Welcome to Mindfulness and Pain Explained with Dr. Adele Stewart. I’ve been a GP for over 30 years and bring that experience—along with my background as a mindfulness teacher, my interest in modern pain neuroscience, and my role as Chair of the Royal Australian College of GPs Pain Group—to this course. I also have my own lived experience of chronic pain. My hope is that this course helps you discover a transformative approach to understanding and processing pain. You’ll explore the neuroscience behind chronic pain and uncover how greater awareness can reduce its intensity and impact. By shifting focus from a fixed “diagnosis” to a mind-body perspective—one that highly considers the level of safety and danger in our whole system—you’ll gain practical tools to navigate the pain-fear cycle. You’ll also learn how your thoughts, emotions, behaviors, and even aspects of life that may seem unrelated to pain influence your experience. We’ll demystify complex topics like neuroplasticity, nociplastic pain, and neuroimmune interactions, making them accessible and applicable to everyday life. Bring along a pen and paper or an electronic journal to capture your reflections as we embark on this journey of curiosity and self-discovery. Each lesson will begin with a brief grounding practice, followed by some of the following: education, reflection, meditation and exercises. Each lesson ends with a suggested home practice, including one of my meditations from the free Insight Timer app. The names of these meditations are listed in the lesson audios and the course descriptions. Once found, they can be bookmarked and saved in a folder, which you might name Mindfulness and Pain Explained. The home practice is an important part of consolidating your learning in an experiential way. This course is quite an ask. The lessons only average 15 minutes—some a few minutes shorter, some a bit longer. However the course represents a paradigm shift in understanding pain, challenging deeply help beliefs and requiring substantial energy to engage with. Like most things in life, the more you put in, the more you’ll get out. Be patient with yourself though, as you navigate this new perspective. Although the course is structured as daily lessons, I recommend leaving a few days to a week between lessons to allow the learning to integrate and to give you time to practice. You’re encouraged to post in the course as much as you like. Reading others’ posts and my responses can be inspiring along the way. I will usually get back to you within 24 hours, except for once a year when I do a 14-day silent retreat and am offline. Let’s get started!