How meditation helps your pain
Mindfulness meditation does not make chronic pain disappear; it transforms your relationship with your pain.
Meditation allows a person to accept their condition and to respond to it with less stress and emotional reactivity and mental tension.
At Pathway to Mindfulness, we use this formula with our clients:
Suffering = pain + worry
It is the worry component that we help through insight mindfulness meditation. How? During an episode, our clients learn to not dwell on the past, thinking about how their condition has affected their bodies and lives, nor are they projecting into the future, about how bad they are about to feel. They are living in the present, experiencing what is happening to their bodies without past baggage or future stress.
A word about the worry component. For some it is not worry that causes suffering. It is any emotion — fear, helplessness, despair, you fill in the blank — that causes the suffering.
Those who practice mindful meditation experience fewer limitations because of their condition, the severity of their pain reduces, and many enjoy and participate in life. Many find they can greatly reduce – or often do away – with their medications.
Who we work with and how we work
Our clients range from the young to the old, and have a myriad of issues caused by an assortment of conditions, including spinal and brain injuries, rheumatoid arthritis and multiple sclerosis.
Our sessions are 50 minutes each, held on eight consecutive weeks. We find that after eight weeks, our clients develop a strong insight mindfulness meditation practice that lasts a lifetime.