Reddit reviews All in My Head: An Epic Quest to Cure an Unrelenting, Totally Unreasonable, and Only Slightly Enlightening Headache

What kind of meditation are you doing now? You may or may not be doing it wrong :D So we'll need some details to figure that out. What do you do when you meditate, and whose instructions do you follow, if any?


I want to be careful not to be discouraging here, because many people do see pain relief from meditation, and just because you haven't yet doesn't mean you won't be one of them. Trying different techniques might be a good idea, and we can make suggestions with more info.


Just to throw it out there in case people don't know: the term “tension headache” can insinuate that the person suffering from them is actively involved in creating the pain [note to advanced meditators: I mean this in a non-meditative way, I'm not talking about mental fabrication ;)], but that's not always true. Tension headaches can be caused by tension in the neck and shoulders, but that tension can also be triggered neurologically like a migraine headache – indeed, with some patients, there's so much overlap between the two that what is migraine and what is tension can hardly be sorted out. A tension headache can begin with stress and simply never stop even once the stress is gone. If your tension headache is caused by current stress, you probably already know that because of the way the pain behaves. Meditation and mindfulness are very useful for that, as well as therapy and biofeedback. If your tension headache is caused by a neurological condition that also causes your muscles to tense up, you probably already know that, too, because you have pain regardless of how you feel or how relaxed you are. Relaxation might help to the extent that you're able to release the muscles, but it can't fully resolve the pain or tension. If your problem is neurological, I don't think anyone can say definitively whether meditation is going to make a difference or not. Again, some people have astounding relief from pain with meditation, and others don't.


There are a lot of ways meditation can help you, I think, besides actually relieving the pain/curing the condition. And I understand at this time, stopping the pain is the most important thing, and the desire to get away from it can be overwhelming. But there is more you can do. For me, meditation has made no difference in my constant pain. But mindfulness and meditation have had profound effects on how I cope with with the pain, including a drastic lowering of stress, aversion, anxiety, and other mental suffering. As you've no doubt experienced in the last two years, one of the challenges of being sick is the way others treat you – doctors are not always so friendly (to put it very mildly) when they can't fix you, friendships can be strained or broken, and you've got to learn to deal with various and often nutty treatment suggestions from anyone who hears about your pain. Using meditation to develop some equanimity and even metta/benevolence about this can help you respond in more positive ways to these problems. So if it turns out meditation doesn't help the pain directly, that doesn't mean it's useless. And if you are able to develop solid concentration skills, there's the possibility of spending some time in meditation where you're at least unaware that the pain is there. To do that, you have to work with aversion. Lessening and eliminating aversion to pain during meditation is a very doable exercise and will carry over to life off the cushion. (Folks here will be great at expanding on how to do this once we know more details about your practice).


It's important psychologically, especially with a somewhat unusual condition like a constant headache, to recognize there are many other people with the same problem. Bhikkhu Bodhi, for example, has had increasingly bad headaches for most of his adult life. As you can see, it doesn't seem to have impeded his spiritual progress, but rather has propelled it. Also, if you haven't already read Paula Kamen's book All in My Head, I would strongly recommend it. It's not meditation-related, but normalizing your experience will go a long way to being able to accept the pain for what it is rather than building a story around it, and that leads to a great deal of mental freedom.