inner corset | Page 3 | Gokhale Method Institute

Susan’s Success Story

Susan Taormina

April, 2021

Learning to stacksit gave Susan a much-improved position for her piano and organ playing.

I am a 70-year-old woman. As a young woman I was tall (5’10"), slender, and active as I would ever be raising my six children.

For the most part, my body and I had a good relationship, but over time and with the demands of my life, something problematic happened. My body began talking to me: my knee, psoas, sacrum, and lower back hurt, and I also suffered a loss of balance. I mainly saw a chiropractor but also physical therapists, massage therapists, and acupuncturists…the list is long. When you want to function and feel halfway decent, you try everything. Read more

Tags:

Gokhale Moving Meditation

Clare Chapman

May, 2021

Moving Meditation is beautifully compatible with the healthy posture and movements taught in the Gokhale Method.

In this blog post Gokhale Method teacher Clare Chapman interviews Roberta Cooks and Kathleen O’Donohue to find out more about their Gokhale Moving Meditation classes. Roberta and Kathleen have been Gokhale Method teachers for 11 and 5 years respectively—and longtime practitioners of Tai Chi Chih (Roberta), and Tai Chi Qigong (Kathleen).* Read more

Tags:

Read more about Gokhale Moving Meditation
Clare Chapman's blog
1 comment
Log in or register to post comments

Home Exercises Part 2: Crunches

Esther Gokhale

July, 2021

This is our second 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 crunches, a common abdominal exercise.

Crunches are often seen as a better targeted and safer
abdominal exercise than sit-ups—but there is still a downside.

Crunches are done lying down on the floor, face up, knees bent with feet on the floor, and with the hands placed behind or to the side of the head. They involve using... Read more

Tags:

Read more about Home Exercises Part 2: Crunches
Esther Gokhale's blog
Log in or register to post comments

Home Exercises Part 4: Low Planks

Esther Gokhale

November, 2021

Plank develops muscular strength and coordination to align, support, and protect your spine.

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. Read more

Tags:

Read more about Home Exercises Part 4: Low Planks
Esther Gokhale's blog
Log in or register to post comments

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

Tags:

8 Steps to a Pain-Free Back

mechanism of a shoulder roll

stretchlying on the side

Read more about The Virtues of a Hard Copy Book in Digital Times
Esther Gokhale's blog
1 comment
Log in or register to post comments

Secrets to Pain-Free Sitting, Part 2: The Making of a New TV Show

Esther Gokhale

July, 2022

Gokhale Method teacher Eric Fernandez shows how to make car seats comfortable and healthy for your back.

Welcome to the second blog post in which I am delighted to tell you more about our exciting recent TV project. If you missed it, you can read The Secrets of Pain-Free Sitting, Part1: The Inspiration behind a New TV Show here.

Getting the Gokhale Method out there
People are sitting poorly and continue to blame sitting for their back pain. And so we created Secrets to Pain-Free Sitting, a pledge show that the Gokhale Institute made with producer Frank Zamacona for American Public Television (APT). The solution to back pain has never been so urgently needed—and now, with our new 45-minute show, so available. Read more

Tags:

sitting

stretchsitting

car seats

American Public Television (APT)

traditional societies

Kala Ramnath

Secrets to Pain-Free Sitting

Read more about Secrets to Pain-Free Sitting, Part 2: The Making of a New TV Show
Esther Gokhale's blog
Log in or register to post comments

Outer Corsets and Inner Corsets

Esther Gokhale

September, 2022

This young woman shows wonderful alignment and poise in an age when corsets were commonly worn.

I have often written about the elegance of people in bygone years. The women, sometimes corseted, show striking deportment. The excesses of nineteenth-century fashion understandably gave corsets a bad name. Extreme tight lacing had some terrible effects, imposing some drastic anatomical remodeling: The stomach and liver are crammed down, with the ribs compressing into drooping S-loops. The neural spines of each vertebra, the little projections that stick up from the central body of each bone, are also pushed out of place. Normally they stack nicely one atop the other in a neat midline ridge, but in long-term corset wearers these spindles of bone jut to this side or that. Science writer Brian Switek in Skeleton Keys: The Secret Life of Bone. Read more

Tags: