Breathworks is a major Triratna project offering thousands of people living with chronic pain the potential to improve and transform their quality of life using a ‘toolkit’ of mindfulness -based techniques. They’re booming, and we’ve two days worth of news from them, starting with their recent “Mindfulness Now” conference in Bangor. Vilasavajra writes -

“Earlier this year Vidyamala, Sona & Cate Clark from Breathworks attended the “Mindfulness Now” conference hosted by the Centre for Mindfulness and Research Conference at Bangor University. This was held over three days, was fully booked and a highly successful event. Vidyamala gave a keynote address http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGAg2YmzIMY&feature=player_embedded">"25 years of mindfulness practice with a spinal injury - why I developed Breathworks" which was well received. Click the link for her PowerPoint presentatoin, or listen to the audio recording via link on this page.

Sona and Vidyamala also gave a workshop along with Ruth Passman, senior policy advisor within the Department of Health entitled "Breathworks for chronic pain & illness and its application to the addiction recovery, asylum seeker and carer communities". Vidyamala and Sona did some practical input on mindfulness of the breath and body and then Ruth took over and presented details about a course that Ratnaguna recently ran in Manchester for people who are recovering from drug and alcohol addictions - for more details see the Breathworks website. Ruth had arranged a minivan full of participants to come to Bangor and speak at the conference and this was very powerful for the attendees. The recovery participants spoke from the heart in a very powerful and moving way.

At the conference Breathworks also launched a new course for health professionals aimed at existing MBCT/MBSR trainers. This will be introducing the Breathworks approach to working with people in pain and there seems to be a lot of interest in this. It will be a three-day course and if you are interested then please contact the Breathworks office on info@breathwork.co.uk or click http://breathworks-mindfulness.org.uk/training/breathworks-approach-for-mbsr-mbct-trainers.html">here. There's other courses in the pipeline which we'll report on tomorrow.

Internationally, Vidyamala and Sona are continuing to travel to develop Breathworks training in Germany, Sweden, Australia and NZ as well as the UK. There are now qualified Breathworks trainers working in more than a dozen countries.