Taming Pain& Yoga: Can Ancient Wisdom Meet Modern Science
One of the great strengths of applying yoga to pain care is that it sees the whole person—not just the pain, not just the body part, but the human experience and the individual at the centre of it all.
Yoga teaches self-acceptance. It grounds us in the present moment, rather than pulling us into the past or future. Breathwork, awareness and the ability to directly calm the nervous system all make yoga a natural fit within modern pain care.
So yes,with yoga, you are in a position to help with a few small shifts in perspective – and let’s be very clear, helping doesn’t mean fixing, curing, mending or giving false hope and misinformation but teaching what you already know. We aren’t trying to bend yoga to fit recovery, we are trying to aid recovery by facilitating philosophical shift.
It’s the potential misunderstanding of these issues that make me feel restricted about connecting yoga and pain but to me there has always been obvious correlation. We just need to be careful with our wording that we aren’t talking in terms of definites and absolutes but possibles and maybes.
For example we wouldn’t say to an addict, ‘well, just don’t have it’ and we can’t say to people in pain ‘well, just get moving’ or ‘just breathe and it will feel better’. We don’t necessarily need to reference any human issues head on or even name them, as teachers we know that the philosophy is a slow drip that can create subtle shift over time and all we are doing here is adding into our normal teaching this new layer of understanding.
Let’s pull at a thread together:
Twinning; Pain and the Kleshas
Below is a diagram I created to show what often happens when pain or injury strikes. It’s a cycle—starting with pain and looping through thoughts, emotions, physical shifts, behaviours, and back to pain again. Often an endless cycle of looping that feels difficult or impossible to break, much like any of our thoughts and behaviours.
Rāgaḥ (clinging) – grasping at old, familiar states of being, even when they’re no longer helpful “I used to be able to xyz”
Dveṣaḥ (aversion) – rejecting discomfort, change, hope or new ways of moving or thinking
Abhiniveśaḥ (fear of loss or death) – the panic that comes from feeling unsafe in our body, wanting to freeze or control everything
These ancient teachings map closely onto the pain spiral in the image
Thoughts driven by avidyā and asmita
Emotions rooted in fear, anxiety, blame (abhiniveśaḥ, dveṣaḥ)
Physical shifts that mirror rāgaḥ and our conditioned responses
Behaviours of avoidance, isolation, or over-reliance on a “fix”—all part of a karmic loop we unknowingly reinforce
In yogic philosophy:
Vṛtti are the fluctuations of the mind
Kleshas are the root causes of those disturbances
Karma is the action that results
Saṃskāra are the patterns or grooves those habits carve into us
With awareness, practice, and compassion, we can interrupt this loop—creating more space, less affliction, and the possibility of mokṣa (liberation) and for clarity that doesn’t mean liberation or freedom from pain it means relief from the grip long-term conditions can have over us. This is the direction most modern pain science is moving in, don’t hope your pain will shrink
but instead try and expand your life around the pain.
Pain is well researched as being far from just a physical event—it’s a full-spectrum human experience and yoga can offer us tools to meet it on every level: thought, emotion, behaviour, and nervous system.
What we learn from pain science today only reinforces what yoga has taught for thousands of years: we can’t always erase pain, but we can change how we relate and react to it.
And that has potential, for some, to be personally powerful.
