Learning how to practice Mindfuless and Movement for Pain Control can change how you feel about yourself, your pain, and your life. For example, the way you breathe influences your movement, behavior, and sense of well-being.
A life cannot be lived without some suffering, say the Yogis and Buddhists. We must suffer in order to let the light in, to awaken the sleeping ego and mind complex to the nature of the True Self: Pure Consciousness that remains ever awake.
How?
Everyone has or has had major problems at some point in their life. These times are for learning about ourselves, and if we are curious enough, also how to successfully steer through these times, becoming wiser and healthier.
This involves some effort on your part. Once you realise the value of doing it you can tackle your problems from a different perspective. Feeling more emboldened as you embody a type of self empowerment. The other alternative is to slide into fear. Let the fear take over. Any sense of empowerment vanishes and you feel there’s no answers or way out.
You become stuck in the mire of thoughts and confusion, which only cause anxiety; hence more suffering. You reinforce the suffering with thoughts of helplessness rather than embracing self empowerment and finding a pathway to freedom of some sort. It involves effort, as I said, but anxiety, worry and stress also require effort!
A snippet of my journey
For me, finding yoga was an immediate answer to the suffering of domestic abuse that had been a part of my life for so long. Suddenly, at my first class, I discovered the peace and stillnes within me, that I had lost during my childhood. I reconnected with my authentic Self – my Home. I rediscovered a sense of self empowerment; a joy, a relief, a strength, because through abusive relationships, one’s sense of self is lost, stolen away and replaced with feelings of uselessness and unworthiness. You live in fear devoid of empowerment.
All the different forms of abuse used will accumulate in your body and make you sick. Your issues are in your tissues. The trauma, the fear, worry, anxiety live in your body not just your head. This is what people don’t realise. Your body is in fight , flight or freeze a lot of the time just because of your thoughts.
The abuse that my body held for years, in part, led to arthritis in my hips. The lower part of the body where we shove down our emotions. There they gather, undealt with, unexpressed in the pelvic bowl. When I finally escaped the cycle of abuse I was peri menopausal. This is when I became aware of the osteoarthritis due to the pain. (It’s called menopausal arthralgia).
Healing Myself through Movement and Mindfulness Practices
I had already been practicing yoga for 10 years. However, to make life changes first requires awareness, then time, plus a lot of effort. It was the practice of yoga that empowered me with an awakening self awareness to extract myself from a life of abuse.
It is the practices of yoga that empowered me and I never gave up my Sadhana (personal practice) even when I developed painful, arthritis in my hips. As you can imagine it was an awful shock to me as a Yoga Teacher of several years to find myself in this critical situation straight after I had left this abusive life. As is often the case illness follows trauma. Our issues live in our tissues. However, I decided to keep teaching and I had some wonderful students back then who, when I offered them a way out, refused to go and in fact said, ‘Don’t stop we want to keep coming.’ and they still do to this day. Since then they have also gone through traumas, but they know to keep practicing because they watched me…loll. I’m so grateful to them as we have gifted each other.
The arthritis and it’s symptoms lived in my body for about 12 years, until I got the 2 hips replaced. I put the illness down partly to all the years of abuse from others and by taking accountability for not taking care of my body when I was young. I used the skills I had learned from the wonderful Teachers, that I’ve been blessed with, from The School of Body-Mind Centering to be creative with my practice. I learned to listen to how my body wanted to move rather than how my intellect said it should move. It felt so amazing, everything my body craved. It is wonderfully empowering to help yourself. To everyday manage to do something to help yourself without totally relying on Doctors, Hospitals and pills.
I learned how to loosen the stiffness by feeling into my body as I moved. I learned how I breathe influences my movement, behaviour and well being; I learned it takes time to befriend my body when it feels like it’s letting me down. I learned that meditation slowly allows my tissues to let go of the issues and that it’s ok to feel love and compassion for myself. In fact I must if I am to heal and move forward. I learned Meditation requires deep listening to the intelligence of the body’s cells, which are sending messages. There is much to learn if you are curious.
Practicing Awareness
To regularly meditate and practice breath awareness – to know and understand the value of this practice is essential to help heal yourself. This will enhance your life as it is now and well into the future. Your whole life will change for the better as your consciousness awakens and helps you work through your issues. You self study more, you awaken to the wonder of how the body responds when you practice awareness and meditations. This is self empowerment. I’m not dismissing medical help because obviously I needed the hospital and Doctor’s etc to have hip replacements and I am incredibly grateful for their life altering skills. Yoga practices helped me to manage the symptoms prior to surgery and made recovery after it was much easier.
Awareness during movement is vital. Yoga and somatic movement is not just copying a set idea of what a pose should look like. It’s about listening to what your body feels comfortable doing and allowing it to move with ease and flow, slowly with a telescopic awareness. Making friends with your body, creating this new relationship from the inside out, not the outside in. This is a difficult concept to grasp in this world of pushing harder, how you look comes first, and no pain no gain concepts, which are becoming somewhat outdated now, I have to say!! If you don’t listen or be body aware then injury happens.
Our energies get stuck if we don’t move in various ways. It gets stuck around the sore part. Then it gets worse and effects another part and so on until we reach a difficult place to come back from. Even if you are in pain there is always something you can do no matter how small a movement. Start very slow with small movements that allow you to feel what’s happening inside your body, not in your mind!
Somatics
Somatic movement is very small but very deep in the tissues. It’s like a telescope focusing in close to a specific feeling in the body. To feel the body can sometimes take time, like to make a new friend takes time. Through somatics you are making friends with your body not resisting it which is usually what happens with pain. In those times you probably feel your body is letting you down somehow.
Somatics requires you to look inside the body and feel or sense what’s moving and how you can repair the light flow of energy. Over a life time you develop bad habits of movement and break the natural sequence of muscle movement you’re born with. This happens through mental trauma, physical accidents, bad habits and age etc.
Somatics invites us to learn about fascia. A web like structure that holds the body together with its fine web like strings moving across each other. Droplets of water keeping it hydrated and so the body is free to move in any direction.
Somatic movement invites you to hydrate the fascia, by moving in different ways with ease and flow. The movements work deep into the tissues and muscles so we are still building strength through fluid movement. This keeps our muscles long and malleable rather than short and contracted.
Once awareness is learned the healing can start. This is all a study for the rest of your life, because suffering can happen unexpectedly throughout life. It’s not a 6 week course and cure all, for there is no such thing. Although it’s the most worthwhile thing you’ll ever do for yourself. What’s the most important thing in your life? Once you’re over 50 you’ll probably say your health. Health is wealth for sure.
Use it Or Lose It
Unfortunately, I can’t tell you how many people have come to me over the last 24 years of teaching and have met with a crisis or illness and tell me they can’t come for a while. Then sadly never reappear. I want to say no. This is when you need yoga most. This is what all the practice has been leading up to. This very moment of suffering.
So you must keep going and use all the skills you’ve learned, plus learn more. Learn with your home practice how you can move your own body safely. Attending class may not be suitable for a while but you must still keep a regular practice at home until your ready to come back, otherwise you drop off the path into lack of self empowerment again.
You become stuck once again in the mire of thoughts and confusion. This causes anxiety and leads to more suffering and damage to your health. You reinforce the suffering with thoughts of helplessness. Instead embrace self empowerment. Find a pathway yourself to freedom of some sort. It involves effort, as I said, but remember anxiety, worry and stress also require effort! It’s a fine line between being on the path and falling off it.
Trusting the Higher Self
Yoga is not just a form of exercise it works on your koshas meaning ‘sheaths’ in Sanskrit. Koshas are energetic layers of the body . They are often likened to a Russain nesting dolls. The first one is your food body, Annamaya Kosha, it is dense and visible. The other 4 are invisible, they are the Pranamaya kosh, (vital sheath), Manomaya kosha (mental sheath), Vijnanmaya kosha (intellect/intuitive sheath), and Anandmaya kosha (bliss sheath). The Anandamaya kosha is the little Russian doll in the centre.
As you practice yoga you will work through the layers of sheaths either consciously or unconsciously and things will start to subtly change over time.
Unfortunately a lot of people aren’t interested in this inner world of gems and diamonds. The amazing messages of wisdom and intelligence that can guide you to a life of good health and abundance. They don’t believe it because they can’t see it with their eyes. Their eyes and ears are only connected with the external world. There is no time for inner research on the most important machine in your life – your body and mind. Even when it breaks down. There is plenty of scientific research to support what the Sages said centuries ago. Yoga and mindfulness help you manage pain and can help heal your body.
Every tiny shift that occurs in your body, mind and life, whether it is physical, mental, emotional or spiritual is something to be grateful for. It is not to be merely dismissed as nothing. All of these little gems add up to become a beautiful chrystals. They build on one another and meanwhile the healing quietly takes place over time.
Yoga teaches that this moment is perfect in every way. It takes you on a path of adventure and discovery. The Bhagavad Gita says ”Yoga is a journey of the self, through the self, to the Self.” The English word heal comes from a Proto-Germanic word meaning ”whole, sound, safe.”. The act of healing is inherently an act of making whole or returning to a state of wholeness.
UPCOMING EVENT:
Mindfulness and Movement For Pain control Course
I’m offering a 6 week course. It takes place on Fridays: 6th February to 13th March 2026. The time is from 11.30 to 12.30
It is held in st John’s Church, Milenniuem Hall, The Rock, 161 Central Promenade, Newcastle, Bt33 0EU. This venue is warm and comfortable with plenty of parking available.
The cost is £60 for 6 weeks. Payment is due when you book your place and payment details will be supplied then. Please be aware that spaces are limited.
This is an investment in your health and well-being. You will learn many things to help you on your path to wholeness.
This course includes Mindfulness Practices And Movement, a mixture of both, it is a type of mindful movement called somatics. There’ll be 3 weeks of Mindfulness including meditation alternating with 3 weeks of somatic movement. Chairs are available.
If you are interested or have questions please message me on the contact form below or email:
janet@beyondmindfulnessni.com