Vidyamala Burch - Living Well with Pain and Illness: The Mindful Way to Free Yourself from Suffering

The cultivation of mindfulness can make a profound difference in how we relate to pain and whether chronic pain conditions need to turn into endless suffering and misery. This has been known over the past 2,600 years and is now being supported by studies in both medicine and neuroscience. In this book, Vidyamala makes the practice of befriending your experience through mindfulness, however unpleasant or pleasant it may be, both commonsensical and compelling. I admire her tremendously. This is a beautiful and very important book. It could save your lifeand give it back to you.

This is a wonderful work, one of those books where you know within a few pages that it is going to be worth stopping everything else in order to make time to read it. The book is a moving and compelling invitation to bring a radically new way of working with the fact of our pain. It is a book of enormous tenderness and honesty. Here is wise guidance on how we can move beyond our natural resistance to our pain to a willingness to be with it, and how we can live with greater ease by turning toward what we most fear about our pain and suffering.

Vidyamala Burch has practiced mindfulness for many years, and she has applied the practice to the relief of physical suffering. She has now embodied the fruits of her extensive experience in a very readable and useful book. I hope that Living Well with Pain and Illness will have a wide circulation in a world where, despite all our progress, there is still so much suffering, some of it unnecessary.

It is one thing to have our pain and emotions and another to be ruled by them, one thing to live our life and another to live in our thoughts about our life, one thing to make choices according to what we hold as important and another to helplessly act as our habits will have us do. This wonderful book helps us to appreciate these differences. The act of reading it alone may bring a small measure of space, life, freedom, warmth, and gentleness to your life. Following the direction it suggests could bring you much more and radically change your life for the better.

This is an excellent self-help book for sufferers of chronic illnesses. It guides the reader in how to deal with pain, illness, frustrations, anxieties, and even life itself. Vidyamala has written a beautiful, profound, yet easy to understand book on how to live happily, regardless of what state of pain or difficulty you are in. A definite must-read for my patients, students, and colleagues in health care. A milestone book on living mindfulness fully.

In describing her own journey with pain, Vidyamala has written a definitive guide to the practice of meditation with pain and illness. She explains how we have a choice as to whether or not we suffer with pain, and she teaches us a quiet and reflective attitude of acceptance and kindness toward ourselves and others. Vidyamala describes how, through becoming more aware of our body and its sensations, the pain diminishes. I am happy to recommend this useful book to the members of my support group.

This book, while acknowledging the complexity of living with pain and illness, suggests creative ways to live with these challenges. Vidyamala draws not only from her own experience with chronic pain but also from the experiences of her many students who have learned, through Breathworks, to live with their pain more skillfully using mindfulness. She demonstrates skills and understanding that can help us all move through life with greater ease whatever our particular version of the human predicament may be.

Vidyamala has made an insightful contribution to the current dialogue between mindfulness and the fields of medicine and psychology. Rooted in her own experience, this book will be a great support both to those living with pain and those endeavoring to find new ways of working with pain and illness.

Every effort has been made to identify and acknowledge the copyright holders. Any errors or omissions will be rectified in future editions provided that written notification is made to the publishers.