Living with chronic pain can gradually change almost every part of your life.
Perhaps you have spent months or years searching for answers. You may have seen doctors and specialists, tried medication, changed your diet, adapted the way you exercise, explored complementary therapies or reorganised your life around what your body will and won’t allow you to do.
Each new approach can bring hope. And when the pain remains or returns, that hope can be replaced by frustration, fear and exhaustion.
Over time, pain can become about far more than the physical sensation itself.
You may begin worrying about when it will flare up, what you can safely do, whether you will be able to work, sleep, drive, socialise or care for the people you love. You may find yourself constantly monitoring your body or avoiding things because you are frightened they will make the pain worse.
The pain is real. But so too are all the thoughts, emotions, memories and physical responses that can develop around it.
And this is where The Walters Method (TWM) offers a different approach.
Freedom from Chronic Pain introduces a felt sense approach to understanding your experience of pain.
Rather than focusing solely on eliminating a physical sensation, you will learn to explore what you are actually experiencing in your body in the present moment – and begin separating that experience from the fear, anticipation, memories and habitual thought patterns that can become attached to it.
Through a series of practical exercises, you will learn how to observe sensations with greater objectivity, respond to them differently and reduce the amount of mental and emotional energy that pain occupies.
The aim is not to deny pain or suggest that physical symptoms are imaginary.
It is to help you change your relationship with your experience of pain so that it no longer has to dominate your life.
As you work through the course, you will be encouraged to take your time. You may choose to practise each exercise for several days before moving on, allowing what you learn to become part of the way you naturally respond to your body.
For some people, changing this relationship with pain may also change their experience of the pain itself. For others, the physical sensation may remain while the distress and suffering surrounding it become less consuming.
Either way, the goal is freedom: more space for the things that matter to you, more confidence in your body and more opportunity to live your life rather than organising your life around pain.
Beyond chronic pain. Living your best life.
