Re-contextualizing Pain

Let’s change the context around chronic pain. What if you could use your pain as your gain?

Maybe pain wouldn’t feel like such a loss of precious time if you could use it to your advantage and heal.

Would you prefer to use pain as an asset or deficit?

Look at it. You have to go through pain, we all do at different levels and degrees, emotional, physical, psychological and spiritual. But, it’s HOW we go through it that makes all the difference. When we are able to reframe our experience we can manage it in a different way. I am all about, “it gets to be easy even when its hard!”

So whether you are dealing with chronic migraine or chronic anxiety we can also be chronically healing. You can hold multiple frequencies at once, however you can only focus one.

When bodybuilders want to build muscle one of the things they do is irritate existing muscles and rework them until they get bigger. Lots of times they use their rage to push past their limits. They get to what “seems” like their limits and then blast or dynamite through them. The only thing usually in their way is pain, a stimulus. Here is where people quit if they are not fully committed. Bodybuilders manage their pain and stimulus in a different way.

So did and so do I. After 30 years plus of chronic migraines and doing the same thing over and over and completely reinforcing my migraine pattern I finally WOKE up and committed to something different. I decided to try something COMPLETELY FOREIGN TO ME.

I not only surrendered to migraines but I made them mean something totally different. In an instant I transformed from migraine warrior to waving the white flag in surrender and recognized my experience with pain and migraine as my best friend trying to get my attention.

And when I wouldn’t listen to them they kept turning up the volume. And only when I wouldn’t listen they spoke to me through my daughter, but that is another story in another blog on my website…

So what did I do? While literally sitting under a pounding shower to alternating hot water for muscle tension and cold water to numb nerve endings (while I was on 4 meds that did NOTHING before I created Migraine Magick), I found a space–it was only a millisecond–but in that space I was able to re-contextualize my experience with migraine. I shifted the negativity of chronic pain as not only manageable but as medicine to rewrite my experience and my migraine story.


I was able to narrate my pain differently using different language.

Pain isn’t a thinking thing, it’s a feeling thing.

Most people don’t think about how they navigate pain, they just go through it because they don’t want to die.

But I have a different perspective.

You can’t rewrite the narrative of the stimulus (pain or physical causes) but you can rewrite the narrative of the pain that is happening to you. When you change your process you change your outcome. It is all connected: the mind, the body, and the spirit.

Your pain is causal, and you are accountable for how you handle it. It is your pain because it is in your body and no outside influence can sustainably heal you. You are your medicine. Sure there are remedies, I made my own and everyone needs it even if they don’t have migraines because not only is it a physical remedy, but I structured emotional healing into it as well.

But, I digress.

Make no mistake; if you have woken up with ice picks in your eyes, or interactive pain for months for years, or forced yourself to throw up to maybe relieve tension in your neck for months on end, or had crippling anxiety…then you talk to me. There is a hell that will fry your brain.

There are people who have NO IDEA what this is like and I’m sorry to say there are also probably millions who do. When you change the narrative of your pain it means you own it and you can do something about it, and it divorces you from victimhood. Pain and migraine become less personal because after all we are most intimate with our shadows.

Listen, I get that is thought of to be devastating but it also gives you freedom, and it gets you thinking. And when I owned it–I mean owned, not being codependent with it–it changed my perspective from suffering to doing WHATEVER IT TAKES for me to feel better.

Because my friends, there is ALWAYS A WAY.

If you identify with your pain, or you speak of your pain as “my pain” or “my migraine” you are reinforcing your story you are your migraine or pain and you are not. You are completely independent of your pain. You feel it, yes.

And oh, I love you so much! Your ego will detour you from healing. It is counterintuitive, I know. But it will. You see this innocent piece of your limbic system is in place to keep you alive.

Any kind of healing will signal to your brain you are dying. So it will dig deep through all the painful moments of fear, yours and your entire ancestors and bring up any coping mechanism that “worked” to keep you alive.

And most of those mechanisms were and are not healthy and completely born out of the sympathetic nervous system. There is always a way to re-contextualize your pain.

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