Flu: emotional and spiritual meaning

What flu is

Flu, or influenza, is an infection with an influenza virus. It usually arrives harder than a common cold: fever, chills, headache, aching muscles, a sore throat, a cough, and a chest that is tiring to breathe with. Many people need a few days in bed. Most recover at home with rest, fluids, and medicine for fever and pain. Antiviral medicine is sometimes used early, especially for people at higher risk. A yearly vaccine lowers the chance of a severe bout. A cold, bronchitis, or a chest infection can look similar, so a clinician is the one who sorts them when the illness is heavy.

The emotional meaning of flu

Flu sits with anger. The French name, grippe, is also the verb in prendre en grippe, to have it in for someone, to be angry at them. The question is simple. Who, or what, have you got it in for?

The symptom that shouts loudest points at the scene. Fever sits with anger. Sneezing sits with criticism, and with wanting someone or some situation out of the room. Often the quarrel is in the family. Something was said, or something happened, that you could not swallow, because a rule or a limit was crossed. You had the impression your living space was walked into, or that you might lose a person or a thing you were clinging to. S'agripper is to cling. Grippe and the clinging share a sound, and the reading hears both.

People close to you can make you doubt your judgement, or your ability to do the task in front of you. When they are family, it cuts deeper. A whole life can be spent building a personality by stepping back from them, while still wanting their approval, especially a parent's. The two pulls confuse the question of who you are, and of which choice is yours. An inner defence can feel as if it has gone. The person who disturbs you may be someone who holds authority over you.

Fear has a place here too, including the everyday fear that says, "I got so cold today, I am sure I will catch flu." The reading asks why the flu is here. Is rest actually needed, a real stop? Or is the bed a way of not facing a responsibility at work or at home? Low trust in yourself, and a habit of being influenced, even invaded, is the inner picture. The question is where you have stopped standing on your own sense of things.

There can also be a great disappointment, a frustration strong enough that you no longer want to feel what is happening around you. A blocked nose is read as "I cannot smell this any more," and, of a person, "I cannot stand them any more." Breathing gets harder in the same movement. Fever, in this reading, is the heat of what had no other way out.

A gentler way to hold it

• Name who you have got it in for. Anger that stays unspoken is the scene this illness is read against.
• Look at the family sentence you could not swallow. A crossed limit is worth saying, once you can sit up.
• Let the rest be real. Use the days in bed as a stop, and notice if they are also a way of avoiding a responsibility.
• Let tears and words move. Expressing what you feel is the way this reading pictures the congestion easing.
• Keep the medical plan. Fluids, rest, fever care, and a clinician if breathing or alertness changes, stay in place.