The Mindful Migraine

A significant part of my self-healing journey has been re-learning how to meditate. When I was in my 20s I used to attend regular Yoga sessions, and a short guided-meditation was almost always included at the end of the lesson.

More recently, I started meditating again as a means of calming down my migraine-brain’s hyperactive fight-or-flight alarm system (which had glitched and was constantly on the lookout for migraine-triggers… always wailing and whooping and causing me pain.)

I’ve written before (here) about how I used to be wound up so tightly, mindfulness felt ‘risky’. Closing my eyes or counting my breath was frightening and claustrophobic. Over time, I learnt that it was OK to keep my eyes open, or partially closed, and to just breathe in a manner that felt comfortable, no matter what I was ‘supposed’ to be doing… there was, I finally realized, no ‘mindfulness police‘ to arrest me if I was meditating ‘wrong’.

The more I practiced, (meditation is a true practice in that you never stop practicing – there is no ultimate benchmark you need to attain as a measure of success (in my opinion)), the more I began to notice the elements of guided mediations that worked best for me. They tended to include a combination of breathwork, visualization and small body-movements that stopped me getting uncomfortable and gave me an ‘excuse’ to fidget.

After I began noticing the elements that I liked best, I also began to think about which order I preferred to hear them in.

Eventually, I realized I could do my own guided meditation in my head, without the need for an external teacher’s voice-over instructions.

By repeating the same process each time, it became very easy to guide myself through a short meditation session. As odd as it sounds, when you start out, it doesn’t hurt to adopt the role of the teacher and speak to yourself in your own head (it probably breaks all best-practice ‘rules’ of meditating to be a voice in your own head when you are supposed to be cultivating a quiet-mind, but it seems to work).

Before I tell you what I say to myself, a quick clarification – if I am doing the meditation in the morning, then the sky that I imagine is a dawn sky, whereas if I am doing the meditation in the afternoon or evening, I imagine the sky at sunset.

OK then, enough preliminary chit-chat, here is what I say to myself in my self-guided mediation:

+ sit down and take a few moments to get comfy (wriggle your hips and roll your shoulders)

+ visualize yourself in a calm location (usually outdoors in Nature)

+ concentrate on your breathing, don’t change it, just notice it

+ take a moment to notice how your imaginary setting looks and feels, paying particular attention to the sky, its colors and clouds

+ return to your breathing, and try to slow it down slightly, lengthen the inhales and exhales, but gently, not forcefully

+ notice how your mind often tries to wander away and gently bring it back by looking at your sky-scape and imagine your thoughts as clouds sliding across the sky, there, and away.

+ put your attention on various body parts, one after the other, scrunching them up and then releasing them (I usually keep it simple and start with my toes, then do my hands, my shoulders, and finish with my face, but if you have a soreness or an itch, then you can focus on that part of your body too)

+ the first scrunchy-release I do intuitively, the second and third time I repeat it (3x toes, then 3x hands, etc), I do it in time with my breathing (scrunchy-inhale / release-out with a sigh (but you could reverse it if you prefer))

+ now that you have stressed-and-relaxed your body, return again to just breathing in and out, and try to slow it down a little bit more

+ look again at your internal sky-movie, notice again if thoughts come and go, move them like clouds across the sky, and then slowly, slowly, change the color of the sky as the sun rises or sets, increasing or decreasing the brightness, and blending the hues

+ sit for as long as you like, just breathing in and out, and watching the sky change color, intentionally scrunching-and-releasing any part of your body that feels tense

+ when you’ve had enough, end how you began by wriggling your hips and rolling your shoulders, then open your eyes and smile.

Whilst this might sound like a lot of instructions to follow, it is actually only 3 things repeated: breathing in and out – imagining a sky which is gradually changing color – and making small, intentional movements with your body.

Now, one last thing… and it’s a biggie… as a perpetual wallflower, I do NOT like doing things that are look-at-me in nature. I know that sounds ridiculous when I blog about myself and my migraine-mindfulness journey, but, I generally hide behind my Healing Mandala rather than put up photos of myself or reveal too much about my general life… so today, I’m being brave and including 2 personal things; a picture my daughter took of me meditating a couple of years ago (I look a bit puffy and sad, because it was a migraine-day).

AND

A voice recording of the meditation narrative I’ve described above, so you can try it yourself. It’s 2 and a half minutes long, low-tech, AI-free (and has Beethoven’s Concerto No.5 in the background) – hopefully it works…

And with that… I’m off to meditate on the sky… outdoors!

Take care taking care,

Linda x

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PS – if you want to experiment further, my FREE Mini-Mindfulness Course is available to download on the RESOURCES tab, or you can read more here – the course includes several meditations (by other people) which you can click on to try.

PPS – if you want to learn more about meditation specifically, there are several types I’ve written about before on this blog (with more links to online meditations). I recommend trying them in this order: short meditations, long meditations, and then the more complex versions including kundalini meditation and transcendental meditation.

PPPS – sorry to all the meditation teachers out there if this post feels a bit rogue – I have no doubt there’s much more to writing a powerful meditation text than how I described it in my creative process, but after years of trying to heal my pain by listening to many different versions from many different teachers, sometimes making things up when it feels right, is the way to go.