The Mindful Migraine

A year ago, my neurologist told me that in our attempt to reduce my chronic migraines, we had essentially exhausted Western science’s medical interventions.  Instead of adjusting my medication (again), he recommended that I begin a more holistic approach to healing.  His long list of suggested therapies included counselling, yin yoga, meditation, and HIIT (all of which I talk about elsewhere on this site).  

My neurologist was stating in no uncertain terms that ‘more medicine’ would not make me ‘less sick’.

At the time of the meeting, I was furious.  Where was the magic bullet he was supposed to provide?  I felt ignored, abandoned, rejected, hung out to dry.  The sense of sadness and isolation that I had been feeling for months, due to chronic migraine, now felt ten times worse. 

As my husband drove me home, he told me how impressed he was with the doctor’s ‘straight-talk’.  My husband was genuinely shocked when I started crying and began cursing both him and the doctor.  In that moment I hated them.  Clearly neither of them understood what I was going through.  Why would they give me a long ‘to do list’ when I was struggling with all that I was already facing?  To me they were unsympathetic to the point of cruelty.

Later that night, as I was staring at the ceiling, something else the neurologist said came back to me.  It was something to the effect of ‘you used to be all Linda with a little bit of migraine, now you’re almost all migraine with a little bit of Linda – the trick is to restore the balance’. 

When he had said it in the office, it seemed a sad admission of how futile my situation was; the purposeful life I had imagined for myself was disappearing – I was disappearing.  That night however, I thought about it some more and asked myself, “what would (the original) Linda do?” 

I pretended for a minute she was somewhere else, and I imagined her replying; “I’m creative, hardworking, resourceful – I’d research everything I could, get organised, and invent a system that worked for me… and I wouldn’t stop until I got better”. 

The next morning, I wrote up a program and started researching everything I could about mindfulness for migraines.  This blog is part of that process; recording all the things that have and haven’t worked for me, and sharing my findings with others so I don’t feel so alone.  

Throughout the journey I have stayed focused on one overriding idea: I want to be more me again.  Yes, I want to separate suffering from pain, reduce my triggers and increase my tolerance to the triggers I can’t avoid, but more than anything, I want to remember that there is in ‘I’ in Linda and another in ‘my-graine’.  I want to do the things I used to do and be the person I feel like I’m forgetting.  The ‘I’ in Linda used to be a go-getting version of me and is currently the not-so-healthy version of me, but bit by bit, day by day, I’m reversing the balance.

My advice is to figure out “what would the old version of me do?”  Shop, garden, cook up a storm, paint their way out of a mess, dance, travel?  And then, in your own way, modify those strengths to create a get-well strategy that works for you.  Generate a mood board, write up a ‘recipe for success’, think of yourself as a plant and find out what you can do to nurture yourself back to being leafy and green again…

Every brain is unique.  Every migraine subtly different.  That’s why it’s your brain – your pain – your journey.   Good luck on yours.