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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.

ALL OF ME In December 2020 I received an email from Gokhale Method® offering a five-day trial period of exercise classes and dance parties with posture lessons. Every day for five days! I was thrilled to receive this email and joined on January 1st. From day one I knew I had found something very special. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, I swam to stave off the pain I felt in my back and hips. But when the virus struck I wasn’t able to swim. Eventually my back pain returned to being constant. This showed me that being dependent on an external circumstance, swimming in this case, to feel good, could not give me everything that I needed to heal.

Welcome to the second blog post in our series on running. This series is designed to be useful to beginners and would-be beginners, as well as seasoned runners and everyone in between. If you missed Part 1, you can catch up here.  Reactivate your feet When it comes to advice about running, the feet often get overlooked as the subject immediately turns to shoes. While shoes are an important subject (spoiler alert! Part 3 is about shoes), I prefer to start with that miracle of bioengineering that actually does the work—your feet. Our feet become very passive from walking on flat, featureless surfaces rather than natural, more undulating terrain. They are also constrained, misshapen and deconditioned by less-than-ideal footwear, which, sadly, includes many running shoes on the market.

Welcome to our first blog post in a new series on running. This series is designed to be useful to beginners and would-be beginners, as well as seasoned runners and everyone in between.  Running is primal Running was a defining feature in our development as a species. We are built to run. As children, almost all of us enjoyed this facility. You may believe that you are too injured, too old, or too uncoordinated to consider jogging—and you may be right—but I would still like to invite you to bring running onto your radar as something to work towards. 

This is our fourth blog post in the series where we put popular exercises under scrutiny to examine how they stack up—or not—against the principles of healthy posture. Here we are looking at “low plank,” a whole-body exercise that particularly develops abdominal strength and trunk stability. Our model for the photographs is Eric Fernandez, our Gokhale Exercise teacher who teaches the Gokhale Method in the Philadelphia area.

This is our fourth blog post in the series where we put popular home exercises under scrutiny to examine how they stack up—or not—against the principles of healthy posture. In this post we are looking at head rotations/circling, an exercise that is often suggested to ease stiffness and mobilize the neck. Neck pain—causes and solutions Although not often considered in physical fitness and exercise regimens, the neck frequently becomes a problematic area for people in our culture. At that point, we look to mobilizing, stretching, and strengthening exercises to alleviate pain and stiffness.   

Rediscovering ancestral posture can be fun! In our online 1-2-3 Move program we have had several “Show and Tells” during which participants share old family photographs. The inspiration for healthy posture and positive change that these pictures bring to their descendants, as well as to the online community, is powerful.  In Part 1 of this series we looked at the upper body. Here we are going to consider what our forebears can teach us about healthy alignment for the lower body—specifically, what needs to happen with the pelvis, legs, and feet. 

Here I am in September 2017 when I began the Gokhale Method—sitting and bending over: I have kyphosis. My upper back is curved from the shoulders to the bottom of my ribcage. The exact cause of my kyphosis is not known. There are two types of kyphosis: Scheuermann’s and postural. In Scheuermann’s disease, the normal bone growth in the vertebrae is interrupted during adolescence leading the spine to develop wedge-shaped vertebrae which result in a rounded curve in the thoracic spine. I believe I may have been diagnosed with Scheuermann’s Kyphosis at some point, but I don’t know for sure. I would like to think of it as postural because that word opens up more room for change. I was born with my left leg and foot turned inward. I wore several different braces on my leg and my foot until the age of five. I became a shy and inhibited child, and I remember not wanting to be seen.

At the beginning of the pandemic, my tween daughter was the dancer in my house. When her in-person hip-hop class was canceled, she quickly turned online for inspiration, showering me with her 30-second Tik Toks. I was amused, but resolute that dancing online was not for me. I had my own exercise regime, at the heart of which were a series of Pilates-based exercises that I had incorporated in the hopes of healing a nagging injury. But now, 16 months into the pandemic, I’m dancing online too, maybe even more than my 12-year-old. This is thanks to Esther Gokhale and her unbelievably fabulous community who, like me, wanted to find a safe, therapeutic, and fun way of exercising after injuring our backs. I first heard Esther years ago on a podcast and subsequently checked her book 8 Steps to a Pain-Free Back out of the library. I remember being especially interested in the pictures of women holding their babies so comfortably; I had recently given birth, and I tried my best to imitate the women pictured.