For about five years now I have been getting migraines fairly consistently spaced out over periods of several months. I don't know if any of you can relate, but they start out as a shimmering, pulsating light directly in the center of my vision. This light continues to expand over the course of an hour and then fades out. Once the light is gone, the pain begins and lasts for about four to five hours.

I experienced another one of these today and approached it in a completely new manor. As the shimmering light began to take over my vision, I simply decided to meditate on it. I focused on the light, examining it and pondering its source. It seems to me that migraines are likely a release of pent up energy or stress? I cannot say for sure. As the light faded, the slow throbbing pain began. I shifted my focus towards this pain and found this to be a rather successful technique. I analyzed the throbbing and began to view it as a foreign state of energy gently pulsating throughout my skull. I seemed to alter my perception of these signals from feelings of pain to feelings of energy. Despite my success, I found it difficult and exhausting to maintain my focus making it a short lived moment of bliss.

Has anyone else had similar experiences with migraines?.. or in a more broad context, successful means of dealing with pain?

Thanks for the advice =] First thing I do upon noticing them is drink a big glass of water with a packet of emergen-c. I am beginning to suspect dehydration causing loss of vitamins and minerals is one of the bigger factors in this, if not THE factor. I run regularly, though I have taken a month or so off and just started again today. Lack of hydration would certainly seem the culprit for today's case, however they can come on quite randomly. I'll keep these meditation/stretching techniques in mind for next time.
Thanks again for the advice, it's much appreciated.

I suffered from migraines and cluster headaches from a young age. The only thing that I've been able to successfully treat this condition with is regular low doses of psychedelics. LSA seeds, psilocybe mushrooms, and Salvia divinorum. Keeping hydrated and having a good diet weren't enough to have the migraines go away completely. And the cluster headaches would come on suddenly and brutally, with no warning or possible reason. Doctors couldn't help me, so I had to help myself.

Try regular low doses of LSA seeds, or mushrooms if you have access to them. By low I mean low, barely enough to achieve much effect. It's not as if you have to trip out once or twice a week, unless you want to

LSD/mushrooms and migraines article.

If you wish to take a dietary route, try completely eliminating gluten for 40 days.

If you can notice 1 hour before it actually starts, maybe as soon as you start noticing, taking a micro dose of lsd/shrooms, to see if it helps?

Good luck and let us know if you find a way to deal with them!

I personally wouldn’t use experimental techniques except in an absolute emergency to deal with migraine but I do have very severe migraine issues.

In one case recently where I could not get medication for my migraine I smoked a small amount of spice which I believe aborted my migraine. I say believe as I have suffered a variety of migraine types ranging from migraine with aura, migraine without aura, aura-only migraines, Alice in Wonderland syndrome (excellent name, eh?) and ocular migraine so sometimes I do not have the pain/nausea/bowel disturbance/loss of motor function/speech etc.

I would not have tried this if it had not been for the fact that to get my medication (I use either Sumatriptan or Rizatriptan) without prescription in the UK you have to fill out a huge form in a well-lit pharmacy (I filled it out incorrectly, luckily they told me where for next time). As anyone who knows migrianes knows this is going to be hard when you are in the initial stages of migraine and are having difficulties seeing or thinking!

I will try this again if I am caught short, but that will be the only situation, for me migraine is far too debilitating (the main effects of the last two lasted around three months each, went end-to-end and ten months later I can still see some visual effects if I am in the dark, most of the time I was unable to work and had to deal with loss of significant amount of my vision). The last two hit whilst I was asleep so there was no escape from them.

My advice is to get a prescription for Rizatriptan wafers or if that is unavailable or too expensive where you are Sumatriptan. I like Rizatriptan more as they work sublingually, so are fast and if you suffer from nausea there is no issue with you just throwing the medication up again. Rizatriptan seem to be effective in 10–15 minutes, as far as I am concerned it is a simply amazing drug.

The best meds to abort a migraine episode (BUT not in hemiplegic or basilar migraines) are, as d*l*b has mentioned the triptans.Sumatriptan also comes as a subcut injectable prep and also a nasal spray.

The best triptan presently available is FROVATRIPTAN; one of its boons is its long duration of action with a half-life of 24-26 hours.

Interesting with that pulsing light. i get that too but without the migranes, if i relax into it it is more then light it is energy pulsing. very pleasant, id love to have it more often again. after getting stronger it usually fades into the background again.

About dealing with pain. Of yogic teks there is one which is related to pratjahara. where one puts full attention to a disturbance, in this case pain. by holding ones attention in that position the perception of pain changes. Impossible to do proper yoga asanas without this technique because every now and then one will encounter pain in the poses which is best dealt with the teqnique above.

At least in my case migraine has quite a few effects at the same time and there is no way to concentrate on anything at all. For instance if I am having classic migraine (migraine with aura) the best I can do is make animal noises, scream, puke, shit and headbutt the wall! Hehe. I tend to scare people!

Maybe with less severe migraine this is possible though.

Edit– with headaches (I don’t medicate for normal headaches in general) I can concentrate on pain and make it fall into the background, I have also found you can move this kind of pain around and it will go.

I wouldn’t risk trying anything else than popping a rizatriptan or similar for migraine though. I consider the potential risks too great and I have something that works without fail if I get there at the start.

I can defiantly relate to this from the migraine point of view. I regularly take sumatriptans to cope with headaches. Normally my aura is smells and a pressure behind the eyes, but smells really turn me off, I begin to crave sweet foods. Perfume and food smells start to make me nauseous, ugh and tobacco. I then get a sharp stabbing pain in my neck and shoulders radiating from my 6th and 7th vertebrae.

This travels out the edge of my skull, where it meets the neck, to rest over my left eye, I then have stabbing pain in my lower left rear quadrant of my head. The pain builds until it is unbearable. By this time I have normally have been sick probably once maybe twice. Sumatriptans will have stopped working by then, but I'll still try to pop 100mg more in the hope it will kill it.

Next comes the severe light sensitivity, and by now my partner has taken me to the emergency room. Where I get morphine to knock me out and enables me to sleep. 4 hours later I leave to return home physical shattered where I sleep some more.

I take a sumatriptan before I get the pain over the left eye, I'm good. If I am alseep and wake up with one, there isn't any hope.

I hate them.

I am very interested to hear about the effects you have prior to the more obvious physical symptoms. I will have to look out for other symptoms, I have only noticed visual effects – shimmering, growing blobs of light and turret-type formations – and then loss of feeling in the inside of my mouth, hands and then spreading up my arms.

After a bit of reading I find there is a phase called prodrome which in some migraineurs precedes the aura phase and can be noticed quite a time before the main attack, even days in some cases. I will have to start paying more attention! I guess some of my migraines will not have a stage like this (my main triggers are atmospheric pressure and stress, I used to have issues with food colours too but it has been a long time since I have suffered from them).

I was going to moan about the fact that it seems that the best sources of info on migraine on the web seem to be pay sites, but I just found a forum that seems to be quite good at:

http://forums.healthcentral.com/discussion/migraine/forums

Reading it makes me glad my migraines are generally quite infrequent nowadays, I actually feel quite lucky now!

I appreciate everyone's feedback.
d*l*b and Awakened, you certainly seem to have a lot of experience with migraines so thanks for sharing your input. I would like to avoid getting a prescription for this. From what it sounds like, the migraines I experience are much less severe than what both of you have dealt with so I don't think a prescription would be necessary unless this condition worsens, which I suspect is quite possible. Did your migraines increase in intensity from the time you first started getting them? All of the migraines I have experienced so far have only lasted about 5 hours and drain my body of energy. By the next day I am back to normal and usually don't experience another for several months. I might also note that my mother gets severe migraines often resulting in emergency room visits. Is this possibly hereditary?

At this point I would like to approach these experiences with more traditional techniques and use them as opportunities to explore the nature of pain and overcome it to some extent. If these worsen, I will seek medical attention.

Thanks for the link =]
The first thing that I notice is the shimmering aura that begins as a small speck in my vision. As for yesterday's migraine, it started almost instantly after going for a run. I am a fairly consistent runner and usually don't have an issue but this was my first time in about a month. Maybe my body was shocked from being in an inactive state for so long and suddenly becoming active?

For me my migraines have changed a lot over time.

I used to have very regular migraines when I was 11 to 16. At this time I could have anything from once every month or two to several times a week. I only really suffered classic migraine and occasional issues with perception of myself and surroundings (Alice in Wonderland syndrome, actually quite fun!) up until quite recently. Classic migraine, for me, is very debilitating. The concept of doing anything to get over them once they have kicked in apart from headbutt walls and try and live through the symptoms is basically zero.

Once I got to 16 my migraines reduced slightly in frequency, but the symptoms stayed the same. This carried on until I got to around 25. Infrequent but very debilitating.

I think I had a pretty good break from them for a few years and they reappeared about 5 years ago. Since then I have seen quite a variety of migraine types. Some would kick in with no aura stage, and some would show nothing but aura.

The most recent, and I find most worrying, type I have suffered was late last year when I woke up feeling like I had been punched in the side of the head with my vision blurring in and out. After this I lost most of my vision in one eye, there was no heavy pain as such. I had one night of pain a month in, but that was all. This migraine lasted 3 months and when my vision was nearly back to normal I woke up one morning and my vision was better in the eye that had gone wrong and it had switched to the other eye and got just as bad as the start again! Another 3 months until my vision got back to normal! I am still seeing odd green flashes (like lightning) if I open my eyes wide in the dark.

At the moment the only thing I can do to try and stop myself having more like this is try and chill out, the last ones were at a time of very high stress in my life. I got offered Amitriptyline (a tricyclic antidepressant) as a preventative measure but I chose not to take it up. As far as I am concerned I do not suffer from regular migraine anymore and I don’t want to have my brain chemistry messed with in such an extreme way unless it is utterly essential (I have been on propranolol, a beta blocker when I was frequent and felt it left me too airy-headed).

I would, however, throughly recommend the triptans for when a migraine hits. One pill when you notice an attack coming is all you need. As long as you get there before the end of the aura phase you can carry on as you were. Amazing things. Shame nobody prescribed them to me in the first 10 years of hell I suffered. “You will grow out of them”. Yeah, right, thanks.

Just found another interesting bit of info on the site I linked before, good for understanding migraine stages and symptoms:
Anatomy of a Migraine

Wow, I had no idea there were so many different ways a migraine could attack. After looking at this link, I did notice that I was lacking in energy for a couple days prior. I will try to pay close attention to any signs that could suggest a migraine now that I am aware of them. If my condition seems to worsen or become more frequent I will likely see about the triptans. You have been around the block a time or two with these things so your advice is more than worth considering. Thanks for sharing!

Whilst I don’t want to be a walking advert for the triptans, I am sure many on this forum who have not looked at them will be interested to find out that they are triptamines and very close relatives to DMT. Sumatriptan for instance is 5-methylaminosulfonyl-N,N-dimethyltryptamine.

Knowing that psilocybin mushrooms had been used for clusters and migraine and the similarity of my then prescribed medication to DMT I was happy to dose a small amount of DMT to try and abort my attack in desperation (I had run out of prescription, and due to my filling out the form wrong was denied any at the pharmacy).

The two that I have experience with:

Sumatriptan (Wikipedia)
1-[3-(2-dimethylaminoethyl)-1H-indol-5-yl]- N-methyl-methanesulfonamide
aka
5-methylaminosulfonyl-N,N-dimethyltryptamine

Rizatriptan (Wikipedia)
N,N-dimethyl-2-[5-(1H-1,2,4-triazol-1-ylmethyl)-1H-indol-3-yl]ethanamine

I few people have posted this already, but I definitely have to say ...

Salvia Divinorum, all the way.

I had a seven day migraine, and Sally was the only thing that helped, and even cured, it. Completely, took away my migraine 100%. You have to have a salvia "breakthrough" to completely get rid of it, but sub-breakthrough doses can definitely help ease it enough to go to sleep or make it bearable. Salvia is also a lot more convenient than shrooms or LSD. Only takes about 10 minutes. Foliage works the best, but extract means less smoke to inhale.

Good luck!

Interesting that you were able to find relief from salvia once into the main stage of the attack. Conventional medication aside of extreme analgesics don’t seem to be able to touch it once it has hit, and they aren’t doing anything to the attack, just giving pain relief. Something to test next time I wake up with one. Nothing to lose!

See, the odd thing about my condition is that Sumatriptan never worked for me. It would provide a little relief, make the pain sort of bearable, but that was it. And it didn't work at all for the cluster headaches, only the migraines. Thankfully I didn't have too much problem with my vision, at least not where it was impaired for days/months at a time. I just had extreme sensitivity to light and sound and pulsing light when I would sit in the dark.

The cluster headaches are another beast entirely. The doctors could find no treatment at all that would work. And since I've found Salvia, I haven't had one. The low doses of LSA seeds and shrooms worked to take my migraines away, but the cluster headaches would pop up every once in a while still. Salvia seems to have cured me of them, and I love her for it I just smoke the plain leaf every couple days now, and I feel confident that I won't have to go through another episode. It's become part of my life style really. Since I've found DMT and the whole changa world, I've been exploring with that a lot, but I still put Salvia leaf in my changa blends. Very special, healing plant.

Bumping this just to leave my last experience...

I've had strong migraines occasionally. The main triggering agent seems to be nervous tension, along with neck-shoulders rigidity. They are not common now at all, but yesterday I had an episode after a somewhat stressing day at work.

Then I do the usual routine: Try to drink and eat a little bit (since sometimes the chewing massage is soothing), then lay down still, lights off, with a cold cloth in my eyes, in silence. But this time this barely helped, and I did not have any painkillers (much less triptans) other than ibuprofen, which is useless.

So the only thing I could do is try to relax, and for some reason I decided to make a tea. So I picked a pinch of blue lotus, a pinch of black caapi (around two grams each I guess) and brewed it for a bit. Then added a dry lemon+ginger herbal tea for the flavor, and drank it slowly over ten minutes while laying my head.

In less than an hour, the migraine had vanished. Also, today I felt pretty good.

I am not aware of placebo effect in migraine treatment. And this worked like a charm for me.