How to Alleviate Pain with Mindfulness | Simple Techniques for Chronic Pain Relief
13:22 Share

This episode is brought to you by Amazon. Sometimes the most painful part of getting sick is the getting better part. Waiting on hold for an appointment, sitting in crowded waiting rooms, standing in line at the pharmacy, that's painful. Amazon One Medical and Amazon Pharmacy remove those painful parts of getting better with things like 24-7 virtual visits and prescriptions delivered to your door. Thanks to Amazon Pharmacy and Amazon One Medical, healthcare just got less painful.

When you need mealtime inspiration, it's worth shopping fries for thousands of appetizing ingredients that inspire countless mouth-watering meals. And no matter what tasty choice you make, you'll enjoy our everyday low prices. Plus, extra ways to save, like digital coupons worth over $600 each week and up to $1 off per gallon at the pump with points. So you can get big flavors and big savings. Fries, fresh for everyone. Fuel restrictions apply.

It's very counterintuitive to pay attention to your pain. Many chronic pain patients say that that's the last thing they want to do is why would I want to pay more attention to my pain? I'm trying to get rid of it. And that's the paradox of mindfulness. Mindfulness allows us to be with our whole experience.

without judgment. So let's say there's a patient with some knee pain. It might be very acute, might be a dull pain. Let's say there's pain in the knee. With mindfulness, you can explore the regions of pain in the knee. If it's too much, you can back away and explore regions around the pain in the leg and explore the sensations around the knee.

with a sense of non-judgment or with a sense of courage, kindness, self-compassion. So you're exploring the areas without judgment, without judging it as good or bad, right or wrong, and really just sensing into it a little bit. If it's too overwhelming, we back out a little bit with a sense of courage to stay with our experience,

If it's too overwhelming, we can explore the other areas of the leg or breathing. What is it like to be breathing right now? So in a sense, you might be moving your attention away from the pain itself but still staying engaged with your experience in your body, which is really helpful over the long term. You're building this muscle to be able to stay engaged with your experience

When the pain has lessened, you can bring your experience back, your awareness back towards the pain and over time to the pain itself. So in the beginning of what we teach in our classes is we're not going straight to the pain right away. We need to build the muscles first to bring our awareness into our bodies, know what it's like to

bring awareness to our bodies without judgment and slowly start to explore the areas that are slightly uncomfortable, a little bit more uncomfortable, very uncomfortable. And over time, patients are able to actually almost embrace their pain with a sense of kindness. They're not welcoming more of it and they're not necessarily even accepting it completely, but they're acknowledging that it's there because it's there.

The more that they ignore it or pretend like it isn't there or the more that they feel trapped by it, the worse the pain gets over time. So we're engaging them into their real life experience to be able to sense into areas of discomfort more and more over time.

This episode is brought to you by the Mindfulness Teacher Certification Program. To become a certified mindfulness teacher, visit mindfulnessexercises.com/certify. So a lot of patients ask how long they should practice mindfulness for each day. There is no right or wrong, but we recommend about 10 minutes minimum. If you can only do one minute, then that's great.

but do it for as long as you can while staying engaged. The act of curiosity and enjoyment is an important part of it. The practice of mindfulness is not to necessarily make things feel better, but the more you can stay engaged with the practice with a sense of lightness or ease or relaxation, the better. And so if you can

practice for 10 minutes, 15 minutes a day, that will be enough to strengthen the muscles of mindfulness over time. We recommend that patients who are starting out practice for eight weeks before they decide whether or not to continue. This is like going to the gym. You may not see results right away if it doesn't work overnight.

We invite skepticism and we invite patients to try it for eight weeks at least three or four times a week, 10 minutes each time before they judge whether or not it's right for them. But I think 99% of all patients who go through this program over eight weeks find some benefit from the practice

and will continue to practice it. We found that 60% of patients who try it for one week want to do more of it. And so I think the findings of our beta testers are very encouraging for the long run of how much people are interested in trying this. There are a few examples of when mindfulness may not be appropriate. Those struggling with

acute PTSD, I would recommend trying bite-sized chunks of it along with guidance from a therapist. Those living with schizophrenia can be very challenging to bring your awareness to your actual experience. There may be a few other mental conditions that are sensitive around mindfulness practice.

But for the most part, those living with certain kinds of trauma, it's totally fine and very healing to practice mindfulness. In our program, we pay attention to those living with PTSD, especially by giving specific mindfulness practices for those living with PTSD.

so that if they either self-identify as having PTSD or if a doctor notes that the patient has PTSD, then they'll be prescribed certain exercises that help them to bridge where they are and where they need to be to start a fruitful mindfulness practice. And so we pay attention to that.

But by and large, mindfulness can be learned by just about anybody who has the courage to bring awareness to their actual experience. All you need is a little bit of focus, a little bit of courage to be with your experience, and that's it. So it's very quite simple.