Lymph: emotional and spiritual meaning

The lymphatic system is made of nodes and of vessels that carry lymph toward the bloodstream. Lymph carries white cells, proteins and fats. It fights infection and helps clear what the body does not want. Swollen nodes, lymphoedema and an infected vessel are medical events. A node that stays up, with night sweats or weight loss, needs a doctor. So does a red streak on the skin with fever.

In the emotional reading, the lymph runs in parallel with the blood, and it is tied more directly to the feeling, affective side of you, to the moods. The heart and circulation are the blood's side of that parallel. If the nervous system is tied more directly to thoughts, the lymph is tied more directly to feelings. The spleen is one of the lymphoid organs in that system.

What the lymph represents

The source is brief about the system as a whole, and very clear about what keeps it well: love is certainly the best means of keeping the lymphatic system healthy and effective. That is an inner picture of care. It is not a treatment, and it is not a claim that love prevents infection or cancer.

Inflammation of the lymphatic vessels shows, in this reading, how far you have known how to control your emotions and your environment, and that you cannot go on. You are discouraged. You feel like a large elephant shut into a small house: you want to get out, you want to be free.

Lymphoedema manifests a feeling of insecurity. You give yourself an image of being above everything, and this makes you very fragile, because the life is based on a masquerade instead of being lived at the level of the heart. You are then confused and no longer know which path to take, which makes you vulnerable.

Lymph troubles, the entry says, tell you to pay attention to your thoughts, to manage your emotions, and to accept that joy circulates freely in you, like the sap in a tree. You are to come back to what is essential, and to put your attention on the real values of life rather than on the material and on the things you have the impression of lacking.

Caring for the lymph from the inside

Infection, surgery, cancer treatment and blood disease are real reasons nodes swell or a limb fills with fluid. The emotional perspective adds a question: which feeling have I controlled past the point where I can continue?

• Admit the discouragement. Control that has reached its limit is the picture of an inflamed vessel.
• Name the small house. The wish to be free is what the elephant image is for.
• Drop the masquerade. Being above it all, while living away from the heart, is the reading of a swelling that will not leave.
• Let joy move. Sap in the tree is the source's image for a feeling that circulates instead of stagnating.
• Return to one essential. The fear of lacking is what crowds the real values out.
• Have a persistent node examined. Love is not a substitute for that appointment.