Bharata Natyam

The phrase “it takes a village to raise a child” is thought to originate from an ancient African proverb. 

As I have grown into being a parent, uncle, and beyond, I have realized that this quote extends to any age. I have directly experienced this with my own posture journey—my own family “village” has helped me and others dear to me find a near pain-free life through the Gokhale Method®.

Annoying body pains were affecting my fun in life

In my late thirties, a stream of inflammatory pains permeated my body, including back pain, shoulder pain, knee pain, and—worst of all—plantar fasciitis in my foot. While these weren't absolutely crippling pains, they were painful enough to keep me from enjoying life as I gave up my favorite hobbies—tennis, golf, and playing the piano.

I visited numerous renowned doctors in California. They genuinely tried to help, but nothing resolved my pain. So I began searching for other solutions.

Finding Esther’s book, 8 Steps to a Pain-Free Back

In 2012 I bought Esther’s book, 8 Steps to a Pain-Free Back, as it was highly recommended on Amazon. 

 
The book that helped me, 8 Steps to a Pain-Free Back.

In particular, what caught my attention was how traditional and tribal communities across the globe do not have the level of musculoskeletal pain that we are seeing in modern society. The book explained how their cultures have preserved our natural blueprint for healthy posture over the centuries, while industrialized societies have lost it. 

This made a lot of sense to me, because as an American with Indian heritage, I used to visit India a lot and noticed that many traditional communities there do not have body pains as modern cultures do. There were people in their sixties and seventies doing manual labor regularly without pain.   

As an Indian-American, I visited India often as a child, so I could relate immediately to the images like this one in Esther’s book that showed people with traditional posture performing physically challenging tasks with relative ease.

I then took the Gokhale Method Foundations Course. It took me a couple of months to meaningfully understand the core concepts. And then I felt significant pain relief for the first time in a long time and knew I was onto something. I began playing sports and music again! I was so happy. 

The Gokhale Method Foundations Course helped me stand, walk, sleep, and sit comfortably. Before the course (left)) I would sit with my pelvis tucked, back rounded, shoulders forward, and my neck compressed at the back. During the course I began to change this, learning to antevert my pelvis and stack my spine.

Helping each other out posture-wise

I shared my Gokhale Method story pretty regularly with family and friends. My family—perhaps knowing that I am a rather talkative person—would give me the “ol’ eye roll” when I talked too much about Gokhale posture!

That said, many of my family members nevertheless found the Gokhale principles intriguing. For example, my wife spent much of her childhood in India—and also learned the Bharata Natyam Indian dancing which Esther draws from—all of which gave her good posture and a relatively pain-free life. Equally importantly, it gave her a keen eye for good and bad posture. So she was able to provide excellent feedback to me as I kept trying to improve my posture with the Gokhale Method principles I was learning.

However, my sister Annissa grew up in America, and began experiencing hip and other arm pains as an adult, which was hard for her as she is a keen athlete. She realized that her posture might be the root cause. She learned the Gokhale Method with Esther’s younger daughter, Monisha, and started feeling meaningful relief. She is now a regular participant in Online Alumni Classes, which help her to keep healthy posture on her radar and continue refining it.

My sister Annissa (shown here with her PostureTracker) likes to use her Alumni membership most days—it makes checking in on and refining healthy posture comparatively effortless—and fun!

The next-gen

Interestingly, as my daughter Saya became a teenager, my wife noticed that her posture began to deteriorate. We were concerned that our daughter’s posture would worsen further when she went to college, leading sooner or later to inevitable pain and discomfort. Trying to offer advice and corrections to our daughter just caused a lot of frustration for both of them. 

When our daughter turned 16, we suggested that she learn the Gokhale Method before going to college. For her it was perfect to take the online Elements course. The fact that it was 18 compact 13-minute Zoom sessions worked perfectly for her busy high school life. Her posture markedly improved with Gokhale Method Teacher Kathleen O’Donohue.

We were so encouraged that we also asked our 15 year old niece Riya to take the course. She did the Elements course as well, and her posture improved too! 

Bringing different generations together with the Gokhale PostureTracker

In the last year, my daughter, sister, and I were really intrigued by the PostureTracker™ wearable, which gives real-time feedback on your posture by displaying the feedback from two highly accurate sensors on an app. My daughter and I did the first online Alumni PostureTracker class during the summer before my daughter headed to college. 

My daughter Saya is a young Gokhale Alumna, and has taken her PostureTracker with her to college. She has real-time feedback on her posture wherever she wants it.  

We then bought the PostureTracker (which comes with one-to-one tech assistance) for my sister Annissa’s birthday. She loves it and uses it most days, including in her Alumni Classes. When we all get together, we often have fun correcting each other’s posture and also talking about our PostureTracker experiences.

The village beyond my family

Beyond my family, my “village” extends to the Gokhale Alumni community too. I have truly enjoyed and benefited from the collective curiosity and wisdom of the 1-2-3 Move classes. The teaching and follow-up questions and answers have been so helpful and insightful. I will never forget Gokhale Alumna Mary Walsh’s saying, “Good things come to those who ‘bean-shape’ [their feet],” which really captivated me and continues to help me in my own posture journey.

Here we are on the 1-2-3 Move class sometime in the COVID winter of 2020–21. The online community we forged back then has continued to thrive and be a great resource for everyone on their healthy posture journey. There is a 7-day free trial open to the public. 

Best next action steps for newcomers

If you would like insight on your posture, consider scheduling an Initial Consultation, online, or in person.

You can sign up below to join one of our upcoming FREE Online Workshops. . .

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.

This photograph shows me teaching yoga as best as I knew how in 1979, standing with a sway in my back (and putting excess flexion into my student's neck).

Aged 15, I came to the United States as an exchange student and proceeded to go to college here. It was while doing a yoga pose in college that I first experienced a significant back episode with severe spasms. A few years later I injured my back while windsurfing; this time it took five days of bed rest to recover. I did weight training to strengthen my back, and returned to normal activity. 

When nine months pregnant with my first child, my back problem resurfaced with an onset of sciatica. After my baby’s birth, it grew worse, leading to surgery for a large disc herniation at L5-S1 a year later. Within another year the pain had returned. I declined a second surgery, and instead deepened my quest to understand the causes of back pain and how best to resolve it. 

An MRI scan done in 1987 revealed the cause of my sciatica and severe back pain—a large herniation at L5-S1.

Yoga postures require healthy posture

I learned from my life experience, as well as that of key teachers such as Noelle Perez, that in the industrialized world we do not use our bodies well. As our posture has deteriorated, traditional ways of performing everyday tasks in sitting, standing, and bending positions have become distorted. These damaging postural patterns are now deeply embedded in our culture and have even been unwittingly carried through into therapeutic activities such as yoga. 

How is it that yoga asanas, developed to bring strength, flexibility, and relaxation to the body, are now causing frequent injury? This question has been the subject of much media coverage in recent decades, including the provocative New York Times article in 2012, How Yoga Can Wreck Your Body¹. From a Gokhale Method® perspective, the primary problem is that poor posture in the population at large, including yoga students, combined with misguided conventional wisdom shared by yoga teachers about what constitutes good posture, has created a perfect storm. 

I came to realize that much of the flexibility I had as a young yoga model came from the wrong places—it was achieved at the expense of my lumbar discs and nerves as I compressed them to sway back, round forward, and twist. Let’s take a look at how yogis are likely to be causing themselves injuries and how using the Gokhale Method to apply the principles of healthy posture will avoid them:

Back bends

A large group of yoga postures are backbends. Bending backwards is something that is generally done extremely poorly in our culture, with most of the bend occuring around waist level. This puts a great deal of pressure on discs, nerves, and soft tissue in an area of the lumbar spine already compressed by tight erector spinae (long back muscles). This shortened baseline length is due to poor posture and furniture, part of our culture’s paradigm shift away from a healthy spine shape. You can read more about spine shape in my blog post What Shape is Your Spine? 

Many versions of Warrior pose, or Virabhadrasana in Sanskrit, are taught with a significant bend in the upper lumbar spine or thoraco-lumbar junction. This is especially a problem when one or both arms are lifted, encouraging the ribs to pop up. Pixabay

Even mild sways perpetuate tight muscles in the lumbar area and correspond with a lack of healthy articulation at L5-S1, the lumbosacral junction. Pexels

Gokhale Method teacher Lang Liu shows how anchoring your rib cage prevents swaying and encourages healthy articulation at L5-S1. You can read more about our approach to this pose in my blog post Why Keep the Body forward in Warrior I 

Forward bends

Many yoga postures contain some form of forward bend. This can be standing, sitting, symmetrical or asymmetrical, with the legs together or wide apart. Regardless of these permutations, from a Gokhale Method perspective, the key point is to make bending healthy and avoid the damage that comes with rounding the back, distending the spinal ligaments, and pinching the front of the discs.

Standing forward bends (Uttanasana) are often taught with legs straight. This leaves most students in our culture, who have tight hamstrings, straining towards the ground with their shoulders pulled forward. It also rounds the back, distending the spinal ligaments and pinching the front of the discs. Hanging off the lower back is also aggravating for the sacro-iliac joints and soft tissue in the area. Pexels

Bending the knees softens tight hamstrings allowing a lower bend to the floor—but this student is still rounding her torso to reach over her pelvis and legs to reach the floor. Pexels

This man is using blocks to reach the floor. He is still rounding his back, and severely compressing his neck to try and look ahead. Pexels

Unfortunately this well-meaning mother is teaching her daughter poor bending form. This is especially regrettable as young children naturally tend to bend healthily by hip-hinging. Pexels

In seated forward bends yoga students often hunch forward. This compounds any rounding already established in the upper back, and forward rounding of the shoulders. Her head also strains forward, chin up, compressing the back of the neck. Pexels

Gokhale Method teacher Cecily Frederick hip-hinges in a standing forward bend. Her pelvis rotates forward around the femoral heads (tops of the thigh bones that form part of the hip joints). Her spine remains long, rather than rounding. 

Twists

In twisting postures (Parivrtti), it is especially important that your movement is not concentrated at a particular level of the spine, but is well distributed. Levering into a twist by pushing or pulling with the arms or legs can cause a twist to concentrate at any vulnerable point. Typically people will twist most in the mid-spine at T12-L1. Here the more axially mobile thoracic spine meets the lumbar area, where the orientation of the facet joints limit rotation. This is likely to result in disc bulging or even herniation at this junction, pinching of the nerves, and undue stress on the bony spine.

This woman is twisting mostly at the waist. Pexels

This seated twist shows tucking of the pelvis. There is considerable rotation at the base of the shoulder blades as the yogini levers with her arms against a fixed pelvis and legs. Wikimedia

A lying twist with one knee reaching the floor and the opposite shoulder remaining there is an extreme rotation for most people. It will often compromise healthy posture. In this case the woman is using her forearm and tucking her pelvis slightly to get her knees down. It is better to prioritize  healthy movement over achieving the “correct” shape. Pexels

Gokhale Method teacher Clare Chapman in a lying twist. Allowing the pelvis to rest back and the thighs to separate avoids tucking and encourages more rotation in the hips. 

We recommend that you initiate twists using the muscles of the torso’s inner corset, especially the obliques. The inner corset is explained in detail in Lesson 5 of my book 8 Steps to a Pain-Free Back. Using these muscles means that the lumbar spine is protected while the muscles originating in the thoracic area and connecting to the pelvis power the rotation. Engaging the inner corset also lengthens the spine avoiding the common pitfall of imposing rotation on top of flexion (rounding) or extension (swaying) or any other kind of compression. 

Twists should mainly occur and be appropriately distributed in the joints best designed for them—the ankles (standing twists), hips, the thoracic spine, and the neck. Small amounts of rotation can contribute from elsewhere, but pushing beyond natural limits anywhere by applying force is a recipe for injury and pain.

Before executing yoga bends or twists, we recommend that you first learn the basics of the Gokhale Method® in our in-person Foundations Course, Pop-Up courses, or online Elements. These courses teach you how to bend back without swaying, and how to bend forward in a way that profoundly benefits rather than damages your body. The Gokhale Method Online University has many offerings for Alumni which explore additional movements such as shearing and twisting in ways that are healthy.

If you are a yoga practitioner who suffers from recurrent bouts of back pain or strain, have stopped practicing due to injury, or have been put off even trying yoga, then a solution is at hand! 

It has long been my ambition to offer yoga classes with healthy posture. I am delighted that one of our most experienced and accomplished teachers, Lang Liu, will offer regular Tuesday and Thursday Gokhale Yoga classes, ​​7:00 am (Pacific Time), starting April 21, as part of our Alumni Gokhale Exercise program. 

We look forward to seeing you there.

Gokhale Method teacher Lang Liu looks forward to seeing you in the Gokhale Yoga class.

References:

¹ William Broad, “How Yoga Can Wreck Your Body”, New York Times Magazine, Jan. 5, 2012,
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/08/magazine/how-yoga-can-wreck-your-body.html 

If you would like to find out more about how the Gokhale Method can help support you, sign up to join one of our upcoming FREE Online Workshops…

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. 

Here I am showing a photograph of me with my extended family in Holland. The tailoring of the traditional costumes we wore helped us to sit and stand with open, relaxed, and upright posture.

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. 

Ancestral photographs provide compelling evidence for what is taught in the Gokhale Method and can be a posture lesson in themselves. For example, in the print below it is striking that everyone is sitting on an anteverted pelvis, with externally rotated hips and legs, and feet angled outwards.

This group portrait shows how people sat with an anteverted pelvis, external rotation in their hips and legs, and feet pointing outward. It is one of several spare antique photographic prints donated by the Mendocino County Museum to the Gokhale Method Institute’s collection and also featured on the 1-2-3 Move exercise program. 

Pelvic anteversion 

Pelvic anteversion is the natural and healthy position for the human pelvis, in upright sitting and standing. “Anteversion” means the pelvic rim settles at a slight forward angle, rather than the “neutral” or “level” position which is often taught as ideal today. Most people in modern societies “tuck” or “retrovert” the pelvis in the opposite direction to anteversion, and consequently get into various kinds of trouble.

Anteversion is the pelvic angle you still see in historical artefacts, in our infants and children, and in populations throughout the non-industrialized world that suffer far less back pain than we do. This is explained and illustrated in detail in my book, 8 Steps to a Pain-Free Back. Below are just a few examples.

Antique statues, infants, and people in more traditional cultures all show a naturally anteverted pelvis. 

Legs externally rotated 

Pelvic anteversion is natural for our species, but was more prevalent prior to the 1920s, when traditional posture was still preserved and people had good role models. The prevailing dress codes of past times were also more conducive to healthy posture and movement patterns. For women, long, wide skirts allowed the legs to widen and the pelvis to settle well. In shorter skirts women tend to turn the knees inwards because of moral codes. Tight skirts and jeans will also tend to limit the range of movement in the hips in a way that traditional clothing does not. (Note: there is a healthy way to antevert the pelvis even when the knees are close together, but this takes a little more education and training.)

Pelvis nestled

A well-trained eye can also discern from a photograph the deep nestling of the pelvis between the leg bones that takes place when the legs are externally rotated. This nestling enables people to sit more forward on their sitz bones in an upright but relaxed position (below left). With the more common tucked pelvic position of modern times, a person is left with two equally unhealthy options for the torso: relaxed and slumped (below center) or upright and tense (below right). 

We have forgotten how to be upright and relaxed to the extent that when we look at old photographs with upright people, we mistakenly imagine that they are stiff and must be exerting a lot of effort to be upright.

Feet pointing outward

If you are lucky enough to have full-length family portraits you will see that the feet are angled outward in standing. This arises naturally from having external rotation in the hips. The current conventional wisdom that the feet should be parallel interferes with the healthy alignment and function of the lower limbs and pelvis. Without external rotation, feet are more likely to pronate (roll inward), knees to collapse inward (knock knees), and the pelvis will not articulate well with the heads of the femurs (hip joint). Students have reported much improvement in hip bursitis and impingements in the groin from gently progressing external rotation over time using Gokhale Method techniques. 

1-2-3 Move participant Linda Grande shares a photograph of her grandparents, taken around 1916, who emigrated from Sicily and met in Brooklyn. They both show beautiful posture, including outward pointing feet.

Finding external rotation

Our 1-2-3 Move Alumni exercise program gives participants further practical posture experience as well as sharing compelling history and theory. Below is a short video clip in which I introduce and teach a traditional Indian dance (Bharata Natyam) movement, which I learned as a child in Mumbai. Like most traditional dance forms, it encourages external rotation of the hips, legs, and feet. Dance is an excellent way to learn new movement patterns and make them feel familiar. Try this move for yourself! 

Traditional dance forms such as Bharata Natyam encourage external rotation of the hips, legs and feet.

The Gokhale Method® approach to posture and movement is always holistic, supports good habits, and develops healthy alignment that protects joints and soft tissues from injury. You can find out more in one of our new FREE Online Workshops. If you would like an expert one-on-one assessment of your posture and especially your lower body alignment, you can arrange an Online Initial Consultation or take an in-person Initial Consultation if you have a Gokhale Method Teacher near you.