This book offers mindfulness practices specifically for those dealing with chronic pain, injury or any other health conditions that feel limiting. Both authors suffered significant injuries themselves and are no strangers to pain. A key element of mindfulness for pain is understanding primary and secondary pain, where primary pain is the direct, raw sensation caused by illness or injury, and secondary pain might be described as the mind’s reaction to this pain, it is very real and can be ‘more powerful and distressing’ than the primary pain, and is described as ‘suffering’. It takes a lot of courage to turn towards pain, but being with pain and accepting the direct experience of pain often allows us to see that pain is not fixed, permanent or ‘solid’ – but instead it ‘waxes and wanes much more’ than perhaps we initially thought and that like all experience, it changes ‘moment by moment’. The meditation practices offer a safe space to ‘tentatively’ explore the sensations of pain. We might discover that pain is made up of ‘different sensations too, hot, cold, tight, throbbing, or sharp and… that not all of them are completely unpleasant.’
This eight-week programme will help individuals to work with pain and negative thoughts around pain, and past participants have found that consequently they are able to improve their quality of life and even reduce medication in time.
There are some free meditations online if you want a taster. The book comes with a CD of all the meditation practices, or the Audible version has the practices in context in the chapters, and altogether at the end. Vidyamala Burch, living with spinal injury is also the founder of Breathworks.
