Dear Friend,

If the time is right for you to receive guidance and support while you learn, and to join a group of like-minded colleagues sharing experiences and insights along the way, this is the right place for you to begin.

We know that pain has been medicalized and ‘psychologized’, leaving many health professionals wondering if pain care is outside their scope and many yoga teachers believing they need to become physiotherapists or counsellors to help individuals when pain persists.

We know that reconceptualizing pain can be highly beneficial for health professionals, especially when they know a system like yoga, which allows translation of pain science into clinical outcomes.

Pain science education and yoga are beneficial for people in pain. We believe that when you put them together, even more people in pain will find their way to less pain, better ease of movement and improved quality of life.

Neil comes from a background in athletics, physical education and physiotherapy, throughout which there was an emphasis on pain as primarily an indication of injury or irritation to the body. At times this was difficult to reconcile. Then when he first practised yoga he was blessed to have teachers who not only taught asana/postures and pranayama/breath practices, but who also passed on yoga teachings and philosophy. He quickly realized the vast overlap and similarities between what he was practising in yoga and what his treatment team was providing to people in an inter-disciplinary pain management program. In retrospect this makes so much sense since yoga can be considered as a system with which to decrease suffering. So inspired with this, starting in 2008 Neil began retreats for people in pain. Feedback confirmed that people practising yoga benefited from reconceptualizing pain, and people who had reconceptualized pain, benefited from learning and practising yoga.

Lisa comes from a background of Kriya Yoga and her call to service was to help those who suffer. Using Yoga as a way to help others to help themselves, she was naturally drawn to Kriya Yoga Seminary becoming ordained as Swami Swarupananda in 2009 and since then has used her expertise serving the emerging field of Yoga Therapy. When studying to become a Yoga Therapist, having been a person with pain for over a decade already, Lisa was “divinely inspired” by how merging “all of yoga with understanding pain science” could serve her very well and allow her to adjust, adapt, and acclimate her plan as necessary, in creating a sustainable platform of therapy for her own personal pain care. Yoga teaches us we need to remember that we are whole, and that our suffering is changeable, and therefore, so is our pain …and so does pain science. Lisa was correct about her divine inspiration, has lived well with pain for over two decades using these skills as her medicine, and is now calling on all yoga teachers and therapists to become pain care aware so they too can help make an impact on pain in society with our shared platform of merging yoga and pain science.

We need a change in our understanding of pain, our understanding of people in pain, and our understanding of pain care. Changing one does not necessarily lead to changes in the others. Once we begin reconceptualizing pain, listening to the stories of people in pain makes sense in a whole new way. The next step is to change our language and approach to pain care.

Current approaches to pain care can appear focused on changing cognitions or psycho-emotional factors. Other approaches continue to focus on ‘fixing’ the body. Yoga as therapy provides an even more integrated and expansive view of the human and of pain care than the biopsychosocialspiritual perspective. It provides options to use embodied experiences, changing interoception from top-down and bottom up approaches. Yoga provides the compassionate view that the person in pain is whole and not broken. Pain science offers the clinician an intellectual way to get embedded misconceptions about pain out of the way, while they provide expert-supported yoga practices and techniques.

There is no quick path to becoming pain care aware, and to integrating pain science and yoga into your clinical or therapeutic practice. Completing the Pain Care Aware Yoga Therapeutics Certificate prepares you to listen in new ways, to have greater conviction that change is possible, and to offer a pain science-inspired care plan to individuals living in pain. We hope this will not be where you finish your education about pain and yoga, yet it is a powerful way to start.

Join this community of like-minded health professionals and yoga therapists.

Complete a Pain Care Aware Yoga Therapeutics Certificate.

Changing pain is possible.