We know that often people with disabilities also suffer with pain. Vidyamala Burch founder and co-Director of Breathworks, an organisation offering mindfulness-based and compassion-based approaches to living well with chronic pain and illness is helping people in pain through the practice of “mindfulness”, the act of paying more attention to the present moment. She feels that often people who suffer with chronic pain brings out different sides of people’s personalities. She says “One is the denial, pushy, driven side and the other is the more passive, overwhelmed, depressive side.”

Burch lives with chronic pain having acquired two spinal injuries at an early age. The first happened at 16 when she lifted somebody from a swimming pool during water safety practice. The second was the result of a car accident five years later. Surgery and years of wear and tear have added to her toll. “I’ve got a paralysed bowel, a paralysed bladder and my walking is impaired,” she says. She admits she dealt with it all very badly in the early days, pushed herself too much and ignored her extra needs.

A lengthy period of rehabilitation followed in which she tried many different relaxation techniques. Three years later, she found that one, called Mindful Meditation, worked well for her. Now more widely known as mindfulness, it can be described as the act of focusing on the present moment, acknowledging thoughts, feelings and physical sensations. It is thousands of years old and Buddhist in origin, but has become popular as a therapy in the West in recent years.

Burch says that when you have severe discomfort, there’s a “rising up” in your body that exclaims “this hurts and I don’t like it”.

“The intuitive response is to turn away from it and try and get on with life in spite of your pain,” she says. “With mindfulness, what we do is we turn towards it, to investigate what is actually happening in each moment.”

Burch has started a social enterprise called Breathworks where people with chronic pain take an eight-week course to learn how mindfulness could help them cope better with their physical symptoms. Burch says some of her students were able to get back to work after a lengthy period of unemployment following the course. Others say that their sleep has been transformed. The programme has been taught to thousands of participants, in over 20 countries. You can visit here to find out more information.

Here at More Than Mobility we do not want any disability to stop you from living independently or to disrupt your lifestyle. We therefore provide a wide range of disability and mobility products to suit your specific needs from mobility scooters, rise and recline chairs to a range of daily living aids all suitable for people suffering with disability.

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More Than Mobility

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