Achilles tendon: emotional and spiritual meaning

What the Achilles tendon is

The Achilles tendon joins the calf muscle to the heel bone. It is the strongest tendon in the body. It can bear a load of hundreds of kilos, and it is what lets you rise onto your toes and push the ground away. It works harder when you are standing, upright, than when you are lying down. Overuse, a sudden increase in running or walking, tight calves, and some medicines make it painful or swollen. That is tendinopathy. A rupture is a different event: a pop, a gap, and an ankle that will not push. Both need proper care. Rest alone, or a burst of heroic stretching, can make a sore tendon worse.

The emotional reading below asks what you are asking this cord to carry, and what the inside is standing on. Calf pain and muscle cramps are the neighbouring complaints.

The emotional meaning of Achilles pain

This tendon is how thoughts and desires, physical and spiritual, are read as taking form. It also expresses a block in the movement of the ankle. You may have a great desire for stability that is hard to realise because money is precarious.

The tendon can bear a lot. Do you have the impression of carrying a lot too? It can be strong and bear a heavy load if the base, the inside, is solid. If you feel a void inside, what can you lean on? Perhaps you give too much importance to the container, to the outside of things. What about the content? What are your priorities, your values? What does your life rest on? Are you in contact with what is essential in you, or only at the level of how things appear?

Is there a rupture in your relations with other people, particularly with your children or your parents? Do you always need to move, to leave, as if you could not stay in one place for long?

The tendon fragilises when you live an impossibility of rising. That can be the desire for a promotion, a change of social rank, the desire to be part of a professional sports team, while obstacles keep it from taking material form.

A gentler way to hold it

The direction is to put things into action so that dreams and the aims you set yourself can be realised. You base your life on sure human values. You increase your inner strength by being yourself. A tendon still needs graded load, not a sudden proof that you can bear anything.

• Ask whether the inside is solid. A heavy outside on a hollow inside is the question.
• Separate container from content. Appearance and value are not the same support.
• Name the rise that will not happen. A promotion, a rank, a team: obstacles are part of this picture.
• Look at a ruptured bond. Children, parents, or the need to keep leaving.
• Notice the wish for stability against a precarious base. Money is the example the reading gives. It is a question, not a judgement.
• Have a pop in the tendon seen the same day. A rupture is not a symbol of a broken relationship.