The Detour to Interrupt a Migraine Before It Began

Sometimes a session takes an unexpected turn — and that’s often where the most powerful work happens.

That was the case last week when a client arrived telling me they could feel a migraine coming on. This is someone who experiences migraines every few weeks, and having worked with migraine sufferers before, I know just how debilitating they can be. They’re not only physically exhausting, but deeply distracting too — especially when you’re trying to focus on therapeutic work.

Migraine sufferers often recognise the early warning signs, and that’s exactly what this client was noticing. Between sessions they had been doing reflective work around the original issue they came to see me for, and they were already a regular meditator. Because of that, we chose to take a short detour in the session and explore how meditation could be used to interrupt the migraine before it fully took hold.

We agreed on a simple plan for that evening: a guided visualisation focused on waking the next morning feeling clear, well, and reversing the unwanted sensations that were beginning to build . With that in place, we continued with the rest of the session as planned.

The following morning I was delighted to receive a message to say the migraine hadn’t arrived at all and so were they! They had woken up feeling completely fine.

Moments like this are a powerful reminder of what the mind is capable of when it’s given the right tools and the right focus.