Help for Headaches

By incorporating yoga into your life, you can reduce the severity and frequency of painful episodes, or ease an ache as soon as it starts.

By Jennifer Pirtle

Shoulder shrugs and circles can also help release the space between the shoulder blades, as can slow, soft neck movements, says Nischala Joy Devi, a yoga teacher in Fairfax, California, and the author of The Healing Path of Yoga (Three Rivers, 2000). "Move your head gently from side to side and forward to back," she says. "But be careful not to rotate your head in circles. The top vertebra in your spine, which supports your skull, moves in only a few directions. Rolling your neck goes against the natural motion of this vertebra and can actually cause damage."

Relax into the Pain

While specific asanas, like the ones that Baxter Bell, M.D., chose for this story, can help with headaches, the trickle-down effects resulting from an ongoing yoga practice may be the best preventative medicine of all: Headache-prone people who take up yoga often report that they eat more healthily and sleep better, two of many factors that can reduce the frequency and severity of headaches. Of course, even the best precautionary measures are no guarantee that a headache won't crop up occasionally. If it does, yoga offers plenty of ways to help make the body and mind comfortable during even the most painful episodes.

When a headache is at its worst, even dedicated yogis may find an intensely active practice excruciating. Relaxing, restorative postures are preferable during those times. Most important, if something creates strain, don't do it.

Keep noise to a minimum and dim the lights or turn them off completely. Darkness helps move the body's focus from the sympathetic nervous system (which increases the heart rate and blood pressure) to the parasympathetic nervous system (which eases the body back into restorative mode). "This environment essentially re-creates what people do naturally to break a pain cycle, which is to go into a dark, quiet room and fall asleep," says Bell, who teaches yoga and workshops on the therapeutic applications of hatha yoga in the San Francisco Bay Area. He suggests spending at least 10 minutes in each restorative pose, even if the headache has gone, explaining that "this is really the minimum amount of time needed to truly achieve the relaxation response."

For many restorative poses, Bell recommends placing a weighted sandbag (between five and 10 pounds) on the feet to shift the energy of the pain away from the head. "During a headache, people feel trapped in their head. The sandbag can bring the focus down the body to the feet," he says. "Visualize the downward movement as you exhale to facilitate this sense of grounding."

Some yogis, like Kathy Livingston, 43, who lives in Brownsville, Tennessee, find the restorative inversion Viparita Karani (Legs-up-the-Wall Pose) particularly soothing. Livingston, who has suffered from migraines since age 14, began practicing hatha yoga just months ago at Your Yoga Source, her local studio. She's always known that a headache is coming on when she gets a loud roaring in her ears followed by tunnel vision. Now, at the first sign of a symptom, Livingston puts her legs up the wall, even if she's at the busy law office where she works. "I find that the tunnel vision goes away," she says. "When I get up, the headache is gone."

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