Prudence Margaret Burch (born 1959), known professionally as Vidyamala Burch, is a mindfulness teacher, writer, and co-founder of Breathworks, an international mindfulness organization known particularly for developing mindfulness-based pain management (MBPM). The British Pain Society has recognized her "outstanding contribution to the alleviation of pain", and in 2019, 2020, 2021 and 2022 she was named on the Shaw Trust Power 100 list of the most influential disabled people in the UK. Burch's book Mindfulness for Health won the British Medical Association's 2014 Medical Books Award in the Popular Medicine category.
Early life Born Prudence Burch in Wellington, New Zealand in 1959, Burch enjoyed walking and mountaineering as a child and teenager, especially in New Zealand's Southern Alps. At the age of 16, she fractured a vertebra in her spine while lifting someone from a swimming pool, and due to a congenital spine condition suffered severe long-term consequences. Within six months she required major surgery, which itself caused complications requiring further surgery. Burch's life "changed overnight", and ever since she has experienced chronic back pain and varying levels of disability. At the age of 23 Burch was involved in a major car accident which fractured another of her vertebrae, significantly worsening her pain and debility. After working for two years as a film and sound editor (including for Vincent Ward's film Vigil), Burch's health suffered a complete collapse, and in 1985 she was hospitalized in an intensive care ward. During her time in hospital, Burch had a number of experiences that profoundly shaped her future life. The most important, which she has described as "the axis on which my life has turned", occurred after having a procedure after which she was required to sit upright for 24 hours to avoid complications, causing her almost unbearable pain. She writes:
"I hadn’t sat up for months, but this time I had no choice. Throughout the long hours of the night I felt impaled on the edge of madness, and it seemed that two voices were speaking within me. One was saying, I can’t bear this. I’ll go mad. There’s no way I can endure this until morning. But the other replied, You have to bear it, you have no choice. They argued incessantly, like a vice growing tighter every second. Suddenly, out of the chaos came something new. I felt a powerful clarity, and a third voice said, You don’t have to get through until morning. You only have to get through the present moment." Burch suddenly "saw that the present moment is always bearable", and that "much of my torment had grown from fear of the future". She felt "the tension torturing me open into expansiveness", and knew that "something extraordinary had broken through". According to Burch, this experience showed her "a completely different way of being", which "it has taken me many years... to integrate... into my daily experience in a way that's sustainable and practical". The way that Burch eventually integrated these insights into her life was meditation and mindfulness practice, which she was also introduced to during her 1985 hospital stay. A hospital chaplain guided her through a visualization meditation which she experienced as transformative, showing her that "although my body was broken to some extent... my mind could be a tool for healing and well-being". After leaving hospital, she spent several years experimenting in "do it yourself" meditation and yoga, and investigating Hindu philosophy. She eventually discovered Buddhism, and "started attending Buddhism and meditation classes in Auckland with the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order (FWBO), now renamed the Triratna Buddhist Community." She quickly became a committed Buddhist, and in 1990, at the age of 30, she moved from New Zealand to the UK to live at Taraloka, a rural residential Buddhist retreat center for women. She lived there for 5 years, and during this time trained intensively in meditation and mindfulness - particularly mindfulness of breathing and loving-kindness meditation. She has described her time at Taraloka as "very intense, but I knew I needed this kind of strong medicine if I was to transform my mind in any lasting and meaningful way." In 1995 she was ordained into the Triratna Buddhist Order and took the name "Vidyamala", meaning "garland of wisdom". In 1997, at the age of 37, Burch suffered another major deterioration in her health, becoming paralyzed in her bowel and bladder and partially paralyzed in her legs, meaning she had to use a wheelchair. For around five years, until she had a further surgery in 2002, she was largely housebound, and was forced to spend many months lying flat on her back. She has described this time as a "dark voyage", during which "I had to face my deepest and most destructive habits, especially my tendency to overdo things and then 'crash and burn'". In particular, Burch realized that she had been using meditation as a way of escaping her pain, meaning that when her pain worsened "I felt as if I’d failed and that I needed to try even harder, only to become even more confused and despondent when the pain persisted. And so the cycle continued, leaving me emotionally barren and desperate." Influenced by the work of Stephen Levine (in particular his work with the dying, as described in his book Who Dies?) and Jon Kabat-Zinn (in particular his work with the chronically ill, as described in Full Catastrophe Living), as well as by the lessons of her own experience, Burch realized that she needed to "turn toward the difficult, rather than try to escape it." She also realized that she had to bring mindfulness more fully into her daily life, and was helped in this by pain management practices of "pacing" and "activity management". Gradually, Burch's daily life and meditation practice shifted into a mode of "acceptance", in which,
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