The Mindfulness Solution to Pain: Step-by-Step Techniques for Chronic Pain Management

Your mood, thoughts, and emotions can affect your perception of pain and even your ability to heal. In fact, your past life experiences influence your current physical challenges: “your biography influences your biology.” While treatments like medication and physical therapy can be enormously beneficial to the body, to maximize pain relief, it’s necessary to take advantage of the mind’s healing abilities. This book offers a revolutionary new treatment approach, mindfulness-based chronic pain management, that helps you harness your mind’s power to quiet your pain and put you in control.

Mindfulness practice, which includes stationary meditations, movement meditations, mindful art, and other strategies, will help you:

• Understand how emotions and thoughts affect physical symptoms
• Reverse the debilitating effects of some chronic pain conditions
• Prevent pain from becoming chronic or long-term
• Lift the anxiety and depression that may accompany chronic pain

In The Mindfulness Solution to Pain, pain specialist and mindfulness based stress reduction (MBSR) teacher Jackie Gardner-Nix offers techniques proven to reduce chronic pain and suffering using mindfulness meditation exercises based on the pioneering work of Jon Kabat-Zinn.

Dr. Jackie Gardner-Nix is a physician and chronic pain consultant at St. Michael's Hospital and the Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, in Toronto, Canada. She is assistant professor in the department of anesthesia at the University of Toronto. Gardner-Nix has been on advisory boards for the Ontario College of Physicians and Surgeons, the Ontario Medical Association, the Ontario Ministry of Health, and a number of pharmaceutical companies. She is an accomplished speaker who has given many workshops and presentations internationally and has written publications on control of chronic non-cancer pain and on palliative care. Gardner-Nix was a Toronto Sun "Women on the Move" nominee in 1994 for her work in pain and symptom control.

Lucie Costin-Hall, MA, currently works with Jackie Gardner-Nix as a co-facilitator of mindfulness-based chronic pain management (MBCPM) workshops for patients at two teaching hospitals in Toronto and at numerous distant sites throughout Ontario via the interactive conferencing technology of the Ontario Telehealth Network (OTN). In the last five years, more than 2,000 chronic pain patients have participated in these workshops. Before discovering the mindfulness program, Costin-Hall was a chronic pain sufferer.