Avis Favaro and Elizabeth St. Philip, CTV News: Doctors in Ontario are taking a new approach in the battle against chronic pain, ditching the prescription pad and teaching sufferers how to harness the healing power of the mind.

St. Michael’s Hospital pain specialist Dr. Jackie Gardner-Nix developed the program targeting pain with mindfulness and meditative techniques. The classes are facilitated at St. Michael’s Hospital and Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto.

“I do nothing but teach chronic pain patients meditation and mindfulness,” she said. “I am so impressed with it.”

The classes, which typically run for nearly three hours, teach participants practical meditation skills…

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When it comes to cancer, stress can be a cause and effect; reducing it is a big part of both the prevention and the treatment of illness.

Mindfulness meditation, the practice of clearing the mind through deep breathing exercises, is becoming an increasingly widespread part of healing and coping with cancer.

Dr. Miroslava Lhotsky, one of the facilitators of Mindfulness Meditation Toronto, is a physician who spent years delivering bad news to women whose mammograms had revealed breast cancer.

“You can imagine the kind of adrenaline that flows in their body …

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Tralee Pearce: I haven’t studied enough. I’m going to fail the test. My mom’s going to be mad. Maybe I’ll skip class.

Thoughts like these can quickly gallop out of control in kids’ minds, but what if there was a way they could clear them away? Enter the three-minute breathing meditation, which can be done anywhere, whether it’s on the bus or in a school hallway.

It’s one of the cornerstones of the increasingly popular practice of mindfulness, a blend of Buddhism-inspired calm and cognitive-behavioural therapy. Used as a therapy for adults for about 30 years, it’s now moving into the world of kids …

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