CLINICAL MINDFUL MOVEMENT

Clinical Mindful Movement  

Transforming our approach towards pain 

Why attend a Clinical Mindful Movement course?

Be a leader in pain management, incorporating evidence based body-mind practices into clinical care. This training enables you to explore and build attitudes, knowledge and skills to work mindfully with people with pain addressing the complexity of their lived experience.  Compelling clinical and neuroscientific research on pain, immunology, stress, neurophysiology, mindfulness and yoga are integrated to present a clinical intervention that is immediately clinically relevant to compliment your exisiting toolkit to work with people individually and in groups. 

Working with people with pain can be personally challenging but also incredibly rewarding. This approach will help you develop personal aptitudes to support your wellbeing and find meaning and purpose in your work.

The Clinical Mindful Movement course acknowledges and brings together the work of pioneers in mindfulness, pain and trauma care including Jon Kabat-Zinn, Vidymala Burch, Lorimer Moseley, David Butler, Rick Hanson, Pema Chodron, Peter Levine, Pat Ogden and Bessel Van De Kolk, into a body-based interventional framework.

Past participants have described this approach as “the missing link” in working with people with pain.

About Clinical Mindful Movement

People living with pain often find themselves stuck in a spiral of being less able to engage in life activities; sadness and frustration, reducing physical capacity, less enjoyment in life, relationship issues and increasing isolation, poor sleep, reliance on increasing amounts of medication and the merry go round of assessments and treatments. The struggle to get rid of the experience of pain fires up the body’s natural protective mechanisms: stress and pain. It sounds exhausting and it is. 

Clinical Mindful Movement is a system approach that addresses not only the body part in pain but the underlying systems that contributes to the lived experience. It enables people to pause to see more clearly their automatic avoidant, physical, cognitive and emotional patterns. These are understandable natural responses build into the human DNA to survive but they can become overactive especially when a person has had times in their life where they haven’t felt safe. We know however that new approach patterns can be developed. Response patterns have their roots in automatic body tendencies to move towards or away and can be recognised as sensations. When we bring a curious and open attitude to our bodily sensations, there is less struggle, pain becomes less threatening, and the protective pain and stress mechanisms down regulate. The person is in the driver’s seat responding in new ways that directly effect neural pathways and the immune and inflammatory system processes.  

Our role can be to create the right conditions for recovery, like we would water and nourish the soil, for a tree to grow and thrive. 

Clinical Mindful Movement guiding principles

A Mindful Movement trained therapist develops the skills, attitudes and knowledge to guide a person to over ride their natural tendency to escape pain. They develop a relationship of trust and collaboration and provide simple, safe body-based awareness and movement experiments that create a shift from distraction to curiosity and engagement. Pleasant sensations are then no longer shut out and a new way of relating to themselves and their experience of pain arises. When the factors stoking the fire of pain are no longer present pain quietens. 

There are steps, attitudes and pillars that lead this path out of pain.  

Steps – Attention, Perception, Regulation and Conscious responding

Attitudes – Curiousity, Compassion, Creativity and Courage

Pillars – Mindfulness, Movement, Meta (kindness) and Mindset 

The Clinical Mindful Movement program has evolved over 10 years adapting to new science and clinicians needs. Its original precursor, PREVENTING CHRONICITY, originated with the support of a WorkCover Grant and was taught to hundreds of health professionals across Australia and New Zealand face to face. Pre-, post- and three month post-course evaluations show that participants report a significant increase in their skills, knowledge and confidence in working with people to prevent and treat persistent pain.

You will be invited to:

• Develop the skills, attitudes and knowledge to help our patients create the conditions for healing: building self-efficacy, helping them to see their inner worth and capacity to heal.

• Learn how to skilfully help clients turn towards body sensations to increase awareness of patterns that increase pain.

• Learn how to identify risk factors for persistent pain.

• Reflect on your current skill set acknowledging what you already do well and build on this base to enhance your work in preventing and treating persistent pain.
• Learn how skills of attention, perceptual shift, stress regulation and conscious responding create positive neurophysiological change. 
• Engage in a range of body-based mindfulness practices including breath awareness, body scan and mindful movement.
• With your colleagues notice the broad range of normal responses to these practices and discuss the relevance of this in patient care.
• Have a personal experience of the relationship between your body and mind to enhance this awareness in others.

“As you begin to unravel your habitual patterns – fear of vulnerability, aversion to discomfort, nagging self-critisism – you will open yourself up and experience your true nature with limitless potential.”
Pema Chodron