Hay fever: emotional and spiritual meaning

What hay fever is

Hay fever is allergic rhinitis set off by pollen. The eyes itch and water, the nose runs or blocks, you sneeze, and the sinuses can ache. It returns in the same months, grass, tree or weed, depending on what you react to. It is an immune response to a grain of plant pollen, not an infection, though it can look like a cold. Antihistamines and a steroid nose spray are ordinary care. They do not need to be suffered through untreated. If you also have asthma, pollen can tighten the chest, and the inhaler stays part of the plan.

The emotional meaning of hay fever

Pollen is the fertilising grain of the flower, the part the reading hears as masculine, carrying the symbol of reproduction. The allergy usually touches the eyes, the nose and the sinuses. An allergy, in this reading, sits with a resistance. To a situation in your life, to a memory, or to a facet of your own personality.

You do not like your life programmed in advance. A resistance can sit, often unnoticed, toward a form of sexuality or toward some aspect of it, especially if what you sense about sexuality "does not smell right". Fear of reproduction can be there. Are you an adult watching time pass quickly, afraid that the dream of children and a family is fading as the years go? Are you a teenager full of questions about having children? It can also be a resistance to time itself, noticed particularly at each new season, the moment the allergy reappears.

Hay fever is also read beside a separation from someone that affected you deeply. A pollen allergy brings you back to a difficulty in going to meet life, in going toward adventure. Novelty makes you afraid. You are anxious about changes. One thing the reading holds as sure: you are smothering, or you feel smothered by a situation. You revolt. Something does not suit you at all, and you do it anyway to please, and you smother. You change your mind under someone's influence. You are ready for anything, and you smother. You can feel smothered in the things to say or to do, especially because taking your place and saying no is hard. Guilt tends to be there too. You feel inferior, fearing how others will react. You reject yourself, and you want to expel what disturbs you. You are afraid of ending up destitute. In French, sur la paille is to be left with nothing, on the straw. And still you stay imprisoned in old habits. You are rigid, like the sequence of the seasons, which always arrives in the same order.

The season as a pattern

The reading asks you to look at the programming, mental as well as seasonal. Summer is an easy time for this allergy to show, including when a part of you would like a reason to do less in that beautiful stretch of the year. Some people carry hay fever across many seasons, even several years. The question is whether the cold has also become a way of avoiding a situation, because you would not otherwise be able to refuse a task or a place. Now there is a good reason. It can also become a way of feeling different, of needing attention drawn. During allergy season, people at least have to notice you.

Taking your living space, what the reading calls a bubble of light, is pictured as a way of opening to others as you really are, without a disguise. Flight and secrets have less hold. The first bout may have sat, without your knowing, beside a marked event and strong emotions. When the same part of the year returns, you remember, or rather the body remembers, and the hay fever appears. Becoming conscious of that event is what the reading asks, so the pattern can be seen for what it was. A sign that asked you to stop and look for what was underneath.

A gentler way to hold it

• Accept what is good for you, including a desire, or a sexuality, you have kept unknown.
• Know that love and harmony can hold more than the old programme.
• Come out of isolation and go toward people. You do not need the season in order to be noticed. You are already different, and unique.
• Keep the sprays and the antihistamine. If the chest tightens, the asthma plan stays with your clinician.