Pain is a multifaceted response to a perceived or actual threat to your well-being and safety. New research sheds light on how the body and mind responds to pain and from that understanding comes new ways of managing pain and the pain response. Our understanding of how the brain processes pain has dramatically changed over the past 20 years. This new understanding of how the brain changes over time is called neuroplasticity. This ability to change allows both adaptive and maladaptive responses to adverse events. Understanding this also provides hope that the brain and its response to pain can be affected by mind-body practices like yoga.
The International Association for the Study of Pain defines pain as a sensory and emotional experience that depends on the evaluation of many types of input: sensing things inside and outside the body, memory, emotions and thoughts.
The individual experience of pain is real and reflects the brains interpretation of the injury and what it means in terms of threats to life and limb. A scratch on the leg is rapidly evaluated by the brain to be uncomfortable but not life threatening. But if that same scratch is linked in the brain to a similar sensation felt in the past that was actually due to a snake bite, then the brain will rapidly decide that this could be something serious and dangerous and will cause intense painful sensations (1).
Chronic pain changes the brain so that larger amounts of the brain become involved in the sensation of pain and the body’s response. Research is showing that mind-body practices such as yoga can reduce pain and improve quality of life. Carson, et al (2) showed in a pilot study that fibromyalgia symptoms and functional deficits improve after eight weekly yoga classes that included gentle stretching poses, meditation, breath work, and discussion. McGonigal (3), in her book Yoga for Pain Relief , describes how yoga helps people unlearn the chronic pain response and triggers the neuroplasticity of the nervous system in order to re-engage the built-in healing responses.
Yoga for chronic pain uses all of the tools in the yoga tool kit: breath and body awareness, compassionate stretching and slow movement, meditation, and education about pain and yoga philosophy.
1Butler, D., Moseley, L. (2013). Explain Pain. Adelaide, Australia: Noigroup Publications.
2Carson, J., Carson, K., Jones, K., Lancaster, L., & Mist, S. (2016). Mindful yoga pilot study shows modulation of abnormal pain processing in fibromyalgia patients. International Journal of Yoga Therapy (26), 93-100.
3McGonigal, K. (2009). Yoga for Pain Relief . Oakland: New Harbinger Publications.
