Book Offers Physical, Spiritual Help to Migraine Sufferers

Newswise — For the millions of migraine sufferers, the advice is familiar: “Reduce stress.”

“Sounds simple, but it’s a tall order – and rarely do we address what our stress really is,” says Marian Wolbers, instructor of English at Albright College and author of the book, “Migraine: Pain of the Body, Cry of the Spirit.” “Stress for migraine sufferer is really a strain against your essence. That is, anything which is pressed hard against what is most important to your life’s purpose.”

Wolbers suffered from debilitating migraines for 20 years, including cycles when the headaches would strike daily for months at a time. After a stint in the hospital for the disease, she resolved to make changes in her life. “I was very careful with my diet and took only as much work as I felt I could handle safely,” she says. “Still, I got the headaches.”

As a health writer, she had written about migraines, read everything she could, talked to experts in the field and tried “almost every therapy known.” Nothing worked.

“There have been tremendous advances in medicine,” she says, “but my interest was not being on medicine forever. I didn’t want to face the possibility of spending another 20 years in pain. So I said, ‘I’m surrendering to this. I’m going to find out what this is about.’”

The book chronicles her journey to unravel the mysteries of migraines and develop a proactive approach to prevent them and lessen their severity through specialized meditation, artistic expression and natural healing.

“When my health began to improve, it was a side effect of a drive to find my true essence, to nurture the spiritual side of myself,” she says.

“Migraines don’t just represent pain,” she explains. Sufferers – like Lewis Carroll and Ulysses S. Grant – often experience wildly creative swings of imagination. “Migraines open a kind of super world or super awareness.” In it, she says, is an opportunity for migraine sufferers to uncover their unique selves.

“Why are we here? What can we give to the world that nobody else can? That’s the soul’s message underneath the migraine itself.”