Another idea that you might want to try is listening to music that you find relaxing. Let the music wash over you and when you let go, imagine it going through the areas of concern. Don’t focus tightly, more like wave on the beach. Music is usually less intense then direct meditation. Also, if you feel the need to cry, let it come. We all need a good purge every once and a while.
Peace & Love.
Also, wind and kundalini are just different terms for the same thing…in spinal breathing practice, you will be channeling the wind to the third eye area (not the crown), balancing the energy along the spinal nerve. Attention goes from your base up the spine and through the brain to between your eyebrows, and back down…up and down with awareness. The buildup in your head should start to decrease as you progress, and become more ecstatic throughout the body…
I wish you well 
Hi Meditation Casualty and welcome to the AYP Forums…
I’ve been silently following along with the conversation here and I felt drawn to chime in just now. But I have an inclination that what I am about to say you may not like.
I would suggest that you honestly inquire into whether or not you actually want to be rid of these symptoms. I know you SAY you do, but do you really? It appears to me, that you are very much identified with these symptoms (it would be very hard not to be after going through this for 18 years straight)… that this headache has become part of “who you are” and that (at least subconsciously) letting go of it may cause some fear to arise. I say this only because you remind me of myself… I have been in, what appears to me, to be a very similar situation in the not so distant past. There were some things in my past (namely addictions or the status of being an addict) that I subconsciously was identifying myself with and did not want to let go of. I wanted to be able to call myself “a recovering drug addict.” Letting go of this label filled me (subconsciously) with fear. I hear you saying over and over again, “Nothing works, I am always going to be afflicted with this curse.” In fact, your very forum ID “Meditation Casualty” alludes to this “I’m a victim” mentality that seems to permeate your posts. I would suggest, that in order to overcome this, you are going to have to let go of the victim mentality and ALLOW yourself/choose to move on. The mind (both the conscious and the subconscious mind) is extrememly powerful and it dictates our living experience. This is why yoga (meditation in particular) is so effective in bringing us to a place where suffering does not fill every crack of our experience… it brings the subconscious mind into the conscious realm so that we can consciously create our reality instead of falling victim to it over and over again.
Again, I suggest that you honestly inquire into whether or not you truly want to be free of this headache and then go from there depending on the answers that arise from that inquiry.
Hope this wasn’t too brash.
Love!
Hey again. I’ve been thinking more about your dilemma, and I still get the impression that relaxation of tensions is the way to relief here.
The problem with relaxation, as you’ve noticed, is that our minds get in the way and frustrate our efforts to relax. They are tricky like that. Tell someone not to think of an elephant, they think of an elephant. Tell someone they are already enlightened, their mind tells them they aren’t. Tell someone to relax, they tense up.
I think one of the Big Ideas behind all the spiritual practices we do is to subvert this very tendency of the mind. Instead of telling someone to ‘realize you are enlightened,’ we tell them, go meditate and let your inner silence grow. And instead of saying ‘go meditate’, we say let your attention rest on this mantra as best as you can, and meditation just happens.
So I like jeff’s suggestion to listen to music. No focus, no trying really hard to relax, just gentle attention to the music and your body. I also think working on the body with massage, tai chi, or yoga asanas would be good. No direct focus on the mind or head unless you feel like it - just releasing tensions wherever you can.
But I think what will help you more than any technique, is learning to understand the interplay between our mind, our body, and our Self. Something Kirtanman said in another forum really struck me. “Our true nature is release”. If we can learn to accept our tensions and our pains (and our pleasures), let them arise and pass, then almost the whole race is run. I think what has helped me the most was actually forgetting about the mind and focusing on being attentive to the body. I realized that the mind, the thoughts I had, were springing from the body.
Next time you are having a strong feeling or emotion, scan your body and look for tension. See if that tension is related to the feeling you are having. Then try to be fully aware of that tension so that there is no longer any thought of “I’m angry” or “I’m nervous” but just the bodily sensation. This went a long way towards helping me find inner silence.
So, I guess I’m saying several things here. 1) Take your time with learning to relax. Tensions that have been cemented over 18 years won’t go away at once, but they can be undone. 2) Be intentional about it. Learning how to relax, how to unbind yourself from thoughts, fears, contractions, aversions to pain is your path. And it’s a really good one too. If you need meditation, the time for it will come, but if you’ve learned how to relax into silence, you’re a lot of the way there.
All the best,
John
I thank you all for your additional input. A few things. I basically “made my peace” with this around two years into it. I basically woke up one day and felt that I needed to just get on with life and live with it as best I can.
That’s been what I’ve more or less been doing for all these years, only occasionally looking into a possible solution. A recent event in my life prompted me to start looking into it again seriously. I started undergoing chiropractic sessions again, for example. I’ve tried acupuncture again and I’m trying other things. I can’t afford any of this but I have to give it a try.
I apologize for appearing to whine on this board, with this ‘woe is me’ attitude. I apologize. Nobody likes a downer. I stopped talking about it years ago and close confidants of mine don’t even know about it.
It’s just that the pressure is unbearable at times and there’s nothing I can do about it. It can be frustrating beyond words. I can’t pretend otherwise, and yes, CarsonZi, I really do want a solution. I know what you mean, I really do, but I am more than willing to surrender my identification with this.
A quick point. Spinal breathing seems like a potentially worthwhile practice. I tried it but I have great difficulty orchestrating the actual practice, coordinating the deep breathing with a complex visualization. I have trouble with visualization anyway. It seems rather difficult. Anyone else have trouble with this?
Don’t worry about visualising. I can’t visualise for toffee, and I’m still doing spinal breathing.
As long as your awareness is going up and down between the third eye and root, in time with your breathing - it will work.
Stick with that or add mudras and bhandas if you feel like them in the future.
Hey MC, no worries…you are at the right place
Regarding spinal breathing, it helped me to visualize for quite a while. But visualization is not necessary. If you can’t do it currently or it is not helpful, try to do the practice by focused attention and/or feeling. It is focused attention that is most important, IMO…when I was starting, I visualized a point of white light. So I placed my awareness on the point and followed it up and down. Before long, I started feeling the energy moving with my awareness and breath. So now, I could choose to focus attention on visualizing, feeling, both, or simply move awareness…
We all visualize sometimes, probably more often than you realize… Think of a pink elephant 
You might be getting mixed up with terminology. You could consider it to be imagining…
Absolutely, i have the same problem. Of course deep meditation should take precedence over spinal breathing, but if the problem is energy getting caught in the head, SB can help.
Don’t worry about the visualization. Just follow the instructions, take it easy and do the best you can. Don’t do a whole lot of it as it is powerful. Practice consistently, and visualization will improve with time, and it is not important, only the consistency is. If the head pressure gets worse, quit for a while, and read about self pacing. Best of luck.
meditation causality do you hear any ringing/buzzing/humming accompanied by this head pressure ?
No, there are no other symptoms at all. Just the constant pressure.
Hi MC,
I had lived with pressure in my head for a long time too. It would feel like there was a something growing in there and would feel like my head is going to burst.
I had come to AYP with this. Self pacing, spinal breathing and meditation helped with this a lot. I would do 5 min spinal breathing and 20 min meditation once a day for about 6 months (the once a day was more of a time constrain than self pacing issue). That helped me a lot. But I still went through phases of excess crown pressure. Any time this happened, I realized I was either doing too much or practices like spinal breathing were creeping into my day. I had to make conscious effort to not do practices in between sessions. Also staying away from crown activating mantras like “shree” helped.
The thing that helped the most was when someone at the forum suggested, any time I feel the pressure in my head, to see if I am thinking… and when I realize I am thinking, to bring my attention down, into my heart or even lower into my solar plexus. Then think from there. We don’t realize how much we live in our heads.
So any time you realize you are in your head, any time you consciously realize the pressure in your head, bring your attention into your lower body… take the attention away from the head. I have suggested this to a few others, and most have been helped by this a lot.
Also, think ground… whenever you become aware of the excess feeling in your head, consciously move that pressure down and out of your feet. Or at times, even touching the ground with yours hands and saying, “ground the excess” or “what is not mine, ground” will do the trick.
I have not read all the replies here, and sorry if someone has already said all this to you.
Hope the pressure subsides soon.
Wish you all the best!!!
Shanti, Thank you for your suggestions. Unfortunately, redirecting my awareness has no effect whatsoever on the pressure. Ignoring it or placing my awareness on another part of the body does not influence it in the least. Nor does my mental state have any effect on it at all. Nothing. My thoughts, intentions or desires do not seem to matter.
Any kind of meditation or deep breathing or quieting of the mind only make it worse. The pressure only grows more intense. That’s why I’m reluctant to pursue some of the techniques suggested here.
It’s just too powerful, like a torrent of energy running in the wrong direction. I know the energy runs up the spine. I just wish I could reverse the pattern. On the 3 occasions that I was able to get rid of it, albeit temporarily, direct physical manipulation was involved. Why those methods only worked once, I wish I could say. But it seems that only some kind of blunt physical manipulation that can release this energy may work. I don’t know.
Keep trying the practices. Every day, once or twice a day. Sounds like asanas that stretch and open your neck and back would be of benefit. And I agree with E-fish about the spinal breathing. It redistributes energy flooded areas.
In your extreme case I think it would be OK to dive into an abbreviated asana/spinbal breathing/meditation routine right away. Something like:
3 minutes
A few sets of standing neck rolls in each direction. Spinal twisting - lock your hands in front of your body and swing the torso back and forth. Plow pose. Rolling back and forth on the back, with knees hugged to chest.
3 minutes
Spinal breathing as described in the lessons.
3 minutes
Deep meditation as described in the lessons. Easy with it. It should be like taking a stroll in the park. A time to relax from your regular barrage of thoughts, if you want.
Make a daily effort to do that, even if you can’t complete it every day. The practices have a cumulative effect. It might not be “working” day 1, or day 10, but by day 100 something will be happening.
I had a wild kundalini experience going on a daily basis when I began AYP. It was a constant daily presence, sometimes I couldn’t sleep at night, sometimes I thought I was dying, exploding, etc, etc. And it is now a tame, mundane, even banal experience. It is still there, the same sensations, energy movements, and pressures. But it just doesn’t bother me at all anymore. Kundalini symptoms are now just a bodily function. It’s kind of like farting (LOL) there’s a little pressure, and it releases, and I go on like nothing happened.
Whenever somebody is “overloaded” with energy, we recommend doing various “grounding” techniques. Regular physical exercise, physical activities in general, eating a heavier diet, getting involved in fun/calming/non-spiritual activities, and sexual release. Maybe none of those have helped before.
I could understand if you never want to meditate again, but that is the advice you will get here, from most all of us. That’s why I agree with E-fish that spinal breathing is the main ticket for you - it balances the meditation and redistributes the energy throughout the body. So try out the practices, with an emphasis on the spinal breathing - but keep a small dose of meditation in there too. They work together. Meditation energy gets redistributed with the spinal breathing. Your head is flooded with meditation energy, needs to get redistributed. Maybe even doing breathing up the spinal channel, and down the front channel could be useful (some people, including me, like it even though it’s not in the main lessons). It feels like the energy can move down the front easier sometimes. Although nowadays it is moving every which way.
One other thing that I just thought of (and maybe you’ve tried it already) is a class of drugs called anxiolytics. I used one called Lorazepam when I had panic disorder a while back. Instantly aborted any panic attack. They basically make it impossible not to relax. That, or some kind of muscle relaxant might do the trick. They’re very addictive, and not a permanent solution, so be warned. But it could be useful just to feel fully relaxed for a period of time to break the cycles.
Good luck MC!
Dear MC, give yourself a break!
You’ve had a lot of good advise here from all paths and approaches, everything have been covered. You just need to stick to someone’s advise and follow up with him. IMHO Shanti has given you the best advise here, plus she’s been through it all so I’d suggest you go on and follow up with her and she will guide you through and help you out if you are willing to help yourself.
Time for you to take responsibility and forget about the passed and let go of your preconceived notions about this won’t work and that will make things worse… Live in the now it’s all what you’ve got… And take the advise of the good people who have put themselves out here for you.
Wish you a safe recovery!
Love,
Ananda
Hi MC,
I suggest if you try spinal breathing that you try it reversed, bringing it downwards rather than bringing energy upwards.Don’t stop at the root though, do as Shanti suggested and continue into the earth and down to the centre of the earth.
If you feel you have tried everything have you considered trying japa.Try using japa witht the eyes open and concentrate on simply repeating the mantra without any thought of samadhi or energy movement.I suggest you try a small amount daily and note any positive or negative effects.You will be better using as mala so that you keep awake.
Another idea you might try is to find an energy practicioner to ground you as you obviously have too much energy ungrounded and in your head.
L&L
Dave
Meditation casualty
Do you feel the energy moving any where? at the base of the spine / perineum or in the spinal tract?
It’s difficult to tell if the constant head pressure is truly from kundalini. Kundalini rises from the base, travels up the spine and reaches the crown. There may be pressure then in the head from energy going up too forcefully without venting.
Given that this problem does not really respond to meditation practices and has been relieve by physical maneuvers I am more inclined to think that it may be a physical problem. I am studying to be a doctor and have experienced kundalini myself. When I first read you comments, I though this could definitely be kundalini, but the fact that it has persisted for so many years with no relief from spiritual practices, makes it likely to be physical.
I don’t know you whole constellation of symptoms but this could be persistent cervicogenic migraine. Cervicogenic refers to what the location is, meaning the base of the skull. Migraines can be throbbing, pressure like and they can be very persistent. If this is indeed a physical problem, be assured that can be controlled. You don’t have to take aspirin to control the headache, there are many excellent treatments now available that can basically reduce the frequency of the headaches. Some doctors inject botox into the muscle to cause relaxation of that area too.
Hope this helps,
Peace and may Shakti guide you
I am VERY puzzled by your symptom meditation casualty.
As I’m a principal computer engineer in my false life, I have learned very good troubleshooting
skills, and i’m nearly as stubborn as death. I think that all of us would love to help you.
First off, we need to determine whether this is kundalini at work, or it is not.
Please answer all the questions carefully:
- Do you have any other symptoms in your body, under any circumstances whatsoever? If so, what?
- Do you feel surges up your spine at any time, or is your inner world pretty constant?
- Is there any link between your sexual activity and your inner state / pressure in our skull?
It is physically impossible for any living person to “waste vital essence at will” and not have
it dramatically affect Kundalini. If you do this, and have no repercussions, it can’t be
Kundalini. - Do you have any mood swings? What causes them if you do?
- Do you ever perceive light within yourself or another?
- Do you ever feel conflicting personality patterns? Do you ever feel that you have a soul mate?
- Do you ever feel a “presence” outside of your body?
- Are there any abnormalities in your appetite?
- Do you have any aversion to water touching your skin?
- Do you feel a little better after eating heavy meals?
- Have you ever gotten a nerve conductivity test? This could be a pinched nerve.
- So, you never experience symptoms of higher consciousnes? Does the pressure make that impossible?
- If you workout to the point of exhaustion, is there any change?
- Do you feel tingling in your legs?
- Does your symptom affect your sleep?
- Other than your symptom, do you feel like a regular person?
- Who do you discuss your symptom with?
- Have you explained this to your partner (if you have one)? What is their reaction.
- Are you on the autistic spectrum, or have any native american blood?
- Do you have ANY medical history? Any tiny thing could be the clue we need.
What puzzles me, is that negative symptoms are always “nailed up” and long term,
only because of a psychological reason, or a very bizarre medical defect.
I’m also very dubious about the ‘wind’ explanation. What people call prana is pretty docile
stuff, unless whipped up by Kundalini, an advanced technique, spiritual posession (yes,
I have encountered that), or other factor. If prana was this hostile for the average person
for no apparent reason, humans would now be extinct or living in wood huts.
I’d almost bet your lumbar is out of position or your coccyx is damaged. You may simply
have benign intercranial hypertension (have you had your cerebral spinal fluid pressure
tested?) This just does not feel like kundalini.
But i’m very interested in your reponses.
Kind Regards,
Kevin Cann
Sounds like too much heat rising.
It’s the first law of thermodynamics. The element of fire rises and the element of water flows downward.
The trick in Yoga is to reverse these - to make water rise up above the fire, so that the fire transforms the fluids into bindu - ambrosial drops of nectar.
Always keep the tip of the tongue touching the back of the teeth. This will close the energy circuit of two particular nadis/meridians (not ida or pingala) and bring the heat downward once it reaches the head.
How is your diet? Try to follow a Pitta reducing diet - this will reduce the heat in the body.
If you have no opposition to milk, that would be a good option, though do no take it in the evening as it will stimulate sexual dreams.
If you can find the herb Shatavari, that is a prime cooling agent, but also has the benefit of increasing the quality of fluids, both sexual and Yogic. This will give something for the fire to simmer.
Sun and the moon, fire and water, yin and yang - these are the two dynamic forces to be kept in balance.
Milk and Shatavari both increase the elements of water in the body and will subdue the fire from creating unwanted disturbances in the upper portion of your body.
Hope this helps.
hello i truly can relate to what you’ve been going through. I have had constant head pressure for 30+ years. At times i’ve been convinced i can’t take it another day and surely this must be ending soon… it never has. i try to embrace it as part of me now. occasionally on a very few occasions it has abated for a few hours but then returns. If I can remember to concentrate my attention on the opposite side i feel the pressure on i can feel a movement of energy. I can understand your desperation. I have wondered so often if i will die before i understand what is going on.
My experience began long ago when i had a spontaneous Kundalini awakening. the pressure began gradually but steadily has built up over the years. Meditation in the traditional sense doesn’t help me either. It was heartening to read about someone else going through the same thing. I am an artist and sometimes wonder if my creative energy contributes to this phenomenon. I was very distracted with the pressure this evening and i thought: perhaps i can find others to talk to who are also experiencing this. so i googled: Kundalini head pressure awful and voila this site appeared. I go through times when i really believe i cant take this another day (like now) and then i realize i am in an accepting mode. I do have many questions but not many answers as like you i am the host for this energy. 
Hi MC,
Well seems you have had a ton of suggestions on what to do, who knows what will work? I can tell you if it were me, two things I would do:
1- Pray to the universe for an answer, and listen very intently to my heart until the day I hear the way and it is clear.
2- Daily (physical) asanas practice until the pain is gone (it may never?), either in classes, on my own or both.
Why? Because you have had relief from physical adjustments/ stretches in the past. Even if they didn’t work again, it doesn’t mean the answer isn’t from steady changes to your physiology. Seems like hints to me. Maybe I have missed reading above that you have done this in the past, but dedicating the next couple of years to this could be your answer. Worse case scenario you are healthier, more flexible and the energy flows a little more freely through your body.
I would also avoid meditation. Only because you have strong association to it being the root cause. Maybe one day you will feel an inner calling to do it again, until then, the pain is physical, so keep the solution as physical as possible.
It’s entirely possible that your attention on the issue is sustaining it as well. Also, I am assuming you have explored the medical routes and ruled any ailments as a cause.
Prayers for you, wishing you all the best!