Where chronic pain and illness meet clinical curiosity and hope, this event is for anyone currently navigating a life with chronic pain, as well as therapists and medical providers supporting patients through it - and anyone fascinated by the brain’s remarkable capacity to adapt, rewire, and recover from long-held physical conditions. Through discussing lived experiences, emerging therapeutic approaches, and case studies, attendees will gain a deeper understanding of how the brain and nervous system process pain, how stress, emotions, and past experiences can influence the intensity and persistence of physical symptoms, and how these factors can shape a person’s experience of care. We’ll also explore practical strategies that can help people feel safer, more understood, and better equipped to participate in their healing while reducing pain and symptom intensity.
The event will be facilitated by Haylie Schwartz, a mental health therapist who has experienced chronic illness and pain in her own life and now specializes in helping others navigate this complicated path.
Ultimately, this will be a conversation about collaboration of care: what becomes possible when medicine, mental health, and people’s lived experience are considered together? The goal of bringing together people experiencing pain, medical providers, and therapists is to broaden the conversation around what the body needs in order to heal.
We’ll consider what can happen when your nervous system is repeatedly receiving signals of threat—whether from pain itself, previous medical experiences, trauma, or ongoing stress—and how that state can influence pain processing and a person’s capacity to heal.
There will be experiential offerings where attendees can either practice or observe short and simple techniques that calm the mind and send signals of safety to the body.
Attendees will walk away with practical assessment tools and frameworks to help you, your clients, or your patients consider whether symptoms may involve nervous system dysregulation or neuroplastic pain—and how that understanding might inform next steps in your own care or the care of the people you serve.
While not an exhaustive list, this event will be particularly relevant to anyone experiencing or working with the following conditions:
Lower back pain
Neck Pain
Migraines
TMJ
Stress/Burnout
POTS
Fibromyalgia
Insomnia or disturbed sleep
Chronic Fatigue
Brain Fog
Vulvodynia
Endometriosis
Pelvic Pain
Tinnitus
Unexplained Chest Pain
Ear or teeth pain
IBS
Lyme Disease + other Tick Borne Diseases
Mold exposure or environmental illness
Panic Attacks
Medical Anxiety