WIGWAM - Mindfulness for living with pain - with Vidyamala Burch - Author and founder of Breathworks

About this event

In this talk Vidyamala will introduce how mindfulness can help ease the mental, emotional and physical experience of living with pain. The session will include a short guided meditation.

More about Vidyamala

Vidyamala sustained spinal injuries as a young woman which required multiple surgeries and left her with partial paraplegia and severe chronic pain. She began to explore mindfulness and meditation in her twenties to manage her pain and found them profoundly life-changing and transformative. She founded Breathworks in 2004, to share these tools to help others cope with pain and suffering. Breathworks has grown into a flourishing international organisation with 500+ accredited teachers in over 35 countries. Vidyamala has written three books: ‘Living Well with Pain and Illness’, ‘Mindfulness for Health’, and ‘Mindfulness for Women’.

‘Mindfulness for Health’ was awarded First Prize in Popular Medicine in the British Medical Association Books Awards in 2014. It has been endorsed by the UK Reading Well: Books on Prescription Scheme, selected by expert health professionals as the best self-help book in its category.

In 2018 Vidyamala was awarded an honorary membership to the British Pain Society for her extraordinary contribution to the field of pain management with the development of Mindfulness-based Pain Management (MBPM). In 2019 she was named on the Shaw Trust’s Power List of the 100 most influential disabled people in the UK and is a finalist for the 2020 list. She continues to teach retreats and workshops internationally as well as featuring on a number of apps and on-line summits and webinars. In the pandemic she and Breathworks have developed multiple online offerings to help people living with pain, illness and stress of all sorts.