The Cure for Migraine and Everything Else
“No one cares about me! Everyone wants something from me, all the time! My mother, my husband, my dogs! No one cares about what I want!” I thought on the night of the fourth day of my family visit. My mother being here causes all the traumas I’ve ever known or haven’t know to come up and bite me. The “no one cares about me” is quite an old one and I did recognize it, and yet I took it seriously and got angry. I barked and growled and hissed at my husband until he left me alone, and went to sleep.
I woke up the next morning still angry, though everything seemed hazy and unclear. I knew that there was trauma that came up, I knew I should let go of it, clear it up, but I didn’t want to. I was too resentful, too attached to it, I wanted to keep it with me for a while.
We went to run some errands, Christopher and I. We had to return a car we rented, do some shopping. The morning was overcast, foggy and hazy. I couldn’t see anything clearly, there seemed to be a smoke in the air obscuring everything, blurring the edges. I drove to the rental place rubbing my eyes to see better, drifting in and out of my anger and resentment, starting to let go and then grabbing onto it with a new force. Thoughts floated through my head telling me that I really should give this up … that it’s only trauma … that no one really cares about me … that on countless occasions no one bothered to ask what I want … that I am really making all this up and looking for evidences … that I am always the one made responsible for everything. Then I saw bright lights flashing at the edge of my vision, and I knew that there was no haziness or smoke in the air. My eyes wouldn’t focus properly because a migraine was coming.
I knew it was one of those heavy-duty migraines, one of those that always begins with haziness and flashing lights, and sends me to bed for hours with as many pain killers as I dare to take, then leaves me confused and achy for a couple of days. “I better let go of this trauma now!” I thought, and I felt into it and let it open as much as I could, and as fast as I could.
I sat in the car waiting for Chris to return the rental car. I kept telling myself to be present, to relax, to be who I am, to allow my head to open. Feelings rushed by me too fast for me to register. Pain, anger, frustration, I thought, but I wasn’t sure. I didn’t want to merge with it, I knew that this is where the pain was. I went deeper and deeper inside of myself, out of my head, deep into who I am. There was pressure in my head, there were pangs and stabs. It did not hurt me where I was, but I knew that it was the pain.
I could not feel the pain because I was in the very middle of it, the very center of it. It was calm there, like in the eye of a cyclone. I sat in the center letting my head open, allowing the trauma to leave, to clear out of my body.
We drove to a store, got out of the car. My husband hugged me, told me that he is sorry for how I feel, sorry for everything, that he loves me. “I could feel loved right now” I thought “if I let go of this story, that no one cares, I could feel really loved”.
We walked into the store, the thought still hanging in my mind. Suddenly I felt that I left my head. Something shifted and my awareness was not localized in my head anymore, it was now in my entire body. My head was still there doing whatever it needed to do, healing, I hoped, but I wasn’t in it, I wasn’t stuck in there. The pain of the migraine was even further away now, I knew my head felt it but it didn’t touch me at all.
I couldn’t think much, I felt instead. A men came to talk to us. I didn’t know exactly what he said, but I could feel what he really meant, what he felt. On a way to another store my husband talked to me, explaining ideas he had about something. I could hear the words but they didn’t seem to have meaning, they scraped me, scratched me. I told him that there is no use in talking to me. Conversation happens in my head and I was not in my head. I wanted silence, I wanted for the world to be quiet. I needed to be quiet and my head needed to heal.
We arrived at another store and I started feeling my body going into panic. I still couldn’t feel the pain, but I knew it was there, so did my body. I became feverish, nauseous. Suddenly I wanted to cry, I felt sick and exhausted with reaction. I wanted to cry half with pain and half with relief, as though some terrible disaster was over, as though I now could let go of the shock, as though now I could cry.
The nausea was getting stronger and I felt like a little girl, sad, hurt little girl. I stood in a corner of the store letting those feelings open, letting them be. I tried to make them leave at first, but it only made the feelings stronger, more acute, and I thought I’d better relax and see if thy will float away on their own.
As we walked back to the car I could feel my head getting better, clearer. The child-like pain was fading away, the nausea was clearing out. I felt that the migraine is healing now, that it’s ending. I could tell that the pain is growing less and less. I still couldn’t feel it but my body was calming down, the panic was gone.
I was very, very tired. “I should go lie down” I thought, but it didn’t feel right. I was afraid to lie down, I though that if I drift away into sleep, if I loose even a bit of the presence, then the pain will take over. I thought that I have to stay with the tiredness and remain present till the very end, till the migraine is gone. Then it occurred to me that the tiredness may not be an effect of the migraine, the result of the process – but another stage of it.
I thought that and relaxed, and let myself be tired, and the tiredness grew less and less.
We arrived home, took dogs for a walk. The pain was gone now, the tiredness was fading away quickly and I begun to fell happy, really, really happy! The migraine was over and I knew that the trauma, the pain, the frustration which caused it was over as well.
We went back home for breakfast.
I described the process to my husband. “Wow, it’s amazing” he said. It didn’t feel amazing to me, I didn’t do anything special, there was no magic, no super concentration powers, no secret or sacred levels of consciousness available only to the select few. All I did was pay attention, be present, and let go. Be who I am and let go of the trauma that was not me. And yet I healed my migraine, without feeling any pain, without taking any drugs, without having to lie down. It was gone completely within an hour.
“What WAS special about it?” I wondered, “why could I do it now, while I couldn’t have done it five years ago?”.
Five years ago the migraine would happen to me. I wouldn’t know why, I wouldn’t know how. I wouldn’t connect how I felt with how my body felt, I wouldn’t connect the emotional pain with the physical one. Five years ago what happened to my body was caused by outside forces, therefore fixing it would have to be done by outside means. Five years ago I would have taken painkillers and gone to bed.
Today I know that if I don’t take care of the trauma, if I choose to invest in it, if I am not present, not responsible for it, then my body will have to process the trauma for me and it will get sick. Today I know that all I have to do to heal my body is to be present, to allow the trauma that causes problems to open, allow it to leave.
“You just discovered a cure for cancer” said my husband. “Not only for cancer” I said ” but for everything”.
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