Transcript:
Welcome to Episode 1, Healing Migraine as a Rite of Passage. I’m so thrilled to offer this Migraine Alchemy podcast to you all.
Please enjoy this first episode. What does it really mean to see migraine as a possible opening for a rite of passage? Now, of course, migraine won’t be a rite of passage if you are simply medicating with pharmaceutical medications. This podcast and this particular episode today is geared towards people who really want to inquire on a deeper level as to what their migraines are trying to tell them and what their life is asking of them by way of these symptoms, these terrible, horrible, uncomfortable symptoms of chronic migraine, which of course extend beyond the simple pain of the migraine itself.
There are all kinds of comorbidities that go along with migraine that really lower the quality of life. And because migraine is such an intractable long-term problem that’s not easy to solve, Western medicine does not know how to solve it. I was going to say Western medicine is not good at solving it, but actually Western medicine doesn’t have a clue how to solve it.
That might be because Western medicine is the main cause of chronic migraines. Chronic migraines are caused by poisoning. We could see it through many lenses and angles and throughout the course of these podcast episodes, I’ll be looking at it through those lenses and angles.
In future podcasts, I will talk about iodine and fluoride and one of the main causes of poisoning that’s creating the epidemic of migraine being that of fluoride toxicity. And I’ll also go into my personal story of healing myself from fluoride toxicity. But for today, I just want to come back to this basic question of how can we see a health crisis, which is an identity crisis, as an initiation into a rite of passage that could be deeply, deeply transformational and rewarding and fulfilling, although certainly challenging.
It wouldn’t be a rite of passage if it weren’t challenging. And a rite of passage is not just any kind of challenge. It’s a challenge that challenges you to the deepest depths and core of your being.
Since chronic migraine and any chronic health condition is an identity crisis, the rite of passage of chronic migraine is going to be a challenge of identity. In other words, this is another way of saying it’s a challenge to deprogram and reprogram faulty programming that is causing us needless stress and causing us to operate and be automated behaviorally in our social interactions in ways that truly don’t serve us and to dismantle those cultural programs. You’ll see throughout the course of these episodes that I’m a mineral nerd, I’m a mineral geek, I love nutrition and minerals, and we’ll get really nitty-gritty about some of that in future episodes.
But I also like to get nitty-gritty about the cultural sociological analysis of why people get migraine. And when I say one of the lenses I look through is the lens of medical anthropology, what I mean by this is that I think it’s critical if we do want to understand what migraine is and therefore how to solve it, it’s absolutely critical that we look at our social institutions, particularly our medical institutions and the role that they are playing in the epidemic of this chronic disease. If this is a cultural problem and a sociological problem and a problem with our medical system, then part of the rite of passage of migraine is the ability to discern what you put in your body and to stop and to have good boundaries with putting anything in your body that is going to pollute your body.
So a rite of passage involves awareness and discernment, enormous amounts of courage, enormous amounts of resiliency, and of course this can be hard to come by when we are feeling sick. This is part of why healing chronic migraine is such a feat and why it is such an enormous rite of passage because the level of compromise that exists in chronic migraine is profound. Migraine is primarily a mitochondrial disorder, we could look at it through that lens of the cell.
In my Repattern Migraine coursework, the way that I approach dismantling the beast of migraine is stopping the pollution that’s coming into the body by looking at the environmental impacts, supporting the organ systems of the body, and of course the organ systems are all made out of cells and so the cells work through enzyme processes that are dependent on minerals and nutrients and if we really want to support the cells and the body and the organs, we have to work on the level of the mitochondria and this requires nutritional balancing. So the rite of passage of looking at migraine and the way that we’re getting polluted in our body, stopping that pollution, and rehabilitating our organ systems and our cells requires not only nutritional knowledge but an enormous amount of awareness and discernment about how we’re treating our body. And I hope that this is all clicking and making sense as I connect these dots and I hope that this sounds true and rings true to you because you probably, I imagine, have a deep profound sense that chronic migraine is so all-encompassing in terms of its effects and also its causes that that is why it is not so easy to step out of.
And so I really hope that these podcasts provide a way for you to hopefully not be overwhelmed by this information but to really start to see the scope and scale of the project at hand here. And in order to make this less overwhelming, I think the best way to do that is to recognize that in a whole system, if we’re really approaching this from a systems biology standpoint, it really doesn’t actually matter where you start. Any aspect of support for any aspect of the system will inherently benefit the other parts of the system.
Whether you work nutritionally or emotionally, you will be able to benefit and slowly gain traction and leverage in your journey healing migraine. So I just want to segue into a little bit more of a personal story of my own right of passage of healing migraine and the gradual process that that took. Of course, healing something that chronic is a gradual process and I try to let my coaching clients realistically assess how long something will take depending, of course, on how long they’ve been suffering, how much fluoride exposure and other heavy metal toxic exposures they’ve been exposed to, and what their history of trauma is.
But my hope is that through sharing this information, the length and duration of my journey of my right of passage healing migraine will be made shorter for many of you as I share many of the insights that I’ve gleaned along the way. So a right of passage is different for men than for women and I’m assuming that the majority of you listening to this podcast are women and it’s three-quarters of people who suffer from migraine are women. And so in this idea of the right of passage, you know, in the mainstream mythology we see that the male’s right of passage is usually the hero’s journey in which he faces some kind of outside obstacle and overcomes that obstacle through courage and determination.
But the heroine’s journey, it has been said by others, is a different journey. The heroine’s journey is more of going through a birth canal by going deep, deep within and retrieving a lost aspect of oneself, the authentic self that was disconnected from or dissociated from because of one could say patriarchal thinking. And I’ll do a separate episode on patriarchy and the role that patriarchy plays in migraine, but right now the first disclaimer is that patriarchy is not a thing any more than migraine is a thing.
Migraine doesn’t exist as a discrete thing nor does patriarchy. These are processes, so all illnesses are processes and the illness of patriarchy, if we want to call it a thing, is actually the illness of the process of patriarchal thinking. And women, of course, are subject to patriarchal thinking just as much as men in a patriarchal culture.
And so when I say that the right of passage for women as the heroine of their life is to go deep within and to retrieve the authentic true part of themself that pre-existed the cultural programming that stresses women out and leaves them feeling depleted, like they are over-giving, over-extending themselves, that’s what I mean. I mean that we need to dismantle the patriarchal thinking that causes us to run ourselves into the ground. And I know that this culture, I mean the same thing happens to men, it’s just that men have a very different neurological and hormonal makeup than women.
So while patriarchal thinking is certainly damaging to men as well, and this whole hustle culture is really depleting everyone, you know, men are suffering from adrenal burnout and exhaustion as well, but for women it’s different because women don’t have as much testosterone as men. So when women run out of testosterone, which we inevitably will sooner than men, we have to rely on adrenaline to have energy. And adrenaline is made from the grandmother hormone pregnenolone, from which progesterone is also made.
And I wasn’t sure I was going to go into this level of depth around hormonal balance, but I think it’s important to recognize the stressors of our cultural expectations and the degree to which we try to meet them and feel like we’re failing, affects our adrenal function and our hormonal balance to the extent that cortisol and adrenaline are made from the same substrate as progesterone. Progesterone is really needed to prevent migraine, it’s not only a hormone of reproduction but it is also a hormone of, it’s an anti-inflammatory hormone that is also needed for nerve conduction, it’s needed for the myelin sheath around the nerves, including the vagus nerve, the vagus nerve being one of the most important nerves in the body. So when we’re stressed out and we deplete our progesterone, this leads us to be more prone to migraine.
So I hope that you’re starting to see the ways in which our social, emotional, sociological context that we live within, the life we live within, the quality of the relationships that we have with other people as well as the quality of our own relationship with ourself in our own thought process internally, how we push ourself, the degree of drive and dissatisfaction and criticism that we bring internally to ourself does affect our hormone status which in turn affects our mineral status as well. And maybe in future episodes I’ll go into this most fascinating topic, one I would love to learn more about, of the relationship between hormones and minerals and how minerals are needed to build hormones but hormones also regulate our mineral status. So we must find a way within the dysfunctional culture that we live within to be agents of change, to live the lives that we want to live and to be the people who we really are.
And chronic migraine is an identity crisis to the extent that when we do not have the energy to show up for our lives in the way that we want to, we experience depression and a low sense of self-worth and a lot of blame and guilt. This is especially true of mothers and mothers with chronic migraine. And in my own journey, of my own rite of passage, my chronic migraines coincided exactly with my initiation into motherhood.
So giving birth is a rite of passage in and of itself. And just looking at my life, I think it is not that different than the lives of many women in our culture right now where I became a mother living in a new place where I knew hardly anyone, where I did not have the village to support me, I did not have aunties and uncles, and we also moved very frequently, even after that initial place where I became a mother in Vermont. And so my journey of healing chronic migraine was my experience of waking up to how profoundly under-resourced I was on the most basic fundamental levels.
And I think that’s one thing I really want to drive home is that part of what’s sick about our culture is that the most basic fundamental forms of nourishment are not in place. This is a result of the fragmentation of our culture, the displacement, the way that we move around, especially in my case, the way we moved around a lot for my husband’s work at the expense of my own social nutritional support that I needed in order to be able to show up as a mother in a resourced way. So as you can tell, I have a lot of grief.
I have a lot of grief still, not just for what I experienced and the way I was under-resourced and undernourished as a mother, but when I kind of globalize this out, which is something I have the tendency to do, and really just feel into how incredibly sad it is that our culture doesn’t value and support mothers more. And again, that’s an abstraction, like that’s kind of a tall order to say that our culture should do this or our culture should do that. Because again, that’s, I don’t know if we could say our culture is a discrete thing any more than migraine is or any more than patriarchy is.
And I’m sorry if I’m getting really abstract about this, but the culture that we live within is our holding field, right? And I think that Stephen Porriga’s work with the polyvagal system is a very insightful way to look at how and why we get so emotionally and hormonally dysregulated. It’s because we have a nervous system that evolved throughout history to include an invertebrate branch of our nervous system, a reptilian branch, and a mammalian branch. And each of these branches of our nervous system has different ways of coping with and dealing with threat and with stress.
The invertebrate and the reptilian branches of our nervous system, well, the invertebrate responds to stress through contraction, freeze response. The reptilian branch responds to stress through fight flight. It’s the eat or get eaten program.
And then the mammalian branch deals with stress through social networks and through basically creating safety through social bonds. And this occurs through being in a community of people who are attuned to each other in such a way that they notice when the other is in distress and they respond with care since mammals understand that they survive together through mutual care. So what happens if that layer of our social beingness as mammals has pretty much essentially we’ve culturally regressed to a state where we’re mostly reacting from fight flight most of the time to the point where it’s actually even a normal state of being to the point that we don’t even understand that there’s another way, maybe because it’s been so long since we’ve experienced that.
And I just want to drive home the point that the fight flight response on a physiological level is really relevant here. The vagus nerve is like the way that our social nutrition interfaces with our organ systems. And so I just want to drive home how deeply interrelated all of these systems of nourishment are.
When we don’t feel safe in our environment and we don’t get the social cues from other people in our life that tell us that we’re mammals who are socially resourced, the vagus nerve which innervates all of our major organs is affected. And this is the way that social stress can compromise our organ system functioning. If on top of this we have nutritional deficiencies that are affecting how well we can make neurotransmitters and hormones as well as make the cells that make up our organs, we will be in a mitochondrial fight flight response.
This is called the cell danger response. And my coursework aims to address this cellular mitochondrial challenge that we face. But the whole point is that the crisis of migraine, and I hope I’m not making this all more overwhelming, but the crisis on the micro scale of the mitochondria is being mirrored on the macro scale of our social lives and these two have a feedback loop system with each other.
When we’re looking at whole systems we can see that compromised mitochondria will affect how we behave socially because we won’t have the cellular energy to regulate ourselves hormonally and neurochemically and vice versa. If we have a stressful social environment this will affect our system and our major organs and our cells. So the bottom line is that the right of passage of healing migraine is the right of passage of accessing nourishment, re-accessing nourishment.
And how do we do this? We must remove the roadblocks that are blocking our nourishment. You know in my case it was constant moving that was a real roadblock to my nourishment. And we must start to nourish ourselves physically in terms of what we eat, being discerning with what we eat.
And we have to go deep within to really ask ourselves some deep spiritual questions in this crisis. And they’re uncomfortable, they’re very uncomfortable ones. You know some of you hearing this you may think wow this is you know this is a tall order I’m not sure that I’m game for this as far as like what it really takes to heal migraine.
Well not everyone is going to approach it this way, not everyone has to. But I doubt that those people are going to get out of chronic migraine without looking at least at least some of these angles. Because as uncomfortable as some of this may be the reason it’s worthwhile to do is not only because the alternatives aren’t good, you know the suppressive paradigm isn’t really a good solution.
Although it may be the appropriate path for some people. But that the real reason to do this is because when we do start to nourish our life and come back to our authentic self, take responsibility for our personal agency and our ability to heal, we start to live the life that we really wanted to live, that we really came here to live. And I would propose that if you have chronic migraines one way to frame it, and this isn’t like an objectively real or objectively truth true way to frame it, but this is an experiment.
It’s an experiment to ask yourself that if as a soul coming into this life you knew ahead of time, actually you agreed to sign up for having chronic migraines, why would you have signed up for that? Now the element of choice is critical. Choice is the realm of the human spirit. So I have a whole philosophy, mostly informed by Alison Armstrong, about human spirit and human animal.
So when we’re talking about this vagal system and our social stress and the way we react to that, that’s human animal right? And we’re here in embodied form, in a body, and our human animal reacts very quickly to stressors as part of instinct, and these instincts are designed to help us survive. Some of these instinctive survival mechanisms are also maladaptive, and in the course of trying to survive we can often feel like victims of circumstance, and then that is not also conducive to healing either right? So the element of choice, which is the element of spirit, recognizing that we do have a spirit, in other words we have a purpose, that we came here to experience in embodied form what it is like to be an animal, and our ability to choose is the defining characteristic of the degree to which we’re a victim or not. So I think that it’s a very interesting question, just as an experiment, a thought experiment, if you had chosen as a soul to agree to come into this life, to experience chronic migraine, why would you have chosen it?
And again it doesn’t matter, there’s no objective true reality here, this is a process, an experiment, a meaning making. The meaning that we make out of our experience in our journey is really what determines the type of energy that we bring to our journey, and you know we may make different meanings at different times, there will certainly be times, and there were in my experience, when I felt like a real victim. There’s still a part of me that’s extremely angry at the medical system, that still blames the medical system, that victim part of me, and indeed I was poisoned by the medical system, so it’s actually completely valid and appropriate that that part of me is still angry for getting floxed and getting poisoned with fluoride. On the other hand, I also understand that part of the reason I’m so angry is because I’ve generated a story in which I believe that that is what the truth is.
I’ve hung my hat on the belief that to the best of my ability, my ability to make sense and meaning of my experience of migraine and what happened to me, one of the best ways that I can make sense of it is to understand the degree to which pharmaceutical medications had a negative impact on my body, and of course I do have some blame, not only that that happened to me but that it’s continuing to happen to a lot of people, and yet this injustice and this problem culturally of people getting poisoned is also something that has given me a great amount of meaning in sounding the alarm and bringing to people’s attention and awareness the level of magnitude of the problem that we have of fluoride toxicity and all of these chemical exposures. So for me, the rite of passage of healing myself of migraine taught me so many things. It taught me how incredibly resilient my body was as I was able to see it heal through nutritional balancing.
I also learned to develop just incredible access to many forms of intelligence that I believe are latent in many people and are not really relied upon and used, that when you really face the rite of passage of a healing crisis, you have to start to rely on more forms of intelligence than simply deductive reasoning. So the gift of this rite of passage for me was that healing chronic migraine taught me that in order to survive, I had to rely on intuition and common sense. I had to be willing to experiment.
I had to develop my intellectual capacities and my ability to read science and understand science and also to do citizen science, to do experiments. Self-compassion and empathy was something that I had to develop. That’s certainly a form of intelligence.
And so basically a healing crisis is asking us to bring our full humanity to ourselves in this rite of passage. And so we we develop a broader range of our sense of ourself. And this is definitely a good thing.
We become more dynamic and more authentic when we bring our full self to the task of reclaiming our life. So I didn’t really go much into the personal details of my own rite of passage, other than to say that, you know, the chronic migraines, which started back when I was 12, and I’ll do another podcast with a more detailed description of my own personal journey. They really became exacerbated with a C-section operation where I got fluoride-based medications.
And then the fragmentation from all of the moving and the lack of social support made it very difficult to heal. You know, that combined with the breastfeeding at night and the sleep deprivation, it was extraordinarily difficult. I had about two to three migraines a week for the first few years of my life.
And it wasn’t until I hit upon mineral balancing and nutritional balancing that I really started to get real leverage. Prior to that point, I developed a protocol that I called a Simply Well Protocol, or I called it that at the time, that was mostly a bunch of folk medicine remedies that actually included a lot of minerals. At the time, I didn’t know as much about minerals, but it just so happens that those steps that I took early on with the folk medicine remedies, part of the way that they were healing my body was because of the minerals that they contained.
And then it was later when I discovered hair tissue mineral analysis and mineral balancing that I really started to get leverage. And that’s one of the main tools that I use now in working with people. But we can’t stop there.
You know, again, I think that this rite of passage of healing migraine, primarily if we look at it through the lens of a spiritual initiation, is probably the best way when it comes to finding the inner resources to face the magnitude of the task of healing migraine. I want to stress and undermine and just emphasize how incredibly devastating and difficult and hard chronic migraine is to navigate. It’s very difficult to navigate when you are in so much not only physical pain, but existential and emotional pain.
So one of the best antidotes to that pain, which involves a lot of isolation, is being part of a community of people who understands what you’re going through. And that’s why I’ve created the Repattern Migraine coursework. But I also hope that this podcast is serving for you as an example of a resonant field of information coming from me as an extension of compassion and love and understanding for what you’ve been through.
And just hopefully this also provides a spark of inspiration that you too can go through this rite of passage and come on the other side and reclaim your life from the disease of chronic migraine and perhaps even see some blessings along the way. So that concludes this first episode. I basically just wove together a bunch of different insights together and you can see that my brain kind of works this way. I like to look at healing migraine from many different angles, and everything is connected.
