Irina Poleshchuk is a researcher at the University of Jyväskylä. Her main interest lies in the field of chronic pain, psychology of pain, embodiment, and sociality. She has published several articles, and conducted workshops on chronic pain, ethics, and normativity of pain experience.
Experiencing severe neuropathic pain over the last ten years, Irina learned how to maintain her daily life addressing various practices of phytotherapy, lithotherapy, meditations, breathing and art works which help to balance emotions, sensations of pain, and different levels of suffering. She focuses on methods of mapping pain, understanding of extended embodiment, pain storytelling, art therapy, which facilitate work with such states as feeling of guilt, shame, despair, and depression. During her psychological sessions she aims at enrooting understanding and acceptance of new pain embodiment, feeling new extended modes of body in pain (individual, parental, and social), embracing emotions originated from pain sensations, and learning how to introduce and harmonize new body-mind connections in chronic pain experience. Her goal is to release trauma originated from chronic pain and to restore happy life.
