pioneer

Travel is part of our Gokhale Method® DNA—the method arose and developed through study of foreign cultures (including ancestral cultures), and remains informed by images, videos, statistics, and other data from pain-free and remarkably functional human beings. 

I have learned firsthand what healthy human posture looks like alongside the Sami reindeer herders in Scandinavia, tribal people in Odisha, India, villagers in Burkina Faso, and people with African roots in Brazil. When I travel teach, I make it a point to visit the local museums and also check for local cultural events, ethnic restaurants, and areas that might bring to life the kind of insights and body wisdom the Gokhale Method is based on. 

These Arnhem Land and Torres Strait Indigenous dancers incorporate both external rotation of their legs and hip-hinging in their movement vocabulary—an example we do well to follow. Image from Wikimedia

In my experience, travel makes the mind especially receptive to new ideas and impressions—we are away from our usual routines and responsibilities and free to take in new sights, sounds, smells, feelings, and thoughts. 

Travel with a purpose

If you suffer with back pain, I would like to encourage you to consider traveling to a location to take our Gokhale Foundations course. These courses are often taught intensively in a weekend or a week, and our teachers are spread in many wonderful corners of the globe. You might think of this as a “destination Gokhale Foundations course” that combines wellness, learning, and transformation alongside the local attractions that the destination has to offer. 

Combine a city break with your passions, be they history, engineering, science, or the arts, alongside your Gokhale Foundations course. Image from Wikimedia
The Clifton Suspension Bridge and Observatory, Bristol, England.

Our teachers can not only offer you instruction and hands-on guidance in how to move like you are meant to, but also information on the posture-relevant sites in their towns. They can offer you tips on museum exhibits, restaurants where the servers have great posture, localities that are home to recent immigrants, and other supplemental suggestions on how to immerse yourself in your wellness vacation. This kind of journey makes you a pioneer in the new field of posture tourism!

Posture tourism also insures you against losing all the benefits of your vacation soon after it ends. Posture learning and transformation will improve the course of your life, even if your life is busy and has tensions in it.  

Choose your destination

Geographically speaking, where might your Foundations adventure take you? We have teachers offering both group and private courses all over, so here are some suggestions:

• City breaks, US: Atlanta GA, Berkeley CA, Cambridge Boston MA, Chicago IL, Cotati CA, Hingham MA, Madison WI, Memphis TN, New York NY, Palo Alto CA, Philadelphia PA, San Diego CA, Westchester IL
• Town and country breaks, US: Brooklyn WI, Edmonds Seattle WA, Elmwood IL, Greeley CO, McCormick SC, Whitefish MT  
• Ancestor trail and abroad: Basel Switzerland, Besançon France, Braunschweig Germany, Bristol UK, Canberra Australia, Dittisham UK, Edmonton Canada, Erfurt Germany, Ingolstadt Germany, Kilkenny Ireland, Ljubljana Slovenia, Öhringen Hannover Germany, Ottawa Canada, Stuttgart Germany
• Sea and coastal locations: Cat Island The Bahamas, Celebrity Cruising (Fort Lauderdale visiting Aruba, Bonair, and Curacao in the Southern Caribbean), Hawi Hawaii, Sydney Australia
• You can find all our course location details here.

Make “destination Gokhale Foundations course” your own “retreat,” or go with your partner, a good friend, or family member, to share and remember your discoveries. (Aruba, southwest Caribbean). Image from Unsplash

Vacation time away can be an ideal time to improve your posture. Getting away from familiar home and work routines is conducive to being open to new experiences and possibilities. There is space for reflection and relaxation as you explore changing the ways you inhabit your body. 

You can easily search for Gokhale Foundations courses and other offerings here.

And staying away from home doesn’t have to be expensive. Many of our students stay with family members, or catch up with friends who live in a Foundations destination. A weekend course can also be a well-earned, self-care extension to a work trip.

I knew I wanted a hands-on experience but was hesitant to make the commitment—an intensive weekend class would require a three-hour drive from my home plus a two-night hotel stay… My in-person with Doreen was a transformative experience… Plus, she helped me correctly set up my stretchsit cushion in my car. Thanks to this, my back and legs were blissfully comfortable on my three-hour return trip home. 

Amy Alpine, Gokhale Foundations course student.

The river Dart in the Devon village of Dittisham, England, a Gokhale Foundations course destination.

Can’t come to us? We can come to you!

Many of our teachers enjoy travel teaching, and have visited Northern Ireland and Dublin Ireland, Edinburgh Scotland, Berlin and Freiburg Germany, and Werkhoven Holland. This year I am looking forward to travel teaching Gokhale Foundations in Sydney, Australia alongside teacher training. 

The church on the market square in Öhringen. This October will be my third visit to this delightful German town. 

If you have a group of friends, colleagues or clients, who would like a course in your town, please let us know—we would love to make this happen! If you own or know of a venue, a provisional course can be listed publicly on our website.

Whichever destination you choose for your Gokhale Foundations course, you’ll be on your way to healthier posture and breaking away from back and other body pains.

 Sunset at Kapa’a Beach Park, Hawaii, a Gokhale Foundations course destination.

Best next action steps 

If you are new to the Gokhale Method, get started by booking a consultation, online, or in person with one of our teachers. 

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

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. 

These European settlers all show a preference for sitting with a straight back.

Sharing our heritage from abroad

People with heritage from abroad will often have photographs of their family, especially parents and grandparents, showing excellent posture. Immigrant parents frequently bring excellent posture with them from their homeland, while their children grow up adopting the tucked and slouched posture they see around them in the US.

In our “bring and tell” sessions on our Alumni 1-2-3 Move program participants have generously shared their own family photographs. It is noticeable how many of their ancestors and older generations from abroad have particularly wonderful posture. Their posture would not have been exceptional back then, but today we can find it an inspiration for our own personal posture journeys and improvement. 

Lucy Atkin shares a photograph of her maternal grandfather on the 1-2-3 Move program. He was of German/Prussian descent. It shows a lifted sternum, a tall neck, his head turns on the axis of his spine, his eyes look ahead.

 
1-2-3 Move participant Susan Rothenberg shares a photograph of her paternal grandparents from Lithuania. Their feet are turned out and their shoulders are back and wide.

The decline of posture in the US

Posture deteriorated sharply with the “flapper generation” in the 1920s, and then nosedived again after World War II. The decline in our posture over the generations is a fascinating story, which I have written a little about in my book, 8 Steps to a Pain-Free Back. 

I consider there are two main reasons why posture deteriorated more rapidly in the US, while the “old countries” kept it intact for longer. Firstly, when young adults are transplanted from their place of origin, they lose some of the kinesthetic traditions that would otherwise be reinforced by their parents and grandparents—for example, how to perform tasks in the fields, or raise children, with all the lifting and carrying that involves. Even rest positions for sitting and sleeping well can be forgotten. 
 

As children we learn what we see around us—and that goes for healthy posture too. 

Secondly, due to its pioneer days and mainly youthful immigrants, the US evolved a culture and commerce driven by innovation. While this dynamism has brought many benefits, prizing innovation also has its downside. New fashions, furniture, and lifestyles have been developed and adopted indiscriminately, often with a damaging impact on posture.

Posture deteriorated sharply in America from the 1950s—a decade earlier than in most of Europe. Crain's Chicago Business

Looking back to our heritage

“Modernizing” trends from the US were slow to take hold in Europe, due in part to postwar austerity, and this meant that more traditional posture often persisted well into the 1960s. It is not uncommon for today’s seniors to have photographs of themselves as children in the 40s and 50s with parents and grandparents showing largely intact posture, especially if their roots are abroad. You can observe chins rested down, wide, open chests, and externally rotated legs and feet. 

 
Gokhale Method alumna Pauline Tilbury, aged nearly five, at the beach in Filey, England, June 1959. Her grandparents in particular show the open posture typical of their generation—and children.

Some readers will recall the beautiful photographs in the post Posture in Old Lithuania by Gokhale Metho​​d™ teacher Aurelia Vaicekauskas. Aurelia came to the US with her parents from Lithuania in 1979. Her post shows the inspiring posture of the people there as they lived and worked in their traditional communities.

Aurelia’s post Teaching My 95-Year-Old Lithuanian Mom the Gokhale Method includes this wonderful family photograph, posed on her mother’s wedding day in Kaunas, Lithuania in 1957, with everyone exuding elegance and poise. Truly, when it comes to posture, looking back to our heritage is one of our best ways forward.

Gokhale Method teacher Aurelia Vaicekauskas’ parents (far left) in Lithuania with family on their wedding day.

We work diligently to bring healthy, natural posture within the most modern of contexts here in the US. We are grateful that this posture remains embodied in various populations around the world, and embedded in historical art and sculpture the world over. We also celebrate its existence in the photographic records of our relatives from abroad.

You are invited to share any of your family photographs of ancestors from abroad in the Comments below this post. (Log in and click on the upload picture icon, far right .)

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