Learn how Mindfulness practice applied to chronic pain helps individuals understand how emotions, thoughts and behaviors affect physical symptoms, worsening or improving them.

Living Well With Chronic Pain is a supportive skills class for people living with chronic pain. Developed by a leading center for Integrative Medicine at Vanderbilt University, it is an effective, non-medical approach to managing chronic pain and often used in conjunction with medical treatments. In this course participants learn to become aware of thoughts and emotions shaping their pain experience and, in so doing, take advantage of the healing links between mind and body. This treatment approach helps harness the mind’s power to quiet pain, improve psychological flexibility and gain self-efficacy. Mindfulness practice applied to chronic pain helps individuals understand how emotions, thoughts and behaviors affect physical symptoms, worsening or improving them. Using new skills, they learn to reverse some of the disabling effects of many chronic pain conditions, while also lifting anxiety and depression symptoms that often accompany chronic pain.

Living Well With Chronic Pain

LWCP Session 1 Home Practice

Guided Practice:  5 minute Awareness of Breath

Guided Practice:  20 minute Awareness of Breath

The focus of this session is to learn and explore strategies and skills based on the principles of “mindfulness“ for dealing with pain and the many negative effects of pain such as depression, anxiety, hopelessness, loss of productivity and purpose and difficult relationships.

Introduction to Mindfulness for Pain:  A New Way of Paying Attention

LWCP Session 2 Home Practice

Body Scan

This session focuses on bringing mindful awareness to the body, breathing and letting body sensations be just what they are without trying to change them.

Mindfulness of the Body:  Practicing Letting Be & Letting Go

LWCP Session 3 Home Practice

This session focuses on letting go and the idea of non-striving. By practicing noticing striving, restlessness, bracing and tension, participants begin to get the idea that wanting things to be different, resisting reality, can cause more stress, negativity and less creativity.

Mindfulness, Pain and Sleep:  Wandering Mind, Non-Striving and Sleep

LWCP Weekly Session 4 Home Practice

LWCP Unhelpful Habits of the Mind Session 4 Handout

This session focuses on moving more deeply into thinking and looks at how thoughts can affect striving, resisting, stress and contribute to an increase in pain.  It explores the top ten tunes of the mind, pain stories and how thinking affects the body and pain.

Mindfulness and Thoughts:  Pain Stories and the Top Ten Tunes of Your Mind

LWCP Session 5 home practice

This session continues the exploration of pain by bringing mindful awareness to the body with movement and breath. It will focus more about the relationship between pain and movement.

Mindfulness, Pain and Movement:  Moving With Greater Awareness

LWCP session 6 Home Practice

Chronic Pain Handouts - Pleasant and Unpleasant Events

This session will dive deeper into how to bring mindful awareness to eating and daily activities. It begins to explore how being more aware mindfully can nurture releases and small joys.

Mindfulness All Day:  Awareness to Eating and Daily Activities

LWCP session 7 Home Practice

By this session, there is an established, solid foundation of mindful awareness that enables participants to learn how to use mindfulness skillfully to deal with difficult emotions.

Mindfulness and Emotions:  Difficult Emotions and Pain

LWCP session 8 Home Practice

This session moves from turning more deeply towards experiences of suffering—emotional and physical—to facilitating healing by nurturing self-compassion.

Mindfulness and Emotions:   Self-Regulation and Self-Compassion

LWCP session 9 Home Practice

This session focuses on bringing mindfulness skills into relationships and communication.

Mindfulness and Relationships:  Pain and People Stress

This session focuses more on the moving forward aspect of managing pain. Now that participants have acknowledged where they are and learned to turn towards experiences with a different kind of awareness, is it possible to envision moving forward into a best self, no matter what pain or other hindrances may arise?