide, hard to know what is good for you and what should leave, and hard to tell truth from illusion. The two kidneys also stand for collaboration. The source asks whether you make your partner responsible for all your pain, whether you pour your waste onto other people, or whether you cling to the past until you are exhausted. Criticism and defeatism, the sense that life is only failures, are what it places beside kidneys that struggle, even beside kidney failure. Dialysis is then read as having to collaborate with a machine. That is an image. It is not a reason to refuse treatment.

A gentler way to hold it

The aim is not to blame yourself for a kidney disease. The emotional perspective invites you to find the fear, and to let what is old move.

• Admit the fear. Especially the one you have not wanted to say to yourself.
• Let one feeling leave. Held anger and held sorrow are what this reading says the filter is stuck with.
• Look at the partnership. Collaboration is the picture of two kidneys working together.
• Stop waiting to be made happy. The source asks you to take your own needs in hand.
• Keep the medical care. Filtering, blood tests and dialysis are not optional once a doctor has said you need them.