About Breathworks and Mindfulness

From humble beginnings to international recognition, Breathworks' mission is to bring mindfulness as a tool for reducing suffering to people worldwide; regardless of their situation.

About Breath­works "The Breath­works ap­proach to Mind­ful­ness-Based Pain Man­age­ment (MBPM) is the most com­pre­hens­ive, in-depth, sci­en­tific­ally up-to-date and user-friendly ap­proach to learn­ing the how of liv­ing with chronic pain and re­claim­ing one’s life that I know of.....I ad­mire Vidyamala tre­mend­ously... her ap­proach could save your life and give it back to you." Jon Kabat-Zinn, PhD au­thor of Full Cata­strophe Liv­ing and Com­ing to Our Senses Pro­fessor Emer­itus of the Uni­versity of Mas­sachu­setts Med­ical School. Breath­works is based on the ex­per­i­ence of Vidyamala Burch who sus­tained a severe spinal in­jury in 1976 when she was six­teen lead­ing to mul­tiple sur­ger­ies and par­tial para­ple­gia. Over 27 years ago she began ex­plor­ing mind­ful­ness and med­it­a­tion to man­age her per­sist­ent pain and in 2001 wondered if she could share these life-chan­ging skills with oth­ers who were suf­fer­ing from pain, stress or ill­ness. She was soon joined by Gary Hen­nes­sey and Sona Fricker, both mind­ful­ness prac­ti­tion­ers for over three dec­ades and to­gether they de­veloped Breath­works as it is today. Along the way, Vidyamala wrote two books Liv­ing Well with Pain and Ill­ness and Mind­ful­ness for Health (co-writ­ten with Danny Pen­man). These form the 'back­bone' of the Breath­works ap­proach to mind­ful­ness-based pain and ill­ness man­age­ment (MBPM) and the Mind­ful­ness for Health course. To fur­ther de­velop the Breath­works Ap­proach, Gary Hen­nes­sey com­bined his ex­per­i­ence of MBPM, med­it­a­tion and mind­ful­ness to cre­ate the pop­u­lar Mind­ful­ness for Stress course, which has helped hun­dreds of people to find bal­ance in their lives. As Breath­works grows, so does the core team, the in­ter­na­tional pool of train­ers and the com­munity of Breath­works teach­ers and course gradu­ates. Today, thou­sands of people world­wide have be­nefited from the Breath­works mind­ful­ness meth­ods for man­aging pain, stress and ill­ness. You Are Not your PainUsing Mindfulness to Relieve Pain, Reduce Stress, and Restore Well-being---an Eight-week ProgramBy Burch, VidyamalaBook - 2015

What is Mind­ful­ness? There are many ways to de­scribe mind­ful­ness in­clud­ing: "Mind­ful­ness means de­lib­er­ately at­tend­ing to and be­com­ing more aware of our ex­per­i­ence: our thoughts, feel­ings and body sen­sa­tions. This al­lows us to clearly per­ceive thoughts, phys­ical sen­sa­tions, emo­tions and events at the mo­ment they occur without re­act­ing in an auto­matic or ha­bitual way. Ex­per­i­ences don’t over­whelm us and we be­come steady through life’s ups and downs." Hun­dreds of books have been writ­ten on this very sub­ject and yet it is still a chal­lenge is to de­scribe it in a nut­shell. Per­haps the most con­cise way to de­scribe Mind­ful­ness is that it is simply as a spe­cial kind of aware­ness. This means you can be fully 'awake' to life in each present mo­ment; fully alive and vi­brant. Mind­ful­ness works! Try it and you’ll dis­cover its be­ne­fits and its magic. Once learnt, it is freely avail­able to every­one, any time, no mat­ter your age, gender, re­li­gion or cul­tural back­ground. (read more) In order to share this won­der­ful tool called 'mind­ful­ness', the founders of Breath­works have de­veloped courses and re­sources that can be ac­cessed in a num­ber of ways. So wherever you are, whatever your health and mo­bil­ity, you can find a way to learn mind­ful­ness for re­liev­ing the suf­fer­ing that comes from liv­ing with pain, ill­ness or stress­ful cir­cum­stances. We are also ded­ic­ated to train­ing as many people as we can to teach mind­ful­ness to oth­ers. We do hope you enjoy ex­plor­ing our web­site and you find what you are look­ing for... Find out more about: re­search into the breath­works meth­ods the Breath­works Found­a­tion Link: http://www.breathworks-mindfulness.org.uk/aboutbreathworks