It is easy, when my pain level is low, to imagine I will always be able to cope with my symptoms of TN without some sort of drug. And at least at this time, even when the pain is bad, I'm discouraged from trying the usual options of pharmacological treatment by the memory of how lousy I felt on some of them. They didn't really help anyway- they just made the pain feel like it was detached from me, but still detectable, in all of its intensity and duration, but like something that could be objectified. While that was as good as it got, concerning my experience of the pain on the medications I tried, it wasn't so great to regard a red traffic light, or a friend's emotional conversation, with the same intellectualized detachment. Those things in my environment I was supposed to respond to. But when I was on the drugs prescribed for my TN symptoms, ALL things in my environment were experienced in the same grey fog.
Fortunately, I'd practiced meditation for some time prior to taking the medications prescribed, and so I tried, again and again, to meditate during the episodes of TN. Yet that met with little success either. The pressurized burning pain on the right side of my head, which is a relatively mild, but frequent, symptom of my TN does subside with meditation. I can almost, but not quite, completely 'meditate it' rather than medicate it. That's possible, perhaps, due to the fairly uniform and moderate intensity of that sort of pain. It is more easily cradled by my full attention, and while cradled, it becomes bigger and bigger until I can't seem to stand it anymore, and then, poof, it changes and disappears.
Yet the same meditation techniques fail completely when focused on the often random nor regular-as-my-heart-beat excruciatingly painful ice-pic stabbing type of pain I have during the worst episodes. That's like trying to ignore a strobe light with your eyes open in a darkened room. You just can't hold an image in that condition long enough for it to habituate to extinction. So, I'm happy that on the one hand, meditation works under some conditions, but at a loss as to what to do when I'm most desperate for some relief from the pain.
Have others had success with meditation? Besides treating it with drugs, have people had success with other treatments? How about diet? Exercise? Yoga?