I thoroughly support everything Roy writes here. He wrote that he is concerned you might think yoga is "woo," so I thought i'd add more scientific details here.
My doctoral research in clinical psychology was on the effects of mindfulness on chronic pain (moderate to the most severe pain). The research showed (a) mindfulness works for reducing any kind of pain; and (the most relevant for this article) (b) the degree that you can shift your mindset will determine the degree to which pain is reduced.
For those who are utterly opposed to ANY mind-body research (there's no scientific reason to be opposed, but I'd like everyone to be able to listen to this), feel free to completely ignore the word "mind" and just consider this a brain-body effect.
Ronald Melzack first developed his 3-part pain theory Approximately 50 years ago.
Virtually all the research I’m familiar with has confirmed it.
Here’s a very simple picture of how it works:
You feel pain in your lower back.The pain is not perceived in the lower back however.
Nerve messages are sent up the spine to the brain.
The brain INTERPRETS those messages and that interpretation is what you experience.
What makes up that interpretation?
(1) The physical sensations in the back
(2) A complex emotional reaction to those sensations
(3) an even more complex set of mental or “cognitive” reactions which includes virtually all experiences of pain in your life, your subconscious assessment of problems that your brain assumes may occur due to the sensations, and a host of other “stories” that your brain is constantly constructing to interpret not just the experience of pain but virtually every moment of your life.
The way we ATTEND to these sensations is largely responsible for the intensity of the pain we experience.our customary mode of attention (the kind we learned painfully in school when our teachers reprimanded us, telling us to PAY attention) is one which grips whatever we’re attending to.
Because we so often do NOT want to pay attention to what we’re experiencing – in school, at work, and many other places – we develop a habit of fighting with ourselves to attend.
What happens when we learn a little mindfulness but don’t understanding this tense way of attending? We do the same thing when watching our breathing, or if a clinician is coaching us at a pain clinic, when watching our pain sensations.
We struggle, we tensely focus on it, we try to control our attention, and either nothing changes or we feel worse.
Instead of fighting, if you become interested – I mean really interested, to the point of being fascinated – with the flow of sensations, noticing how they constantly change rather than make up one block of “pain,” with the ever changing flow of emotional responses, and the surprisingly interesting layers of stories, and memories, and beliefs, and assumptions, and distorted perceptions and biases that our brains bring to the experience of pain –
JUST THIS ACT OF ATTENDING WITH INTEREST, WITHOUT ATTEMPTING TO CONTROL, AND SEEING THE WHOLE EXPERIENCE IN A RADICALLY DIFFERENT WAY –
is enough to tell the brain, “you can relax, you don’t need to keep producing the painful sensations as much because they’re being attended to and dealt with.
Just attending in this calm, effortless, interested way has been shown, now (I did my research about 25 years ago) in thousands of studies, to substantially reduce or even eliminate pain.
And you don’t have to practice mindfulness.
If you do yoga in the same gentle, relaxed way, noticing your experience without trying to change or manipulate, this will bring about the same effect.
www.RememberToBe.Life