Explore Pain, Brisbane

A new year, a new dawn, a new course, it feels good to be heading back live!

Explore Pain is a brand new course that has been over a decade in the making. What is it about? Just what it says on the tin. This new course is all about exploring pain deeply and humanistically, with the lived experience of the person experiencing pain at the very centre of our explorations.

Together we will explore pain from an embodied predictive processing perspective, with special attention given to the interplay and interconnectedness of the nervous, endocrine and immune systems. Exploring each system in turn, but most importantly looking at the complex, adaptive system that is the ensemble of these three powerful systems. We will explore neuroimmune and neuroendocrine interactions in pain and discover how they can help you as therapists and clinicians, and the people you work with, make the best sense of ongoing pain experiences.

At the heart of Explore Pain is the very nature of subjective experience itself, and this course will explore the most up-to-date insights from the philosophy of mind and consciousness linking them with modern cognitive and affective science to go beyond heuristics and shortcuts to explore the lived experience of pain.

A Key thread running throughout the course is the fundamental nature of homeostasis and allostasis- processes that maintain life in the face of precarious and ever-changing environmental conditions. We will explore feelings and subjective experiences, including pain, as extended homeostasis in line with the most promising theories yet of how and why conscious feelings arise.

Supporting our exploration of pain will be the most exciting theories to emerge from the intersection of philosophy and science in the last decade – the Free Energy Principle (FEP) and Predictive Processing (PP). These ‘grand unifying theories’ will form the bedrock of a new and revolutionary way of thinking. Through the lens of the FEP and PP we will explore language as a powerful shaper of experience, clinical interactions as the interface between two complex systems trying to understand each other, and movement as an extended form of perceiving the world and our body within it.

During this very special three day events, your learning will be supported by case studies and fully explained examples of how these modern theories can be utilised in a clinical setting; providing a framework for approaches to pain treatment that we know work; offering new ways to tackle the most difficult clinical challenges; and even developing new treatment approaches and strategies based not on simplistic and singular approaches, but on fundamental principles governing perception, action, experience and living.

The course is open to all health professionals helping people experiencing pain in an inclusive, interdisciplinary approach that values and welcomes all expertise and perspectives and focuses on how to incorporate existing skills and knowledge into a broad overarching theory of FEP and PP