In The Pain Companion: Everyday Wisdom for Living With and Moving Beyond Chronic Pain, by Sarah Anne Shockley, who has personally lived with chronic pain since 2007, offers fellow pain sufferers a compassionate and supportive guide for living with pain that can be used alongside their ongoing medical or therapeutic healing programs. The book is divided into the following four parts:
Part 1: Pain Moves In — Explores the ways physical suffering affects lives and shines a light on how pain can move in and take over one’s experience.
Part 2: The Emotional Life of Chronic Pain — Addresses the very deep and persistent fears, anxieties, sadness, anger, and shame that are a part of living with chronic physical pain and offers simple, practical steps to help ease these psychological and emotional consequences of living with pain.
Part 3: Meditative Approaches to Physical Pain — Offers eleven meditative exercises Sarah developed to help herself open a path to physical relief and release.
Part 4: When Pain Is the Teacher — Sarah shares important life lessons she has learned with pain as her mentor that offer invaluable insights for living life with more ease, grace, and wisdom.
“I cannot know your personal suffering, of course; only you can,” writes Sarah. “But I do understand the experience of being in significant and relentless pain for long periods of time, and I understand the fear, sadness, and frustration associated with long-term physical debilitation. So I can say that this book has been written from inside of pain, a perspective on the experience and the healing of pain that we are seldom offered.”
ABOUT SARA ANNE SHOCKLEY
Sarah Anne Shockley is the author of The Pain Companion. In the Fall of 2007, as a result of a fall, she contracted Thoracic Outlet Syndrome (TOS), which is a collapse of the area between the clavicles and first ribs, and has lived with debilitating nerve pain ever since.
She has been a regular columnist for Pain News Network and is a regular contributor to The Mighty, a 1.5 million–member online community for those living with chronic illness and pain.
A native of Connecticut, Sarah Anne Shockley is a multiple award-winning producer and director of educational films, including Dancing From the Inside Out, a highly acclaimed documentary on disabled dance.
She has traveled extensively for business and pleasure. Her first book, Traveling Incognito, a guidebook for international travelers, won a Critic’s Choice Award (San Francisco Review of Books).
She holds an MBA in International Marketing and has worked in high-tech management, as a corporate trainer, and teaching undergraduate and graduate business administration.
