Blog | Gokhale Method® - Primal Posture™ for a Pain-Free Life

How the Gokhale Method Solved my Neck Pain and Transformed my Life

Felicia Grimke

May, 2022

Applying Gokhale Method techniques such as this healthy stance, I continue to tease out residual sway and rounding in my spine as I massage my clients!

I am an acupuncturist and massage therapist who specializes in assisting individuals with chronic pain. Over my 30 years in the profession I had been exposed to hundreds of continuing education classes but had never heard of the Gokhale Method®. I suffered with cervical stenosis, multiple herniations, and bone spurs My battle with cervical stenosis (a narrowing of the neural canal in the neck, causing compression of the nerves), multiple cervical herniations, and osteophytes (bone spurs) began 40 years ago, all of which progressively worsened over time. Read more

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Comparing and Contrasting the Herman Miller Aeron Chair and the Gokhale Pain-Free™ Chair

Esther Gokhale

April, 2022

I frequently get questions about what makes a good office chair. Of course, some office chairs are primarily fashioned for style and aesthetic appeal. In general, I would say these may be easy on the eye, but over time are hard on the body! Ergonomic chairs People frequently ask my opinion on how various ergonomic chairs on the market might help them. This makes sense given the rising prevalence of back pain¹. “Ergonomic” means that something is designed primarily for the health, comfort, and protection of users. Among the specific chairs people ask me about, the Herman Miller Aeron Chair tops the list. To answer efficiently, I like to compare and contrast it with the chair I designed, the Gokhale Method Pain-Free™ chair, as this embodies the posture principles confirmed by my research and experience. Read more

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office chair

Herman Miller Aeron Chair

Gokhale Method Pain-Free Chair

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How Not To Do Yoga

Esther Gokhale

April, 2022

Gokhale Method teacher Lang Liu shows how anchoring your rib cage prevents swaying and encourages healthy articulation at L5-S1.

This blog post explains how some common yoga injuries occur and how applying the principles of healthy posture to yoga postures replaces this scenario with movements that are good for your body. Yoga postures and back pain Growing up in Mumbai, India, my Dutch mother was a student of BKS Iyengar and the Satyananda yogis, and keen for me also to learn yoga asanas, or postures. I practiced, and, being reasonably athletic as a child and already trained in Indian classical dance (Bharata Natyam), did not find it particularly difficult to choreograph the back bends, forward bends, and twists that were asked of me. I became a yoga model, demonstrating postures alongside visiting swamis’ presentations to induce the audience to sign up for upcoming yoga courses. Read more

How to choose running shoes. Running: Part 3

Author: Michelle Ball, Gokhale Method teacher

March, 2022

A lightweight barefoot-style shoe gives my feet sufficient protection and lets them be active on a soft, forgiving surface like this sandy coastal trail.

Welcome to the third blog post in our series on running. My name is Michelle Ball, and I am a Gokhale Method® teacher in Tasmania. I am a lifelong runner and am passionate about sharing my experience with beginners as well as seasoned runners and everyone in between. Even if you don’t run, but do wear shoes, this blog post is for you! Active feet come first When it comes to advice about running, our feet often get sidelined by the subject of shoes. If you missed Part 2, which is about how to build healthy, active feet, we recommend you catch up here. Read more

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The Virtues of a Hard Copy Book in Digital Times

Esther Gokhale

March, 2022

8 Steps to a Pain-Free Back is available in 12 languages

It has been 14 years since my book 8 Steps to a Pain-Free Back came out in hard copy. For years I had wished I had a book to send to those people who called me from the East Coast or Midwest. These were often relatives or friends of people I had worked with in California, who were suffering terrible back pain and needed help. And so I got writing. A book to solve back pain Although there was clearly a huge need for a book to solve back pain, I was still surprised to find I had written a bestseller. It reached number two on Amazon.com following our American Public Television program in 2011, and number three following the New York Times article (paywall) naming me “The Posture Guru of Silicon Valley” in 2013. It has now been published in 12 languages (Croatian later this year), and sold over 250,000 copies. Read more

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8 Steps to a Pain-Free Back

mechanism of a shoulder roll

stretchlying on the side

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Old Family Photos are a Great Posture Tool: Part 4: From Abroad

Esther Gokhale

February, 2022

Lucy Atkin shares a photograph of her German/Prussian grandfather.

This is the fourth blog post in our series on old family portraits and photographs. Previously we have looked at how antique images can inspire us to improve our posture in the Upper Body, Lower Body, and Small Bends. Here we are going to focus on how old family photos from abroad make a special contribution to our posture knowledge.

Photographs as historical evidence
Antique photographs are often notable for the healthy posture they capture. Even images taken well into the twentieth century are likely to show healthier posture than we see around us today.
In the US you have to go back several generations to reliably find images of healthy posture, and usually even to a time when photography was not widely available due to its elaborate processes and cost. Had the first immigrants to North America settled later, we would have much more photographic evidence of their intact posture. As it is, we have rare but valuable examples from the 1840s onward. Read more

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kinesthetic tradition

pioneer