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- It is 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 wanna 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.
May 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,
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 overtime.
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 active 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 a 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,
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 over.
Let's find some benefit from the practice
and we'll continue to practice it.
We found that 60% of patients who try it for one week
wanna 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.
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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
is, 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, (mumbles) 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.
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