I was 8 years old when I had my first migraine. My family had just come back to Israel after 3 years in the USA, and I remember feeling stressed about fitting into the tight knit group of children in my kibbutz class. So began many years of pain and anguish as migraines became a ‘normal’ part of my life. That is until I discovered the Grinberg Method and was able to find a way to navigate through pain and restore normality to my life.I don’t remember how often I got these migraines, but they usually started in the afternoon. I used to try and hide it from my parents because they wanted me to rest in bed and I didn’t want to miss any social gatherings – I didn’t want to be left out! My headaches were strong and always just above my eyes.
When the pain became intense, it was accompanied by nausea and vomiting. When this was happening, I didn’t have pain: Iwas pain. All of me, all of my attention went to stopping it, and distracting myself from the awful feeling that was invading my body. Doctors gave me different kinds of medications but they didn’t work.As the years progressed I learned to identify the migraine approaching from a mile away and automatically took a preventative painkiller, and then another one. Sometimes the pills helped, but mostly they didn’t. In time, I learned how to suppress the nausea. In my twenties, the migraines would appear mostly on Saturdays, on my only day off. Interesting, but not a unique phenomenon.
My relationship with migraines changed 4 years ago when I met my Qualified Grinberg Method Practitioner, Etie Tamari, for the first time. In our sessions she touched points on my neck and shoulders that triggered the sensation of a migraine instantly. It was astonishing.What was becoming clear to me was that when I automatically avoided the headache and suppressed the nausea over and over, I disconnected not only from the pain, but also from other sensations. When our body tries to avoid pain, it shrinks and contracts, thus influencing our ability to experience other kinds of intensities. Unfortunately, we don’t have the ability to electively disconnect from just some of our feelings but I noticed that feelings such as excitement, joy and more were dulled, therefore narrowing my ability to experience life to its fullest.
In my weekly sessions of somatic bodywork with Etie I learned how I created tension in my body when I was feeling stressed, anxious and fearful of making mistakes, so I asked her, “What should I do when I feel a migraine approaching?” I would ask. “Breathe and allow the pain” she answered – and so I did. That week I was visiting my family when I started feeling that ominous sensation building in my neck – BREATHE!! – I told myself. ALLOW THE PAIN!! – I decided not to take a pain killer right away and see if I could handle the pain. That was the most powerful migraine I ever felt. How the hell can I allow this pain? How can my body relax when my head feels like it’s going to explode?
My migraines didn’t stop at first, on the contrary, they became more frequent, but oddly enough a lot of things in my life started to change and shift once my body started learning how to relax into the pain and once I stopped disconnecting automatically at any sign of intensity. I became more confident, I started recognizing what I liked and disliked (sounds obvious right? Not for me!), I became more independent, less stressed, less anxious and had much more energy than in the past.
After seeing what a huge impact the sessions had on me, I decided I want to become a Qualified Grinberg Method Practitioner and teach others all that I had learned in my own process and I’m now half way through my final year of studies. In addition, I don’t have migraines anymore, just an occasional headache here and there.
When I started working with clients suffering from migraines (or other chronic pain) I noticed that most of them had totally given up on ever living a pain free life (just like I had). “Yes, I have migraines but I learned to live with them” is something I hear regularly. Many of my clients have tried so many treatments for their pain, that they’ve lost hope of ever living life without it. So when I ask about their pain in a session and they say “oh, I didn’t suffer from it this week – that’s weird, I didn’t even notice it got better”, I realize how efficient learning through the body is – and specifically understand better how to stop or reduce pain.
My passion is to teach my clients how to allow themselves to experience and expand with pain in order to allow the natural healing process of the body. Stopping our control over the pain is a process that is filled with fear; fear of the unknown, fear that our body is in danger, fear of not knowing how to fix the pain or fear that this pain is just way too much for me to handle. I can’t just tell my clients to allow the pain (because pain sucks), but instead I teach them to pay attention to their body, to stop their automatic reaction to the pain, and to learn what they say to themselves when they feel pain. Being able to stop the inner dialogue and create silence will better allow them to let the body recover and heal.The Grinberg Method is a process of awareness. Once we learn how to pay attention and experience our body, our reactions to discomfort and pain stop being automatic and we are better able to self-heal, and enhance our quality of life.
Published:
http://grinbergmethod.de/2015/
07/08/navigating-through-a-lifetime-of-pain-2/