Hey there! In this episode of the So Frickin' Healthy Podcast, we're diving into the transformative world of the Gokhale Method (pronounced Go-clay) with esteemed guests Esther Gokhale, L.Ac., Founder & CEO of the Gokhale Method, and Gokhale Method Teacher Julie Johnson. As founder of the Gokhale Method, Esther aims to empower individuals to reclaim their structural integrity, bid farewell to back pain and rediscover the inherent grace and strength within.

Are you tired of being plagued by persistent back pain caused by bad posture? Learn how the Gokhale Method offers a comprehensive solution to address and alleviate back pain, providing you with practical tools to make a remarkable difference in your daily life.

Through profound insights and gentle hands-on instruction, the Gokhale Method illuminates the fascinating evolution of our spine, transitioning from a S-shaped curve to the resilient and harmonious J-shaped form, offering the key to unlocking pain-free living. Discover how adopting this primal posture can be a life-changing experience, building strength, resilience and reducing compression, tension, and degeneration.

The episode delves into the realm of preventative care, exploring how you can actively safeguard your well-being by comfortably altering how you stand, sit, and move. Learn the art of returning to your primal posture, unlocking immediate effects that last a lifetime.

Curious to know if your back pain could be related to poor posture? Our guests highlight the link between back pain and posture, helping you understand the subtle nuances that often go unnoticed.

Perhaps you wonder why your back still hurts even with good posture. Esther and Julie unravel this mystery, explaining the potential underlying causes and how to address them effectively.

Adopting good posture doesn't have to be a painful process. Our guests reveal the secrets to easing into a new way of moving, making the journey to better posture a comfortable and gradual experience.

So, how long does it take to correct your posture? Is it too late to fix years of bad posture, especially for those in their 30s or 20s? Fear not, as the Gokhale Method has answers for you. Esther and Julie share their expertise on correcting posture, regardless of age, demonstrating that it's never too late to embrace change and invest in your well-being.

Join us on this transformative journey as we explore the limitless potential of your body's design and the profound impact of the Gokhale Method in healing and revitalizing your life.

Tune in for a life-changing conversation that inspires you to unlock your body's natural grace and strength, paving the way to an active, pain-free, and fulfilling existence.

LINKS & MORE

Gokhale Method Newsletter

Gokhale Method Exercise Free Trial

8 Steps to a Pain-Free Back by Esther Gokhale Book

1. On Amazon.com
2. On Amazon.de

#headbalancechallenge on Instagram

Free Online Workshop

Video-How to Rib Anchor

This episode does not constitute medical advice; the thoughts and stories in this episode are for entertainment only. Always consult your healthcare provider when making decisions about your health and well-being.

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If you normally listen to the So Frickin' Healthy Podcast, you may want

to watch this episode in video format due to the very visual nature of this topic.

You can find the video of this episode on our YouTube or Spotify podcast channels.

Welcome to another episode of the So Frickin' Healthy Podcast.

I'm Megan McCrory and I am usually joined by my fellow health coach, Donna

Levy Hoffmann But unfortunately, she could not be here for this episode, but

fear not her potty mouth and sarcasm will return in the next episode.

Today we have the honor of hosting not one, but two guests.

And as you've probably seen from the title of this episode, we are

talking about our back health today.

And we are joined, with Esther Gokhale and Julie Johnson to talk about the

Gokhale Method and how to end back pain.

I'm gonna bring them on now.

Thank you ladies, for being here today.

Hi, Megan.

It's a great pleasure to be here.

Same here.

Yay.

So nice to see you ladies.

We're recording this in July and we're all very hot, so

both literally and figuratively.

So we're gonna hop right into this.

Esther, I'm gonna go ahead and start with you.

Obviously this method is named after you the Gokhale Method.

Why don't you go ahead and tell us about the Gokhale Method and how it

uses posture to address back pain.

So it's based on an observation that people in indigenous cultures and

people in ancestral populations and very young children have some features,

posture features in common movement, um, characteristics in common, and

that those make sense and that those happen to be the populations who

don't have very much back pain at all.

In sharp contrast to modern industrial populations who have crazy high rates

of all kinds of musculoskeletal problems and have very differently shaped spines.

So the conclusion is that these very different populations sharing

the same spinal shape, ways of bending, ways of walking are

actually exhibiting what's natural.

What's normal, what's healthy for our species, and that in modern times

we've more or less forgotten how to be in our bodies and that this is the

reason we have so much degeneration or arthritic change and pain dysfunction.

And that by studying these other cultures and emulating their ways

of being in their body and their ways of moving, that we can restore.

Our lives to something much more enjoyable, something much more functional

than the average person experiences.

It's very sad how much we suffer and we think it's largely unnecessary.

And so what the Gokhale Method has done is chart a very efficient, a very effective

way of getting people back to the kind of posture we used to have in olden times.

The kind of posture we used to have when we were little tots, the kind of

posture that some of our counterparts in non-industrial cultures still have.

Doing research to get ready for this episode.

it was very easy for me to find lots of videos where you've already kind of

explained and, demonstrated some of the, the posture that you're talking about.

For me, what you're talking about in terms of a visual is seeing a

young infant sitting up on the floor.

For me, that's the, like, cuz you see an infant and they're just sitting

straight up their back is just perfect.

And at some point during our childhood, we start to get out of that.

But is that, is, is that the correct kind of imagery that you would say for,

to, to explain for obviously a listening podcast what you're talking about?

Yeah.

You know that, that resilience, that sturdiness and yes, there the

characteristics of being straight in the back with the behind, behind.

If you look at a little child, their rump, their bottom is out back.

And, uh, so I coined the phrase J spine to capture those characteristics, the

straightness of the upper lumbar spine and going into the thoracic and cervical

spine, and then the behind being behind.

So this is in contrast to an s that we in modern times have

mistakenly come to believe is the desirable shape for the human spine.

And Julie, maybe you can show as the contrast of the modern spine and

the, spine illustration from an older anatomy book to, to clarify this.

That would be great.

The part that we don't ask modern people to emulate is sitting on the floor.

That part you have to have grown up with in order to be able to do.

So here you have it.

On the right is an illustration from a text published in 1911, and you

see at the very bottom, you can see how the behind is behind, and then

the lumbar spine is pretty straight.

On the left, you see.

An illustration from a modern anatomy book, and it's way more curvy worvy,

and it doesn't really make sense because you can see that even at the baseline,

the discs are getting compressed.

The edges of the bones are stressed against each other, which

encourages calcium deposition.

So creating arthritis, it, it just doesn't hold up under scrutiny.

But you know, when we have these generally accepted paradigms,

we don't scrutinize them.

You know, it was 600 years we believe that the earth was flat and somehow,

you know, that held on for 600 years.

Well, this paradigm needs to be upgraded as well.

This S-shaped spine, which determines the shape of our ergonomic chairs,

which asks our car seats to have lumbar cushions and so on.

It's just wrong.

Mm-hmm.

And I think it's at the root of a lot of our problems.

So how could moving from there cuz with the image on the screen

and for people who are listening, it's a very slight difference.

Like if you had just shown me the one on the right, the old one, I

would've said that's the same as today.

But obviously when you have them next to each other, you can

see that there's a difference.

But I mean, to the untrained eye you've been doing this for 25 years,

so for you the back is very, um, very,

I'll tell you, I'll tell you what it makes a big difference to, is.

The discs and the nerves.

It's not a small difference to the discs and the nerves in there.

They're getting squished and impinged and such.

Mm-hmm.

If you zoom in, then you can see that it's really, a huge problem

for the elements of the spine.

But yeah, to an untrained eye, doesn't seem like a big deal, but.

Yes it is to those parts

Maybe may, maybe it's a good thing Esther, to point out, this is

how I like to explain it, being based in Germany where we like our sausages.

I explain to people, that you imagine the way a disc would like to be is

like a cylindrical piece of sausage.

If you take a sausage and cut it into slices, these are kind of

the pieces that want to slot here in between the vertebrae, right?

Mm-hmm.

These little spaces here are the vertebrae and they'd like to

have even pressure up and down.

And Megan, I think that would make it a bit clearer that you can see the

cylindrical spaces that are the discs.

Mm-hmm.

Here in this 1911 medical image and I have a German Brockhaus here at

home that has the same spine shape.

You can see they all have enough space and room, whereas here

you see triangular shapes.

Where the discs here are getting squished.

Yes.

So how did, how did we evolve then?

Like what are the, some of the main factors in the evolution of our spine?

Because people were sitting in 1911, right?

We've, we've been sitting for way longer than 1911.

So what has shifted in just the last hundred years to cause this

kind of shape shift in our back?

And why is the medical industry promoting this s shape?

Or are, I'm sorry, maybe I'm assuming, are they promoting the S shape?

I mean, they're, they're just illustrating what is

commonly understood to be normal.

There's no promotion here.

There's just a lack of under understanding.

You mentioned evolution.

So this L five S one disc is actually wedge shaped.

And when we went from being quadrapedal creatures to becoming bipedal,

something shifted and that L five S one disc is what shifted the most.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

And it is now a. A wedge shaped disc.

And the other ones are cylindrical, so there's a perfect fit.

When we go to an S-shaped spine, you know, the, that bottom disc is severely

compressed when we tuck our pelvis, for example, which is a commonly taught thing.

And the other ones, as Julie mentioned, are like squished

into a wedge shape space.

So there's just generally a misfit.

So how did this happen?

Well, I think what happens is that the illustrations in the anatomy texts

tend to reflect what is average in a population, you know, so when you have

some deviation and it becomes very broad, then it finds its way into.

Up the echelons of society, you know, lay culture and even, um, medical culture.

So the way an illustrator would decide how to draw this is they look at x-rays

or they look what's around and they assume that what's around is what's normal.

So it happens in a lot of fields of medicine that we mistake average for

normal and even ideal, and then, then people get shepherded in this direction.

But when we have an 85% incidence of back pain, you don't wanna

shepherd people towards the average.

You wanna go back in time, you wanna look at other cultures.

You wanna look at more functional examples to, decide what's ideal.

So I think that's the, that's what's happened in modern times is that as

our furniture and fashion, um, sort of dictated certain trends like tucking

the pelvis, think flapper era, you know, where it became fashionable to

tuck the behind and be very flat in the backside, that got adopted in the

fashion industry, in chair design.

Then you also have modern populations transplanted, you know, like mm-hmm.

Think about the US you know, where I am.

That's all transplants, right?

So a lot of kinesthetic characteristics ideally get passed down in a unspoken

way, you know, it's like grandparents are holding grandchildren at a certain way.

It's not articulated, but there's a look and a feel, and

that's what gets passed down.

You know, grandfather is out in the fields bending over, and we are naturally a

monkey, sea monkey, do kind of species.

We copy what's around.

Mm-hmm.

And then when you transplant the population all over the place, we

lose that unbroken kinesthetic thread of wisdom and people start becoming

more subject to fashions, to the, to the way a chair is designed to the

way people are holding their babies.

Or the strollers, umbrella strollers or the car seats all really, really

poorly designed in modern times.

And so we've sort of lost our wisdom on, on how to be in our bodies.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's something that, Donna and I talk about regularly is, knowing your

body, like listening to your body.

A lot of people don't listen to their body.

They may think they do something and then they wonder, well,

why do I feel like that?

And oftentimes the connection's not made.

And I think what you're talking about is also along that same lines of

just listening to your body, trying to feel, feel yourself, and get to

the point where you can start to understand how your body is moving.

And you sometimes use the word like slot, slot it in, like,

like, it should be like a puzzle.

You just put it into the right place and then your body should just naturally

be able to hold itself there without.

The pressure of muscles and feeling the angst of standing up straight and,

you know, sitting up straight and, and then two seconds later slouching again

because, uh, your back hurts because you're doing it very viciously almost

like you're like just throwing your back into a different position, uh,

rather than, than feeling it out and putting it into the, to the right place.

So I agree and thank goodness we still have our sense of self.

Like we can tell when something feels good.

And we can also tell when it feels bad.

I mean, that's what pain is all about.

Nature took millions of years to design pain, to help give us signals about

how things are doing in our body.

But unfortunately, I think in modern times we have gotten so profoundly lost.

You know, it's not just that we don't know how to be in our bodies, but

the signs are pointing the wrong way.

We're being given really counterproductive directions, like sit up straight, like

chest out, chin up, like tuck the pelvis, like do crunches to help your ab strength.

You know, there's a lot of counterproductive folk

wisdom about, well, I shouldn't say folk wisdom.

It's, um, you know, lay guidelines on how to go about posture.

And so it's really difficult.

We don't even know how to interpret our pain.

We just wanna slap it away, you know, take a med and cover it up.

And because we don't know how to interpret it.

And so I think we're not just lost, but we are profoundly lost

and it really helps to have some

well-informed wisdom.

That's rare.

You know, and this is what our company is trying to do, is our, our very

dedicated group of teachers all over the world are trying to bring this

wisdom on how to be in your body.

And now we will hear from Julie, who is actually one of your teachers.

Julie I think has a pretty good story to tell as well because it's one of those,

was the student now as the teacher type of scenarios where Julie had some back pain.

Julie, can you tell us about your experience what the back pain that

you had, how it kind of impacted your life and, and what steered

you towards the Gokhale Method?

And then, uh, obviously now you're a teacher, so obviously you're

fully converted to this method.

So tell us your story.

Yes.

I don't think there are many people more passionate about the Gokhale

Method and getting the message out than I am, although there are many

holding my hand with this passion.

I had back pain I think first when I was 20.

I was carrying some heavy boxes and had I think you call it lumbago,

don't you, when its very, very bad

back pain went to the doctor for the first time when I was on my year abroad in

Germany during my first bachelor's degree.

Ever since then, people would say to me, don't carry heavy things.

Be careful because I'd have back pain regularly and it would last a while.

Wasn't so bad in my early twenties.

But it became to be a big problem when I was pregnant age 30 with my twins.

And my body was in good enough shape to hold the pregnancy

up until the end of week 40.

So, I'm not tall, but I weighed 92 kilos at the end.

I had a huge belly.

You know, I could put a plate here.

And I would've desperately needed to have known Esther at that point

in my life and learned how to anchor my ribs, the inner corset.

I'd have needed a few techniques, and I'd have got through pregnancy

wonderfully, but I didn't.

And I was in horrible, horrible back pain to the, to the extent that I couldn't get

my my babies outta their bed for feeding.

I had them lying next to me in my bed.

I just couldn't lift them, couldn't carry them.

Um, and I had attacks of back pain very regularly for the next 20 years.

And I did what everybody does.

You know, I, I took up yoga and I did yoga for 18 years, and in the beginning

it helped me to some extent, for sure.

but over time, It got worse and I thought I need to do something more.

And exercise is something that we all think we all need to do.

So I did lots and lots of exercise three times a week.

I did a sort of yoga inspired, they call it body art as of aerobic body

strength, very intense workouts.

But by 2015 I'd got to a stage that whenever I did yoga or I

did my sports class, my back pain was excruciating and my, my right

arm was kind of numb and tingly.

My right leg and calf and foot was numb and tingly.

And when I turned in my bed at night, I woke up every time kind of cringing

with tears in my eyes and pain and I didn't want to have a back operation.

I tried osteopathy, I tried physiotherapy, I tried acupuncture.

And a colleague at work had said, you know, you need to go for

spiritual, spine alignment, and the guy holds his hand over your spine.

And then it helps.

And I'm someone, I don't like esoteric stuff, not one bit.

I like to kind of understand what's happening or, but I was so desperate.

I was even thinking of visiting this guy, because I was in tears giving

up my beloved yoga and my sports.

And I think I spent every free moment that I had Googling back

pain and back pain solutions.

And in the end, the solution came from my yoga teacher.

She said at the end of one of the yoga classes that we expect a lot of our

yoga class, if we imagine that one and a half hours a week is enough to

solve all of our back pain and that the spirit of yoga is about mindfulness

and that we should observe ourselves in our everyday lives and take this

practice of mindfulness into what we do at work in the evenings and so on.

And that got me thinking and I observed myself at work, at my desk, how I started

the work the day as we said, you know, upright, and straight sitting at my desk.

And then over the course of the day, I'd sort of crumple until late in the day.

I was kind of hanging in there . And I kind of thought,

ah, maybe this is not ideal.

Maybe this is somewhere where I could work.

So, I Googled posture and I found all sorts of incredibly

weird devices and things.

But thank goodness I found Esther on YouTube I found her Ted talk that she

gave at the University of Stanford and thought, thank goodness for that.

This is a totally logical approach.

And to spend $20 on a book is not a big investment.

I bought Esther's book, read it from cover to cover within 24 hours and

started working with the techniques and found my goodness, it actually helps.

So I worked with a book for a couple of months then realized

that I need a bit of help.

You know, learning things from a book, I dunno how many people have

successfully learned tennis or golf or whatever from a textbook.

You need a bit of coaching to get into the details.

And I drove a long way to Waldsberg to my German colleague Gokhale

Method teacher, Esther Paul, and did the foundations course with her.

That was 2016.

And I don't have back pain anymore.

It's just gone.

And nowadays you can't see them in the background.

But I, I like my weights and kettlebells.

I like in terms exercise.

If there's something heavy needing, carrying, I kind of am, I'm in

there to prove the men that, that it doesn't have to be, you know, just

men that can carry heavy things.

And my back is just good.

I'm, I'm as fit and healthy at 55 as I've ever been.

To get a very long story, a little bit shorter, I, joined Esther when

she came to Europe 2017, 2018 for alumni events or for extra training,

cuz it just fascinated me so much.

And Esther asked me 2000, um, 18 if I could consider, if I would consider

becoming a Gokhale Method teacher.

And I said to her, I'd love to be a Gokhale Method teacher, but you

know, I need another 10 years.

I'm not, not really good enough yet.

And she gave me a hug and said, no, no, you're good enough and

I'd like you to think about it.

And I realized that there was a little voice in me that said, go for it.

This is something you really, really want to do.

Yeah.

So I flew to Palo Alto 2019 and uh, yeah, now I'm not only a Gokhale Method

teacher, but since last year also worked for Esther full-time, so Wow.

So truly changed the course of your life in many different areas of your life.

Mm-hmm.

Actually, yeah.

It's amazing when you let yourself be open to opportunities.

Um, and you never, you never know.

One little decision, one, one, click somewhere on the internet and, and it

can set your, your life in a different trajectory than what it was before.

And I think, um, totally for

us, yeah, happily in the case of Julie, because she is really taken on a

lot of roles and has so much enthusiasm and ability that she's bringing on board.

So it's helped us, our organization enormously.

I have a question, a follow up question whenever people change their

behavior we always try to change behavior slowly so that you can stick to it,

you know, so it becomes the new normal rather than I'm trying to do something

mm-hmm.

That's not normal for me.

And I feel like especially something like Posture, which people have adopted for a

long time how do you see the success rate of people sticking with the method and how

long does it take someone when they first start using this method to really become

where you stop thinking and you just, your body is just doing what it does naturally.

How, how long does it take from student to where you don't think about it anymore?

I'll take that.

Um, it varies a lot from individual to individual and technique to technique.

You know, there's a sweet spot feeling when you discover how to bend or discover

how to take your strides, use your glutes.

Every step is a rep. It's a powerful feeling.

It's, it feels right.

It's surprisingly quick for certain things, even big changes to settle in.

And then what we discovered over the years is that people do need reminders

because the old ways of moving and sitting and bending and so on are

all around reinforcing themselves in our visual field and so on.

It took us a long time to discover a robust way of

creating a reminder system and the pandemic helped with that.

We started, I started before the pandemic actually coming on screen every

day, January 1st, 2020, to remind the alumni of so that they wouldn't forget.

And then the pandemic hit and we realized people were waxing lyrical

about how good this reminder program was.

And the main feature there was we were reminding people of

one little piece every day.

So this behavioral change wisdom about breaking things down into

little pieces, it's not very burdensome for people to show up.

It's a 13 minute lesson and that program proliferated so it's

now become an exercise program.

We dance every day and keep in mind one posture principle.

So that has become, very, very popular and that is helping people not forget what

they learned in their beginner courses.

And we've opened it up to the public, even as an exercise program, it's

not the best way to learn posture.

It's not the best way to get out of back pain.

We have other offerings for that, but if people wanna exercise in

a way that's healthy, that isn't destroying their discs and such this

is a really good program to check out.

We have 17 live classes every week.

Tai Chi, dance, fitness, yoga.

So that's been a big part of helping people keep things on their radar.

We've been experimenting for over two decades on how to best teach what order

of things to teach people so that it sticks how well to break things down.

Mm-hmm.

So we feel like that's a, that's our, one of our major contributions

to this field is we've charted, an order and we have collected wisdom on

teaching what metaphors to use hands-on placements when it's in-person classes.

Tiny pieces of learning when it's online, 13 minutes and so on.

I think the other thing, the students that learn the

fastest of my experience are the ones that are in the most pain

because they're the most motivated.

And the thing is, if you are in terrible back pain, For instance, because you

have a habit of parking your hips forward or perhaps of having a very arched back

then if I'm teaching someone and bring them into a healthy alignment mm-hmm.

People will often say they feel like a gorilla or somehow very weird.

And I celebrate this because I want people to feel weird if they're

doing what they always used to do.

They needn't come to me for a course, but then they say, this feels so

incredibly weird, but it doesn't hurt.

And that's an incredibly fast curve then because if you know what to do,

say your body doesn't hurt anymore, so you can suddenly bend without it

hurting where it always used to hurt.

Or if you can stand for two hours without being in pain and you know how to do it,

then you are automatically going to do it.

And yeah, you might slip back a little bit but you will not slip

back to where you came from.

Particularly if where you came from is causing you a lot of pain.

And that's why, in a way we're going back to how we were when we were two years old.

We all used to be able to do this and therefore in a way we are relearning

something that's innate to us, rather than putting on some new habit

that's not entirely natural for us.

And I think that also aids in the learning process.

Do you wanna follow up, Julie, and tell me about a specific

story that demonstrates how quickly the method can help someone.

Sure.

I mean, I can think of many, I can think of a 27 year old consultant who

had horrible neck pain, who wrote to me on the Monday after the course.

That it was just gone immediately.

And that it was the best investment in 27 years to take the Gokhale

Method Foundations course.

That was very quick and easy.

I think my most dramatic experience was with a dear woman who drove all

the way down from Hamburg on the train.

She couldn't drive a car because she was on very strong painkillers and

had been on opiates for six weeks because she had a very severely

prolapsed disc at L five S one.

her physicians, her doctors had said you can't keep taking these

painkillers and opiates forever.

You need to have surgery, you need to have an operation.

And she was desperate not to have an operation.

And she called me and she said, may she come and take the Gokhale

Method Foundations course in person with me in the south of Germany?

I said, yes, of course she can come.

Made it clear to her that I'm not a therapist, that I'm a teacher

of healthy posture but that I'm not going to do anything to

her, manipulate her in any way.

And that everything she does is that this is an educational intervention.

And she understood that very clearly.

And she came down she was in terrible pain and tears when she arrived.

It was hugs and tissues.

as she came into my house to be honest, I was a little apprehensive.

I wasn't a so experienced teacher as I am now.

But I followed the course gently with lots of time in between.

Obviously for someone with a severe case like this, a one-on-one course

is better than a group course context.

And she felt a relief already in the first afternoon.

On the second day of the course she rang my doorbell she was smiling with

a relaxed expression on her face that I had not seen in the previous day.

And she said, Julie, You won't believe this, but I've not taken a painkiller

nor any of my opiates this morning.

I'm okay without them.

Um, wow.

That was the second day of the course.

And it gives me goose pimples when I tell the story still.

But she didn't have that operation.

And she wrote to me how great it was to be windsurfing in Portugal in the summer.

Wow.

And amazing.

She did yoga.

She had a good sense of her own body.

Mm-hmm.

But she never bent in any other way, ever since she learned the Gokhale

Method course, except as a hip hinge.

We teach bending, keeping the spine as one unit.

Mm-hmm.

And her bending, putting on her shoes, getting dressed was

a cause of excruciating pain.

But when she learned our technique of hip hinging, she could even bend down deep

and put on her shoes and that window where she wasn't squishing that prolapsed disc.

Was possible for her to bend pain free.

So the logic of the method was so clear to her, of course, that

she had no difficulty retaining.

Hoping that she'll become a teacher one day.

I'm working,

Converting the people to the Gokhale Method.

It's an interesting story and it actually gave me the next question for

Esther cuz I'm a lifelong person who has been going to chiropractic care.

My uncle was a chiropractor and I recently started going to the chiropractor again.

And in Switzerland where I am osteopath is something that I hear a lot.

And like what Julie was just saying about invasive back surgeries, could

you maybe put in context how the Gokhale Method, chiropractic, osteopathic care,

and these more invasive back surgeries, how are these all connected and where

should someone start based on kind of the level of the back pain that they have?

Yeah.

I don't think it's so much about the level of pain, but the level of dysfunction.

Like if something is severely out of whack, if the person has had an

accident, they have broken bones.

Thank goodness.

We have people who have the skills to mend those severe situations.

We have surgeons who have dedicated decades of their lives

to develop the skills to fix it.

And that's also true of all other modalities.

You know, like if you have fallen and your bones are actually.

Displaced, thank goodness there are people, chiropractors who can

help put the bones back in place.

Mm-hmm.

But an, a very large percentage of back problems are because of systematic

errors in the way we use our bodies.

And we can't expect that a chiropractor or an acupuncturist or

a osteopath can make up for that.

You know, they might be able to reset things, but then if we just go back to

the same old habits, then that's not going to really get to the root of the problem.

Ours is the least intrusive intervention.

Mm-hmm.

And so I think everybody needs to know how to be in their bodies, how to sit,

bend and walk and get the positive benefits from these life exercises

before we go to a regimen that requires us to take time out of our lives, to

do special exercises buy equipment.

So ours is the most basic of the interventions for back pain and mm-hmm.

Something that I think everybody wants to know about and have as a base.

And then when something more complex happens in the accident realm, or if

there's a very unfortunate genetic condition, then thank goodness we

have the experts to deal with that.

So would you say that if someone who doesn't have chronic

back pain, but maybe once in a while, Their back hurts a little bit.

But if a doctor asked them, they wouldn't say I have back pain.

How much benefit would the person who doesn't actually have back pain get to

take the time to learn this method now?

Yeah.

Well, I mean, we'd love for people to come to us for preventive,

reasons, but it's a rarity.

I mean, this is why we have pain, because pain makes us take action otherwise many

of us would merrily go our way and sever our nerves and be paralyzed before we

did anything is the truth, you know?

So pain is in our face.

It's a friend and it makes us take action, but it's not by the degree of pain that

we determine which kind of intervention is needed because we work with people

with severe pain as well as, chronic naggy pain, and we are equally successful

with all kinds of levels of pain.

It's what, the question is what's at the root of the pain.

And people often believe that they, since they have tried so many techniques, so

many methods unsuccessfully, they must have a very rare, esoteric kind of pain

that needs a higher level of expertise.

And they're shocked to discover that all of this time it was the way they were

bending and walking and sitting and using their body that was at the root of this

problem that stumped so many experts.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, absolutely.

I've been out of back pain for years now, but I continue to work on my

posture on nuances here and there.

Because it's a, a kind of mindfulness practice.

Of actually being in your body, feeling yourself, feeling perhaps

a different sense of self.

And the other thing it's totally ironic that I ended up as a posture teacher.

I always actually wanted to be a teacher other than going to business.

So that bit fits.

But my father was always onto me about posture and it was always

stick your chest out, chin back, kinda this military kind of chin up.

And I hated when I was called up and made to sit like this.

And I couldn't wait until the adult eyes kind of left my body

and I could gently kind of sink into something more comfortable.

And the other thing that surprises people incredibly is that healthy posture enables

your body to have very good circulation.

And it enables muscles to be relaxed.

So, You actually feel better in your body, the better your posture is.

You feel more relaxed, you feel more, I, I think I've got more energy than

I've ever had before in my life.

And I'm not done yet I'm still working on my posture.

Even if someone just says, oh, I've got a bit of a sore neck.

Or I just love it when someone massages my shoulders and they

always come forward when I'm at work.

It's totally worth learning the Gokhale Method because it gives you a

different level of comfort in your body.

And we women have been told all sorts of weird things that we're supposed to do.

Putting our knees together when we're sitting there with our skirts or

to show our cleavage or to hide our cleavage or all these kinds of things.

Perhaps the Gokhale Method is also an invitation to look

at from a different angle.

We women want to feel comfortable and healthy in our bodies.

And that's a good enough starting place and we perhaps leave some of the baggage

from women generations before us.

Going back to pre-industrial cultures that Esther talks about

typically in Africa and probably I would guess in South America.

The way that they move is different and maybe Esther, you could talk a

little bit about the types of work.

Going from how women in different cultures are taught to behave differently

and hold our bodies differently.

So how does that translate into cultures where both the men and women have very

similar backs or similar ways of using their body for work or for recreation.

Maybe you could also talk a little bit about the people who

are putting stuff on their heads.

Doesn't that compress our spine?

How is that helpful?

So actually carrying something on your head is one of the more

useful cues to line your spine up.

I think because we've done it for millennia, I actually believe it's

written into our genetic code, how to respond to a weight on your head.

And Julia's demonstrating our little head cushion.

And I will too.

We have it ready at hand because putting it there cues the right muscles to work.

So no, it doesn't cause compression.

It actually induces your deep abdominal and back muscles to engage, to push

up against the weight, the longest collar muscle, deep in the front of

the neck to push up against the weight.

So it's actually giving you.

Healthy exercise, not unhealthy, compression and degeneration.

And that's true for all the kind of traditional work that happens, but it

also carries over to computer desk work.

We have this fashion lately of thinking that sitting as the new smoking

and sitting harms you and we should always be escaping, uh, one position.

The best position is the next position.

And that's true if you do poor posture, then you don't wanna stay there long

and you have to kind of frenetically be moving on to the next position.

But if you know how to sit or stand at a desk or do any work sitting

manual work, if you know how to do it well then there isn't this frenetic

need to be moving on to something else to escape this bad posture.

So actually the statistics for manual workers in modern times are worse

vis-a-vis degeneration of discs and back pain than they are for computer workers.

Now the statistics are bad for everyone in modern times, but they're

even worse for manual workers.

So it's not really fair to blame sitting like we tend to for

modern back pain and dysfunction.

So in non-industrial cultures, people are basket weavers or skinning

or preparing food while sitting.

It turns out there's research being done on the Hadsa, a tribe in Africa,

and it turns out they sit nine hours a day just like we do, but they sit well.

That's the difference.

So I think no matter what job you're doing and how much weight you're

carrying, and whether it's sitting at a computer or bending over repeated tasks.

We are so capable as a species.

We could do all of these things without pain, without dysfunction, with great joy.

Being in your body and using it well is just a joyful thing.

This graph actually shows degeneration with age.

on the X axis you have age.

On the Y axis you have disc narrowing, which is an index of degeneration.

And in the middle graph, the middle line shows what happens to sedentary workers.

People sitting behind their computers, sure enough, with age they suffer

degeneration in their discs and, but the graph up top is manual workers and

you can see that they're much worse off.

this is the basis for me saying that it's not fair to blame our aches

and pains on our computer jobs.

We all suffer with back issues in modern times.

And where you really wanna be is in the lower graph with the

Beal tribals of Central India.

And there you can see that at age 50 the discs are indistinguishable

from the 20 year olds.

They have pristine discs.

So this is pretty unheard of in modern times.

What we wanna busy ourselves with is what are they doing differently?

Because it isn't that they're genetically different.

There's very little variation in spine shape and things like that

across the entire human race.

This is because they are in a culture where they're reinforcing these

wonderful body mechanics and how to lift and how to bend and so on.

They know how to be in their bodies, whereas in modern times we've forgotten.

We hear a lot about the brain gut connection and the vagus nerve, which

is the main nerve that runs through our back and triggers us to go into

fight or flight or rest and digest.

So there's a lot of talk about how depression can either be even started

from the gut and into the brain.

But the point is, is that it's all connected by the back, right?

Everything has to go through the back.

And so where does our back health actually start to impact our

emotional health in terms of how we're feeling on a day-to-day basis?

The research is just so fascinating.

The recent research showing that it's harder to be depressed when

you have open upper body posture.

It's harder to be anxious.

There's a New Zealand study where they using FMRI look at what's

happening in the brain in response to these anxiety provoking images.

So we know that, that there is a connection.

We've already known it from the animal world.

You know, how do you tell how a dog is feeling through its posture, tail

tucked between its legs, head hung.

Means frightened, submissive, dejected, and head hung, high tail out back.

And the equivalent in the human animal is having your behind,

behind, which is what we teach

So we know that that's that connection from observational experience from

studies, and we hear it from our students.

Our students will spontaneously come and tell us.

I feel much more confident, I have much more energy.

I have a different presence in my corporate meeting room.

I have to tone it down because I am sitting so much more upright.

Things like that.

That's actually a particular interest of both Julie and mine, and we

are in the process of creating an offering that is in that direction

and it's very, very exciting.

We think that we are going to begin with a course on

empowerment of women using posture.

So I'd like to share one of my favorite slides.

I think this woman, I, I just Love watching how she holds her body.

It's a photo Esther that you took many years ago, isn't it?

and she's just drying her laundry she's not posing, but look at how regal

she is how much self possession she has.

It's really wonderful.

And that is our birthright, for all of us as humans.

Esther, you've been doing this for a long time.

20, 25 years now.

Obviously we talked about the evolution in how you're teaching

in the methods and the timing.

How is it gonna continue to evolve in terms of our posture?

Where do you see the future moving with technology and with the resources that

are coming for our back health in general?

We've always been high tech and high touch and I think both of those need

to keep developing technology is wonderful and we use it, we lean on it heavily.

What we are trying to seed is a culture of good posture and

that takes many touch points.

So in the future, we hope that this will be a standard offering in schools

or even earlier for young parents to know how to hold their children

because that seeds their way of sitting for the rest of their life.

How to parent for good posture is another important direction of growth.

I have a nephew that's in his late teens and he always had

immaculate posture almost too a point.

I think he's, his neck is too straight.

His chiropractor told him, but I tend to, this is all my speculation, think that

young adults don't think about their back so much because they probably don't have

the same amount of back pain, just cuz they haven't been on the earth this long.

But how are you going about trying to tap into teenagers and young adults

to teach them something that they might not really even care about yet?

How do you introduce them to care about their back?

So I would say over half our teachers came into our organization with

the desire to spread this to youngsters.

And it's a difficult nut to crack because they are overscheduled.

Posture is just not a sexy thing, although it is in fact.

But you know, it's not perceived that way.

It's just perceived as something your grandmother would tell you to do.

Time is a big issue.

We've tried many, many approaches.

The most successful has been when parents come in with their

kids and it's a family course.

That has been really good.

We have tried through music teachers, athletic coaches.

One of our next projects is going is a book.

And even young parents, they still read.

They have a hard time going out to things.

And now that we have online offerings, we are much more accessible, you know?

Mm-hmm.

It's like in the throes of, uh, raising an infant, it's hard to have access.

Technology brings our method to people's homes in a much more

effective way than I anticipated.

I've been shocked at how effective it is to teach posture online, and

I think one of the main contributors is that we can break things down

into little bite-sized pieces.

And people are learning on their own bed and their own pillows

and chairs and couches and so on, and they don't have to commute.

It's nice if you have pain.

It's harder to commute, but also for children, harder to

navigate all of that logistics.

But if we're talking about it in terms of a vision Esther dedicated

her book to the millions who suffer from back pain, unnecessarily.

And that I think is the vision that joins all Gokhale Method Teachers

and all Gokhale Method fans.

that we want back pain to become something that's very rare and not very common.

And we want to redefine what people know and see healthy posture to be

at all levels of society and all countries and continents of the world.

That's our mission, that's our goal and we're doing that.

One back at a time, one person at a time

and one family at a time, one community at a time.

That goes into our last question I think the most important thing now is

how does our listening audience actually start getting their back healthy.

What are the actionable steps that they can take?

What's the first thing to do?

Julie?

How about you talk about lengthening, like that's how we begin?

Yeah.

I mean, the first, the first baby step to getting out of pain is

to create length in the spine.

We kind of think it's normal that we shrink as we get older,

and in fact, it's not normal.

I regrew a couple of centimeters that I shrunk.

I regained that length.

We have tight erector, spina muscles.

We have compressed discs.

So the first baby step is to learn how to anchor your ribs because a lot of us

are in this kind of s shaped spine where we have a, a very big arch in our back.

And what we want to learn to do is not tuck our pelvis,

but we want to tuck our ribs.

So the lower border of my ribcage here is coming down and in, and the upper part

of my ribcage is coming up and that's decompressing my lumbar spine here.

And someone that's in back pain will feel that immediately.

And that will be the first thing to do before anybody visits a course, would

be to start by learning to anchor the ribs and to use, for instance, one

of our stretch sit cushions that you can put on the back of a chair, where

you can attach yourself to the nubs of the cushion with some traction.

And that pulls the skin up and again, helps to decompress the spine.

And someone with back pain will learn how to stretch, set and

you'll normally hear a big oh.

It's not a big stretch but it's a very gentle release where the nerves and

discs and start to rehydrate and the worse someone's back pain the bigger

the sigh generally in my experience, when someone learns to stretch sit.

So stretch sitting and stretch lying.

The two techniques described in Esther's book where you can start

to create some length in your spine.

Videos are also free of charge on YouTube.

The next step would be to invest in this very excellent book

and then of course to subscribe to our newsletter, which has a blog that comes

out once a month with lots of free posture tips, and if you like when you subscribe

the newsletter, we'll send you a PDF with a free chapter on the inner corset,

which is a technique for using your muscles to create length in your spine.

And if you like all of that I'd love to invite you, Megan, and all your

listeners to join a free workshop.

Thanks.

I offer free workshops in German, regularly around monthly and Esther

and my colleague Claire in England for European time offer workshops in English.

They're free of charge.

They last an hour.

We generally teach some small techniques help start people getting out of pain

and give a little bit of an introduction.

Excellent.

Let's not forget your social media because as Esther mentioned tidbits

and nuggets and beautiful things that can be dropped into your social

media feed, when you're looking at your phone with the bad posture.

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

Hashtag head balance challenge.

We tend to be a bit serious because we just want to get

everybody outta back pain.

I think our Head Balance challenge anybody who would like to follow it and see me

carrying funny things on my head and some of my colleagues and I'd invite anybody

to put something on your head, make sure it doesn't hurt your toes but try it out.

And also follow us on Facebook, on Instagram on TikTok.

You'll find Gokhale Method.

And again, you'll have all sorts of tips and inspiration for a healthy posture.

Great.

Esther, any last words before we sign off?

No, thank you so much.

This is such an important part of getting the message out, having people

like you share us with your audience.

Actually this episode is brought to you by an audience member who wrote to us

with a suggestion and they said, I really want an episode on the Gokhale Method.

So the whole reason I know about these beautiful people in my virtual room

is because of you wonderful listeners.

So please feel free to drop us a line.

sofrickinhealthy@gmail.com.

Of course, you can find us on social media as well and let

us know what you wanna hear.

All of the things that we talked about and more are gonna be linked in the show

notes, whether you watch it on YouTube or you listen to it on your podcast provider.

I wanna end there and thank Esther and Julie very much for your time.

We thank you for joining us today and we'll see you next time.

Thank you so much.