How do I know which session would be a better fit for me?
What sessions are available? How to book? MSP rules? How many GMV’s a patient can join?
Brain & Mental Health
This program dives deep into stress management and relaxation training concepts. Over the course of the 9 sessions, you will have the opportunity to work with a wide range of tools, including breathing, meditation, mindfulness, cognitive behavioral therapy, self-compassion, chair yoga, and emotion regulation. A goal of this program is to support you in actively using these tools in your daily life, so strategies for successful habit change will be explored as well.
This unique 8 part weekly group medical visit series is co-facilitated by pain specialist Dr. Lau and neurologist Dr. Magalhaes. Each session delves into brain physiology, provides practical tips to improve brain function, body health and emotional resilience. In this series, we are excited to join you in sharing effective ways of keeping our brains healthy for life.
Overview of Key Pillars of Health
This is an 8-week progressive series. It is an essential part of your treatment plan at CHANGEpain. Pain is in the brain, and most pain patients need more than traditional medical treatments to manage (or preferably resolve!) their pain. During our 8-week series, Empowering You to CHANGEpain, our highly trained facilitators and physicians will discuss gold-standard self-management tools and strategies and connect you with resources both inside and outside CHANGEpain clinic to help you resolve or confidently self-manage your pain.
In this important interactive 60 minute session, our medical director Dr. Lau summarizes all of the components of the Core Pain Program, why we've had to make these changes and how they affect you. Our team has expanded services and she'll update you what's happening with services for patients with motor vehicle accidents, work injuries, veterans, surgeries, insurance-changes and more.
This group medical visit series consists of a 4 week program that reveals how to bring your best self to the operating room. Evidence has shown that some light changes in your lifestyle can reduce pain after surgery, recovery days and mitigate the overall possibility of developing chronic pain after surgery.
Physical conditioning
Restorative Yoga |Yin | Yoga for Beginners | Hatha Yoga | Kundalini Yoga | Hatha Flow Yoga
Body Regions: (All are 3-part series) / Morning Stretch & Activation (Recurring but unique class every week)
Weekly Somatic Therapy
A somatic movement class to gently support wellbeing through breath, movement, sensory awareness, and embodiment explorations.⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
Sessions will build support through ground and space orientation. This will be implemented through simple tonic function-based embodiment explorations. Gentle standing or seated Qigong, body scan practices, and others will be utilized to "open attention" to body regions. A spectrum of related somatic movements will be utilized to bring presence somatically in the current moment.
Pilates
This weekly class is designed to build strength, balance, and flexibility through alignment-based movements. We will practice core activation, connecting to forgotten muscles, and finding ease and fun within challenge. This class will explore both isolated muscle movements such as feet and ankle movements, shoulders, and core, as well as whole-body integrated movement like squats and planks. Don’t worry - modifications and alternatives will be provided! Exercises are slow, controlled, and functional, with the intention of learning to move well both in class and in everyday life.
Wellness/Pain Conditions
If you struggle with sleep, take this program. Research finds that, when people are struggling with pain and sleep, they do better when they focus on improving their sleep. This program will coach you through a pain-informed approach to improving sleep through cognitive and behavioral interventions. These types of interventions are effective because they address the root cause of most sleep issues. The primary focus of this program will be to improve sleep, but a secondary focus will be developing the ability to suffer less in the face of disturbed sleep.
Stress impacts us all – trauma occurs when stressful events or situations overwhelm our system, impeding healing and recovery. Trauma essentially results from circumstances that are too fast, too much, or too soon.
In this GMV we will look at the physiology of trauma and introduce tools for self-regulation such as simple Qigong-based movements, breathwork, visualizations, strategies, etc.
The evidence-base for cultivating more compassion in the face of persistent pain is explored in our Empowering program. We know that higher levels of self-compassion are found to increase well-being, decrease stress, foster resilience, and increase motivation.
The next step is doing the work to break the habits of judging, shaming, and beating ourselves up and learning to be kinder to ourselves.
This 6-week program is intended to support you in doing this work. You will be guided through a practical and experiential exploration of self-compassion applied to navigating pain, our health care system, relationships, productivity, emotions, and body image.