Welcome, it's Vidyamala here. I've been asked to answer the question, how to use mindfulness to help manage pain in daily life? I'm really grateful for this question as it raises such an important point, how to use mindfulness to ease our pain not only when we meditate, but also within the ups and downs of daily life. This has been such a crucially important area for me to work on in my own journey with pain. And I'll tell you more about my own story in a moment, how I learned through hard experience the importance of taking my mindfulness practice into my whole life. But first of all, I'll give you a heads up as to the areas I'm going to cover in this answer.

I'm going to offer you three slogans and tips to help. First of all, the slogan, take a break before you need it. Or, take a break before you break. And I'll tell you more about the importance of pacing your activities. Secondly, I'll offer the slogan, go with the flow.

Let your pain be like a river rather than a rock. And then thirdly, which is related, the slogan, when in doubt, breathe out. When in doubt, breathe out. So these are the three areas. Take a break before you break, go with the flow and when in doubt, breathe out.

So let's look at the first one, take a break before you need it, or take a break before you break. And this points to the importance of pacing when we're living with pain or any other health condition that limits our resources, our energy. So, what do I mean by pacing? This is pointing to the importance to find balance in our lives, balance and how we engage with the activities of daily living when we're living with pain. Many of us tend to flip flop between boom and bust. So when we have a good day, our pain's a bit less severe.

We might think, great. I'm going to catch up on all the housework. Do all my emails. Maybe do some shopping. So we tend to go for it when we feel good, and that's totally understandable.

But just as inevitably as day becomes night, we have to reap the consequences. And for many of us, this means we fall into bust. So we crash. Our pain flares up, we feel exhausted and maybe we do hardly anything for the next day or the next few days. So we totally go for it when we feel good.

And then we crash as a consequence. And okay, you could argue that at least it keeps life interesting being in boom and bust, but it's not really a very sustainable way to live well with our pain condition. What tends to happen is that over time, our overall capacity reduces. Because every time we crash, we lose some physical condition, we lose some stamina, we lose some fitness and we lose some muscle strength. And that means when we go back into being overactive again, we can do even less.

So we push ourselves and then we crash. We lose condition, lose fitness. We push ourselves, do a little bit less. Then we crash, lose even more fitness, more strength. And it becomes a cycle of ever diminishing returns.

So, how do we get out of this? How do we get out of this awful kind of prison of boom and bust? The way we do this is to learn to pace our activities, learn to pace. And in my own case and the many people I've taught, I always encourage using a timer, starting to use a timer. So let me tell you a little bit about my own journey with pacing. First of all, I have to say it has not come naturally. This isn't my natural temperament.

I'm someone who tends to be quite driven and tends to push myself. So I used to have quite big cycles. I'd push and push and push and push and push, maybe for months. Getting more and more alienated, more and more uptight, more and more stressed. My pain getting worse.

And then eventually I'd have a really big crash. But what I've learned to do over time is to really moderate those extremes. So when I'm working at my desk, I'll set a timer, either using my phone, or I've also got a Fitbit on my wrist that vibrates, and that's really helpful. And I'll set the timer for about 20 minutes. And then when the timer goes off, I'll stop.

I'll stop, whatever I'm doing. And what I find most helpful now is just to stand up with my crutches, have a stretch, move around a little bit, potter around a little bit and move my body. And then I'll go back to working again. Prior to this, I would sit at my computer until my back was absolutely screaming. I'd be sweating, really, really tense.

Maybe I'd managed two, three hours and then I'd be totally wiped out for the rest of the day. But by pacing in the way that I've just suggested, 20 minutes on 5, 10, 15 minutes off, then I'm now able to keep my work going for a whole day. So this has been absolutely central to my mindfulness journey. Learning how to manage my activities, come into more balance and to pace. And very helpfully, the acronym for mindfulness in daily life is middle, M I D L.

And really what we're trying to do with mindfulness is always find that balance between extremes, always find the middle way between extremes. And in this case, I'm referring to it in relation to daily activities. Finding the middle away between pushing yourself, getting exhausted, and then crashing and doing very little. So that's the first slogan, take a break before you break. And you can apply it to housework, cooking, shopping, working, exercise.

You can apply it to every thing. And the other thing that I do as part of my pacing activities is I do a body scan every day after lunch. So I lie down on the floor after my lunch and I do a body scan 15, 20 minutes. And I find that really, really helpful because it resets my body, resets my nervous system for the rest of the day. The next point I want to offer, or the second tip is to go with the flow.

Let your pain be like a river rather than a rock. So this points to a really interesting insight that we get with mindfulness practice. And this is where we learn to feel into or to perceive the nature of experience, the very nature of experience. We start to dismantle, if you like, our fixed views about things or our ideas about things and to feel into what is actually happening. The word pain, for example, we normally assume describes something that's quite solid.

And pain in the body, of course, can feel very solid. It can feel very hard, very stuck, like the enemy, like it's a thing that's ruining our lives. But with mindfulness, we drop inside our actual direct experience moment by moment. And we realize that everything is continually changing, even this experience that we label pain. We experienced directly how it's not a thing, but it's a process.

It's not a thing, but it's a process. And it's changing one moment to the next. No two moments of pain are exactly the same. So I really love this slogan, let your pain be a river rather than a rock. And that becomes much, much easier to deal with.

And the way we drop into this in daily life is we just stop regularly. Stop whatever you're doing. Settle. Feel your feet on the floor, feel your bottom on the chair, the back on the bed, whatever posture you're in. Yield.

Release. Soften. Breathe. And include this experience we label pain within your awareness, which means softening the resistance, softening the hardening against it. And just like the breathing is flowing through the moments, see if you can let the experience of pain flow through the moments.

So there's some really crucial words in what I've just described. There's stopping, settling, yielding. I love this word, yield. Yield suggests a kind of release, an opening and receiving the support of the chair, the floor, the bed, whatever it is beneath you when you receive that support rather than hardening against it. Yield, and yield is different from collapsing.

For me, the word yield implies some degree of alertness, even dynamism. It's a very vital, alive kind of quality. But rather than resisting, hardening, contracting against the experience, we rest into the support of what's holding us up - the floor, the bed, the chair. We just yield down into that and allow ourselves to be held and that can be such a relief. Such a relief.

And then we soften. We befriend gravity, befriend gravity. This can be a really beautiful thing to bring into your life as well. Gravity is always here pulling us gently down towards the earth. And I think when we've got pain, we've very often pull against gravity.

We don't want to be in the body. So we try to strain away and that creates all kinds of extra tension and fatigue and struggle. So befriending gravity can also be a great blessing. And this leads into the third slogan or the third tip which is the phrase, when in doubt, breathe out. When in doubt, breathe out.

So of course this is very similar or related to the second point of going with the flow, yielding, softening, befriending gravity. But we're paying particular attention to breathing in this instance. Because what I've noticed in my own experience and the many, many people I've taught is that when we're resisting the pain, fighting the pain, pulling against the pain or pushing against the pain, we almost always hold the breath and we don't let the out-breath have full expression. And breath holding leads to all kinds of extra tension in the body, in the mind, in the heart or emotionally. So when in doubt, breathe out.

If you really don't know what to do with yourself in your daily life, if you got yourself in a state. You're uptight, your pain's awful, your mind is racing, with your mindfulness practice, with your awareness you can choose to simply stop. Just stop. Stop. Yield.

Soften. Rest. When in doubt, breathe out. Let the out-breath flow all the way out. And the in-breath will flow back in its own time.

You don't need to worry about the in-breath. But see if you can give the out-breath its full expression. Do that a few times whenever you remember throughout the day and your body and your mind and your emotions will be grateful. The out-breath particularly stimulates the parasympathetic wing of the autonomic nervous system. And this has to do with calming, has to do with rest, has to do with restoration.

So by emphasizing the out-breath, there's this instant recalibration of the nervous system away from stress, being agitated and dropping into calm and greater ease. So these are the three tips I'm offering in this particular answer. Remember pacing, take a break before you break. And I strongly encourage you to start using a timer to break up your activities. Secondly, go with the flow.

Let your pain be like a river rather than a rock. And thirdly, when in doubt, breathe out. I hope you found these tips helpful, and I suggest you start to implement them immediately. Just being aware, knowing what's happening, choosing to stop, introducing a timer into some of your activities, always looking for the middle way and letting your pain flow through your experience like a river coming and going, coming and going. I wish you all the very, very best.

And thanks for listening.