There are as many schools of thought as there are people on this planet—and just as many recipes for health as there are diets that work for different individuals.

I don’t claim to hold the truth of the matter. I share my truth.

It doesn’t come from indoctrination, education, books, or even science. My work has been to observe myself experientially. And one of the things I have experienced and observed, again and again, is pain—both physical and emotional.

This doesn’t mean my life has been harder than anyone else’s. It simply means I’ve been in touch with myself. And in some strange way, I’ve been given a life where the “bad” has allowed me to sublimate pain and find a place closer to my real home.

Pain as a Messenger

I’ve learned this truth in my own flesh:
in every migraine attack,
in every recurring body pain,
in every heartbreak.

Pain does not exist in itself. It is a communication mechanism—between the body’s intelligence and the conscious mind.

At its core, pain is emotional in nature because the fabric of matter is vibrational. Everything is energy. Energy vibrates at different frequencies, and depending on that vibration, we experience emotions, colors, or physical sensations.

Dis-ease appears when something blocks the natural flow of energy. These blocks are not coincidences. Every density, every coarse sensation has a reason. Sometimes it comes from subconscious mechanisms. Sometimes from the soul.
Each emotional resistance—each block in our energy system—is a coded message. The body delivers it so that we can resolve it.

The reason it’s so hard to believe that all chronic pain is emotional in nature is simple: most of us are disconnected from our emotions and out of touch with our bodies. Understanding this requires direct experience, and it’s not an easy practice.

23 Years of Migraine

I suffered from chronic migraine for over 23 years. Today, I no longer live with chronic migraine—though occasionally one returns, just to keep me in check.

For most of my life, I never believed my migraines could be anything other than physical. When someone suggested otherwise, I felt hurt, even angry. How could I be the cause of the very thing I wanted most to get rid of?

It seemed more logical to blame genetics—both my parents had headaches—or simply bad luck. I stopped talking about my migraines because most people didn’t understand. There was no cure, and nobody could explain where they came from or how to deal with them, except by silencing them through painkillers.

As a woman in otherwise good health, I felt migraines weren’t taken seriously. They didn’t belong to the “A-list” illnesses like cancer or diabetes, and this increased my sense of shame about having migraine attacks. I soldiered on, shut the pain down with medication, and kept performing. I hardly ever allowed myself a day off work. But beneath it all, it was always a fight against my body.

I abused my body most of my adult life. As a woman, I thought I had to show up equal—or better—than men in the workplace. I suppressed my feminine side and lived in masculine energy. I thought there was no other way to survive.

Touching Bottom

So how did I come to understand that my migraines—and all chronic pain—are emotional in nature?
I touched bottom.

I reached a point where I questioned whether life was worth living. I was drowning in pain, in failure, in disconnection. I failed at finding happiness. I failed at understanding life. I even contemplated suicide.
But something in me knew it was too soon to make that choice. I had one last thing to try.

Years earlier, I had attended a Vipassana meditation retreat. At the time, I couldn’t really integrate the practice. But now, broken and furious with myself, I decided to go inward.

That anger—at myself, at life, at missing the point of my existence—gave me enough focus to be present in my body. For the first time, I managed to observe and listen.
And then, my body began to show me—taking me step by step.

The Revelation

As I broke through the barrier between my conscious and subconscious mind, which is the foundation of Vipassana, I began to feel my body in a different way. I realized the physical sensation in my temple wasn’t the root cause of my migraine—it was just a surface signal.
The real source was a massive block in my stomach.

As I concentrated on the pain in my right temple, remaining equanimous and observant, something happened: my attention kept being drawn to my stomach.

Initially, I thought I was simply losing concentration, so I went back to the temple. But it kept happening, as if there were an invisible thread connecting the point on my head and my stomach.

At a certain point, I realized that the feeling of pain in my temple was exactly the same as the sensation in my tummy. Soon after, I realized that the sensation in my tummy was even stronger than the pain from my migraine.

How was that possible?

I didn’t believe in chakras or energy fields at the time. All I could do was observe the dense sensation in my stomach and stay present with it. Slowly, through many layers, emotions and images surfaced.

Step by step, my body took me on a journey of integration and healing—one that took weeks of work, and high levels of presence and concentration.

One day, as I was focused on my stomach area, an image appeared in my mind: a naked girl, at the bottom of a well, shivering, pale, covered in wet leaves and mud. Barely breathing. Close to death.
The physical sensation associated with that image was exactly that of my migraine attacks.

My migraine was that girl—and then I realized, that girl was me. That’s what I had been living: near death, disconnected from life, suffocating. My migraine was her cry for help.

In that moment, I felt profound love for her. I made a promise to myself: I would put her first. I would make her better.

That was the beginning of my healing. That’s when my chronic migraines began to disappear—through many long sessions of bodywork and deep presence, as stuck energy was released little by little from my stomach area.

Doctors Wouldn’t Hear It

Months later, I attended my routine quarterly appointment at the migraine unit of the hospital. I had been on a new, potent monoclonal treatment for migraine for almost two years. Since it was very expensive for the system, only patients with certain characteristics were eligible to receive it. When I started the treatment, at age 35, I had migraines 10 to 13 times a month.

With the monoclonal administration, my migraines had dramatically reduced to three or four times a month—a miracle! I thought I wanted to stay on that drug for the rest of my life, considering the astonishing results. I had tried all kinds of preventive treatments before, and nothing ever worked.

In the spring of 2020, I was meant to be hospitalized for a week to detox from all the painkillers I had been taking since long-term use can actually trigger migraines.
Fortunately—or perhaps fatefully—the hospital was overwhelmed during the COVID crisis, so I wasn’t admitted. Instead, I was led to eventually try this new treatment that looked promising.

By January 2023, I was ecstatic to tell my neurologist that I had had zero migraine attacks in the preceding three months. Zero. I hadn’t taken any medication. I was migraine-free. I was cured.

The neurologist smiled, pleased with the results of the protocol.
But when I explained that it wasn’t just the protocol but meditation, she brushed it off:
“Yes, mindfulness can help.”

But it wasn’t mindfulness. It was deeper. And she simply wasn’t interested in hearing about it.

For 40 years, she had been working with people suffering from chronic migraines. And now, a patient was telling her she was cured—but she didn’t want to hear the story. She just kept doing her paperwork and moved on to the next patient.

I asked if I could share my experience with the board of the migraine unit. She gave me an email address to write to. I never heard back.

A migraine recovery, in a system paying 700 euros per injection per month for my treatment protocol, was simply not part of their framework.

So I carried on, knowing I had touched upon something that could be life-changing for others too—but also knowing I’d have to share it through different channels.

Conclusion

So here it is—what I’ve come to believe after years of self-observation and bodywork:
All chronic disease is emotional in nature.

I say this not from theory, but from lived experience—from the pain that nearly ended me, and from the healing that brought me home to myself.

This doesn’t mean that it’s easy to understand where chronic pain comes from and how to evolve out of it. It isn’t.

Understanding and tuning in with the body’s intelligence is challenging, and it’s not for everybody.