Yoga And The New Pain Paradigm

There are many reasons why people become interested in practicing yoga. One of these is the wish to alleviate physical pain, commonly back pain, and studies have shown yoga to be very effective for this. So how does yoga make us feel better?

In the past, pain was thought to be a subjective experience, based on the injury. However, some people with, for example, bulging vertebral discs, experience pain, while others do not. We can experience old injuries for decades, even though tests may show that the tissues have healed. There seems to be several ideas about why this is. Pain is very personal.

New developments in the understanding of fascia, the web of connective tissue that knits all of our body parts into a whole, indicate that we store "issues in our tissues."That certain areas of the body become locked for various reasons. In this case, an aligned practice of yoga postures that build heat in the body would be ideal therapy for chronic pain.

Another related concept may lie in new developments in pain science. Pain has traditionally been seen as an input to the brain from the body, but the new pain paradigm has defined pain as an OUTPUT from the brain. Our brain manufactures pain.

According to newer research, the brain receives a multitude of signals from the body, then sorts and prioritizes them to create sensations of pain. Our minds do get set into patterns, as we have all experienced, and so our pain is influenced by these patterns, such as our beliefs about our bodies, cultural conditioning about body image and aging, anxiety, perceived threats, and so on.

Yoga can provide us with a multidimensional approach that shifts the relationship we have to our thoughts and our bodies. The brain has a plasticity - it can be remodeled at any age. Also bear in mind that with all of the research there is, no amount of science has been able to pinpoint where thoughts originate. We can discount experiences as being all in our heads, but yogic theories tell us that this is never the case. What exists in one aspect of our being can roots that stem from other layers of who we are.

All of these new ideas make an even better case for the efficacy of yoga. Pain signals are valuable information that are a wake up call to shift out of the patterning and evolve into wholeness.