#gokhale method

[mollymorgansshovel]

I'm ready to send posture talk all day long! And I'm fascinated by this particular swap out of young v. old:

I am so glad you asked!!!

Okay, so to start with, young Obi-Wan is a good example of how you can actually have decently healthy posture without looking too uptight! (I mean he still looks uptight but that’s because he is.) His shoulders are on level plane, which bodes well for those muscles. His lower spine probably is curved, which would probably hurt over time, but if you have strong back muscles they should be supple enough to pull this off for a while. You can see that even though his hips are tilted, his pelvis is not tucked under him, so he is being primarily held stabilized by his gluteal muscles (good because they are big and strong muscles) instead of his hip flexors (bad because they are smaller, tendinous, and more prone to strain.) His abdominal muscles are being engaged by holding the relaxed weight of his stomach, instead of by sucking in and clenching the way that so many of us are taught to do but which so easily leads to back pain and a weak abdominal wall. So, hooray for padawan Obi-Wan! He has enough latent strength in his body that he can stand in his awkward, I-don’t-know-how-to-take-up-space way and probably not have a backache in the morning. In other words, this is the stance of someone who is habitually uptight and intentional about movement trying to appear more casual and spontaneous than he is. 

Older Obi-Wan: oh boy. So, there is a way to stand in this pose and have a straight back/neck and to have the power of the core and lower body available to aid the arms in case of a swing. He’s not doing it. He’s too busy GUARDING HIS CHEST because this is what Obi-Wan does, constantly, all the time, obsessively. His shoulders are rolled forward, which weakens them and endangers his rotator cuff to injury, but hey, it guards his chest. He could strengthen his whole stance by letting his sternum press forward, but hey, then his sternum would be vulnerable. Psychologically speaking, it’s almost like he GUARDS HIS HEART. 

You see this tendency throughout the series. You know how he’s always crossing his arms in front of himself? In my observation of body language, there are two ways that people cross their arms. One way is to take up more space and assert dominance; that usually involves shoulders pulled back to their full breadth, chest sticking out, arms resting there kind of like a threat. Then there’s the way that functions to take up less space/avoid scrutiny/hide self-perceived flaws: shoulders hunched, chest caved, hands resting there so they can fidget with hair/facial hair. Physically speaking, Obi-Wan crosses his arms in the second way. I know that I, for one, infer certain things about his character based on that. It kind of drives me nuts when people assume any character who crosses his arms is doing it in a domineering way. I’m like, but look at the forward roll of those shoulders!

Anyways, if you’re reading this, take a break and STOP trying to pull your shoulders back. This often just strains them. Instead, let your spine straighten (imagine you have a tail and it would hurt to keep it tucked under you; imagine you have lasers shooting out of your nipples and they should be aimed straight ahead of you and not at the floor or the ceiling; try whatever works) and let your shoulders HANG from the frame of your skeleton. That’s what they’re supposed to do. They should feel relaxed, not like you’re rowing a boat. Not like Obi-Wan’s shoulders feel by the end of the Revenge of the Sith.

[mollymorgansshovel]

OKAY, I am so into your posture analysis and characters, etc.! I was gonna give you some star trek characters, but I'll go older for a sec: Jim Stark. What's the deal, posture wise? How much of this is terrible 50s tailoring, in other words??

I AM SO GLAD YOU ASKED

Jim is a GREAT example of how much posture tells us about our environment. His posture physically hints at the destruction of healthy communal family structures in favor of the confusing, sterilized nuclear family model that we see driving a lot of teen angst (and back pain!) in 1950s America!

It all comes down to this tucked tailbone:

When you tuck your tailbone, it's easy for the back muscles to be overstretched and not strong, which leads to excess pressure being put on the vertebrae of your spine. In the US, baseline back muscle strength and spine straightness was pretty good up until the 1920s, when the fashion industry started convincing people that upright backs are stuffy and old-fashioned and slouching (with the pelvis tilted up and forward) is sexy. (Slouching is unfortunately not sexy because it shortens your hamstrings, weakens your back muscles, interferes with proper shoulder movement, and damages your spine, let alone your internal organs.)

Around the 1950s, we start seeing a HUGE rise in back pain where there didn't used to be any before. You get kids like Jim Stark who are still under the media influence that slouched posture looks cooler, and who grew up with parents who have never provided helpful examples of good posture to mimic. Children learn by mimicking their parents and by being guided by touch. In 20th century America, you get a bunch of contraptions being invented to replace familial touch, so instead of being manually held into a spinal stretch as babies are when being carried hands-on by parents/grandparents/caretakers who know what they're doing, babies are left to slouch in shapeless or even slouch-encouraging seats. It sounds silly to say babies shouldn't slouch, but it's amazing how that stuff trickles down into adulthood.

And with the post-war zealotry for the nuclear family, you get kids cut off from ancestral knowledge of healthy posture and/or how to raise kids with healthy posture. These parents are just kind of making it up as they go along, and you can obviously see Jim's frustration with that in the movie as he struggles with his family's confused gender roles. [For the record, I'm gay and all for dads wearing aprons, but symbolically speaking it's important that Jim doesn't know what to model in society because there's no stability in his role models. On a related note, there's also something gender-ishly interesting about Jim Stark (and other male 1950s sex symbols like Marlon Brando, Elvis, etc.) in that their posture (pelvis up and forward, shoulders rolled in) is just like those 1920s women's fashion ads that made slouching look cool.]

So yeah, the dissolution of ancestral familial connections to healthy living and the explosion of new family structures/roles makes for a lot of Jim Stark's angst and his need to create his own family out of the pieces he collects. And you can see that all in his posture!

His low back and shoulders are going to hate him! They’re tearing him apart!

[mollymorgansshovel]

I’m just here for the gay stuff, but send me a character/group of characters/photo of a character and I will provide fun commentary on their sitting/standing/bending posture and the likelihood of their back pain. And while you’re visiting, have some unsolicited posture advice: untuck your tailbone and let your abdominal muscles catch the weight of your gut. Your back will thank you. 

[culturalogique]

Back to Back (Pt. 8) How I Healed My Spine

The pictures in Gokhale’s book say it all, Gokhale, herself an acupuncturist, had experienced severe lower back pain in the form of sciatica during her pregnancy and infancy of her first daughter, the doctors recommended surgery, and advised her not to have any more children. Within 12 months the pain returned and the doctors recommended more surgery.

She knew there must be a better way, she began studying posture around the world, archeologically and in infants. It turns out that back pain is a fairly new phenomenon and many traditional cultures around the world with a healthy kinesthetic tradition as part of their every day culture do not report the high rates of back pain which are up to 80% in the US, more than twice as common as in 1950. In her book she outlines the perceived causes of back pain, standing upright (vs. on all fours), leading sedentary lives (too much sitting, driving), stress, weight, height and age or degeneration, one by one she debunks these causes and instead points to our posture as the single point of entry into alleviating our symptoms, so it’s not that we sit too much, but how we sit, stand & lie that need to be re-evaluated.

In her book, she carefully and simply outlines methods for:

STRETCHSITTING

STRETCHLYING ON YOUR BACK

STACKSITTING

STRETCHLYING ON YOUR SIDE

USING YOUR INNER CORSET

TALLSTANDING

HIP-HINGING and

GLIDEWALKING

And there they are, the 8 steps, in their full glory, no special exercises, machines, treatments or diets, just a re-examination of how we sit, stand, walk and lie.

I started trying to follow Gokhale’s directions in the book, but I knew I was missing some critical pieces.

Inspired by my progress and still desperate for something that would help me feel better, I signed up for a 3 day basics workshop with one of Gokhale’s certified teachers here in Portland, Joanna Cowan.

The workshop was everything I needed, slow, steady and methodical. Joanna teaches you, hands-on how to stretchsit, stretchlie on your back and side, stacksit, hip-hinge, when you need to pick things up off the floor, tall stand and glidewalk.

It was revolutionary and I could tell immediately, that these simple methods that could be done all day, were giving my spine room to breathe.

Also at this time I switched Chiropractors, to a practitioner, Dr. Jason Lindekugel of Concordia Chiropractic, who was familiar with Gokhale’s principles and who I hoped could help me unravel this path for healing and re-aligning my spine.