Free Download! Transforming Our Understanding of Pain: Causes, Perception, and The Role of Yoga

The traditional medical understanding of pain for hundreds of years has been a simple linear understanding: Pain results when something in the body is damaged or deteriorated through the natural process of wear and tear.

In recent years, however, this understanding has dramatically changed. We now know that the experience of pain is not a simple 1:1 relationship between damaged physical structures and the resulting pain signals. Rather, pain is a multi-dimensional, non-linear process involving the entire nervous system and numerous factors influencing the sensitization to pain.

In this free download, Neil Pearson and Shelly Prosko discuss the factors involved in long-term or even chronic pain issues and the various ways in which yoga can provide relief. Normally, pain results only from potentially (or actually) damaging stimuli to tissues. This pain is an essential early warning device that helps protect us from the dangerous environment we find ourselves in.

However pain can also develop into hypersensitivity, in which pain thresholds are lowered so that stimuli that would normally not produce pain now begin to, and at the same time, responsiveness is increased, so that noxious stimuli produce an exaggerated and prolonged pain. In cases of pain hypersensitivity, the pain may persist for a long time even after the actual physical ‘cause’ that triggered it is long gone.

Neil and Shelly discuss the mechanisms involved in this, and the role that neuroplasticity--the malleable nature of brain functioning--can play in this process, for better and worse. They also talk about how and why yoga in some cases can provide the perfect tools to enhance somatic awareness and help 'reset' the body's pain response.

Check out Neil and Shelly's course on YogaUOnline: Yoga, Neuroplasticity and Pain: New Hope for Self-Empowerment and Healing.