I help people to change their thoughts, beliefs and actions so they can break out of a persistent pain cycle.
I have gone through this experience myself and I know how hard life can be when you’re struggling in pain.
You can read more about my story below…
How I help people.
I’ve helped many people dial down their pain since 2010, using skills that I’ve developed through my own experience, extensive training and learning from the people I’ve worked with.
- Yoga therapy 99%
- Pain management coaching 95%
- Pain science education 90%
- Acceptance and commitment therapy 85%
- Mindfulness 80%
- Trauma-informed approaches 75%
My Approach and Philosophy
I have developed four elements to working with people in pain as I found movement on its own often wasn’t enough.
When we combine these four elements
- natural intelligent movement
- understanding pain science
- befriending our nervous system
- reframing our habitual thought patterns
we can change dial down how pain affects our life.
My Story in more detail.
I first remember having back pain when I was 18 years old, but it wasn’t that bad. It was there a lot of the time, but it didn’t stop me from doing the things I enjoyed, like canoeing, dancing and going for hikes.
That was until I had a car accident when I was 30. At that time, I struggled to walk for more than 10 minutes, I couldn’t sit or stand for long, and I struggled to sleep at night.
It wore me down, I couldn’t do the things I loved without paying the consequences. I felt pretty miserable. I felt like my choices and freedom had been taken away from me at the age of 30.
I saw so many different practitioners from physiotherapist to acupuncturists, each giving a slightly different best-guess diagnoses. I had scans an x-rays but none of the treatments helped in the long term.
I found I was compensating more, I began to move less and smaller things would make the pain worse. It wasn’t just the physical pain, it affected my mood and relationships I started to feel very depressed.
None of the treatments helped in the long run until I started to do gentle yoga movements.
That was when an osteopath recommended a yoga therapist to me.
She made a huge difference, I could move much more easily. But I found that yoga helped me mentally too. I could manage the bad days without my my mood spiralling, and I started to feel a lot better about myself.
I found yoga helped me so much that I trained to become a yoga therapist and started teaching in 2010.
I love supporting people, and exploring what might be the best type of movement for their body. For lots of people they found that with the right movement their pain stopped and hasn’t come back, but this wasn’t the case for everyone.
There were other people, like me where yoga helped them to manage their pain, and often symptoms weren’t as bad, but the pain still persisted.
This got me interested in the science behind pain.
I came across John E Sarno’s research into chronic back pain in 1980s. He came up with the term Tension Myoneural Syndrome (TMS) to name a psychosomatic illness causing chronic back, neck, and limb pain which is not relieved by standard medical treatments.
This and other research made me realise, that for a lot of people working ONLY on the physical body wasn’t enough to change how they experience pain.
In books like The Body Knows the Score, The Body Says No and listening to Freedom from Pain, the authors were all saying the same thing, that our body can get stuck in over protective habits that reinforce pain.
There are a variety of reasons as to why this happens. If you have persistent pain your body may well have become overprotective in areas away from the original source of pain.
A lot of this tension and contraction in the body can be released. But it takes time, small and incremental changes need to happen on the physical, emotional and mental levels.
Tension can be released
Once I discovered this relationship, I knew this understanding would be a game changer for a lot of the people I work with.
Instead of conquering the pain, I help people to find ease in their body and release tension rather than reinforcing it. Breaking up with fighting your pain – (article coming soon)
Through this work I have been able to dial down my pain even further. But it’s not only my experience I can refer to, I know how much this approach helps other people I work with who have persistent pain.
If you’d like to find out if this could help you, read the about you page.