The Spiritual Meaning of Seasonal Allergies and Hay Fever

Seasonal allergies, known also as hay fever, are common enough and usually relatively benign. They can include sneezing, runny nose, hives, and other cold-like symptoms recurring around the same time each year. There are over-the-counter medications that can help short-term, and if your allergies are more serious you may want to talk to a doctor about treatments that can help. In the meantime, it could support your system to consider the spiritual meaning of allergies and hay fever and see if we can approach the problem more holistically.

Immune Confusion

Fundamentally, any allergy is the immune system’s reaction to the wrong thing. It takes harmless pollen, in this case, and assumes it is a harmful invader, causing an immune reaction to get the offending substance out of the body. Pollen goes into the nose and eyes, and so the nose and eyes start to stream, trying to remove the allergen. Metaphorically, that means the system is confused about who is a friend and who is an enemy.

Emotionally, this could be understood as hypervigilance, the tendency to assume something bad is going to happen at any time and needing to be on high alert, even when things are relatively safe. Hypervigilance is a stress state, and stress can quickly trigger immune reactions and other issues, certainly including allergies. Let’s consider the following questions:

• Do you feel fundamentally safe in your life?

• Do you have (or have you had) close people in your life who betrayed you, scared you, or hurt you?

• Do you have a clear sense of the difference between safe and unsafe, whether physically or emotionally?

• How are your boundaries, physically and emotionally?

Difficulty with Seasonal Transitions

Seasonal allergies tend to happen about the same time every year, usually during the transition from winter to spring or summer to fall. The seasons have strong energetic resonances, and there may be some difficulty or confusion around these times of year that your body may be trying to express.

Spring allergies: The spring and summer are extroverted times; seasons of joy, movement, activity, and openness. We may feel pressure to go out and do things, travel, make new friends, and remove layers of clothes, which could bring up anxiety about body image or being seen. Spring and summer are all about light, heat, yang energy, and the more active, masculine side of life. Consider the following questions if you have spring allergies:

• Are you more comfortable inside, alone, and with close people than out at a party with strangers?

• Do you already run hot and tend to get frustrated or angry easily?

• Is there something within you that you want to hide, keep safe, or keep still?

• Do you have a fear of being seen, either literally or emotionally?

Fall allergies: The fall and winter are times of drawing inward and connecting with self, spirit, and family. The darker, colder times invite us to learn, dream, connect, and feel. It is a yin time of year, reflecting the cool, gentle, slow, feminine side of life. There are also many holidays centered around connecting with family. Consider the following questions.

• Are you comfortable resting, sleeping, and dreaming, or would you rather be out experiencing life socially?

• Is there something you’re avoiding that comes up in quiet moments?

• Do you have a difficult relationship with your family?

• Are there ancestral traumas in your family, especially around your grandparents’ generation?

Cyclical Emotions

The seasons, and thus seasonal allergies, happen cyclically, on a similar timeline every year. We may want to consider this reaction in terms of time and cycles. Consider the following questions:

• Did something happen during this season in the past that was scary or a major change in your life?

• How comfortable are you with change in general?

• Do you have regrets about the past or fear about not getting something done in the present or future?

• What is your relationship with aging, time passing, and the concept of death?

Chronic Repressed Grief

The symptoms of seasonal allergies are similar to those of a head cold, which in turn mimic crying: Tears stream down our faces and our nose runs. Head colds and seasonal allergies can sometimes make us “cry” when we’re not crying enough for ourselves. When this happens with seasonal allergies, there may be something chronic that we are grieving, or something in our familial or ancestral line that is showing up in our bodies. Consider the following questions:

• Do you feel sad often?

• Is depression a part of your life?

• Is there something that happened that you’re still grieving, even if it was a long time ago?

• Do you let yourself cry when you are sad, or do you try to hold it in?

• Are you pretty good at suppressing your emotions and keeping others from seeing what you feel?

• Were displays of emotion discouraged or punished when you were a child?

If any of these questions resonate, consider what might need attention in your life to allow these stuck emotions to come through. Healing these parts of your heart and your nervous system may not cure your allergies, but you may find that your allergies soften somewhat when you start to change yourself in these deeper spiritual ways.

Manage seasonal allergies with these yoga poses.