Your Body Advocate

Episode 44: Five Ways To Heal The Head

Ruth Cummings

Five Ways To Help Your Head

Today I’m talking about 5 ways to help head issues and a few ways to look at head pain differently. Is your headache just a “normal” headache? Or is your body trying to tell you something? Here are 5 kinds of head issues:

 

Headache #1: The Low Headband Head Pain

“Normal” headache with pain that follows the line of pain like a band around your head:

  • All the way around your head and face
  • Covering your eyes
  • Above your ears
  • Along your temples
  • Including your occiput area (where your skull meets your neck)

 

What this COULD mean:

This area can include tension and stress from wearing “Rose-colored glasses”, which means that you aren’t looking at a situation in a realistic state. Instead, you may be seeing a situation more positive than it actually is.

For example: being in an abusive relationship:

  • You see the person as being good for you
  • Even though they hurt you or ignore you
  • You make excuses for them
  • And you stay, even though you feel deeply that you should leave

Example: Staying in a bad job: 

  • You ignore the bad behavior around you
  • You stay with poor pay and/or poor behavior for too long
  • You make excuses for not leaving

And many more examples of how we can ignore what is happening in our lives.

 

Our Physical Response:

Your mind might act like everything is fine, but your body is not happy, not safe, not willing to take this anymore, and starts to retaliate to how you ignore what is right in front of you.

How your body reacts:

  • Eyes and head/neck look away from the situation
  • Eyes squint
  • Jaw clamps down
  • Stop breathing

Sometimes, with chronic headaches, all the “right” things won’t help. Then, when you change your circumstances, your headache magically goes away.

It’s not always this easy, and not always related to your emotional environment, but pay attention to your daily surroundings and how your BODY is responding to this environment.

 

Gets Worse When You Are Ready To Heal:

When your body feels like it has the support it needs, then your headaches (or other pain) could get worse. This is a great sign that you can, in fact, get better. But, this cycle is often misunderstood.

 

Headpain #2: Jaw Pain

When we clench our jaw or grind our teeth, this can cause headaches, neck pain, and of course, jaw pain.

How our body reacts:

  • When angry, we can tighten the jaw
  • When thinking and concentrating, we can tighten the jaw
  • Jaw tight = better thinking

How to relax your jaw, massage it like it shows in this video.

 

Headache #3: Eye Pain

Our eyes are over used and need some TlC.

  1. Massage for eye pain in this video!
  2. Do a cross current point hold on areas of pain:
  • Right occiput (under skull @ neck) with Left eye point, inside the left eye socket
  • Left occiput with right eye point, inside the right eye socket
  • Put pressure on both
  • Then press one, then the other
  • Teeter on them, with pressure on one, off the other, and switch

 

Headache #4: Sinus Pain

This is for pain in the sinus cavity that comes up through the face areas, like the cheek bones and around our nose and eyes.

  • Massage around the cheek bones
  • Press down on points along the cheek bones
  • Find tender spots and keep pressure on those points for 10-30 s