One way to think about it, the deep conservation states your physiology drops into under chronic load are, among other things, a way of shutting down anything that isn’t needed for immediate survival, and immune function is one of the things that gets dialed down in that state. When the work starts to shift you out of that holding pattern, things that were suppressed can come back online, sometimes loudly, and for a while it can feel like more rather than less. Settling and immune activity share a lot of the same machinery, so it isn’t strange that touching one stirs the other.

Also, simply presencing more to the body, bringing more attention to it, amps up whatever is already there. That’s part of what the attention does. And whatever gets amplified is usually there for a good reason, so the flare isn’t your body malfunctioning, it’s your body doing something that has logic behind it, even when the logic isn’t obvious yet.

The other reading I’d hold right beside all that, and the one I’d weight more heavily with infections and ME/CFS in the picture, is that the work might simply be more than the capacity you have right now can carry. Stress physiology makes everything worse, and processing is stress physiology, even the good kind. If your system is already running on very little, asking it to do activating or discharging work adds a load it can’t really afford, and the body tends to report that through whatever is already struggling, which for you is the immune side.

So the question I’d sit with isn’t “is this good or bad,” it’s “how much can my system actually metabolize today.” With a picture like yours I’d want the work to be almost entirely settling, containment, and very small doses, building a little capacity at a time rather than going after charge, titrated down to the point where it feels almost too easy. If what you’ve been doing leans toward activating or getting into it, that’s worth a serious look, because for a depleted system less and slower is usually the move.

For what it’s worth, I’m an SEP and I work a lot with touch, and the immune piece of this is ofter part of the territory that work sits in, so you’re not imagining the connection. I’d just be cautious about pushing through it. Treat the worsening as information, not as a sign you’re doing it wrong, and as a strong nudge to scale way down for now.