Taming the Wild Headache

Kitty Scruff Hold

Encountering a wild headache is similar to Forrest Gump’s proverbial life–box of chocolates metaphor: “you never know what you’re going to get”—although you know it will contain chocolate. That’s what makes it so intriguing.

You might say I’m a headache whisperer. For forty-two years, I have been relieving people’s headaches and migraines with a body-mind therapy I developed in 1970. (In case you think I’m ancient, like Dick Clark and my fellow baby boomers, I’m an eternal teenager.) After twenty-one years of informal experimentation, I decided to offer my therapy professionally and became a certified: massage therapist, energy worker, body-centered and conscious relationship therapist, and somatic coach and body worker. Deconstructing what I had been feeling on the head and in my hands all those years, I created instructions for client self-application, and I began documenting the results. Continue reading

Can You See the Sailing Ships?

There is a story that the native peoples of the Americas were guarding their shores from foreign intruders. However, despite their vigilance, the sailors from the old world made it to shore and began trading with the natives, who they later conquered. How was it that the natives, so keen to the elements and their land, did not see their future conquerors approaching? It is said that they could not see the sailing ships anchored in the bay because they had no concept of a sailing ship. The truth of this story as told in The Secret has been questioned, based on various captains’ logs that recount the native people’s use of large paddle boats: a boat is a boat, so they would have seen it.

When something’s right in front of our noses, of course we can see it. Or can we? Until last week, I didn’t know that my computer of four years had a photo share function under the export menu. I use my MAC everyday, yet have no idea how it works or how to fix it. I cannot see what a MAC Genius can see. Even if we cast our attention on the same object at the same time, I can’t necessarily tell what’s there because I don’t know what I’m looking at or what to look for.

After assessing people somatically for years, I can see how someone is shaped and how that shape creates and is created by the person’s reality. Continue reading

Hope for Headaches: Mood in Healing

“Hope for Headaches” is not just a blog post title—it’s the initiation into healing a chronic cycle of pain. That first step is a shift in mood. Mood is largely invisible to us. Our moods have us rather than us having them. They can wash over us in a moment, due to one or any number of things: the weather, a casual comment, one’s hormonal state, or history with handling stress or untenable, uncomfortable situations. Continue reading