Crafted by someone who understands what it's like to live with migraine and chronic pain

🧠Rewiring the Pain Pathway: How Mindfulness & Pain Reprocessing Therapy can Help you Live Better with Chronic Pain

Living with chronic pain—whether it’s migraine, fibromyalgia, tension headaches, or another condition—can feel exhausting, isolating, and unpredictable. Many of us have tried medications, diets, alternative therapies, or even just powering through. But what if part of the solution comes from within? In this blog post, I’m sharing how Mindfulness and Pain Reprocessing Therapy (PRT) can help reduce chronic pain by calming the nervous system and retraining the brain’s pain response. These tools aren’t just ideas—they’re practices grounded in science, and they’ve changed my own life as someone who lives with chronic migraine.

Natanya Mandel

6/6/20252 min read

💡Understanding Chronic Pain: It's not "All in your head" - But it is in your brain!

Pain is real. But in many chronic pain conditions, the brain and nervous system become stuck in a protective loop, firing pain signals even after the original injury has healed.

This is called primary chronic pain-and it is more common than you think.

That's where Pain Reprocessing Therapy (PRT) comes in. PRT helps people learn to shift how they think about, react to, and relate to their pain. By combining this with mindfulness for chronic pain, we can gently guide our nervous system toward safety, calm, and healing.

🧘‍♀️Why mindfulness?

Mindfulness helps us build awareness of the present moment-without judgement. It gives as a tool to be aware of the now, and consciously choose our course of action, rather than having an automatic reaction. For people living with pain, it becomes a powerful way to:

Calm the fight-or-flight response
Increase self-compassion
Soften resistance and tension
Reduce fear and pain catastrophizing
Interrupt pain-stress cycles

Over time, mindfulness can help retrain the brain to respond to pain with curiosity and care, instead of fear and overwhelm.

💬 What is Pain Reprocessing Therapy?

PRT is a research-backed approach that teaches you how to:

Understand how the brain generates pain
Reduce fear of pain through education and practical tools
Practice techniques to rewire the brain’s pain pathways
Reconnect to a sense of safety in your body

A 2021 study in JAMA Psychiatry showed that 66% of participants with chronic back pain treated with PRT were pain-free or nearly pain-free after the program. That’s powerful.

🌿 A New 12-Week Program: Mindfulness & Pain Reprocessing for Chronic Pain

This gentle, online group program brings together the best of mindfulness and Pain Reprocessing Therapy to help you reduce pain and reconnect with your life.

You’ll learn:

How to calm your nervous system using breath and body awareness
How to identify fear-based patterns and shift them
How to approach pain with curiosity, not panic or anxiety
How to use mind-body tools when pain flares
How to build self-trust, resilience, and community

Together, Dr Jackie Gardner-Nix and I will be guiding the program as people who live with migraine and have spent years learning how to work with—not against—our bodies.

✅ Want to Learn More?

📅 The next 12-week program begins [insert date].
💻 It’s online, accessible, and trauma-aware.
🎓 No experience needed—just curiosity and openness.

➡️ Click here to learn more and register

📣 Final Thoughts

Chronic pain doesn’t mean your body is broken. Your brain isn’t “doing it wrong”—it’s trying to protect you. With the right tools and support, you can teach it something new.

If you're ready to stop fighting your pain and start living again, I hope you’ll join me.

Person feeling empowered after an online mindfulness for migraine support session