Migraine Awareness: The Mindful Migraine

[00:00:06] Hi, this is the Be Well with Michelle Greenwell podcast. Our heartwarming conversation is designed to lift you on your wellness journey. Grab your cup of tea and enjoy the podcast.

[00:00:27] Welcome to Be Well with Dr. Michelle Greenwell. And we're exploring pathways to healing through movement, bioenergetic wellness tools, and meaningful conversations. I'm your host today, Dr. Michelle Greenwell. And today we're diving into a topic that touches millions.

[00:00:44] of lives worldwide. Migraine headaches. And migraines are far more than a headache. They're very complex neurological condition that affects, this is an amazing staggering number, over 1 billion people globally, making it one of the most common and disabling health conditions in the world. Women are disproportionately affected. And for many migraines are not men, an occasional inconvenience.

[00:01:13] It's a chronic, life-altering, deeply isolating part of living. And as people go through their day, it can be a very hard way to be living. While medications can be helpful, many people discover that the medical model alone does not always offer the complete resolution. And for those living with chronic migraines, the path to healing often becomes much broader. One that includes stress regulation, nervous system support, movement, and

[00:01:43] sleep, sleep, nourishment, and mindset. All my favorite topics. Today's conversation explores one of the most fascinating and often overlooked tools in healing. And this is metaphors. And I am so excited for this conversation. The language we use every day reveals how we understand our pain, our body, and our healing. And when someone says, I'm drowning, or I'm carrying too much, or healing feels like an uphill battle.

[00:02:13] They're telling us. They're telling us. They're telling us. They're telling us. They're telling us how they're living inside the experience. And they're trying to express to us what is going on and for assistance. But what if changing the metaphor could begin changing the healing? To explore this, I have Linda joining me from the Mindful Migraine. Hello, Linda, and thank you so much for being here. Hello. Thank you so much for having me. I'm super excited as well.

[00:02:43] I just, you know what? Metaphors are something we work with a lot in bioenergetic wellness. But your approach is just so interesting. And I love how you look at everything. So I'm looking forward to what our listeners are going to be able to experience today. Let me tell you. Oh, sorry. Go ahead. No, I was just saying fabulous. It's exciting. I want to tell you a little bit about Linda. She's in her mid-50s and lives in Australia.

[00:03:13] She trained as an architect and has worked for decades as a project manager recently, though she went back and completed her PhD in studying metaphors. Now, as an architect studying metaphors, that's a very interesting way to look at life. And all this she did while she was navigating chronic pain and daily migraines.

[00:03:35] And after being told by her neurologist that more medicine was not going to guarantee less pain, Linda began exploring holistic healing and mindfulness practices that helped reduce her migraines from nearly daily to just once every few weeks. How incredible that must have felt. Very liberating.

[00:03:58] Now she shares her healing journey through her blog, The Mindful Migraine, helping others feel less alone in their own health journeys. Before we begin, Linda, I always love to look at what is happening with our tea. So what have you packed into your teacup today? The Mind's an oldie but a goodie. Lavender and peppermint are my go-to soothing essential oils. So today's tea is peppermint tea.

[00:04:28] Beautiful. And you're holding up the mug. Can you tell me what's on the side of it? So very early in my healing journey, I'm a visual learner and I discovered that if I had sort of a visual mantra rather than a verbal affirmation, it would help me stay focused. And so for me, this was the sort of logo that I created, if you like, that was a constant reminder. My kids put it on a Mother's Day cup for me.

[00:04:51] And now I surround myself with lights and mouse pads, anything that kind of reminds me about that take a deep breath, slow down, center myself. All of it comes back to this sort of logo, helps me on a daily basis to remind myself to keep healing. Oh, my goodness. Okay. We're not even going to get past here. So how did you create that image? So for me, it was just a very basic digital software.

[00:05:21] You just put in a photograph and it was of a pot plant of all things because it was me starting to use some more nurturing garden metaphors, which we'll get to later about my pivot and metaphors that I used. And you literally, it just rotates it around in a circle. And I just experimented a few times until I got something that felt about right for me. The purples, the greens, the blues that all seem to be saying healing to me. And so I said, that's it. That's my logo. Oh, that is beautiful.

[00:05:48] For those people that are listening and can't see the actual graphic, it's almost like a semantics framework when we would take sand and you vibrate with frequency and you get this beautiful picture that is all the same all the way around. That's what you've created. But yours is with color. Yes. To me, I also see a mandala, I suppose, is another traditional version of it.

[00:06:14] But I get a hint of a rose window in a cathedral. There's lots of different resonances that work for me. And that's one of the things that keeps coming through is you find your path that works for you, the path of least resistance, the path that brings you most joy. It will move you away from pain faster. So, yeah. So that's my colors, my feeling, my vibe. And it all helps me, makes the tea taste better as well.

[00:06:40] And that's very true because people will say, how do you get the tea to be that flavor? When I go home, it's not the same. And it depends what you put into it, that love and that compassion and that meaning behind it. I was going to say, it's where you meet it then. So when you choose to take that moment of time for self-care, remind yourself that it's not selfish. You put the love into making the tea. You're going to put the love into taking the time to drink it. It changes it. It becomes a ritual. It becomes an event.

[00:07:10] It's not just a cup of tea that you're smashing down on the way through the kitchen as you rush into the next event. It is the event. Beautiful. Okay. So if you're choosing what you're going to have in your mug while we have this conversation today, for those people, this might be the first time you're listening to the podcast. I choose the tea and talk about affirmations. And we're talking about metaphors.

[00:07:36] But this is a way for you to have a healing session while you listen to the podcast. So at the end, if you set your goal for what you hope to achieve by listening to us and our conversation about metaphors, at the end of the podcast, your energy will be in the flow of that. But you'll be able to sip on your water, your tea, whatever beverage you've put there, you can infuse in the energy that we're talking about right now.

[00:08:00] So I'm going to bring in releasing the warrior from the Cape Breton Tea Company. And this one is a traditional in the Chinese five elements for understanding migraines. It's often reflected as an imbalance between the water and the wood element. And the water element connected to kidney energy can become excessive, especially under chronic stress, adrenal fatigue, insomnia, or fear.

[00:08:30] Meanwhile, the wood element connected to liver and gallbladder energy can become depleted or constrained. And this can affect flow, flexibility, but also resiliency. So releasing the warrior supports the wood element and invites us to soften the fight. And that is something often that happens for people is they're fighting so hard to be well instead of relaxing and to be well, which is really hard to understand when you just are trying to get past such hard things that are going on.

[00:09:00] So the affirmation I chose today, because there's four on the package, is my ability to let the fight go begins the healing process. So as you sit with that, I'm going to bring two herbs forward to highlight for today. I like to bring the relationship of the herbs that are in the compilation, and there's a whole bunch of them. But I'm going to focus on parsley and coriander.

[00:09:25] Those are things that could be in your garden, but also things you might add to your food when you're cooking. So parsley carries the spiritual essence of clearing, purification, renewal. It helps us release what's become stagnant and make space for what is fresh and vital. And coriander offers cooling, clarity, and gentle emotional release.

[00:09:51] Spiritually, it invites us to loosen our tension, soften our over-controlling habits, and create room for calm insight. And this feels like a beautiful way for us to open the door on today's conversation and releasing the fight. So cheers. Thank you so much. I'm going to turn my mug around because I've got my 60th birthday mug ready to go. So anyway, cheers. It was the right color to go with what we're doing.

[00:10:21] Yes, excellent. All right. So let's start, Linda, with your story because this is important. I'm sure many others have had a similar situation. You've lived with the migraines for many years. And at one point, they were daily. So there's not a lot of work that's going to happen while you're in that chronic pain.

[00:10:45] So can you take us back to what life was like with those migraines when you were experiencing them at the worst? Yeah. Yeah. So I had my first migraine when I was 11, and I had them on and off for my whole life. But they were kind of like, I can't explain it. We say they're not a headache. It's closer to a bad hangover. There's the nausea. There's the sensitivity to light and noise. But what happened for me for most of my life is once they were over, they were done. And then I would just get on with my life. So I never really paid them much attention.

[00:11:14] There were a couple of really bad ones. I ended up in hospital a couple of times. There was one where I actually was grinding my teeth so bad I actually broke three of them. But again, even then, it fell into the past and I kept moving forward and didn't really learn any lessons from them.

[00:11:29] Then in 2019, I was accepted for the PhD program in a Sydney university and started feeling almost straight away a sense of a little bit of mother guilt that I was spending these 20 hours a week on myself and not my family, not cleaning the house, not making sure the fridge was full. And in that context of already starting to feel a little bit of emotional unease and being a bit out of control, bang, COVID hit. We all went into lockdown in Australia. I was now homeschooling.

[00:11:59] We were trying to save the family business as well as trying to keep on top of the 20 hours of the university work. So I found myself being a bit of a control freak, as you mentioned. I was getting up early in the morning. I was staying up late at night. I was doing whatever I could to try and keep all the balls up in the air. And I didn't realize it at the time, but I was also perimenopausal.

[00:12:21] So between the hormones, the social changes, the physical changes, the mental changes, the government was imposing changes, the university was giving me hurdles to jump through. I just didn't realize, but I was getting beyond burnt out. I was burnt out at both ends in the middle. It was just ridiculously overdone.

[00:12:40] And so by about mid-22, I realized that the occasional migraines were getting closer and closer together until I realized I pretty much had pain on one side of my face all day, every day. It took me until about the middle of 2023 to get to a neurologist and get the diagnosis of chronic migraine. And to get that, you have to have a migraine event of 15 or more days a month.

[00:13:05] So to be able to get access to a certain type of medication, you need that diagnosis, which means you have to reach a point of being very unwell. So in a weird way, I felt sort of excited because I finally had a diagnosis and I thought that medicine was going to then line up and all be sorted out for me. But the neurologist was not that way.

[00:13:27] He actually, he was very clear that more medicine does not equal less pain and that I was going to have to make some lifestyle changes and change my attitude and my relationship to pain. And he wrote me this long list of mindfulness activities to go away and try. So I went home that night and I was furious. I kicked furniture. I yelled at my husband. I slammed the door and I went to bed and refused to talk to anyone.

[00:13:50] I was so upset that the diagnosis didn't bring a solution and that what was going to happen is me, who was overwhelmed and already stressed and working all day and all night, was given a to-do list. I was just so disappointed. But another part of me woke up in the middle of the night and said, okay, no, I'm going to do this. I miss the old Linda that was able to live a proper life and a more exciting life and do more things and be more painless.

[00:14:18] So I actually started the mindfulness list that he gave me and I started the yoga and the Tai Chi and the meditation and I started to heal. So very, very quickly, without changes to the medicine, I changed my attitude. I started to look for more joy instead of less pain. And I started to heal so quickly that by the end of that year, six, nine months later, he said, you should write a blog. You should help other people do what you've managed to do. And so in early 2024, a couple of years ago, that's what I did.

[00:14:48] I started the Mindful Migraine blog and I've been popping out posts ever since to try and help people heal because the difference between where I was, which was so dark, to be stuck in pain all day, every day in your bedroom, no lights, no sound. You can't parent, you can't socialize, you can't drive. I was still trying to plug away at the PhD, but it was just, it was a very miserable existence.

[00:15:14] So looking back now, yeah, it was a massive shift towards healing that was relatively simple in some ways and quite complicated in others. But we'll get through some of the steps. But yeah, burnout was a big part of it. So and having to, again, calm down, rationalize, prioritize, make some time and space for healing. It all helps. There was so much packed into what you shared.

[00:15:44] I want to bring a couple of ideas forward because I can identify, I'm sure many can identify with you have to be sick enough to get to the right person, to get to the right opportunities. And it's that journey of to be sick enough, which is really a weird way to approach anything. So I messed up. Yeah. So first of all, there's that. So if for those people listening that that's been your journey, we've been on that journey.

[00:16:14] I'll put myself in there as well. And and then there's the not being heard or not being believed. And then the whole menopause thing that gets thrown in there. And then all the stigma that goes around that and the misinformation about what is going on in the stages of our life. So you're nodding your head.

[00:16:36] So I just want people as they're listening and maybe you're in the same place that you and I are in that those stages all brought that level of confusion. Yeah. And I think. Yeah, it's recognizing that that as you change through life, so will your health and so will your condition. So something that I thought I had a good grip on, which was my migraines and that they weren't a big thing, that as I was changing, the diagnosis was changing as well.

[00:17:05] So in a weird way, I ignored it because I assumed it would just fall to the wayside like it always had in the past. So it caught me a little bit by surprise that this was changing as I was changing. And now I look back on it and it's kind of obvious. I'm not my teenage self. I'm not my toddler self. So why would I be any version of my previous self? I'm just who I am here now in this moment. And it makes sense that my health would change and my diagnosis and symptoms and triggers would change too.

[00:17:36] Exactly. Okay. And I'm going to I'm going to bring one more piece up, which was your reaction to what the doctor said. And I'm thinking about because having walked my daughter through cancer treatments and things. If somebody gives you an idea that is not where you thought you were going, many people will come home and do exactly what you did and have a meltdown. And but then they might not do anything more about it.

[00:18:06] But what's really interesting is you decided, no, I'm not going to do that. I'm going to trust this guy and I'm going to say I'm going to do everything that he's recommended and see what happens. Yeah, I think I had reached without going into too much detail. I was really in a very, very low place. I'd run out of options. I was not enjoying my life at all. And so for me, it was it really did feel like it was this or nothing.

[00:18:32] So and whilst I didn't like being told you have to save yourself in another way, it kind of revved me up. I thought, you know, I'm going to do this. I am going to save myself on whatever it takes to heal, heal myself. And we'll get to it a bit later. But there is some other metaphor problems that went into this whole process of trying to save myself that complicated things in other ways. But we'll get there in a minute. OK, perfectly.

[00:19:00] And I just want to bring the last piece up, which is how often we have a medical person who tries to give us alternatives, but we came to them for that medical intervention. And so we're not even aware that what they're offering can be as supportive as that prescription. I wasn't even open to the advice.

[00:19:26] I was I was just angry that he didn't give me what I wanted, which was another script that would make life easy, that I could take a tablet out of bed and wake up healed tomorrow. And I think that society maybe has is partly to blame. It's the relationship that we have with medicine that's partly to blame. But I'm living proof that you do not need more medicine to get better. So if your doctor is telling you no more scripts, don't be angry. You need to step it up in some other ways and you'll get there. You will.

[00:19:56] I love that. Thank you for saying that. OK, so let's let's dive then into really what healing with metaphors is going to mean for people. Yeah. So I know for some people there's language like the migraine warrior, which can feel empowering for others. It might feel the exhaustion, aggressiveness, being disconnected, and they'll have those kinds of words that they're using.

[00:20:24] So I would love for you now to help us walk through this, the healing metaphors and how they fit in for what we want to do. Yeah. So with me, I came to my PhD looking at architectural metaphors. So if you think about the opera house, Jorn Utsin designed it to be clouds above a rock shelf. I see sails or shelves.

[00:20:46] A lot of the critics at the time who didn't like it, they were coming up with rude metaphors like a turtle orgy or a scrum of nuns or a circus tent blown away in a gale. And I can see all of those things. So the building itself hasn't changed. It's the metaphors that we use to describe it. And each of those metaphors is sometimes a little bit like a Freudian slip. It gives us a little bit of an indication of where our subconscious might be at.

[00:21:13] And I spent five years studying the PhD and I graduated late last year. Yay. I'm now Dr. Linda. But one of the things that I realized along the way is that these metaphors that I was looking at for architecture could also be applied to healing. And you opened up by talking at the beginning about some of the wood elements. A lot of the metaphors that we use are elemental. We use fire when we say that we're burnt out. We use water when we say that we're drowning under the workload.

[00:21:42] We use earth when we say that we're digging in sand or that we can't, you know, we feel like we're being buried alive. We use metal with the warrior ones where we're basically fighting and we need to shield ourself from more work, all those sorts of things. And one of the things that I realized is that you go back to this notion of not being heard by your doctor. Sometimes it's because there's a disconnect in the language or in what you're saying and what's being heard.

[00:22:09] So when somebody uses an elemental metaphor in language with me, I try to mirror that back to them. I try to repeat that language back. So if they say that they feel like they're being buried alive under their workload, then you might say, what can we do to clear some space around you, give you some breathing room, shore up your boundaries? It's not a big thing, but in the same way that you'll often kind of mirror people's body language and it makes you feel a little bit closer and heard. The same thing happens with the language.

[00:22:39] And the other thing that you have to remember is that people change their metaphors as they talk. So when you first start doing it, you feel quite clever because they're using a fire metaphor. So you give it back to them. What can I do to extinguish your stress? All of those sorts of things. And then they suddenly say, I feel like I'm swimming upstream with my pants on fire. And you're like, oh, wait, hang on. That's a lot of mixed metaphors. What do I do with that? But that's what language is. That's what we are. We're always on the move.

[00:23:05] So it's not a solution in an easy sense, but it is something that once you start to be aware of it, you do hear people using a lot of those elements. And there is something nice about trying to reflect that back because then you really do feel heard when someone uses your language back at you. Mm-hmm. And it's interesting because when you bring this up for people, they often don't even realize those words have come out of their mouth.

[00:23:34] Or it's a phrase that they picked up that some family member said years and years ago. And all of a sudden it becomes in their repertoire. And they haven't realized that that's even become a part of who they are and what they're saying. That's right. And that's why you do have to be careful. It's like those things where they say, oh, I'll look at your doodles and I can tell what you're thinking and I can read your dreams and know what your childhood trauma was. There's some truth in it, but you have to tread carefully because that's not always the case. It could just be that you watched a movie last night and there's something stuck in your mind.

[00:24:04] Like you said, it doesn't have to carry too much weight. And that's, again, language is slippery. It's always on the move. So it's a tool, but you've got to be careful. It can't be a crutch, if that makes sense. So you use it in the moment, but don't rely too heavily on it because, as you said, it's often subconscious. People aren't using it with deliberate intention. So if you try to rely too heavily on healing someone with their migraines through their metaphors, it's not necessarily going to help.

[00:24:32] But it certainly is helpful as a side tool, if you like. Mm-hmm. Well, and sometimes it really does stop the person and have them think where they might, they're just not thinking. They're just so in their tunnel trying to hold on to that, what's going on with the pain, but also all the stuff that needs to happen. And that tunnel keeps them from realizing that whole piece that's coming. Yeah, so I'll give you an example. I was very early on doing a meditation.

[00:25:01] At the end of the guided meditation, the lady said, I'm going to say some affirmations for you, and I want you to, in your head, just repeat them back. And she said, I am strong. I said, I'm strong. I'm brave. I'm kind. And then she said, I'm at peace. And I broke into sobbing, wailing. It was so extreme. It was like a dam had burst inside me. And I suddenly realized that with those words, I am at peace, that I had been at war with myself for a long time.

[00:25:29] That when you have a migraine, it's not, you go to the MRIs and you go for the blood test, there is nothing there. So it's not like a tumour that you can be cranky at and then they cut it out. Your migraine brain is your brain. It is you. So when you are at war with your brain and you are battling with your brain and you're battling with your diagnosis, you're at war with yourself. And that's not a good place to be. So that migraine warrior metaphor that you talked about before can become quite dangerous.

[00:25:56] And that's what I alluded to is that there's this aggressive masculine energy attached to it that was, I felt like I had to keep fighting. I had to keep being brave. I had to keep being strong. But I really just needed to be at peace. I just needed to have a really decent rest. And that's where I shifted into that metaphor of gardening because you don't go into a garden and look at a pot plant and say, hurry up and grow. So bend over on a Wednesday at three o'clock in the afternoon and touch your roots. You just need to give it sunshine.

[00:26:26] You need to give it water. You need to give it space. You have to trust the process. You have to be patient. And there was something in that shift in that day of crying that I realized, okay, I'm going to lay down my weapons. I'm tired of living to a timetable and all of this sort of linear prospect of healing where I have to get better in a certain way. I'm just going to trust the process and I'm going to relax a little into this and I'm going to rest a lot more.

[00:26:51] I'm going to be kind to myself and I'm going to be a little pot plant and I'm going to nurture myself and see where that takes me. And almost straight away, again, that shift was huge. So I do think if you can hear people talking in a language that implies that they're always fighting, maybe that's a good thing for them. But maybe they could be helped by actually shifting it into a more nurturing space. It definitely made a huge difference for me.

[00:27:45] Mm-hmm. And say to the tree, you're not tall enough. You should have grown more. Yeah, hurry up. Hurry up. Where are my flowers this season? Come on. You know, some plants don't flower every season. In Australia, we have a lot of plants that needs a bushfire for them to regenerate. There's, you know, there's a time and a place for everything. Life has its own cycles and its rhythms. And I think, again, I learned the hard way. When I first started my healing journey, I brought my project management skills to it. So I wrote a timetable.

[00:28:15] I put up a schedule on the fridge that said I was going to do Tai Chi on a Monday and Yin Yoga on a Tuesday, meditate on a Wednesday. And I was doing what felt familiar to me. It felt right. I was doing what I thought I was supposed to do. But again, it took me all time to realize that, you know what? Some days I don't want to do yoga. I prefer to just go for a walk in the park. And once I took that, it helped me get this started with the mindfulness.

[00:28:38] But when I took the schedule down off the fridge and I stopped again trying to do that linear masculine time and just went with Mother Nature's flow, things started to again feel more aligned with my authentic self, I guess is how I would put it. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And then responding to what I need today, which is then not driving the exercise program, which is supposed to be calming you.

[00:29:02] Driving that exercise program because that's what society has said you should be doing. That's right. Because it then added another element of stress accidentally, which is how I didn't get around to my mindfulness techniques today, what a loser I am. And, you know, and I'm a bad mom because I'm going to go to my room and meditate for 20 minutes when I probably should be checking on their homework, even though I checked on their homework this morning. And then you kind of build up this whole narrative that just doesn't need to be there. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Beautiful.

[00:29:32] It's so beautiful. As I was preparing for this conversation, I thought, you know, usually I do it in silence or sometimes I'll have my plant machine on and taking the music out of the plant for a special machine I have. But I actually went back to some music I hadn't listened to for a very long time. So I'm just going to bring that forward for anyone that's metaphorically trying to figure out how would they shift their framework?

[00:30:01] Because I went back to Karen Drucker. Did you ever listen to her work? No. No. Okay. So the song I ended up on when I was working on this section of the podcast was Gentle With Myself. And that really helped me to get into the idea of the metaphors and the kinds of conversation. And then the songs went from there to a couple other ones, which were also my favorites when I was listening to Karen quite a bit. But the other one is I Am Healed.

[00:30:32] And we don't say that. You know, we're always looking for the complaint. We're looking for what's not working so well. One pain disappears and we replace it with a different one because the shoulder isn't sore anymore, but now my knee is. And so you just assume the body's still degenerating instead of coming through a cycle. And I Am Healed can be like you saying, you know, I'm at peace. It's that same thing. Wow, that's a big word to say I am healed.

[00:31:02] Yeah. And I think it's that notion of energy flows where attention goes. So if you focus on that positive and the more joy instead of the less pain, it's amazing how much you have to be grateful for even when you are in pain. There is a lot to be, you know, you're upright. You're talking. Yeah. For me, there was a lot. I have a beautiful home. I've got a beautiful family and friends. It's shifting into the positive. Again, all of that gratitude and the gratefulness that makes a difference as well.

[00:31:36] Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. I think it's called the HIIT, the cardio one, which was part of why I got so cranky because I've never run up a flight of stairs and there was zero chance it was going to happen with a migraine.

[00:32:05] But what he was trying to do was, I guess, recognize that you have to calm down. You have to get a more holistic approach to things. And for me, I guess it's a bit like trying to – I talked about the garden metaphor and the warrior metaphor. But for other people who are trying to decide on their own metaphors, for me, it's a bit like when you go to buy a new shirt. You go into the shop and you go to the change room. You don't try on every shirt in the shop.

[00:32:31] You try on your size, the color that you like, and the style that you like. And then you figure out what fits right, what's comfortable. Well, the metaphors and the mindfulness techniques are the same. I tried yin yoga. I am not a flexible person. I can't do all those pretzel lady moves. And so I got quite, you know, disheartened by it. So that doesn't fit me at the moment. I'll come back and I'll try it on another day. Tai Chi was the one that, without a doubt, I fell in love with instantly. It was upright.

[00:33:01] It was slow. It was steady. One of the things that I hadn't realized until I started practicing it is that I had become like a brain on a stick. I was so disconnected from my body. All that I thought about was my brain because it was my asset in terms of PhDs and success in the past. But now it was also my migraine. So all I lived was up here above my neck.

[00:33:24] And so one of the things that Tai Chi does is it puts you back down into your body. It makes you realize that you have lungs. It makes you realize that posture matters. That all of that hunchy, scrunchy stuff that I was doing was so bad for my breathing. It was so bad for my neck.

[00:33:42] And to be upright again and, you know, hug a tree movement and wipe the clouds, all these beautiful slow things that just were so grounding and didn't require the sort of flexibility, skills or coordination that a lot of other activities do. Even meditation felt stressful for me. I didn't realize until I was doing it how much my anxiety meant that closing my eyes felt dangerous, that sitting with my own thoughts could be so uncomfortable.

[00:34:13] Whereas Tai Chi didn't ask that of me. It just asked me to just be in this moment, move my body slowly and carefully this way that I started to feel my feet, which is such a weird thing to say. But I'm 50, I'm 55 now. But when I started these processes to be 50 and suddenly realized that I could feel my feet touching the ground, it's such a weird thing to say.

[00:34:34] But it was, again, such a light bulb moment for me in hindsight that I was now not just a brain on a stick and I was not just a migraine brain on a stick that was feeling sorry for myself. I had a whole body and it was amazing that instead of, you talk about this idea of the body letting you down and being a bit resentful. Well, then you focus on the fact that I built two babies in my body, you know, and gave birth to these miracles. I've done so many amazing things. I can hold people.

[00:35:04] I can feel the hug that I receive. Our bodies are incredible. And I had taken it for granted for 50 years and Tai Chi, more than anything else, made me recognize the wonder that is the human body, my body. Oh, I love how you just described all of that. I don't know I would have articulated my journey as beautifully as you just did, but I had the same sensations that came from my Tai Chi practice.

[00:35:32] And with it, too, I didn't stick with it. I went away from it, fell off, you could say fell off the wagon and went back to old habits, doing different things, ignoring. And then the body, of course, resonates that and made my way back to Tai Chi. And I did a couple of times just because life, I just wanted to do other things. But somehow that coming back to Tai Chi always felt so good when the body was like me.

[00:36:01] Yeah, and I think what you mentioned as well is that falling off that wagon, metaphor again, is this idea that we have to be on something on a particular path. What I realized is when I stopped worrying too much about fitting into the model and the time frame of Tai Chi, so I didn't join a class, I didn't join the people down at the park, which I'd seen in the past years and down on that beach or whatever. I just started to actually move through.

[00:36:28] Once I'd learned some of the moves, I didn't need to actually set aside 15 minutes. I just lived Tai Chi. I moved through the house in a way that I put the plates on the shelf in a way that was mindful. And then you start to realize it doesn't have to be this organized thing. A bit like, I don't know, it might be controversial, but there's faith and then there's organized religion, I guess. You don't have to be part of the organization to feel something. And it's the same with Tai Chi.

[00:36:56] You don't have to sign up for a class. You don't have to spend any money. For me, I was so sick I couldn't leave my home. So for people who were saying, yeah, I love the idea of it, but I can't get to a class or there's no class in my area. I never in the last two years have been to a Tai Chi class. What I did is I found different YouTube videos. I found the ones that seemed to work for me. And I just kept doing the patterns over and over again.

[00:37:20] And now, much to probably a Tai Chi master's horror, I just make it up as I go along. I listen to what my body wants on the day and I make those movements. If it's my back, I slowly start to move my back and sway my hips and turn my shoulders. And after a while, you'll find what works for you. And that's, again, this is this healing journey. You do you. Mm-hmm. Exactly. Exactly.

[00:37:45] So I think you just segued so beautifully into, I was going to ask you, what are some of the gentle movements of breathing practices that maybe our listeners would be able to explore a little bit? Is there something you want to share? Yeah. For me, there's a couple of things, I guess. One that I don't even know where it came from, but it's the idea of self-holding and hugging yourself. But the one that has really worked for me is I put my left hand on the back of my neck where my skull is meeting my spine and I put my right hand on my forehead.

[00:38:15] And I just basically give my skull a cuddle. And it sounded so weird when I first came across it, I thought that could never work. It is such a beautiful moment that you can spend with yourself just for a second while you're waiting for the kettle to boil. Another one that I like, I call it pug puppy face. It's migraine people are always squinting and frowning and they're pursing their lips and clenching their jaws like a little pug puppy. We're all wrinkles. So what I try to do is I imagine a balloon inside my head that's all scrunched up.

[00:38:44] And as I blow it, my skin on my face is starting to stretch. My eyes are opening. My mouth is starting to smile because my skin is all stretching. And it sounds weird as I say it, but if people go away and blow up a balloon in their head, they will actually feel the wrinkles start to unstretch. And there's a tension that gets released as your brain sort of expands and your face is relaxing. And then what I do is I imagine that balloon has got helium in it and it starts to lift. My chin comes up.

[00:39:12] My shoulders drop down. And if I'm in the kettle waiting and I'm doing it, it only takes a minute, but it's almost like your body starts to levitate off the ground. You actually, I think in Tai Chi, they talk about either the ribbon or the string of pearls that's your spine. If your head is now helium and it's lifting up, it's amazing how much your body just starts to align itself underneath. And there's a lightness that comes in that moment as well. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

[00:39:39] That is so beautiful because I've described it different ways because of the practice that I came through in the training I have. And to hear how you're describing it, metaphorically, it's just so beautiful because you can picture all, you can picture the pearls. And you can picture how they're not right next to each other. There's space in between each one. That's right. And that length and that opening that is created. Yeah. And again, there's a niceness about a balloon.

[00:40:07] We all associate balloons with parties and joy and childhood and happiness. So when you kind of blow up that balloon, it can be whatever color you like that you resonate with that healing. Again, it's me. Again, I keep talking about it. I'm a visual learner and that's where metaphors can be quite helpful. Again, if you imagine your head as a balloon and you imagine the string of pearls and you imagine a colored light around your head and all those things, all of those things help in a way that medicine can't. That you take a tablet and go and lie down in bed.

[00:40:37] Yes, it does help my migraine. There's no doubt. But it's not going to prevent the next one because I'm not healing on a soul level. I'm just fixing the problem. It's going when the car's broken down and you take it to the mechanic or you go to the dentist and he puts a filling into the crack in your tooth. Yes, they fix that problem. But if you're still eating sugar all day and drinking soda, you're going to be back with him a week later. So what you're trying to do is heal yourself from the inside out on a much, much deeper way that medicine just can't. A tablet just can't.

[00:41:08] I'm picturing people that have been listening now and they're thinking about wrinkles. Because wrinkles do change based on how you're feeling. They do move around. 100%. I even had my kids laugh at me the other day and ask me if I had changed my face cream. And I said, no, I'm just happy. I'm just relaxing. So it's true. And again, I would never have believed it until it started to happen for me.

[00:41:34] It's just that we carry a ridiculous amount of tension in our face. And another one that I would ask people to do, which didn't occur to me until I started paying attention, is unclench your fists. I had no idea how often I was walking through life as if I was about to fist punch the universe. Just so much tension, so much stress meant that I sometimes was getting those little crescents of fingernail digging into my hand. That's how often I was doing it. Just unclench. Release. Let that energy flow out.

[00:42:04] You don't need to be at war with yourself or the universe. Just relax a little. And when you start to realize how much you do it, I do it in bed. I do it on the bus. I was doing it all the time. Someone's being, I don't know, the kids are late to get in the car to go to soccer training. My hands started to curl into fists again as the tension was. Just let it go. Let go.

[00:42:23] Let it go.

[00:42:53] There's a beautiful connection of when the fingers roll, you actually make a connection in the spine. So the hands have such an amazing way of reaching into the body and moving it in a different way. So that might be helpful for people. Yeah. Another one that it's hard if you're listening but not watching, but there's a spot just in here between your thumb and your first finger. That is another massive help for migraine people or headaches, tension headaches.

[00:43:21] You just give it a good squeeze with your thumb and your finger underneath. And if you do it when you're just chatting away, you don't really get a benefit. But if you sit quietly with it, it's almost as if I can feel my sinuses clear. Just pinching that one pressure point makes all the difference. The other ones that help for migraines are just on your eyebrows. So you give your eyebrows a little bit of a rub across in the middle to the outside. Everyone's a bit different. Mine is probably most tense right across the bridge of my nose. Other people find it closer to the temple.

[00:43:50] But there are other ones that really help for migraines. Again, when you start to realize how much tension is being carried in your face, you can start to massage it away a little bit more. And that's where that blowing up that balloon, giving yourself a self-massage, having your herbal tea. There's lots of little ways that you can bring yourself closer to calm.

[00:44:11] I'm reminded in Tai Chi, the phrase that we would use when I was training in the club, when I lived on the other side of the country, was smile and your hips will open. Yeah. So as soon as that jaw lets go, the hip lets go. Absolutely. And that would be a huge release for a lot of people. Yes. Yeah. Little steps have big impact for sure.

[00:44:34] I was actually going to, just thinking about that, was talk about a little thing about the healing spectrum on our ruler here, if that's okay. Because it's one of the things that helped me. So we're in Australia. So I've got a zero to 30 centimeter ruler. I know everyone's a bit different. But you often think of healing and illness as being on this spectrum. And it is. We go from very sick to very well or vice versa. And it changes all the time.

[00:44:57] But what we talk about metaphors and language, what happens is that in about 1980s, the researchers started to say that when we were picked up as a baby, the up was good. And we were put down. So down was bad. And that's when we started to get all of this language about being down in the dumps and that healing is an uphill battle. So the spectrum of healing suddenly kind of got a bit of a tilt. So all of a sudden, good was well and ill was bad. And our language started to reflect that.

[00:45:26] And so when we're feeling really sick and we're down in the dumps, it really does feel like an uphill battle because that's the model that we've built of healing. And it feels almost too hard to overcome. But what you have to realize is what we were just talking about, it's all those little baby steps. If you actually start to realize it's not a ramp, it's not a hill, it's a seesaw. We're constantly changing in our health and wellness.

[00:45:50] So if you kind of just make very small steps towards the middle of that ramp, you're now actually going to start to get a sort of a state of homeostasis where you're starting to feel a lot better. You don't have to go from zero to 30. You just have to go from zero to one, to two, to three, and just slowly start moving your way towards that middle spot. And I promise you, you'll feel better. So that's where those cups of teas, those small meditations, those small smile on your hips will open up.

[00:46:20] It might sound ridiculous if you're listening that it could possibly make a difference. But I promise you on that healing spectrum, you're moving yourself constantly closer and closer to a midpoint. And then once you're at that midpoint, things get easier. You start to heal a lot better. But again, this is where the metaphors are important because when you try to build this sort of directional linear healing, we then get disappointed when we go backwards. We think that we've made all this progress and we're better and we're cured. That's not how pain works.

[00:46:49] You can be feeling really good today and you'll stub your toe this afternoon. You can be having a perfect year and then your lover leaves you and your broken heart. Pain is part of life. You will never have zero pain, which is what I started my healing journey looking for. There's no truth in that. Pain is part of life. So what you have to remember is that not only is healing not linear, it's kind of tidal. It's always on the move. So when you're having a good day, just enjoy that good day.

[00:47:19] If tomorrow is a bad day, you're allowed to be disappointed. But don't start to get resentful. Don't start to blame yourself that you've done something wrong. You just have to accept the fact that like the ocean and the tide, you know, we've got some spots in Queensland, Australia, which the beach is like a kilometer long. And you could not believe that the water that's all the way out there could end up touching your feet in a couple of hours. But it does. One little ripple wave at a time. It makes its way across a huge distance in a short amount of time.

[00:47:48] That's what healing is like. A little bit forward, a little bit back. A lot forward, a little bit back. Another step forward, a little bit back. Trust the process. You will get there, but it won't be the way that you kind of imagined it. It won't be that magic tablet. It won't be that I did Tai Chi for three days and like the Instagram ads that I'm being bombarded with says you won't recognize yourself in two weeks' time. That is BS. Sorry. We're not looking for instant changes. That's not real.

[00:48:16] We're looking for those deep soul level changes that are transformational. And they will come. But just like the tide, it'll take time. Just trust the process. As you're saying that, I'm just thinking about the only way that we know to have a conversation with our body is through pain. That's the way. That's how we get into trouble. It's a wake-up call. Yes. Yeah. So for migraine people, one of the issues is that your body will send you a whisper that something's not right. And you have to get good at listening to the whisper.

[00:48:46] And if you don't hear those whispers, so for me, it means my jaws are clenching up. I sometimes get pins and needles in my face. My stomach starts to feel a bit cold. It's my body's way of saying I'm not comfortable. We need more sugar. We need, you know, the blood sugar's dropping. You need to get out of the hot sun. Your temperature's changing. Your core temperature's shifted. My body is trying to tell me, you know, look after yourself. Something's not right. If you don't listen to that whisper, it will start to wail. It will start to scream and yell.

[00:49:15] And that's kind of what that migraine pain is, where your head is in a vice. It's your body's way of saying, I know it's clumsy and it's a clunky way to do it, but you didn't listen to me when I was giving you those early warning signs. The only way I'm going to get you to listen is I'm going to flatten you out in your bed and make it so miserable that you have to pay attention. So it's not pleasant. It's not great as a model. I would think I would redesign it differently as an architect if I could get my brain to send me a signal.

[00:49:43] And it could do a lot more warning signs, thank you very much, before you go to such extreme lengths. But that is the reality. Those pain signals are your body's way of saying you need to slow down. You need to take a rest. You need to, yeah, reprioritize. And then if we look to the other side of that coin, it's starting to listen to the cues that you've done a good job. That's when the back feels like it's lifted like pearls.

[00:50:09] And it's when the jaw opens and you're smiling and you can feel and you can hear sounds and the face is opened and expanded. So what are those cues that are going to tell you you've done a good job and you're taking care? And lots of us have no idea what that is. Yeah. And again, you go back to language. We often talk about we've reached a milestone. A mile is a long way. Let's celebrate inch stones.

[00:50:36] So we made those small changes and we made a difference. So let's celebrate those small differences. Let's not wait till my migraines only once a week instead of every day. Let's just accept the fact that tomorrow was a good, yesterday was a good day and celebrate that good day. Celebrate that we can hear differently, that our hips are feeling better. Just live in that moment for a little bit longer before we worry about the distant future. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

[00:51:04] I just wanted to go back to one piece that you shared, which was putting that hand on the forehead, the other hand at the base of the skull. And in my touch for health work, we call that emotional stress release. So it has a title. But that tool, I just wanted you, you were talking about being able to hold that while you put the tea kettle on and you're waiting for the water.

[00:51:27] I just wanted to invite people to know that if you're lying down, particularly that way, it's beautiful to have one hand on the front, one hand on the back, but being able to lie down sideways. And that same embrace is going to be very helpful. So I just wanted to share and bring that forward for people because it's such a powerful tool. Yeah. So another one I would give you, it's when I had a migraine, I tended to go to bed and I would crawl into a fetal position.

[00:51:57] I would, again, clench my fist, put my knees up against my chest. It was a very woe is me, life is terrible moment. And it's going to sound weird, but migraine people won't believe me, but do it. Is you go back and you lie on your back and you open up your arms and you open up your legs and you stretch out. And in a weird way, you just surrender and you just say, okay, this sucks, but this is my moment right here, right now. And just surrender to it. And it's amazing how much the pain sort of shortens. It doesn't go away instantly, but it is.

[00:52:26] I guess what I'm trying to say is you separate suffering from pain. And when you're in that fetal position and your brain does a welfare check on you, it says, oh shit, things must be really bad. Like she's, she's crawled into a ball. We must be in a bad way. And the pain kind of stays when you just say, okay, it is what it is. Let's just get this over and done with migraine. In a weird way, your brain does that welfare check and it goes, oh, it's not as bad as I thought it was. I don't think I have to be as catastrophic as I was expecting.

[00:52:56] And things get better quickly. Exactly. Thank you for that. Because, yeah, I think people don't really realize, you know, if you go to that joy of what it is to, while you're in, I don't know if you have snow where you are. We have a lot of snow where we are. But if we lie down in the snow, you can do it in the sand too. But if you lie down in the snow, we make an angel swing and you're opening and closing the legs and closing the arms and make this beautiful.

[00:53:23] Now, if you think about that as a kid doing that, that was always such a joy to get in there and just go. Yes. And that's exactly what you're describing for lying down is just letting it all go and you make those angel wings. It's just such a beautiful option. Yes. And that's a beautiful vision. Again, I love that because I can visualize it. And there's a sense that the first time you do it, you feel incredibly vulnerable because you feel like you needed to protect yourself, which was what the ball was all about. But again, that's assuming that the migraine pain is something outside you.

[00:53:53] It's not. It's you. You don't have to defend yourself against you and your brain. You can just be at peace with yourself. And look, it's really hard because if anyone's had a migraine, they are really bad. That's a really horrible way to live. So anyone that's listening and feeling like, oh, yeah, but had migraines weren't as bad as mine because there's no way that lying on my back and holding my head would make a difference. I understand where you're coming from because I was there. But I lived with this for every day, all day for a year.

[00:54:23] And I know how bad it gets. I know how much I lost to it. I lost my sense of self. I lost friends. I lost jobs. I lost a lot. But if I can pick myself up and move myself forward with these simple tools, I promise you that you can too. I was just thinking about that curling into a ball and you have a pec sternal, which is part of liver.

[00:54:51] And you're compacting that and you're holding it tight so it actually can't function. So that opening up into the star gives you this opportunity to let that open and release. That muscle has the chance to let go. But also there is pec clavicular, which is how you digest emotions. So if you're into that ball, then you're not going to be able to move through anything either. So it's that openness that's needed.

[00:55:20] A big part of, I think, is why I was stuck in my pain. And it's even just your lungs. You can't breathe properly when you're curled in a ball versus opened up. I mean, another way that I used to look at it is, if you remember Atlas, and he carries the weight of the world on his shoulders. So stiff neck is a real thing for migraine people. But it's confusing whether it's a symptom or it's a trigger. So it's not clear. It's like a chicken and egg thing. Is my neck sore because I've got the migraine and my body is stiffening it up to hold onto my sore head?

[00:55:50] Or was it my sore neck that created the migraine? They're not really sure. It's all in a bit of a doom loop. But if you can break that doom with those hand holds and the head holds and, you know, opening up, breathing better, all of those things. It's like, again, use those metaphors. Use those visual images. Don't be Atlas. Just take the world. Put it down for a second. Take it off your shoulders. Give your neck and your back and your head a rest. And just, yeah, take a moment for yourself. You can pick it up later if you feel inclined. But I definitely do not.

[00:56:20] I change what I watch on TV. I've changed what I read. I do not need the weight of the world on my shoulders at the moment. I can't save the universe. I'm not going to try anymore. And I'm just going to look after myself first, look after my family and friends. And just slowly, slowly, my boundaries might get bigger. But at the moment, you have to prioritize yourself. And that means, yeah, putting the weight of the world down and giving your shoulders a rest.

[00:56:45] You just helped me reframe an exercise that I use all the time. But I've never used it in the capacity of what you just said. So I'm going to share it because I'm interested what people will be able to lean from that if they're looking at tight neck headaches. So usually, we're checking in with, can you turn your head? And then that's going to tell you how the vagus nerve is functioning. So, you know, how's your nervous system operating?

[00:57:14] So I know you haven't done this before. So if you're okay to do this, I'll share it and see what happens. So if you turn your head to the side, can you see how far you can see going each direction? And just notice what it feels like as you turn to each side. So I can do it, but I'm nervous about going too far because I can feel a lot of tension there. Okay, perfect. That's what we needed.

[00:57:41] Okay, so what I'm going to invite you to do is unroll your ears. So you just go from the top of the ear. I'll just turn sideways so you can see. We go from the top of the ear all the way around to the bottom. And then you just go a little bit deeper and then a little bit deeper. Okay.

[00:58:08] So with that, that's going up in behind the ear. So this is calming, but it's also creating a couple other points to have a little bit of influence. So now if you turn your head, see what happens when you turn it. Yeah, I feel like I've got an extra couple of centimeters. And I'm not so, it's not as tense as it was. It's subtle, but it's there. Perfect. Awesome. So now if you go to what you shared, which is holding that hand on the forehead and then the other hand at the base of the skull.

[00:58:39] And just see what that feels like for just a moment to be able to hold there. So for those people listening, we rub the ears from the top to the bottom three times. And we went a little bit deeper into the ear each time. Pretty, pretty firm pressure. And now what we're doing is we're just holding our hand on the forehead and at the base of the skull. This is just such a wonderful, wonderful tool.

[00:59:06] And sometimes you'll find that if you're seated, you might find that you actually just kind of sink down into the chair as your body kind of melts with your hand there. But if we take our hand away now, now turn your head and see what happens. Yeah, I feel like I've got another centimeter of rotation. Perfect. Okay, now my question is, did your belly turn first or did your head turn first?

[00:59:35] I actually think in the first ones, my torso was stationary. It's that thing about being just a head on a stick again. And in the third one now that you've mentioned that my whole diaphragm is actually rotating my body, I think, and helping me out. I love you. Thank you for that. So for those people, exactly what you described was how you were guarded, right, in protection for the head.

[01:00:03] But if you move from the belly, which means that you're integrated, your body is integrated, the muscles are all working together as a unit. If the belly's moving you around, then the head actually doesn't have that much movement to make. But it's much freer because it has the whole rest of the spine going with it. So it's a very different movement. Yeah. Yeah. So just from the migraine perspective and that guarded piece and the tension in the neck,

[01:00:31] this is a lovely way for people to realize if they're moving in isolation, that's a lot more work. That does mean more tension. But when you get to that integrated piece, the whole body gets to go with you. And now everybody's helping everybody instead of, like you said, the head is on a stick. The body is like not even existing. And now you're going, oh, it does exist. And look how we can work together. Yeah, wow.

[01:01:01] And let's take the effort out. But I usually don't share it that way. So thank you for the reframing of it metaphorically. But also then that opportunity of you didn't know what I was going to do and you still found the belly. The belly started to integrate with you. And that's what I wanted you to be able to discover. So yeah, it's interesting because one last thing. I know that it's totally anecdotal, but it comes up a lot is that people I meet with chronic migraine can't fold the top of their ear over.

[01:01:30] So their ear is so tense that it's kind of rigid. It can't fold. And again, after Tai Chi and all the rest of it, I can do my little flappy waving here. So it is, again, it's one of those weird things that the tension that we carry in our face, our hands, our body is so extreme that it's almost not surprising in hindsight that I was crippled with migraines. It's almost like inevitable looking back on it.

[01:01:56] The amount of tension that I was carrying in my body that my brain was just like, I'm done. I'm out, tapping out. That's too much work. So again, I guess if I had to conclude, one of the things I would say is that I think my migraines turned chronic because I had the equivalent of a nervous breakdown. My nervous system was so exhausted all the time it broke down. So my challenge to people is constantly is see if you can't have a nervous breakthrough.

[01:02:26] See if you can't make little breakthroughs that will help your nervous system like the massaging the ears that we just did and realizing that your whole body can turn. It's not cheating. You're just helping your head out. It's integrated. Yeah, it's a whole body movement instead of isolation. And those breakthroughs that you have when you're going, aha, and I'm going, wow, I've never thought of it like that. Keep holding on to those moments.

[01:02:48] Those little breakthroughs are what are going to help you heal because they're the gold in amongst all the coal. It's all important, but really hold on to those aha moments. Those breakthroughs are what will help. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. And when you were describing how tense your ears were, I never even thought of that either.

[01:03:12] And one of the other things that I do is have people lift up from the ear and see if they are sitting straight or if they're not. And so if you're in that tension of that curled over guarded kind of position. Hunchy-scrunchy, yep. The hunchy-scrunchy. And then pull on those ears. There's your expansion piece that you were talking about on the bed. And all of a sudden the chest lifts. And then it's like, oh, I can get in a breath.

[01:03:41] But I was just thinking about just that love that you would be giving to the ears by pulling on the ear and touching it, where you might not even have been aware of how tense that ear is actually. It's like, yeah, that's right. And again, that's my other thing I would say to people. When you hear some of this stuff, I'm very science-based. I was studying my PhD. Everything had to be triple-checked and dot, you know, I's and cross T's. A lot of this stuff sounded a little bit woo-woo to me. I'm not going to lie. And I didn't believe that rubbing my ears could make a difference or that, you know,

[01:04:10] a peppermint tea was going to be the gateway to healing. These little things really are important. So it's, again, that doesn't mean it's a really tricky landscape because there's a lot of people selling a lot of rubbish online that will tell you that this small capsule will make all the difference or this supplement or this vitamin or this. You have to be guarded. You have to be a little bit careful. But with things like massaging your ear where there is no financial investment and there is no real risk to your health, I would encourage you to have a go to try it out

[01:04:39] because more often than not, you'll find something. Again, it's that trying on metaphor of trying on different things until you find what fits. You might just say, I can't do this meditation or I don't want to do the rubbing of the ears, but visualizing my head as a balloon on it, you know, makes me feel happy I can do that. So keep working, keep trying different things. Try to park your, you know, wallet to one side because you can get a little bit sucked into a lot of things, especially when you're desperate, when you're in a lot of pain.

[01:05:08] Try the free things first if you can and experiment and then work your way up. Eventually you'll find, you know, a healer that you like or a meditation class that works for you and then by all means invest because there's nothing more important to invest in than your health. But just not on day one. When you're at your sickest, most vulnerable, just go slow, tread carefully. I wanted to come back to you. I talked about in between the eyebrows can be very tender. Yeah.

[01:05:36] And you were saying to across the eyebrows to the corner of the eyebrows. So those are all points that if they are tender, you can just hold your fingers just lightly on top of them. And that will also dissipate. So just for anybody who, if they do notice or they find themselves rubbing their forehead, because sometimes people do that too, right? And it's just, that's that same emotional stress release.

[01:06:00] You're targeting some really key points in the body that will help to bring flow and balance to get the blood circulating through the head. And so there's that piece there. And I wanted to share on the side of the leg. Now, the side of the leg, if you rub on the outsides, just take your knuckles and rub on the outside of your legs. For some people that can be extremely tender and it stays that way a lot.

[01:06:31] So my daughter and I will talk about that because she's always got the bladder, bladder meridian for her has always got too much energy in it. And one of the areas is the stagnation of what's going on in the side of the leg. So if you were to hang your hands down to your leg, it's right in the middle of the leg on the outside edge of the leg.

[01:06:55] There's going to be a spot that feels like two big bruises, one on each side. And that spot is a spot that can help with migraine headaches. So I just wanted to bring that forward. So if anybody's rubbing that spot and they notice that is really tender, or you start rubbing and there's nothing there, but then all of a sudden in about 30, 60 seconds, it'll go, hey, you're paying attention just a minute. Let me send you a signal.

[01:07:23] And all of a sudden, so then you can, again, just taking your fingers and just holding them over the points. That'll just bring some energy from the fingers. Just bring it through the leg and let it flow. And that could be really helpful. So if you're not feeling well, lying there and just holding the side of your leg can be really, really easy. Okay, fascinating. So, yeah. So I just wanted to bring that forward because that's one area where I've, I've spent a lot of time either rubbing or holding.

[01:07:51] And the other one people often do is they put their hands on their knees. While your hand is on your knees, your fingertips end up on some beautiful points. So if you just drape your palm of your hand over your knee, and if you notice you're starting to do that, you're already like the ESRs up here, you're already calming the body. Your fingertips are going to touch some beautiful points on your knee. And there's a lovely point just on the inside of the knee, which is K10,

[01:08:21] which helps with kidney tension. And that can really help to just calm everything down. And there's fear and anxiety sits in there. That's a great place to be able to just hold the fingertips. Beautiful. Yeah. So I just wanted to get those couple of points in, if that's helpful to anyone. And again, those are the free things that work and then being able to dive further. So, okay. Is there anything else that you might've had on your list that we wanted to

[01:08:51] make sure we covered? No, I mean, I think the only thing is just over and over when with the metaphors is even for whether you're a healer listening to other people, or you're just actually paying attention to yourself, again, just check if it's not your words, check what other people's words resonate with you. Cause it's very hard to listen to your own speech patterns. But if you notice that when someone's explaining something, can you go, Oh, I get that.

[01:09:18] Or that brought up something that instantly I can visualize. Then they're the moments that you, that resonate for you. Then that's that thing about trying on what fits, hold onto those moments, store it away, take a note. So again, for me, I found that the warrior metaphor, which is a big part of my great culture. Did not fit well for me at that moment. It's, I don't mind it now. I feel really proud that, you know, we battled through and I survived, but at the time it was not helpful.

[01:09:46] So it was by accident finding out that those, you know, garden metaphors were nurturing me in a way that I needed. Look to the things that you love. If you're still not sure how to proceed, painting or you love success, start making some menus that are about healing and comfort food, lean into the things that you are familiar with that bring you joy. Because it, again, it's that holistic approach. So whether it's the metaphors, the visualizations, the, the,

[01:10:16] you want to just build up this really warm and fuzzy feeling around yourself as much as you can. It, all the little things will help. So just, yeah. And, and, and give yourself grace and be patient because again, in the same way we mentioned, you don't yell at a tree to hurry up and bear fruit. It'll come when it's ready. So healing is the same for yourself. Just cut yourself some slack, be patient. And we, we've been through it. We're at the other side, but for people who are deep in their, their pain and their misery, it sometimes feels like it's,

[01:10:45] it's not possible for them. It is. It just, you've got to take it slow. You'll get there. I would, you and I met because of your blogging and, which is so fantastic. And I, you and I had gone back and forth between the blogs that we both post. How can people find the mindful migraine? If they're not familiar with where blogs are. So you basically just go into your search engine and you'll type the

[01:11:15] mindful migraine.blog and that will come up. And there, I post there Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. I post about migraine from a quite scientific point of view, but I also mostly post about it from a personal point of view. So it also then expands into lots of mindfulness techniques that I've tried and what works and what doesn't. Yeah, it's basically a lot of the readers don't have migraines at all, but they either suffer from chronic pain or they are just open to learning new

[01:11:44] ways of living within their own body. And it just, it's a nice community because a lot of people leave comments. And so even if you are feeling a lot, you know, like you're doing this alone, when you read the post and you see that there's a lot of other people saying, Oh yeah, no, I vomit in the night as well, you know, whatever. It's not just me. It's other people that are struggling with this as well. It makes the journey less, less lonely. That's for sure. Because migraine is about lying in your room alone in the dark a lot of the time.

[01:12:12] So if you can find a community online and that's what we're slowly building, then yeah, it helps. So that would be my advice. Um, there's lots of other wonderful places on online. There's lots of initiatives. It's about finding, finding your own home. So yeah, I'd encourage everyone when you're feeling well, when your headache's not too bad is to get online and find, find the spaces that work for you. And, and I keep the blog posts really short because I'm tired. My readers are tired. So you can get in and out in under 10 minutes. So,

[01:12:42] but the interesting thing about your blog too, is, is that you dive into some really interesting concepts. And you do double check those facts and make sure they're correct. And, um, so you're not just putting something into AI and saying, create a blog for me that talks about this. You actually have gone in and you dove into some of the concepts. And that's what I love about reading what you've written because you pull out, because of your architecture background,

[01:13:11] because of the work you did on the metaphors, you're really pulling out some really different ways to think about life. And I still appreciate that. Yeah, I think I'm, I've been lucky. It's landed the right way. All that PhD experience that bought me a lot of pain, but it actually taught me to how to reference, how to look up things, how to research, how to look for patterns in a way and look for the, the things that align. And, um, it taught me how to write. It taught me how to read. So yeah, in a lot of ways it's, I'm where I'm meant to be,

[01:13:41] I guess is what has been the nicest thing out of all of this. So as I said before, migraine felt like it stole a lot of my sense of self and the person that I thought I was is no longer there. But, um, again, for the people listening, it is possible that you'll come out the side and actually be a different person. And you'll like that different person just as much, if not more. So it's okay to grieve the person that you lost to chronic pain, but don't, don't give up. Like I said, you're not your toddler self. You're not your teenage self. You're just the self that you are in this moment and you can be someone else tomorrow.

[01:14:11] So yeah, stay hopeful. I love that. We can all be someone else tomorrow. Yeah. Oh, that's beautiful. Uh, Linda, thank you so much for this opportunity to, um, to explore this deeper dive and really metaphors are so much a part of what we do in touch for health and bioenergetic wellness. And you really shone a light on it in a different way. And I'm just so grateful for this opportunity to have exchanged the way that we have and for the work that you've done.

[01:14:41] So thank you so much. Oh, you're so welcome. And thank you for everything that you do as well, for being the kind of person that helps people like me. I'm so grateful. So for those of you that are finishing up your cup of tea, as you've listened, um, um, what metaphors might you be using for your healing? What phrases might be holding you back just by the way you've said it? We hope you've, we've helped you find a way to heal. And until next time we wish you well, be well, everyone. Take care. Bye everyone.

[01:15:19] Thank you for listening to be well with Dr. Michelle Greenwell. There are a couple of resources. I want to just point out when you go to the website, greenwellcenter.com. You'll have a pop-up window that pop-up gives you the top eight easy stress releasers that you can use every day. That's something you can put beside your computer, the bathroom mirror, beside the bedside table, a great resource. Also my YouTube channel.

[01:15:46] It is full of playlists with all kinds of different ways that you can activate energy and bring vitality into your day. You can find that when you go to YouTube, at Michelle Greenwell. And last, if you're a Linktree person, Linktree, L-I-N-K-T-R dot E-E slash Greenwell Center. That has all my resources in one spot.

[01:16:13] Those are for intricate little things that you can't get everywhere. And it's a wonderful way for me to be able to share all the different aspects of the kind of work I do. So thank you for listening. Be sure to drink that tea. And if you want to have the tea blend that was shared in the podcast today, then be sure to check out kbrettontea.ca. Have a wonderful day.