How many of you know A.A. Milne’s wonderful collection of stories, ‘Winnie the Pooh’? I grew up being read those stories and have loved reading them to my children. One of our favourites is when Pooh and Piglet try to trap a Heffalump.
Poor little Piglet gets terribly frightened in the Hundred Acre Wood and in the dead of night runs away shouting, ‘Help! Horrible Hairy Heffalump!’ at the top of his tiny little lungs. Well today I want to write about what to do when you are wanting to shout, ‘Help! Horrible Hairy Headache!’.
Headaches are always due to congestion in the head area. Not one of you will ever have experienced a headache when you felt wonderfully relaxed and delighted in your life. You experience headaches when you are stressed, off balance, feeling like you are overwhelmed and juggling too much. In other words, headaches are your whole-body system telling you something is off-kilter and out of balance.
One of the big factors in headaches is the level of toxins that you have in your body. The liver, kidneys, and large intestine are the primary organs that deal with the processing and elimination of toxins from the physical body. The lungs are also involved in the way in which they move carbon dioxide out of the body.
Energetically, the aura and the chakras are the most important systems for removing toxins from the whole-body system. And it is this aspect of balancing toxicity to prevent and treat headaches that I want to concentrate on in this article. I explore other ways to work with headaches in other blogs.
The most common reasons for having too many toxins in the physical body are:
Eating food not suited to the body’s nutritional needs
Side-effects of medication
Hormonal imbalance
Drinking more alcohol than the detoxification systems can manage
The most common reasons for having too many toxins in the whole-body system are;
1st and 2nd chakras too congested to be processing effectively
Being un-grounded
Stress creating fight-flight-freeze emergency response
Compromised connection between the head and the heart
So, headaches are the symptom of imbalance. Mostly this imbalance is in the chakra system and the meridian organ systems that manage toxicity, and they can be closely linked to hormones and stress, but the good news is that you can do something about them!
In Chinese medicine, your gallbladder and bladder function as 'yang' support partners to your elimination organs liver and kidney (which are yin). Gallbladder and bladder are often working hard to keep the balance when the liver and kidneys are struggling. Think about those times when the wife in a relationship has just got too much to do… the husband comes in to play a bigger role in the relationship with family/work/home. He has to pick up the slack. But meanwhile, the wife is really struggling, totally overwhelmed with what she is trying to manage, and it just doesn’t stop - the workload keeps piling up.
At this point the stress in the situation begins to affect the husband, and whereas at the start he had been able to manage the situation really well, with a bit more work he is now feeling stressed and strained too. This is exactly what happens within the relationships of yin/yang partners in the meridian system. When liver or kidney are overwhelmed with trying to process toxins, gallbladder and bladder step up and try to hold the balance. But this wonderfully wise energetic solution should only be a short term measure, and if liver and kidney continue to struggle (perhaps you continue to eat food that isn’t good for you, or to have that extra glass of wine), gallbladder and bladder begin to really feel the strain too. With the gallbladder and bladder meridians encircling the head (and especially the scalp), when they feel a sustained strain one of the physical symptoms you can experience is headaches.
I should specify at this point, that for most of you it will be EITHER the liver/gallbladder relationship OR the kidney/bladder relationship that mostly shows up. If you experience headaches then as you do the exercises below you’ll notice that one of them simply feels better to you, you will resonate with it more than the other exercise. That one is the one that you will use most often.
There are many videos on my YouTube Channel that show you ways to help shift your headaches. If you click on the links below you will be taken to them.
For liver/gallbladder headaches
First, massage underneath both breasts (pecs) and above and bellow both collar bones
Do a crown pull to create space for the energy in the head to rebalance
Massage the scalp above the top of the ears as deeply as is comfortable. I call this one the Gallbladder buzz!
Massage the area at the outer sides of the breasts / pecs
Massage the place on your outer thighs where your fingers touch if you are standing with your arms handing straight down
Massage the place on the foot about an inch back from between the base of the first and second toes
Finish by slowly raking up the insides of your legs, through the groin creases and up the front of the body, crossing your hands over your heart and taking a few releasing breaths here
For kidney/bladder headaches
First massage the area underneath the collar bones and across the top of the pubic bone
Do a crown pull to create space for the energy in the head to rebalance
With one hand, using your middle finger and thumb, gently hold the either side of the bridge of the nose. With the other hand gently put two fingers and a thumb bunched together into the hollow area at the top of the neck where the neck meets the skull.
Take three breaths here
Place one hand flat on your forehead and the other hand flat on your abdomen below the belly button
Take several breaths here until you feel your headache shift
These exercises can be wonderful to do when you already have a headache, but also doing them regularly can help balance the system to prevent headaches.
With love, Prune