How Goldie's meditation therapy could help you beat chronic pain: The first in a three part series about the healing power of your own mind.

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Living with chronic pain can be intolerable. You feel desperate to do something, anything, to stop the pain but whatever you try seems to fail. And much as you try to distract yourself, one thought dominates: it hurts.
Being in pain is not only physical but also a mental battle against the painful sensations, wishing them away and trying to endure them.
But doctors now think that struggling like this actually makes your suffering worse. In fact, the latest medical advances show that accepting and exploring sensations of pain and illness can bring more powerful relief than the most commonly prescribed painkillers.

One high-profile practitioner of 'mindfulness' meditation to reduce chronic pain is actress Goldie Hawn

This approach constitutes a new treatment based on the ancient practice of 'mindfulness' meditation, which clinical trials show can reduce chronic pain by 57 per cent. Accomplished meditators can reduce their pain by more than 90 per cent.
One high-profile practitioner is actress Goldie Hawn. She has said that through mindfulness, 'we can move our set point of happiness'.
She set up a programme called MindUp under her Goldie Hawn Foundation to help children deal with stress and emotions and reduce their anxiety. This forms the basis of her book 10 Mindful Minutes, which teaches techniques such as mindful breathing and thinking.

 

Her faith in the procedure is backed up by science. Brain imaging studies show that mindfulness not only soothes the brain patterns underlying pain but alters the structure of the brain itself, so patients no longer feel such intense pain. Such is its effectiveness that pain clinics now prescribe mindfulness meditation to help patients with diseases such as cancer (and chemotherapy side effects), heart disease, diabetes and arthritis, as well as other conditions such as migraine, coeliac disease and multiple sclerosis.
Pain comes in two forms, primary and secondary, each with very different causes. Primary pain is the raw information sent by the body to the brain and arises from illness, injury or damage to the body.
Secondary pain is the mind's reaction to primary pain and is often more intense and long-lasting. This type is controlled by an 'amplifier' in the brain that governs the overall intensity of suffering. Through mindfulness meditation you can learn to differentiate between  the two - and turn off the latter.

Mindfulness soothes the brain patterns underlying pain, so patients no longer feel it so intensely

We do not passively feel pain. The brain processes the information  and teases apart the different sensations to try to find their underlying causes in order to avoid further damage to the body. In effect, the mind zooms in on pain looking for a solution. But this 'zooming-in' amplifies pain. Over time the brain fine-tunes itself to sense pain more quickly - and with greater intensity - in a futile attempt to avoid it. Brain scans confirm that people with chronic pain have more tissue dedicated to feeling its sensations.
Mindfulness soothes the circuits that amplify secondary pain by dampening an area of the brain called the primary somatosensory cortex (PSC), which contains a 'map' of the human body in which nerve cells fire corresponding to pain in a region of your body.
If you feel a lot of pain, this can be clearly seen in a brain scanner - it lights up like a Christmas tree.
The PSC's nerve firing is modulated by a great many other brain regions too, however, and they are affected by emotions, so anxiety or stress can prime the PSC and make it more sensitive to pain signals.

Now do the 'body scan'

The Body Scan nvolves focusing on all the different parts of the body

We call this ten-minute exercise The Body Scan, as it involves focusing on all the different parts of the body, wherever your pain may be. Do it twice a day in quiet surroundings.Lie on your back on the floor, place your hands on your stomach. Close your eyes. Relax until it feels as if you are sinking into the floorFocus on your breathing. Is it deep or shallow, smooth or ragged? Feel the rhythm in as much detail as you can.
Does the breath 'echo' in the pelvis? The lower back? How do you feel in these regions? Are they warm or cold? Do they ache?Move your awareness to your middle back, then the upper back, then the whole back. Focus on your shoulders, neck, face, arms, hands.
Move your awareness through your legs, starting at your hips. If it aches too much, gently broaden your focus so you hold the discomfort in a wider space - such as your entire legs rather than your thigh.
Spend a couple of minutes observing the whole body breathing as one.
Gently open your eyes, and  soak in the world around you. Try to carry this awareness with you as you continue with your day.

But if you are a meditator, with reduced stress and anxiety and better coping mechanisms, you get the initial pain spike but it fades to nothing very quickly - and this too can be seen on a brain scanner.
I used mindfulness after a paragliding accident seven years ago, when I fell 30ft on to a rocky hillside and the lower half of my leg was driven several inches through my knee and into my thigh. Through three major operations and two years of physiotherapy, I found it to be an extremely powerful painkiller and I'm convinced it also accelerated my healing.
Over the next three weeks I'll lead you through meditations from my new book. The programme was developed by my  co-author Vidyamala Burch, a mindfulness expert who runs a UK training centre and became a convert after two serious spinal injuries.
The exercises are based on solid science as well as our own experience and have helped tens of thousands of people worldwide. Try it today - above, we reveal a simple mindfulness exercise that you can do at home to ease chronic pain.

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