Compassionate Awareness & Mindfulness for People in Pain: A Holistic Approach to Pain Management

• Early Bird Special! Save $25 if you register for this 5-week program before February 1, 2025, $150 after 2/1.

The lived experience of pain is felt on multiple levels: physical, mental-emotional, social, economic, and spiritual. In this 5-week program, we use an experiential approach (practices, teachings, exercises, discussions) to explore our relationship with pain and build a foundation of techniques that fuel our own inner strengths, capacities, and possibilities so that we can experience more joy and well-being in our lives and a sense of empowerment over our experience.

These 5 sessions are divided into the different ways we can live well: physically, with our body and breath; mentally and emotionally, with our thoughts, feelings, and emotions; spiritually, with our very place in this web of life; and socially, with how we relate to others. 

Each session introduces practical mind-body-spirit exercises, meditations, and teachings that support us in addressing the experience of chronic pain so that we thrive beyond pain.  Gentle mind-body-spirit techniques will be taught and practiced to balance our nervous system, modulate pain, grow self-awareness and self-compassion, and build resilience to the find calm in the storm. In each session, participants also have the opportunity to journal, share, and discuss with one another.

In this program we create a safe community in which we feel empowered to share the realities of experiencing an invisible illness. This community setting becomes a salve for the fear and distress we feel when experiencing chronic pain. 

5-Week Curriculum:

Week 1:  Essentials Ways to Resource Oneself by Centering in the Body and Breath are taught, including use of our breath and felt sense to find comfort in the body despite pain. These techniques settle the mind-body and nervous system as we learn to relate to our experience of pain in new ways. Week 1 also features a discussion about Pain Science because knowledge enables greater understanding of one’s physical body, how pain is created, and how it’s modulated, thereby creating a greater sense of control and empowerment over one’s experiences.

Week 2:  Taming Our Nervous System is a Resource for How we Relate to our Experience of Pain. This session teaches a bit more about the Nervous System and its relationship to pain and trauma. We will learn to further resource ourself by practicing techniques to down-regulate the nervous system and pain while learning new ways to perceive pain in order to decrease our fear of it. We also begin to explore movement and postures in this session.

Week 3: How We Think About Pain. Our third session teaches new ways to relate to the stress and anxiety we often experience with chronic pain. With attention, awareness, and presence, we practice how we might respond instead of react, and how to address safe versus unsafe messages from our minds and bodies as we learn how to reappraise our thoughts and beliefs. We again touch into practicing small movements and moving beyond fear of pain. Finally, we teach how to gently touch into the mental-emotional pain that arises alongside physical pain, gaining new insight with self-compassion.

Week 4: Our Emotional Relationship to Pain: In week 4, we continue to build on the foundation we have built in the first three sessions, especially session 3.  We deepen the practices and exercises relating to the mental-emotional-spiritual pain, including grief. These realms of our beings cannot be separated, in fact. Our very identities can become entangled with the experience of chronic pain and the mental-emotional suffering that accompanies it.  We practice with disentangling from the tight fist of identification with our pain.

Week 5: Our Relationship to Self and the Wider World.   It can be easy to get so focused on dis-ability, pain, and losses that we may not put our awareness on the abilities, strengths, and qualities that we already have.  It turns out that what we choose to pay attention to, and what we choose NOT to pay attention to, both can impact our wellbeing as much as any distressing life circumstances.   So, we consider how we can share our abilities, strengths, and qualities with others. We are wired to be social beings and in connection with one another and this also gives us a sense of purpose of being.  Specific exercises, practices and meditations will center around paying attention to, and growing our awareness of, pockets of goodness, without denying or resisting the chronic pain that might be present for us.