In keeping with Laura’s wishes her student photographs are not featured in this blog post. We are always happy to respect our contributors' wishes for privacy. We are very grateful for Laura’s generosity in sharing her personal posture journey, and are sure that you, our readers, will appreciate it too.
—Esther Gokhale
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It’s that time of year again—we know we’re about to get one year older and we hope we’re also going to be one year wiser! If you have applied that wisdom to progressing your posture, you may also experience that you look, and even feel, one year younger. Or if you have a long backlog of ignoring your posture, it’s not impossible that you may feel ten years younger!
Over the years, I have often shown students with recliners that they can get a compression-relieving stretch in their lower back as the backrest slides away from the seat (assuming the mechanism is designed advantageously). This is something you might like to try out for yourself.
Have you ever lain in bed wondering when your feet will warm up? And why your knee injury is taking forever to heal? Or what you are going to do about those varicose veins? Why you feel so stiff in the morning? Or why your bunions are getting worse despite your ever-so-sensible shoes? Come to think about it, why have your back and neck decided to gang up on you? The short and sweet answer to all these woes may be in the way you are standing.
In Spring last year we launched the Gokhale® Wedge. For years, our students have been requesting a convenient, ready-made wedge for upright sitting without a backrest, one that doesn’t require folding blankets and other makeshift (pun intended) measures. The requests also specified an attractive item to enjoy around the home or office, and that it be of durable quality, keeping its shape and good looks with daily use.
Signs of good sleep include taking less time to fall asleep and not waking up often or for long periods. And although the American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM)and the Sleep Research Society (SRS) recommend adults sleep at least seven hours a night,¹ over one-quarter of us fall short of this recommendation.² There are many factors contributing to this lack of sleep, and back pain is certainly one of them.
Most of us are familiar with the idea of self massage. For many it may grow from instinctively rubbing a sore spot. For a few it grows into an essential healing art, and may even incorporate skills such as trigger point work, myofascial release, and acupressure.
In keeping with Claudia’s wishes we are not going to use any photographs of her in this blog post. We are always happy to respect our contributors' wishes for privacy. We are very grateful for Claudia’s generosity in sharing her personal posture journey, and are sure that you, our readers, will appreciate it too.
The Gokhale Method® is designed to be, well, methodical. But although the process of learning healthy posture is mostly systematic and progressive, it is also usually punctuated by “aha moments”. These glimpses of intellectual, visual, and kinesthetic understanding of the body can arrive like the warm glow of returning to home ground, or they can be seismic shifts that change your life forever…