Short but useful book on the whys and hows for mindfulness-based pain relief. I like many of the ideas presented here and plan to try them. I do wish there was a bit more included though.

NetGalley ARC review

This book could be very beneficial to someone who is new to meditation and using it as a mindset for pain. I do however find books like this lack the knowledge and understanding that Meditation comes from Yoga & the lack of giving Yoga and Indian philosophy credit. There were aspects of yoga the author remained and used instead of giving credit. Ex 7 principles is very similar to the 7 laws of yoga. Again even western Doc take from Eastern philosophy and never give credit.

What an amazing book. As a person who lives with chronic pain I was happy to learn how to manage without medication. I loved this book and can not wait to read another book from the author

I'm just at the beginning of my journey with this book and its techniques to manage chronic pain but find the concept good and can see how it will help me.

As a counselor who works with several individuals suffering from PTSD and chronic pain, I found this book to offer fantastic mindfulness meditation strategies and guided meditations to aid these individuals in their personal healing journeys. Jon Kabat-Zinn is an extremely gifted writer and does such a masterful job of explaining scientific concepts in an easy-to-understand manner that will resonate well with both clinicians and those who are in pain but have no science background.

Kabat-Zinn grabs the reader's attention with the line, “All our capacities for healing and transforming our lives are based on our ability to pay attention and to cultivate intimacy with our innate capacity for awareness," and then he wonderfully guides us on a step-by-step journey of how we can work to achieve increased awareness, presence, and attentiveness to transform our relationship with pain and, thus, improve our well-being. Kabat-Zinn provides a realistic roadmap and does not oversell the challenge of this journey toward improved attentiveness, emotional regulation, and self-awareness. But it is through a compassionate and optimistic voice that Kabat-Zinn is able to paint this journey as a realistic and achievable goal for anyone willing to consistently practice the guided mindfulness meditation practices provided with this book.

One of the biggest obstacles I have with my patients is helping them develop healthy alternatives to the maladaptive coping skills they have been using (in some cases for several years) to cope with emotional and physical pain. Kabat-Zinn captures this struggle well with this passage: “As a consequence, we might find ourselves turning toward familiar sources to dull the pain, such as alcohol, drugs, food, endlessly getting lost in our phones, binge-watching television, scrolling and posting on social media, going down one rabbit after another, even if these coping strategies and perpetual distraction opportunities deliver anything but an enduring sense of satisfaction and contentment.” As Dr. Jud Brewer emphasizes, it is very difficult to change these behaviors without developing a bigger better offer that can provide similar benefit to our unhelpful behaviors but without the negative consequences. In this book Kabat-Zinn provides not only the tools but a roadmap toward that bigger better offer for individuals suffering from pain. The guided meditations in this book are very helpful in challenging individuals to turn toward their pain to help foster "less emotionally reactive, less critical in our judgments, kinder, and more accepting of ourselves and our moments, whatever they may be, gradually becomes our go-to mode, our ‘default setting.’”

I highly recommend this book to all mental health professionals and clinicians working with patients suffering from chronic pain. I would also recommend this took to those individuals suffering from invisible illnesses that cause chronic pain (including but definitely not limited to complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS)) who have exhaustively sought out ways to improve pain management but have only found minimal success in being able to thrive with their pain. I would not recommend this book to anyone looking for an unrealistic quick fix or who is not willing to practice mindfulness 5-7 days a week for at least 8 weeks.

I was disappointed in this book. It adds nothing new to Jon Kabat-Zinn’s already large body of work on mindfulness. It seems to be an attempt to cash in on the current trend toward mindfulness and meditation within chronic pain treatment and chronic pain self-help.

Mindfulness Meditation for Pain Relief
By Jon Kabat-Zinn, PhD
Sounds True Publishing
Publication date: April 4, 2023

I was drawn to this book because I have chronic pain, have had it for over 20 years. And believe me, I’ve tried everything. Well, everything EXCEPT mindfulness meditation. In fact, I’ve always done the opposite while in pain- detach and dissociate. But I keep coming back to the idea of mindfulness because it makes sense, and maybe it’s the missing piece in the treatment of my chronic pain.

I know of Jon Kabat-Zinn as the foremost authority of mindfulness meditation, so if anyone can teach me about this, I know it can be him. He created MBSR (mindfulness based stress reduction) in 1979 and it’s been gaining momentum ever since.

There are so many just deeply profound words in this book. So many new ideas and revelations.

It is all about actually turning towards pain, holding it in our awareness, and changing our relationship towards in. As Jon Kabat-Zinn states, if we constantly turn away from the pain we are turning away from what the pain has to teach.

This book includes the written out guided meditations and provides access to audio guided meditations as well. These meditations are incredibly soothing, restorative and intensely liberating.

I encourage you to give this a try, open yourself up to a new experience and discover a way to reclaim your life.

Thanks to NetGalley, Sounds True Publishing and Jon Kabat-Zinn for the opportunity to read and review this tremendous work.

A well reasoned explication of how we can use mindfulness techniques to address distress in our mind-body continuum. Well written. Very helpful strategies and techniques. A great addition to his corpus of work.

An I triguing look at the use of mi dullness for chronic pain. As a sufferer for years of chronic pelvic pain, I was I terested in learning new ones to cope and this book delivered. Well-written and engrossing.

Loved this book, it was very to the point and it helped with a few more pointers on consistency to meditate.

I do try to meditate daily some days are harder because of the time, but the more information I get on it, it makes more sense and it helps to know that even a little everyday can help and to try to live more in the moments that sometimes you can totally miss.

If you're initiating or already know it doesn't hurt to always remember why you're doing this and how to live through your pains more effectively.

Jon Kabat-Zinn, an American professor emeritus of medicine and the creator of the stress reduction program mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR), is also a founding member of the Cambridge Zen Centre. In this small volume titled “Mindfulness Meditation for Pain Relief”, Kabat-Zinn offers a few techniques revolving around the practice of mindfulness, to alleviate both the physical distress as well as the mental anguish suffered by people gripped by chronic pain. These are patients who have been advised at various stages in their lives by a myriad of medical practioners to “learn to live with pain”. This “community of the afflicted”, according to the author can take recourse to MBSR whose objective is to strive to be at ‘home’ with pain if not transcending it.

The recognition that living with pain is a type of ‘minuet’ is the first stage in overcoming an attitude of resignation and a defeatist reconciliation. Urging his readers to “tune in”, Kabat-Zin appeals to them to turn pain into an ally. If one was to experience pain experientially and experimentally then the attribute of pain ceases to be an irritant. The once dreaded usurper of hopes transforms first into a trusted ‘teacher’ before donning the mantle of a friend.

The MBSR therapy spans eight weeks in its entirety and requires the eager beaver to unfailingly devote a certain stretch of time on a daily basis. There are no set limits for the number of minutes or hours that one ought to engage on MBSR. So long as the practice is sustained and consistent, even a few minutes each day in the initial phases would suffice, according to the author. The concept of MBSR took shape for the first time in the year 1979 at the University of Massachusetts. Currently, MBSR is being implemented across medical centres around the world.

At the nub of MBSR is the concept of ‘moment-to-moment awareness’. In the same vein in which we come consciously or even unconsciously aware of bodily sensations such as sound, smell, sight, touch etc. one can also develop an acute awareness of the pain in the ‘now’. Developing awareness does not mean recognising the pernicious nature of the pain and wallowing in it but being non-judgmental about the entire experience. The key is to develop an awareness of the pain, in pain. The book lays out seven principles to alter the experiencer’s relationship with pain.

Living and inhabiting the present moment, tuning away from default options such as self-blame and a compulsive recourse to drugs etc are some of the suggestions. There is also a guided meditation technique that is available in the book for the interested and the uninitiated. The potential of MBSR seeks to rend asunder ‘outcomes’, and not being attached to outcomes, including those that are as natural and understanding as it is to ‘want some.’

Mindfulness Meditation for Pain Relief is a reliable primer for all those who are interested in engaging in the practice of MBSR.

(Mindfulness Meditation for Pain Relief: Practices to Reclaim Your Body and Your Life - Jon Kabat-Zinn, Ph.D. is published by Sounds True Publishing and will be available for sale on the 4th of April 2023)
Thank You Net Galley for the Advance Reviewer Copy!

This informative book is about pain management through mindfulness based stress reduction (MSBR). MSBR is a systematic program in mindfulness meditation. Mindfulness involves doing your best to be awake and aware in the present moment. Describes how to cultivative mindfulness. Guided meditation exercises (text of audiotape). Mindfulness in everyday life. Evocative illustrations. Resources