Asthma: emotional and spiritual meaning

What asthma is

Asthma is a long-term condition of the airways. They become inflamed and narrow, and they can produce extra mucus, so that breathing is difficult. An attack may bring wheezing, a tight chest, cough and shortness of breath. In a severe attack the blockage can be dangerous, which is why a written plan and the right inhaler matter.

The immune system can react very strongly to allergens such as pollen, dust, animals or mould. Cold air, exercise, smoke, infections and stress are other common triggers. Asthma often begins in childhood and may ease or persist. It cannot usually be cured, and it can be controlled. Reliever inhalers open the airways quickly. Preventer inhalers, taken regularly, reduce the inflammation.

In children, attacks often rise in September, when school starts again after a summer outdoors. Viruses spread in the classroom, and the change of routine is real. The emotional reading of that return to structure is below. It does not replace the inhaler.

The emotional reading below does not replace this. It offers another layer, for those who feel that their breathing also says something about space, freedom and a cry that has not been voiced.

The emotional meaning of asthma

The source calls asthma a silent cry. During an attack, the pattern it describes is specific: you can breathe in more easily than you can breathe out. You need to take life into yourself, and you struggle to give it out, until panic rises and breathing becomes small. Only a minimum of air is released.

Smothered, and afraid of your own strength

Under the attack, the source sees an immense anxiety, a fear of your own strength, and a wish to run. It can feel safer to hide behind a title, a diploma, an organisation or a structure than to become autonomous and take responsibility. You feel smothered by the power you have given to other people. That still seems better than standing on your own.

Asthma, in this reading, is fundamentally about smothering. You feel taken by the throat, walled in, suffocating in relation to someone you love or to a situation. You refuse what is happening and always want something else, and with that attitude you cut yourself off from any feeling of freedom. Life is lived as obligation rather than free choice. A person in authority seems to stop you expressing yourself and to cut off your voice. You no longer feel free to speak or to occupy your space. A climate of dispute and confrontation can poison daily life and feel like a threat. Fear takes your breath away.

There may also be rage you refuse to see, until it "takes you by the throat." The source links some attacks to a fury you cannot tolerate in yourself, and to contact with a person, a situation or a thought you cannot stand and cannot assert yourself against. The attack is the moment you want to cry out your despair, your pain and your incomprehension.

Love that does not leave room

The same smothering can be love. A mother who is too enclosing, a father who is too authoritarian, a closeness you are afraid of. Sometimes it feels as if, in order to stay alive, you must not show that you are alive. You must disappear. You would like to take what belongs to you, and at the same time it feels dangerous. Part of you would like to be back in the safety of the womb.

The source is frank that an attack can also be a way of drawing love, attention or a form of emotional dependence. Read gently, this is not a trick. It is what happens when need has no other voice. Life, in the healing direction, is an exchange: giving and receiving in balance. Fear of lacking, especially of lacking love, sits underneath.

Breathing itself is read as independence. The first breath at birth is the moment you start to breathe for yourself. The source links some asthma to a fear that goes back to that beginning, to feeling smothered or frightened then, and to a sadness from very early life that was pushed down. Later, it can be hard to live your own life, hard to leave parental ties, especially with a mother or a partner, hard to marry or to see your parents separate without reacting. You may feel pushed aside by the arrival of someone else. You cannot imagine leaving that soft, reassuring image.

In a child

A baby with asthma may, in this reading, be living an anxiety that resembles the anxiety around them. The question the source hears is a very young one: do I have the strength to live, and will someone save me? This is never a reason to blame parents. Childhood asthma has strong physical causes, and it needs a doctor. The emotional note simply adds that the climate of fear in a house can be felt in a small body.

For a school-age child, the September pattern has an emotional reading beside the viruses. Summer was open air and chosen friends. School is timed, ordered, full of things you must do and things you may no longer do, such as staying up late. The frame can feel like it takes the air away. Learning your own strengths and limits, so that life can be enjoyed rather than only obeyed, is the direction the source suggests. Again, the inhaler comes first.

A gentler way to hold it

The aim is not to blame yourself, or your parents, for asthma. Allergies, infections and family tendency are real, and an attack is a medical event. The emotional perspective invites you to look at where your air, your voice and your space have been given away.

• Say what smothers you. The source begins the healing with expression, and with taking up your space.
• Notice the breath itself. Breathing in can be the moment you feel supported. Breathing out can be the moment you let go of control, and let yourself move with life.
• Give without forcing. You can offer something real, even if it seems small, without disappearing in the process.
• Open the heart as well as the chest. What you actually need may be contact and tenderness, not only more effort.
• Leave the role that keeps you small. A title or a structure can be a shelter. It can also be the thing you hide behind.
• Keep the treatment. Emotional understanding does not open a closed airway. Use the plan you have been given, and seek help early when an attack is building.