Hepatitis: emotional and spiritual meaning

What hepatitis is

Hepatitis is inflammation of the liver. Viruses cause the types named A, B, C and others. Alcohol, some medicines, autoimmune disease and a blocked bile duct can inflame the liver as well. The whole body feels it. Weakness, jaundice, loss of appetite, nausea, fever and discomfort in the abdomen are the usual signs. Hepatitis A often comes from contaminated food or water and usually settles. Hepatitis B and C travel in blood and, for B, in sex and from mother to child. They can become chronic and scar the liver. Vaccines, testing and antiviral treatment are medical facts. None of them is a matter of attitude.

The emotional reading below does not explain how a virus arrives, and it does not replace a blood test. It stays with anger, rancour and the way a hard season is carried. Gallstones are the hardened form of a related bitterness.

The emotional meaning of hepatitis

The liver is read as the giver of life, cleaning the blood of poisons and excess, and keeping the emotional state in balance. It is also the place where poisonous feelings and an excess of hatred can accumulate. It is the seat of anger. Illnesses whose names end in "-itis" are read as irritation and anger. Hepatitis is tied to personal relationships or to a difficult situation. You are in despair, and you question the image you project.

Making "bad blood" over nothing brings a great deal of anger, rancour, rage and even hatred, which can tip toward violence against yourself or against other people. Violence is not a metaphor to act out. If you are at risk of hurting yourself or someone else, that is a reason to get help, not a reading to sit with. These feelings often start from a sense of failure in some part of life, or from revolt against an injustice in the world. You resist opening your mind and seeing events differently. Right and wrong are hard to tell apart. Do you really respect yourself in what you are and what you live? You can feel so submerged by everything around you that you lose contact with your own direction. You are between two worlds, cut off from a sense of unity.

Rancour toward family members who interfere in your life belongs in the same picture. Flight is very present, and it keeps you out of truth and respect.

What the circumstances may suggest

The reading distinguishes three viral forms by the flavour of the rancour, not by a cause you can catch from a mood.

• Hepatitis A is tied to rancour about food itself, or about a problem that has to do with nourishment and that you consider vital. A partner refusing to pay support is the example given. The point is what feels essential and is being withheld.
• Hepatitis B is tied to rancour about something or someone that was imposed. You postponed an event that mattered, lived a great disappointment, and perhaps rejection. You were "injected" into a situation you refused, pushed out of a comfortable place into one that did not suit you at all, caught, powerless to react. Anguish follows. Past events marked you so deeply that you define the present by those experiences, instead of trusting that things can go well. You feel poisoned by your own difficulty in letting the past go, and by attachment to the material and to a social image.
• Hepatitis C is tied to a great rancour about something unknown or secret. Who are my parents? Where was I born? You resist new situations that would make you change. You cling to prejudices and to ideas you already hold.

These are questions about bitterness. They are not a map of how the viruses spread, and they are not a judgement on anyone's sexual life or family story.

A gentler way to hold it

Rest, which the illness imposes, is the time this reading asks you to take stock.

• Set down a prejudice and an anger you have been maintaining. New attitudes are what let a potential be lived.
• Let go of what is harmful. Joy is allowed to be part of the life, because you deserve it.
• Ask where the flight is. Avoidance is what keeps the truth at a distance.
• Separate a virus from a resentment. One needs medicine. The other needs to be named.
• Keep the treatment. An emotional picture does not clear hepatitis B or C.