Dr. Joe Tatta:
Welcome to today’s edition of the Healing Pain Summit. I am your host, Dr. Joe Tatta physical therapists. I have with us today, Neil Pearson. He’s a physical therapist, a yoga therapist and educator and a leader in pain management in Canada. And we’re going to be talking about the evidence theory and application for yoga and dealing with people with chronic pain and persistent pain. He’s the first physical therapist to win the excellence of interprofessional pain education award from the Canadian pain society and the founding chair of the Canadian physiotherapy pain science division. He’s also a professor at UBC and a faculty member for five yoga therapy training programs. So with that great introduction, Neil, welcome to the healing pain summit. Thanks so much for having me here, Joe. I appreciate it. Excellent. So excited to have you here. And talking about, you know, both the implications of yoga as well as physical therapy for patients who struggle with pain. Tell us about kind of your history, how you start to use yoga as part of your treatment for chronic pain patients.
Neil Pearson:
Well I think it’s a, it sort of began when I was, when I was working in some pain management centers, one of the things I started to notice was that a lot of the, a lot of the things that we do in pain management, um, the things that the physical therapists were doing or getting the patients to do and the things that the occupational therapists were getting the patients to do and the things that the psychologists were getting patients to do it, it seemed like all that was things that we were doing when we were practicing yoga. So I had a, had started practicing yoga when, uh, in the 90s. And, uh, so, you know, I’m practicing these things and I’m noticing in the clinics that, that we’re asking people to do very similar things. And I really got interested in because, uh, the yoga system is sort of a system where it’s all in one place and you can, you can sort of integrate it all.
Neil Pearson:
Whereas what was what I was seeing happening in the clinic, and we’re trying hard for this not to happen, but it was almost like, you know, the psychologists did their work with the patients there and that the PTs did it there and the OT student there. And, and as best as we tried to integrate it, it was hard to do that. And so, uh, uh, as we started to sort of play with getting people to try to do some of this, um, although we sort of downplayed the whole yoga thing, we really, we’re talking much more about mindful movement. Right. Um, that’s, uh, it actually helped a lot of people to integrate all the different things that we are asking them to do.
Dr. Joe Tatta:
Hmm. Excellent. So, you know, it’s great having you on this, um, summit as you’re, you’re from Canada, so you bring kind of an international perspective on pain to things. Um, you know, I practice here in the U S um, so I know what it’s like here, but tell us, you know, where is Canada as far as kind of starting to really integrate kind of a bunch of, you know, different types of movement therapies into the physical therapy profession?
Neil Pearson:
Well, you know, it’s, uh, I, I travel a lot through United States internationally teaching and in most countries in the West seem to be all, all it pretty much in the same place that there are people, uh, starting up their own medical pain management centers and trying to bring in different, uh, different aspects of, uh, sort of, you know, people call them the complimentary things. Right. Um, so, uh, there are a few of the pain management centers in Canada that are associated with hospital systems and we can see that in some of them that they’re bringing in some mindfulness meditation and bringing in some, some yoga. But it seems most of the time when you see that it’s more private clinics, no private doctor clinics have set themselves up for physical therapy. Clinics have set up where they’re actually integrating some yoga. And meditation into what they’re doing.
Neil Pearson:
Hmm. Excellent. So let’s talk a, let’s dive deeper into yoga itself. Cause obviously there’s many different styles of yoga. What type of yoga do you use in your practice? And then, you know, what should we look for when we’re, um, looking for, let’s say a skilled clinician or a yoga therapist who can work with patients or pain? Yeah, there’s so many different kinds of yoga out there as I’m sure everybody watching this or hearing this with no. Um, and within yoga there’s many paths. I mean, there’s, uh, there were told that originally there were four paths of yoga. One looks very much like what most people think of yoga today, but then there are other passive yoga that had to do with loving devotion or serving other people. Um, uh, or even knowledge. There’s a path viewer that’s all about just gaining knowledge, right? And so the yoga that we tend to see in the West is, is a yoga that brings together movement practices, meditation, body awareness, and almost this lifestyle of starting to pay more attention to how you act in the world and how you treat yourself and sort of a big package that you tend to see in most of the yogas that are out there.
Neil Pearson:
Um, in terms of pain management, I wish I could tell you what’s the right, uh, style of yoga to do. Because even in pain management, we see some people do better when they, um, when they learn how to calm their nervous systems first, right? Sometimes that’s the very first thing a person needs to do. And so there are some yoga practices. There are very much about calming the system, like restorative yoga or the meditative parts of yoga. Um, then other people, really, the first thing that they need to do is start to move their body, you know, in a new, very mindful, gentle and challenging way. And so in, you know, there’s other yogas that can do that. So, Mmm. You just don’t know what’s the, you know, in terms of the style of yoga until you know, the individual, it’s really hard to figure out what would actually be the best for that person.
Neil Pearson:
Um, and I know that’s not all that helpful, but that’s, I think it comes down to we need to make an individualized, but then if you’re going to, if you’re a health care in your thinking, how do I get my patients into yoga? I think this is where what you need to do is you need to go out and build relationships in your community, is to go and find the people who say that they’re doing yoga as a therapeutic modality and meet them and find out what their viewpoint is. Because, uh, one of the troubles we have is this is a business. And so there’s some people who are, are, uh, you know, saying that they’re doing yoga therapy and they’re there really not changing anything. Um, but then there are other people who are really amazing at doing this and her quiet, you may have to actually go, go look for.
Neil Pearson:
Right. Um, but I think if you were, uh, if you were to go look as a, as a consumer, whether you’re a health professional or a person pain looking for yoga, you’d want to look for someone who, who has a yoga therapy certification. They’re there actually, especially in the United States. Um, the, uh, the, the yoga therapy programs are now giving people 800 to a thousand hours of training, um, to, to be a yoga therapist, which is, you know, it’s not the same as a health professional, but still a lot of training compared to what’s been there before. So if you look for someone who says that they’re a certified yoga therapist, that’s a good place to go. Um, you know, at least that’s the, we’ll get you into, um, where to look first. The other, the other thing is that you may find people who are really experienced yoga teachers, but who haven’t, you know, have never done a therapy program. And they would typically have after the name that would say eat and saw capitals, E, R, Y, T and usually 500 at the end, which means experienced registered yoga. That’s good. That’s another place to look. But even when you look at those two things, I think are you really need to do is go talk to the person and hopefully build a relationship there.
Dr. Joe Tatta:
Sure. Excellent. So we have both clinicians on this summit as well as, you know, people interested in, you know, kinda healing themselves so to speak. Let’s talk to the clinicians first and let’s talk about some of the evidence based medicine we have out there. Because as a physical therapist, you’ve studied the evidence around yoga. Um, you said something, a couple of sentences back regarding quieting the nervous system, right? So let’s talk about that for a minute cause it’s kind of a big obviously topic, but how does yoga quite our nervous system, what happens on a biological, biochemical level?
Neil Pearson:
Oh wow. You got two days, right? So, uh, let’s see. So Mmm, we can look at it in a lot of different, different ways. We know that, um, um, the autonomic nervous system is a big part of this. So if we look at the autonomic nervous system, we know that in the face of ongoing pain, the sympathetic nervous system is revved up. The persons that have quieted, we know that the, the hypothalamus pituitary adrenal axis is really in that agitated state. You know, all the, it’s like the a, all the emotional parts of the brain are on red alert, right? Vigilance. So, uh, one the things that, uh, so when we look at the practices of yoga, we think see things like, um, rhythmic movement actually changes their neurochemistry. It actually helps us release more serotonin, which would be calming to these systems. Uh, we know that when people do, uh, quiet, uh, or, uh, rhythmic breathing, when you start to get your diaphragm to work in that, that nice rhythmic pattern, there’s an association.
Neil Pearson:
We don’t know if it’s cause and effect, but when we breathe that way, it actually turns your autonomic nervous system more towards the parasympathetic side. Uh, and we know that that helps to calm, calm down, uh, adrenaline release as well. Right? So I always got to be careful about saying cause and effect factor because we don’t have that stuff, right? So when you breathe that way, there is an associated change in adrenaline, but we don’t know exactly the link. So we also know that, uh, in the, in the face of ongoing pain, one of the big things that happens is, uh, with the, the autonomic nervous system. Um, is that Mmm, the relationship in terms of body awareness, we know there’s this, this, this fascinating bit of that that pain makes it hard for you to feel your body in the area of the pain.
Neil Pearson:
You can feel that pain really, really well, but you can’t feel your body. And there’s a link between not being able to feel your body well and how agitated the system is. And so some of buds, Craig’s work and other people’s work is starting to show us that, that when we can do things like, um, pay more attention to our breath and pay more attention to muscle tension and pay more attention to even a heartbeat, that when we practice doing these things, um, there’s an associated, a calming of the autonomic nervous system. Um, so, and I can go on and on and on, right? There’s so many different aspects of, of this that, uh, uh, that we need to look at that we, um, you know, what we’ve tried to do in the past is we’ve tried to, when a person has an injury, we thought the pains from the tissue, we need to fix the tissue to make the pain go away.
Neil Pearson:
And of course, now that we understand chronic pain more, we’re gonna stand pain more. We realize that when you have pain, there’s, you know, there’s this thing that’s going on in your body, but there’s also this nervous system stuff. Um, and a lot of times, um, what’s happening when pain lasts is both your, your central nervous system, I should say. All of these, your central nervous system, your peripheral nervous system and your autonomic nervous system role in this Roundup state. And so, um, there’s lots of different practices within yoga that effect sort of the, the, the cognitive aspects of pain, the affect, the emotional aspects of pain, but also the effect many different aspects of the autonomic nervous system and that change neurochemistry in a way that would actually to help, uh, you know, release more endorphins, release more serotonin, dope mean all these things that actually calm it down.
Neil Pearson:
Um, so when we say the research, so the research says that when people practice yoga, there’s lots of really great benefits in terms of decreased pain, greater use of movements, some even showing people improving quality of life. Um, so there is not a lot of evidence, really good evidence that says that when people practice yoga, um, in the face of chronic pain, that all those other things that I just said a couple minutes ago, we don’t have a lot of research that says that happens when you practice yoga, but we have evidence that says that when you do things like meditation, those changes are when you’re doing breathing practices, those changes are when you’re doing body awareness, those change too. So there’s, there’s still some gaps, right? But, uh, it’s, it seems to make a lot of sense, right? In terms of what the research that we have at this point.
Dr. Joe Tatta:
Excellent. So I know the topic of pain science could be a, an entire summit all by itself because it’s very complicated. So that was a great explanation. Um, so if, if you’re, uh, let’s say you are, um, a client or a patient, what types of, so you know, there are a lot of therapists who are seeing musculoskeletal patients, right? Um, and they may want to refer that patient on for, let’s say, some yoga training at that point. What kind of conditions, um, or appropriate for someone to go and start a yoga practice?
Neil Pearson:
You know, I really, I’ve really come to believe that’s probably anybody who has a persisting pain problem and that it’s not following that normal getting better. You know, most of the times when we get injured, you know, we do these sort of what we call the normal stuff, the normal treatments and people get better. And when that’s not happening, I think that’s the time when we start to look at need to look at what is we as individuals, what can we do as well to try to change this, this pain phenomenon. So, um, I think as a clinician, if you’re going to send your PA person off to do yoga or I in these practices, I really think you need to give the person a knowledge first and understanding of why. And I think if you’re a person in pain, you need to gain that knowledge as well.
Neil Pearson:
Because, um, if you go into a yoga practice or a meditation practice and your, your thought is that doing this is going to distract me from the pain. You know, the point of this is to help me right now. Um, that’s where we think it’s not going to be as good because what we think is that, um, if you see that the practices as a skill, uh, as something that if you learn it and you practice it more and more and more, you’ll get better and better and better at it. And the better you get at it, the more you’ll be able to actually have an influence on your pain and your movement. Um, that, that it works better that way. But I think most people need to have some sort of foundational understanding of why. Um, in Western medicine we’ve been, most of the times we’ve been getting people to do these things with the idea is that they’re just, they’re really vivid distractions and using as, let’s change the pain right now.
Neil Pearson:
And uh, if it does, that’s really great. But what we want to do is look at these things as if you keep doing them. You’ll change your physiology, your chemistry, your nervous system more and more and more of the more you do it and then you’ll get a better benefit down the road. But I think people need to understand that first before they go off and do that. Um, and then when, when people go off and do it, I think somehow we need to give the individuals a foundation of the idea that if you’re going to succeed at doing say a yoga practice, what we need you to do is probably do two things. They’re really important. One is we need to make sure that you can breeze call me at rest and we need to make sure that you have some sort of sense of what’s happening in your physical body that the pain hasn’t really disrupted.
Neil Pearson:
That. Um, I often say to people is, uh, uh, if you have a pain in your shoulder and I asked you to move your shoulder and if you do this, we’re pretty sure that what this is going to do is when you hold your breath and you’re tense, your body, your nervous system is getting the message. This is really dangerous, right? And so what the thing is that a lot of us, when we have ongoing pain, we don’t know when we do that, right? It’s a natural reaction to hold your breath and tense up when you move towards something that might hurt. And a lot of times we’re not noticing that we’re doing that. So I think this is one of the things that if, if, um, medical practitioners, um, and even yoga teachers to say to people, okay, you’ve got ongoing pain here, what we need to do is we need these as foundational things to increase the success.
Neil Pearson:
Have you been able to do this? It’d be really good if we started to get you to do like a daily, uh, a breath awareness practice on a daily, a party warrants practice. Excellent. So let’s talk to those who are overcoming their persistent and chronic pain. So the learning a bunch of different techniques on, on this summit. So let’s say they’ve been through their physical therapy or they’ve been through their physical rehab, um, and they’re ready now to start implementing some yoga into their life, right? How many days per week and how many minutes approximately would you recommend for them? Because it’s obviously it’s a pouring, cause they’re gonna go out and look at classes. Now I’m going to say, well, this class is 90 minutes, this class is 30 minutes. W where should I begin? Okay. Um, yeah, that’s a really good question. So it really comes down to what’s the dose, right?
Neil Pearson:
It’s like, you know, if you’re going to take a pill, how much of the pill do you have to take? And if you’re going to do yoga, how much do you have to do? And, um, so it’s another area where, you know, I got to start by saying we don’t know. Um, uh, in terms of where do you start, what I would suggest is you start with what you can do in your day. So I think in, when we have ongoing pain and we need to recognize that we’ve got to stop life to do right and that what we want to do is say, almost look at, look at things and say, okay, here’s what I’ve got to do today in life. And here’s the time that I have to work on this pain stuff right now and say, if all you, if you say to me, I’m so busy that all I’ve got is 10 minutes, right?
Neil Pearson:
You know, it hurts like heck, but I still have to work and I’m sucking it up and I’m pushing through all that stuff. I’m still working. If all you got is five or 10 minutes dark there. And so start there with breath practices and start there with trying to calm your nervous system. Um, I mean that’s, we need to start with what we can do, right? Um, and I don’t think that there’s, there’s any spot where you’d say even that little is not beneficial.Because what we’re hoping is if you start with a little bit, you’ll start to notice that you actually can change your pain a bit or that you can call me her system where you can move with a bit more ease if you see that, hopefully you’ll do more and more and, and find a way to whittle this more into your life.
Neil Pearson:
So the research says, uh, that if you want to change your, uh, neural chemistry or neuro-plasticity stuff, that a lot of the research would suggest that you need to work anywhere from 30 to 90 minutes a day. Um, and a lot of them would say, you know, to get a really good lasting effect, you probably have to do this for at least four to six weeks. Right? So really get those, those motor learning kind of things and those neurochemical chemical things to change or to last. Um, so I think that’s another thing for people to recognize is that, you know, how much need to do every day. We can’t tell you exactly how much, so we would say is do as much as you can and consider that. Um, some of the research would suggest that doing it for 30 minutes to an hour or even an hour and a half a day is a really good amount of time.
Neil Pearson:
If you’ve got that non time, less isn’t going to be of no value. And also understand that, um, uh, you need to do it longer than you probably expect. One of the thing I want to say with that is this, is that, um, most of the people who get better in the face of, of ongoing pain, um, they do develop a daily plan. They find something that they can do consistently. Is that, that consistency. Um, you know, being nice about it, you know, it’s, it’s okay to be flexible while you’re being consistent, right? But consistently doing it, that’s where you really start to see the, the, the good changes and well, we need to recognize that, um, pain is hard to change, right? Um, the, the change that happened is when pain persists are very hard to change. And, uh, as one of my colleagues said is we’ve got to stop telling people that dabble in this, right? We have to be saying to people is, if you’re dabbling, you know what that means. You need to be, if you’re going to try to do this, and what you need to think of is in the end, is that you want to be better at this than anybody else in the world. Do you want to be like the expert at your personal pain care? Not someone who is, um, you know, like a couple of times a week I spent five minutes. It just doesn’t work that well. The dose isn’t enough.
Dr. Joe Tatta:
Hmm. Well, well I thank you for sharing that cause I can tell you I’ve been practicing, you know, the frequency and duration is such an important thing. And I’ve been a practicing therapist since 1996 and here in the United States in 1996, I used to get about 60 visits for physical therapy for a patient. So I had, I had the time to work to work with them. Now that has kind of really been chopped away and chopped away with, you know, kind of healthcare reform where, you know, therapists may be see somewhere between nine and 12 visits, but you’re saying the pain science says that we actually need more than than that.
Neil Pearson:
Yeah. Well, and it’s not just pain science either. If you look at, um, I originally trained as a phys ed teacher and so I read them motor learning research all the time. And if you’re going to try to change the motor controller, the more physiology of your body. If you want to get better at throwing darts, you don’t do it five minutes a day for a couple of weeks and expect to be better, right? Sure. You need to practice it. This is a complex skill, this pain management stuff. And so just like learning how to throw a dart or to shoot a basketball, we shouldn’t expect mastery in 10 visits. And I gotta say that’s another reason why I like yoga and other mindful movement practices that people can do in the community. This is, we can teach people all these things in our clinical setting, but people need to keep on doing it when they go. So if we can find people in the community who provide this at a relatively low cost, then they can, uh, carry on doing these things. I’m in a nice, safe place. Right? And of course, we even know that a neurochemistry being around a group of people that are all doing the same stuff, I mean, even that changes your neurochemistry in a positive way.
Dr. Joe Tatta:
Yeah, that’s right. Very powerful. So as a physical therapist and a yoga instructor, tell us what your weekly movement practices, license movement is obviously so important for our life.
Neil Pearson:
Well, that’s, well, that’s a great question. So, uh, my particular practices been influenced by votes. Uh, almost actually three years ago I had a, my second big disc event. I, for some reason I’ve got those things. Um, and so I actually bought my a L four five disc, uh, both into my spinal cord and the L five nerve root. Um, and so even this long afterwards, I’m still having to take care of this. I still have some funky leg stuff that happens. But anyway, so my daily practice, I get up in the morning and I do, I would say what a combination of stretching, um, and a little bit of, uh, um, a little bit of strengthening a mindful movement practice that incorporates what I know in physical therapy and like a yoga routine that would look like. Um, and then when I’m done that I, I actually sit and do a breath awareness and a breath control practice for about 10 or 15 minutes.
Neil Pearson:
Um, and part of that practice is actually at the end of it, um, is to actually just sit and um, work on gratitude and feeling joint. Cause I think that’s an important thing that, that uh, you know, we often think that should just come, but it’s nice to foster it. So that’s part of my practice every day. I also, pretty much every day I’m either uh, uh, riding my bicycle or going for a uh, easy run cause I can’t do hard runs again yet cause of my leg or swimming or even stand up paddle boarding and uh, uh, three or four times a week I do a program of weightlifting, you know, cause I’m 54 and you know, muscles start to go away and we’re going to try to keep them around a little bit more cause cause of all those other things I like to do. But uh, yeah. So I really, I I I liked this, I like getting up first thing in the morning and doing this practice. It feels good to me to do. And then, you know, that’s a very mindful practice where it is. The other practices are more for sort of other aspects of my body and mind too.
Dr. Joe Tatta:
Excellent. So you’ve, you said you’re recovering from a herniated disc base and you had a pretty big one if it’s a, you know, impinging on your spinal cord at that point, but, um, there’s pretty good research on what direction or you know, what movement affects a disc, but just in your personal experience, cause we’re all a little bit different, um, what kind of, you know, movements or poses made your disc heal it made it better and what kind of irritated it?
Neil Pearson:
Yeah, well, the things that definitely irritated it was the Ford bending things. Um, in my particular case, uh, uh, in terms of irritating it, if I were to twist my, Mmm, my torso towards the side of the herniation or my knees away from the side, um, that wasn’t very pleasant at all. But if I twisted the other way, it actually felt good. And if I were to, um, I felt better laying on my stomach and I actually felt better in, uh, you know, a backbend. Um, so, uh, you know, the things that often people sort of attribute to Rob McKenzie, the repeated backbends, um, or you know, I mean yoga has had, Rioja has backbends right. It’s sort of cool. Yoga is back then side bends, twists for bends it, all of them. Right. Uh, but it was definitely the backbends felt good, although backbends from standing didn’t feel very good, but back then as if I was laying down felt really, really nice.
Dr. Joe Tatta:
Can you explain why there would be a difference just for, you know, kind of the clinicians out there, why, you know, standing versus lying down might be different?
Neil Pearson:
Oh, well yeah, I guess I would say there’s, for me, the two things that I noticed, it seems to be the compression is the, you know, when you’re laying down you don’t have that compressive load on the tissue as well. Uh, but the other thing is I would say is, is uh, safety. Uh, when I’m standing and do a backbend, it does not feel anywhere near as safe as when I’m doing it laying down. Cause you have to use your muscles to control, sort of not going too far. Um, and we definitely know in the face of pain that’s the threat value of what you’re doing is equally important. You know, the threat belt value cognitively and sort of autonomically and physiologically all become important.
Dr. Joe Tatta:
Sure. So I guess the take home message there is, you know, if you’re injured starting non-weightbearing positions first on the ground, on your stomach and then slowly
Neil Pearson:
progress toward more weight-bearing base there. Yeah. And you know, the biggest thing that’s been hard to change is the, the, the dural tension. Uh, the Lake things. Cause, um, my back’s been mostly better for quite a long time, but, uh, it’s um, what’s been happening with my leg. I’ve even actually had what, what appears to be an Achilles tendinopathy. Um, but it’s not right. This is, this is a referred feeling of, uh, like there’s Al denia over top of the, in the skin over top of it. And there’s a, uh, if I, some mornings I get up in this, soon as I take a step I feel like my whole Achilles tendon and just is ripping inside in other mornings I don’t, and it’s, it’s uh, it, it doesn’t follow a pattern like an Achilles tendinopathy would. Right. It all is much more of a sort of, uh, lots of things can irritate the disc or the nerve. That’s still obviously that pressure on the nerve is either left, it’s partially annoyed or the dura rounded annoyed or something’s going on. And um, that’s been the, as a physical therapist has been an amazing experience to realize how long it can take and how touchy this can be. Cause there’s been times when for like four months I’ve said a, it feels like it’s fine and then I do something like increase how long I’m on my bike or increase how long as long I’m swimming and the next day it’s, it’s nasty again.
Dr. Joe Tatta:
Yeah. Yeah. I hear you. I’ve had my own back problems. I used to be a gymnast. So I kind of put my spine through things that I probably shouldn’t have at a young age, but I’m like yourself, I, you know, maintain it well and um, have found, you know, my own recovery. So I’ve been speaking with Neil Pearson, he’s a physical therapist and a yoga therapist. You can find [email protected]. So that’s life is now.ca and I’m gonna let him talk for a couple of minutes about the wonderful things he does up in Canada and let all of you know where you can find him.
Neil Pearson:
Great. Thanks Joe. Yeah, so I think, uh, if, if you want to learn more about, uh, a pain, there’s, uh, my website likes now. Dot. CA has a lot of open access resources on it. It actually, uh, in October we’re launching a, um, a learning management system, whereas if you’re a person in pain, you could actually come on the website and there’s just a, a monthly fee. I’m not very much for the monthly feeds actually take you through. This is what pain is. This is how the system changed from pain persists. And it takes you through, uh, the breath practices and body worn practices and guides you through ’em instruction and movements. Um, there’s, there’s lots of video on it to guide you. There’s audio, there’s text files, all that stuff is there. We think most people would actually, there’s so much content that most people might take, um, three to four months and some people may be in six months to make it through it all.
Neil Pearson:
It’s also a resource that we’ve created for people to use with their healthcare professional. Oh. Cause we think the best results will happen when a healthcare professional is guiding others. And we also provided for healthcare professionals because, you know, we don’t always have the time, right? Um, there’s so much that we want to instruct people in and, and often the things that we tell people we want them to hear over and over and over again. So this gives people access to that. Um, the other thing that I do a lot of is, uh, I’ve created a program called pain care yoga. Um, and so it’s a, it’s a training program for healthcare professionals and yoga teachers try to integrate as much as I can. But what we know about pain science, about the lived experience of pain and boats, uh, therapeutic yoga is as a way to help people out.
Neil Pearson:
And I travel around, um, the candidate in States teaching these things and even lead some, some of them are sort of nice little retreat centers like, uh, you go to The Bahamas every year and do a four day retreat where you can learn these things in a pretty cool, cool spot. So, uh, really what’s a, if I were to sum up what I’m trying to do is I’m trying to bring all this information that people in pain have taught me and that I’ve learned from, you know, people like Lorimer Moseley and David Butler and, and you know, so many different people in this area, uh, bring it together and in a practical way for people to understand it and, uh, to be able to, uh, you know, really change what we’re doing clinically and change what we’re doing in yoga and change what we’re doing as individuals. Um, you know, knowledge is really, really nice, but really what I want to focus on more is how do we take that knowledge and make it, uh, practical. Right.
Dr. Joe Tatta:
Excellent. Excellent. So I love your mission. I’m really honored and thank you for being on the healing pain summit. Please go to life is now.ca to check out all of Neil’s work and we’ll see you on the next episode of the healing pain summit. Thanks a lot to him.
