Liver and gallbladder: emotional and spiritual meaning

The liver is the largest gland in the body. It makes bile, clears the blood, and takes part in handling food, including excess protein, fat and sugar. The gallbladder sits beneath it and stores bile until a meal needs it. Hepatitis, cirrhosis, gallstones and liver failure are medical illnesses. They need a doctor.

In the emotional reading, the liver is known as the seat of anger and criticism. The French word foie sits next to foi, faith, and the source uses that closeness: the liver stands for the faith and trust you have in your own possibilities. The gallbladder stores bile, and bile is read as the feelings you have not yet digested.

What the liver represents

The liver is read as your ease, or your difficulty, in adapting to events. Negative feelings are said to hinder it: sorrow, hate, jealousy, envy and aggressiveness. Under those, the source looks for fears that have found no other way out. You criticise and judge, yourself or other people, and you do it easily. You complain. You resist someone or something. Discontent is the climate.

Joy of living is often missing, because you envy what others have, and the envy leaves you sad. The source speaks of a depressive turn here, and of weariness, a general letting-go, when the liver is overloaded. Sadness and the wish to justify yourself sit in the same picture. The question it asks is how far you are willing to make an effort, in practical life and on the inner path, and whether you feel you have the courage for the change that is actually yours.

What you reproach in the other is read as a mirror. Complaining and asking them to change, without any movement of your own, is the pattern the entry keeps returning to.

Anger has its own page because the anger entry places its heat in the liver. Hate does the same for the burn it describes, in the liver and in the gallbladder.

What the gallbladder represents

Bile clears what is toxic into the intestine. Symbolically, it is the clearing of emotions and experiences that are toxic for you. It is the power to take feelings in and digest them so that you can open out.

Trouble here is tied to emotional patterns full of bitterness and irritation, toward your life or toward other people. If those patterns freeze and harden, the source says they become gallstones. Insecurity about someone you love, and the attachment that makes their feelings hard to carry, is another reading. A death, and the bitter arguments that can follow about what is left, are named. So is the fear of losing the game: of having to let go of a person or a thing that might be taken from you.

You struggle to see clearly in your feelings and your responsibilities, and to do the just thing. Situations feel unfair, and you feel you must always justify yourself. That brings a great deal of anger. You become bitter, even furious. You can come to detest someone and look for revenge. Resentment is the feeling that page is written for.

Caring for the liver from the inside

Alcohol, viruses, fat, medicines, stones and blocked ducts have real effects on this system. The emotional perspective adds a question: which unspoken bitterness am I asking this organ to keep?

• Name the criticism. The seat of anger, in this reading, is also the seat of judging.
• Look in the mirror. What you keep asking the other person to change is often the trait you will not own.
• Let one bitter feeling move. Hardened irritation is the picture the gallbladder is given.
• Ask where the joy went. Envy and complaint are what the source says crowd it out.
• Choose a fresh look. The liver entry asks you to take responsibility for your thoughts and to look at the day again.
• Get jaundice and severe pain seen. Meaning does not replace a blood test or a scan.