Shingles: emotional and spiritual meaning

What shingles is

Shingles is an infection that follows the chickenpox virus waking up again in a nerve. The rash comes up on one side of the body, in a band, along the path of that nerve. It burns. The pain can outlast the blisters. Antiviral medicine works best when it is started early. The virus is the cause. A conflict can be present in the same week. It does not light the nerve by itself.

The emotional meaning of shingles

Nerves are read as the paths of inner communication. Pain along one of them is taken as a break in that communication, in the region the rash has chosen. The fire of the rash is heard beside anger that followed criticism, or beside fear. You felt attacked. A deep bitterness remains. A situation or a person wounded you, and the body is asking for attention while the tension stays.

There can be the sense of having been stained, and of a contact that was not wanted, or of having had to submit to some authority. If that contact was an assault, the next step is safety and help, not a search for what the rash is teaching. The first reflex the spiritual interpretation describes is withdrawal. Closing up seems to prevent the next wound. It also turns the aggression back on yourself, as if the people who hurt you had been right. Danger feels constant. A part of you is refused. Creative energy is held in. The side of yourself you call dark is the side you want to flee.

Under the rash, spiritually, there is an intense emotional reaction to someone or something that brings too much stress and makes decisions hard. Harmony in your relationships, and in other people's, is deeply wanted. The only power on offer is power over your own life. Sensitivity is part of you. Meeting each part, instead of staying your own enemy, is how a sense of safety is imagined again. Other people's suffering can be set down. They have their own work.

A gentler way to hold it

• If you are unsafe, leave and get help before you interpret anything.
• Name the contact or the criticism that still burns, without deciding it was your fault.
• Let one held-back impulse have a small, real outlet this week.