With regards to diet, there’s a direct and an indirect relationship to pain. People might be overweight to begin with. Regardless, when people start to deal with chronic pain, they find it more difficult to exercise. Unless they adjust their caloric intake, it’s easy to start gaining weight -- which only worsens the underlying pain problem. On the first level, it’s important to eat properly and be very conscious that if you’re reducing your level of activity ...

If you’re not sleeping well, you enter a negative circuit: Pain keeps you from sleeping well, then not sleeping well lowers your natural production of pain-reducing chemicals. You get into that uncomfortable cycle -- where pain is keeping you awake, and the fact that you are not sleeping increases your pain. To resolve the issue, we recommend starting with non-pharmacological approaches – whether doing a self-massage before bed, taking a hot bath, playing some relaxing music, ...

We think that meditation works by changing the neural circuits in the brain. Whenever we put our attention on something, it becomes more prominent in our lives. So if all day long someone is thinking about their pain - their pain, their pain - then that becomes their life. When people learn meditation, they learn how to shift their thought processes. They go from focusing on one thing to consciously distracting themselves, thinking about other things,  shifting their ...

There are many different causes for chronic pain. Before anyone treats pain just for the sake of relieving the pain, you want to know what it is that’s causing that pain. Assuming you have a disorder for which there’s no easy medical fix, which usually means you’re talking about some kind of arthritis, begin a process of trying to relieve yourself of that pain -- starting with the most non-invasive and gradually working your way to the more invasive approaches. Let’s ...

When people have just the earliest awareness of hope in the possibility of another way, another perspective, the quantum leap from the old pattern to the new pattern instantly makes a big difference in how people perceive their situation. If we can shift our attention and interpretation, we open up new possibilities for experiencing and healing. That is our ultimate goal here at the Chopra Center. Human reality is shaped by patterns of what we focus on and how ...