bending

World Masters weightlifting champion Susan Gerhard shares how the Gokhale Method enabled her to conquer a back injury and set a new world record.

I’ve been doing therapeutic bodywork and massage for 25 years. One of my clients, who owns the garage that services my car, had trouble with his hip—I did what I could to help. About a month later he came back, and was walking much better. I asked him what had happened—and he told me he had taken some Gokhale Method® classes. Intrigued, I ordered Esther Gokhale’s book.

My Gokhale Method® journey has unfolded in stages. I attended an in-person weekend Gokhale® Foundations course in 2016, seeking relief for a stiff neck. My neck had been a chronic problem during my long career as a professional oboe player, and it was now much worse after a freak fall down the stairs. As I began to incorporate the Gokhale principles into my daily life, my neck gradually improved.

Signs of good sleep include taking less time to fall asleep and not waking up often or for long periods. And although the American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM)and the Sleep Research Society (SRS) recommend adults sleep at least seven hours a night,¹ over one-quarter of us fall short of this recommendation.² There are many factors contributing to this lack of sleep, and back pain is certainly one of them. 

The Gokhale Method® is designed to be, well, methodical. But although the process of learning healthy posture is mostly systematic and progressive, it is also usually punctuated by “aha moments”. These glimpses of intellectual, visual, and kinesthetic understanding of the body can arrive like the warm glow of returning to home ground, or they can be seismic shifts that change your life forever…

Today, those of us in the U.S. celebrate our nationhood. On July 4, 1776, the Declaration of Independence announced colonial freedom from Great Britain; our history has included the winning of many more freedoms since. In various and sometimes contradictory ways, our society continues to defend much cherished freedoms, and also to aspire to new levels of freedom.