Expert studies continue to document that if you exercise, pain relief will follow. But what exercise, and how do you get started, and will it really work? Check out Kelly McGonigal’s Yoga for Pain Relief: Simple Practices to Calm Your Mind and Heal Your Chronic Pain, and learn how these simple exercises can help provide chronic pain relief.

Yoga Pain Relief
McGonical, a Stanford psychology instructor and yoga teacher, knows whereof she writes: she herself struggled for years with chronic pain. Consequently, she starts with introductory information: understanding your pain, and understanding how yoga – with its integration of body, mind, and spirit healing – is uniquely suited to provide pain relief.

Subsequent chapters address breathing, “befriending the body,” body movement, the importance of relaxation to letting go of pain and how to achieve this, and meditation. A concluding chapter helps you create your own personalized yoga pain relief program.

Gentle Exercise, Pain Relief, and You
Working from the understanding that chronic pain can be addressed by accessing “the mind and body’s natural pain-suppressing systems through breathing, relaxation, meditation, or movement,” McGonigal encourages you to gently and patiently begin to connect with all four of these pain relief techniques. You may find this approach to yoga pain relief to be just what your body needed.

Yoga for Pain Relief: Simple Practices to Calm Your Mind and Heal Your Chronic Pain, by Kelly McGonigal. New Harbinger Publications, 2009.