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Mindfulness for migraines
Mindfulness is the number one, overarching tool that has helped me reduce my migraine triggers (stress, fatigue, posture) and increase my resilience to the triggers I can not avoid (genes, hormones, climate etc.). As a result, I have managed to reduce my migraines from 3+ days a week (every week for…
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My migraine story
I have experienced migraines since I was 11 years old. In the early years they only appeared occasionally and did not have a major impact on my life. In my thirties however, they became more regular, and I began to experience hemiplegia (stroke-like symptoms). In my forties I was occasionally hospitalized for treatment and…
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What does it mean to be “on the mend”?
When I was a child in the 1970s, I remember my paternal grandmother always being busy. She was either baking cakes, digging in her veggie patch, cleaning the house – or mending… something… anything… everything. More recently, I’ve noticed that we live in a much more throw-away society. Things are…
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I’M ONE YEAR OLD!!!
Woo hoo – pinch me (gently) – I can hardly believe it – The Mindful Migraine Blog turned one year old today…!! As I’ve mentioned before, I started this blog because I was sad and lonely and couldn’t find anything like it online. I was looking for real-life information about…
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The 4 F-words of trauma
This blog post is a very high-level discussion about how people respond to trauma and is hopefully not upsetting in any way, but it IS about stressors, so you may want to give it a miss. * * * * * For a long time when I was growing up,…
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Layer-cakes for healing
Healing requires many different things to take place, often all at the same time. You need to be meeting with doctors to finesse your medication options. You need to be working on your lifestyle decisions to give yourself the best chance to heal in the least toxic environment. You need…
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Horoscopes for the year ahead
Before I get on a roll about living a life with hyper-positivity, I want to do a shoutout to everyone affected by the fires in California. Fire has always been a reality of life in Australia, but the images I’m seeing of this conflagration are next-level scary. Good luck everyone,…
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Welcome to 2025 (teeth and all)!
I’m baa-aaaack! Welcome to 2025 (can you believe we are already 1/24th of the way through the year!!) I hope that everyone’s year is going as great as can be so far – I missed you all! I finished last year with a reference to a bygone Christmas Day which…
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Happy Holidays everyone and farewell (for now)
Where I am in Sydney Australia, it is early Friday morning on the 20th of December… that means it is only a few more sleeps until Christmas… and that means, we’re about to enter a period of festive fanfare and potential chronic pain chaos. Last week I blogged about the…
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The three ghosts of Christmas migraines
I’ve never been a huge fan of Charles Dicken’s story “A Christmas Carol” (1843). The cranky old selfish man Ebenezer Scrooge was a horrible central character, and yes, I know that he undergoes an epic character arc which redeems him… but still… what kind of person picks on a child…
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Happy Holidays with “Revertigo”
Many years ago, I came across the neologism “revertigo”. Even without knowing the details, I had a sense of the concept from the elements of the made-up word: revert + vertigo. The article which the term appeared in explained that revertigo relates to how quickly we fall back into our…
The Mindful Migraine 