Gokhale Method Primal Posture | Esther Gokhale | Talks at Google

Esther. It's my great pleasure to welcome Esther Gokhlay to Google. I'll just say a little bit about Esther and then I'll turn over the mic to her. But Esther has been doing the posture work, teaching it, studying it for 20 years. She's also a licensed acupuncturist in California, and she's been doing that work for 25 years. So a long involvement in the health, in the health field. She was educated at Harvard and Princeton, got a degree in biochemistry. I met Esther, I guess, maybe eight or nine months ago. I had gone to my doctor at the Palo Alto Medical foundation with back pain and shoulder pain and other sorts of pain. And he sort of did standard tests. And then he kind of timidly said to me, well, if you're interested in alternative therapies, there is this woman who, who has a studio in Palo Alto, and she does posture work. And a lot of my patients have gotten great benefits from that, so you might want to look into that. And so indeed, I did contact Esther, and I took her series of six posture courses, and I really loved the work and her. And then I started taking dance classes with her, which got me back into exercising. So I get to see her every week. And in the dance classes, we reinforce the posture work and also have tons of fun. And so I'm just really thrilled to be able to have Esther come to talk to everybody. Her book just came out, and I think it's a great way for lots of people to learn about the techniques that she's developed for managing pain and really getting rid of pain, paying attention, recreating how your body, how you carry your body and how it's aligned and stuff. And one of the things I really like about her work, I'm not going to talk too long, but I just wanted to say one of the things I really like about her work is that it's not something separate from your everyday life that you need to do. She teaches you how to sit, how to stand, how to bend, how to walk in ways that make your body work for itself rather than against it. So you don't have to carve out time in your schedule to do these things. You can do them while you're working, while you're walking the dog, while you're living your everyday life and be benefiting from it. And that's something that I've tried to incorporate into my life, and it's made a big difference to me. And so I hope that hearing what she has to say, reading her book will make A big difference for you. We had 40 books and clearly there are a lot more than 40 people here. So we're going to look into whether we can get more books to give out through the authors Google series. But her book is also available online at her website and it will be available on Amazon soon, in a couple months in April. Okay, so if you did not get a book and would like one, you can send me email sharonoogle.com and I will let you know how the books will be available. If we can't get them for free, we can probably get them at a discount and I'll let you know. And you may also be wondering about the towels on the backs of people's seats. Esther will explain about that, but it comes in as part of one of the exercises that she teaches. So if you don't have a towel on your seat, but you're sitting next to somebody with a towel, perhaps they'll share it with you to try out the exercise. It's a friendly place here, right. We have close quarters. We can share towels for this purpose anyway. Anything else? Logistics.

Great.

I think we're all set. Thank you.

Esther, thank you so much for that introduction. It's a tremendous honor to be here. I love this company, I love what you do for the world. And it's a particular pleasure for me to support people who are then supporting other people. I'm going to start with a story. In ancient Greece, there were two groups of people who dealt with sickness. There were two deities. There was Asclepius, who was the God of medicine, and there was Hygiea, who was the goddess of health. And they operated in a very different way. The Asclepians, if something went wrong, looked to what external force can they fight to get rid of this problem? How can they fix it? The Hygeans took the approach more if something goes wrong, what law of nature are we not respecting or offending? And so it's a very different approach and they both have great validity. What I'm going to present today is very much in the Hygean camp. It's a Hygean way of looking at back problems, neck problems, carpal tunnel syndrome, tendinitis, a whole slew of problems that plague us today. And that I think are best dealt with by asking whether there is some basic law of nature or basic law of human architecture that we're not respecting that's causing these problems. So my goal today is to teach you a couple of simple techniques I had in mind, seated techniques. I'M sorry for those who are left standing, but perhaps in this friendly sharing place, you can even share seats, not just towels. And I will also show you a couple of things that you can do standing. So I'd like to leave you with some very concrete tips. And then I'd also like to give you an overview so that if something goes wrong with your back or your neck or your arm or some other part of your body, some part of your musculoskeletal system, that you will remember things I've said and start thinking along the lines of maybe there's something I'm not doing quite right, rather than, oh, this is because I'm getting old. Not that many of you look like you're getting old anytime soon. You think you are. Or that you blame your sedentary work, your desk job, or you blame that you've put on the Google 15 or the other things. We blame stress and weight and height. And I'm hoping that I will inspire you to think that maybe there's something you could do a little differently that will solve the problem or at least help the problem. So with that, I'm going to start so that we can be more comfortable as we go through this presentation. I'm going to start with a little tip in sitting. The towels do help. We're going to start with the butt back in the chair. So you're going to. Instead of. No, it's okay, I can explain. Like this. So instead of sitting with your tail kind of under you or out in front of you, put your tail back, not too far back. You don't want to stick it way through the hole back there. And then the second thing you want to do is take your rib cage and imagine it to be a big oval. And what you want to do with this oval is curve it forward. So it's the opposite of sticking your chest out, which is something many of us think is part of having good posture. You know, chest out, chin up, opposite. You really want to have your ribcage slightly, slightly canted forward. And if you have a swayed back, which is an unhealthy, excessive curvature in your low back, this curving forward action flattens out that portion of your back. And it's a healthy way to go about flattening that part of your back so you're curving slightly forward. Now you grab the side bars on your chair and you're going to leave your butt in the chair like an anchored. And you're going to push down with your arms so as to elongate Your back and curve it slightly forward so you're pushing down and you're growing your back. Maybe if you have a tweaky back, by the way, don't overdo this. Go about this gently. So slightly forward with the ribcage. Grab the side bars, push down gently. Grow your back some while you're still curving forward. Now you hinge from your hip. You're still curving forward, you're still elongated, and you hook yourself to the back rest. And if you've got a towel, this really works better because you want some part of the backrest to meet you. You want some protrusion, some part jutting out so that you hook yourself to the back rest. And now you let go and you let the chair do the job of elongating you. You no longer need your hand there. And you unfurl your body. You no longer have to curve forward so you're leaning back. Anyone feel a gentle stretch in their back from having done that? Yes, yes, yes. I'm seeing a number of people nodding. If anyone's not feeling it and they'd like me to come and help, I'll be glad to do that. I can also do that after. But if you're feeling really frustrated, let me know. I'll come around. I'm usually. I usually teach this in small groups, but I don't want to leave anyone feeling. Where's that stretch she's talking about? So forward, elongated, hooked and relaxed. And now we're going to go for repositioning the shoulders one at a time. So you take your shoulders slightly forward, up a lot back, and you relax. Do the other side a little forward, a little up, a lot back, and you relax. And now you don't do any more effort. You just relax. And you can let your hands sit in your lap. And I can tell from looking around that there are a lot of people's shoulders hanging further back than usual, and it doesn't take effort to keep them back there. This is a better way of repositioning your shoulders than the usual ways that people use, which include pulling your shoulders back. Lasts about 10 seconds. Then you go back to slumping or worse. A common practice if you know that you slump, is to kind of sit up straight or have good posture, which involves tightening, compressing, damaging your low back. That's not the way you want to do it. You don't want to sit up straight. Okay? So if you know that your shoulders hunch, do this shoulder roll. It's simple, it's effective, and it does you no Harm. It does you a lot of good. Little forward, little up. Back down. Relax. Forward up, back down. Totally relax. What you've done is you've ratcheted the soft tissue of your shoulder back a notch. If you visualize this joint to be something like a gear mechanism, it has bumps and valleys and so on, and you're taking the soft tissue of the shoulder and you're hooking it back a notch, and it actually settles in this further back place, and you don't have to do anything for the it to stay there. This becomes really important for several health matters, and one of them is the way you breathe. When your shoulders are back there and your pecs are not tight, and inhibiting the motion of the ribcage, it actually lets your lungs more freely expand in this direction. So that's one benefit. More oxygen, better for your brain, better for your body, better for everything. The other thing is that it encourages better circulation to and from your arms, which is really important when you're using your arms all day, whether it's typing or playing the piano or chopping vegetables, whatever. So you want to have this portion of your body have optimal architecture. And right under here, this is right under the pectoral muscles, there's a whole network of veins and arteries and nerves. It's called the brachial plexus. And it's like grand central right under here. It's almost everything that feeds your arm and comes back from your arm. So you really don't want to compromise it. You leave your shoulders back there and you. You're going to prevent a lot of tendonitises and carpal tunnel syndrome and such. It is a little awkward in the beginning. If you're used to typing like this, for example, when you have your shoulders back here, it makes your arms effectively a little bit shorter, right? Your reach is a little shorter. So you have to come in a little closer to your keyboard and to your steering wheel and so on. And you have to keep a safe distance from your airbag. But you get used to this, you know, in the beginning, it feels really weird. You feel like you're Tyrannosaurus rex and you should join the little group with Stan out there. You can't reach, but you get used to it, and you learn to reach with your body and with your arms, too. Just not your shoulder blades, not in a systematic fashion. It's not made to be out there. The other good thing about having your shoulders back is that it allows a better architecture in your entire back. You don't have Your shoulders kind of distorting your back and causing you to be increasingly hunched as you, you know, as the years go by. So that's an additional advantage. Whenever I talk about ideal characteristics, that the shoulders are meant to be back here, for example, or that the back is meant to be elongated. It's a description of what you find in certain cultures in the world. There are places in the world where they have a back pain incidence of 5%, for example, in Chad or in the highlands of Thailand, some compared with our 90%. And what these. So, yeah, you know, you may say, well, it's because of underreporting, it's because of this, it's because of that. But that's a huge discrepancy that I think is explained best by the fact that these people know how to use their bodies and we've forgotten how. And it takes studying them or going back in time to study your ancestors or looking to little children who still have their natural architecture intact to find a better model for how the body is supposed to work than we've been using in our culture. I'm going to describe just a few of the characteristics. These are the Ubong tribesmen. They're in Borneo, in Indonesia. And you can see just. You can. You know, they look good, right? But more particularly, they have, for example, an even groove along the spine up and down. You see that it's not particularly deep, for example, in the low back. And there aren't bones sticking out, for example, in the upper back. And that's very desirable and can be learned. You see that their shoulders are prominent off the contour of the torso. And now you know how to get there. Let's review our little shoulder roll. You go a little forward, and those of you standing can do it, too. Little forward, little up, back and down and relax. And it'll just stay there unless you have really tight pecs. And then it pulls back. But that's very few people. Little forward, little up, back and down. And there's ones of you who are standing when you do that. You have to be careful that you don't end up doing this. Those of you sitting are held in place by the. By the chair, and that's handy. So I like to teach this technique, sitting First. I have a course which, as Sharon mentioned, six sessions. And in the first one, we do stretch sitting, and then we do a technique of lying down where you're also elongated. And then we have other ways of sitting and lying on the side and so on sort of progress people through These bite sized morsels of information that steadily improve your structure and make more and more of your day comfortable. No, that's not the right one. How did that happen? Okay, so these are two Greek statues in the Louvre. And one of the things you can observe. Does anyone have anything to say about the shape of the back? Anything that's remarkable about them? Anything unusual? The buttocks, they slant backwards. Good eye. So you can see that they definitely carry their behinds behind them. Right. They're not doing what's commonly taught, which is a pelvic tuck. Yeah. What you can also see is that up higher in the small of their back, there really isn't very much curvature at all. This is quite straight in the higher lumbar area. And it's only way down low at the location we call L5S1. It's the very last link in the chain of your spine that there is a significant angle. You also observe that the shoulders are back, hanging towards the back of the torso. Notice that the ribcage in the front doesn't stick out. You don't see a sort of jag where the ribcage sticks out, where the chest is out. The chest forms a smooth contour with the entire torso. This is also a Greek statue. And again, you see that the low back is quite straight and only way down low at L5s1 is there a significant curve. So this is very different from what we're taught to do. We're taught that there's supposed to be a natural S shaped curve in the spine and that the pelvis should be tucked and so on. So some of these ideas that are being presented are not conventional ideas, but they're not pulled out of the hat. They're a description of what these people are doing. And people like the Greeks thought a lot about form and function and athleticism. And I think they had a lot of things well figured out and it would do as well to study them. And sometimes concocting new theories is not the best way to go. You know, the body hasn't changed that much in recent history. Cambodian Bodhisattva figure. And again, you see that the spine is quite straight throughout until you get down low to L5s1. And there the behind is behind. Familiar. It's the shape of every kid. They have a pretty straight spine until you come down low and then their behinds are behind them. They're not trying to do anything. They're not following anyone's theory. They're just built that way. What you can also observe is that the weight bearing bones in the body are well stacked and they're stacked over the heel. And that's something I'd like to explore with you. Those of you who are not fiddling with your lunch, you're welcome to stand up, and I'd like to show you how that feels. So as you're standing, observe where the weight falls on your feet. Is it on the front of the foot? Is it on the heel? And the way you can transfer the weight forward and back is by shifting your hips. Now, as you shift your hips back, something has to come forward to counterbalance, right? Right. Otherwise you're just going to topple over backwards. So shift your hips back and allow your upper body to hinge at the hip and come forward until you feel a place where your weight is on your heels primarily. A little bit on the front is fine. So shift back and forth until you find a sort of balance point. Weights on the heels leave your knees soft and also leave your groin soft.

And.

And a good way to find that is to actually bend both. So you're as though you're going to squat. Say you're going to squat on the toilet or you're going to go for an exercise. Squat. And you bend both your knees and your groin just slightly, leaving your weight on the heels, just like that. And then you gently elongate. Elongate. Leave the weight on the heels and stop short of locking both your knees and your groin. And. And now you probably feel in a somewhat unusual position. Maybe you feel like. Let's see a raise of hands. How many people feel like they're leaning forward when they do this show of hands? Great. Okay, now for those of you who've shown your hands, I'd like for your neighbors to take a look at you and tell you whether or not you're leaning forward. So let's take 30 seconds to give an unbiased opinion here, honest opinion. Okay. Okay. So now we'd like another show of hands. How many people thought they were leaning forward, but their neighbors told them they weren't leaning forward? So that's a lot. Okay. And this is, of course, not done quite as thoroughly as would be ideal, but that's a common experience. When you find a new position, it feels weird. And it takes some coaxing, some convincing, like looking in a mirror sideways, which is something I do with my students to reassure you that you're not looking like an orangutan, even though you feel like one. All right, so that's about standing. That, by the way, is how you used to stand when you were little. Keep standing because we're going to add something to it. While you're standing there, let's look at our neck position. And here again we have the notion that necks are supposed to have a so called natural cervical curve. And we even have cervical pillows to support these curves and so on. This was a photograph I took in my travels in Burkina Faso, which is off the beaten track. It's in sub Saharan Africa and people live in a very traditional lifestyle there. And so as I was talking about earlier, they've preserved these natural body waves too. You can see her neck doesn't have a lot of curvature at all. So one way you can get there is to grasp a largest clump of hair so it doesn't hurt on the back of your head and gently urge your head to shift back and up so you're pulling on your hair back and up so that the back of your neck is elongating. Allow your chin to angle down. You don't want to force it down, but allow it to angle down. And again, if this is not what you're used to, this is going to feel very strange. And it takes a whole re education of how you use your eyes to make this work. So. But you can see that's what she's doing. And that's also what this Tahitian girl is doing, doing and this Greek statue and every kid. And that's pretty compelling. When you have the village Africans and the Greek statues and the Cambodian Bodhisattva figures and every kid on the planet doing the same thing, it gives you pause. Maybe this is natural. Maybe this is something we should be doing as adults too, A little, you know what I was talking about, the shoulder roll and making your arms feel short. Let's do another shoulder roll while we're standing. So let's start over again with a little squat, slightly bent, knees, slightly soft, groin weight on the heels. Slowly come to standing. Your weight stays on the heels. Don't lock your knees, don't lock your groin. Do a little shoulder roll. Stretch your neck, back of your neck, tall, grabbing your hair. Maybe there are some other techniques you can use too, and they're in my book, which by the way, you can get on wellstackedback.com if they don't work it through Google. So pull back on your hair and feel that elongation in the back. And now this is a photograph I took in Burkina Faso. And you can see how he's got his watering can very close into his body. And that's how you want to do your tasks, so as to not get tired. And so you can see he's been breathing in his chest for many years. And you see what that does to the chest. It's a large ribcage. The act of breathing actually changes the shape of your chest. We think of our bones as being fixed entities. They aren't. They're constantly going into solution. And calcium gets deposited out of solution onto the bones. And the way that happens depends on the stresses of the bones. And this is a healthy stress that you want on your ribs and in your ribcage so that it will expand so you don't have a very concave or vertical ribcage so you can have a bigger lung capacity. Okay, now, this is the last thing I want us to do while we're standing. And I call this the inner core set. And this is really handy if you want to do something active. So this guy is a Portuguese professional porter. He spent many decades carrying fish from the boats to the docks and so on. And here he's carrying a box of heavy telephone books, and you can tell he's doing something with his abs. Right? You can see that. But whatever it is he's doing is not the usual tuck your pelvis, contract every abdominal muscle you have, approach. So he's using only certain of his abs. He's using the internal obliques, the. The external obliques, the transversus, but not so much the rectus abdominis. So the way you find that this particular collection of muscles that's appropriate to use is once you have a good standing position, you pretend that you're reaching up for a high kitchen cabinet that's in front and above your head, so you're kind of reaching forward and up. And it also helps to imagine that you have a bar at chest height that you're kind of reaching up and over. And you reach, reach, reach, reach. And you're going to find that automatically there's some muscles that get engaged in your abdominal area. So you use all of those muscles. You take note of them, keep them engaged. You might want to put one hand on your back to make sure you're not swaying your back, because. Because that's what you don't want to do. If you find that the groove in your back has gotten really deep, that was the wrong direction to pull. So you reach up and forward in a way that doesn't cause an increased groove in your back. So reach up, reach up, reach up. And then when you've got all your Muscles engaged. You gently keeping those muscles engaged. Lower your arms. Difficult isolation to do. You can do it. And then you do your little shoulder roll. Hang on to that ab work. And now what you've got is your svelte greyhound look. Okay, Thin and tall and ready for action. This is what you want to do. Anytime you're playing a sport. You're carrying something. You've got to transport your computer, whatever you want to keep your torso slender and tall. You don't want to be a short, squat cylinder there and let your discs take all the pressure. Okay? You use your muscles. You spare your discs. Okay? And if you want here, we're getting very adventurous. You can even jog in place and see what this does for you. Take a little jog with your inner core set in place and you can feel that your spine feels protected. It's like it's braced. That's the idea. Okay. So that you're not doing this to your discs. Can everyone see? And so have a seat again. Let's go back to stretch. Sitting. Your buttocks are back. You're curving forward. You grab. Grab the chair. You push down. You imagine you're coming up and around bar here too. And then you attach yourself and you relax. Roll open your shoulders. Elongate the back of your neck. We're getting it down. And now you proceed to work or do whatever it is you do or listen. So this is an interesting slide. The picture on the left is taken from an anatomy book published in 1990. It's what we believe is the shape of a normal spine today. S shaped curve. See this person's facing forward this way. This is the front. This is the back. This is the tail. This is the sacrum right there. This is the small of the back, which we today think is supposed to have a curve in it. This is where you put your lumbar support. And the entire shape of the spine is S shape. That's how it's called. This one is taken from an anatomy book published in 1911. Interesting. That's what I teach. If you recall the Greek statues and the kid standing and so on, and superimposed this on there. This is the shape of their back. And this is what I claim is now natural. And what's happened here is that we've mistaken the average in the population for normal and even ideal. And everything is made to the specification. Our furniture is made to this. Our clothing is made to this. And so we're sort of perpetuating the problem. And what you really need and what I'M beginning to teach you today is to go from here to here, see. So here's where your muscles in your low back are back here, right? So what you need to do is to elongate them so that you can go from here to here. And if you think about it, this makes a whole lot more sense than this. These disks after all are little cylinders, you know, so what are they doing in a wedge shaped house? It doesn't really make good sense. This disk on the other hand is wedge shaped. Now when we went from being quadrupedal creatures to becoming bipedal, that was a long time ago, that was five and a half million years ago, that changed. It adapted to becoming and became a wedge shaped disk. And now it doesn't make sense to, to tuck your tail and force that wedge shaped disc back into a cylindrical space. Anyone here had L5s1 disc problems? Me too. That's where I'm coming from. I had miserable problems, sciatic pain, had that. Not fun. And you want to respect this wedge shape and not distort it. So today what I'm teaching you is the beginning of going of changing the shape of your spine. I like to encourage people because sometimes people have the notion that since I've had this habit for three decades, four decades, two decades, whatever, is it really feasible to change? So I like to show people the kind of change that is possible. This happens to be my husband who at the time was 28 at that time a while ago. And he's a math professor at Stanford. And he's looking very nerdy with his neck forward. A lot of people in the math department look like that. And 20 years later you can see that this, he actually looks younger. This is when he's 48, he looks nicer and he feels better and it's quite a change. And it's not like he was very conscientious. I can tell you he just came to class once in a while and yeah, he got rid of his beard. That's true, that did help. And you can see that the struck history structure is altered. And one of the things that's really interesting to me in this work is to track the change in personality that happens with people when they go through these changes. And I know it sounds a little wacky to say that people change when they change their structure, but it's really true. And just on anecdotal basis a lot of people will, will tell me they feel more confident, they have more self esteem, people respond to them differently. And if you reflect on it a little bit. It makes sense if you think about the animal world, the way, you know, how a dog is feeling. For example, how do we know if a dog is feeling unhappy or happy or tail. Right. And what is the unhappy position? Tail between the legs. So what's the equivalent in our species? Tuck your pelvis. Right. Pretty common. I'm not saying there's a one to one correspondence at all, but I think it does provide an undercurrent. When you take on the posture of depression, it sort of predisposes you a little bit and slumping shoulders and so on. There are a lot of steps, studies that have been done actually showing correlations between emotional health and physical structure. And that when you change that, it actually changes your outlook and your sense of self and sense of life. This might be a good time to take some questions, if anybody has questions to ask.

Hi there. So I'm one of the hundreds of Googlers who have hurt the back in the past.

Sorry, can you speak a little louder?

Yeah.

So I hurt my back.

You hurt your back?

I was actually juggling, juggling oranges in the micro kitchen in Building 41. It's a very googly injury. And I dropped an orange and I bent down to pick it up and I twisted and I strained my leg.

Stood and bent.

Yeah. So my question is, one of the sort of bits of advice that you always get is if you hurt your back, you should get a standing desk. And that's a trend in the tech industry to get a standing desk and how it's a good thing for you. What are your thoughts on standing desk?

What are my thoughts on standing desks? Well, if you don't know how to sit, it's a very good idea. But you know, sitting can be a very restful and even therapeutic activity. So my encouragement is to learn how to sit, stretch. Sitting is one very good technique. There's another technique that I call stack sitting, lesson three in your book. And that introduces a whole new set of concepts. You know, pelvic position, stacking the bones, allowing the muscles to relax. When you breathe in, that actually lets your whole spine move in a gentle fashion. You breathe in and it elongates, you breathe out and it, it settles back down. So you're kind of getting a massage action going in your back. Very therapeutic, very comfortable. It can't happen if your muscles are tense, which if your bones are not arranged right, if they're not stacked well, there's no way for the muscles to relax and then you don't get this therapeutic massage action. So, yeah, sitting well is a really good thing to know. Standing is good too, you know, and again, it's better if you do it well, you know, stack your bones like I was showing you. You know, a lot of people park their hips forward, excessively sway their backs and then standing isn't great either. You know, a lot of, I'm sure you've had the experience. You go to a museum and it's fatiguing, your back aches and so on. But if you stand well, it's great. So I think the most important thing is to just learn to do whatever it is you're doing. Well. Now I do want to make a small comment about the bending and twisting. Bending is one of the most important things to learn for the health of your low back. I don't talk about it in an initial session because the concepts I present are so out of the ordinary. I don't like to shock people, but it's a fact that people in the kind of cultures I'm describing do not bend with their knees to pick things up and to do their work. You know, if they did bent their knees for every little toy their kid drops and for every, you know, that's hard on the knees and it's not. There are a lot of tasks you can't do like that. You know, try making your bed like that or brushing your teeth. You know, you need to bend over sometimes and it's really important to do that right. You know, you don't want to bend in the way most people do. With the curved back, you're putting all your discs under a great deal of load. So they do what's called hip hinging. I'm not even going to talk about it. You can read ahead. But I suggest that you don't start with that because you first want to create a really good structure in your back and then you want to keep it, maintain it throughout the be. Can you show us what that looks like? I really resist this, but. All right, so you get, you know, I spent three lessons in my course teaching people how to first elongate their spine and then shape it really well so that their pelvis is, you know, back and their low back is straightened out. Not excessively curved, neither hunched. And then the third lesson, I, I teach them what I call what you learned, the inner core set and how to stand. And then they're ready for bending, which then takes this beautifully elongated and well shaped spine and preserves it throughout the spine. Nothing changes in the back, you see, and that's how you. And now in the beginning, you don't pick things up like that because your muscles aren't very strong and so on. But if you think about it again, it makes a lot of sense. It's what these people in the cultures I'm describing do. I'll show you a slide against my better judgment. It's just don't do this at home. Not yet. Let's see. Yeah, See, here's how you don't want to bend. And then take a look at these women. These are women I watched for many hours in Burkina again. And they're gathering water chestnuts and they spend seven to nine hours every day gathering water chestnuts. This is how they do it. They have no back problems, no arthritic changes, no sciatic pain, nothing. They get a bit tired at the end of the day. So it's something different than what we're taught. And you know, it's well tested. People have been doing this for many, many years and it works. Any other questions?

Could you contrast your technique with say the Alexander technique?

Sure. Alexander technique is a wonderful technique. Alexander was an actor. He used to lose his voice every time he was ready to go on stage, which is a slight problem for an actor. And he observed himself in a mirror and noticed tensions just as he was about to speak. And he sort of did biofeedback by himself. He was his own biofeedback machine, observing himself and adjusting his tensions. And he figured out a lot that's very good for this part of the body, the neck and the shoulders and so on. So it's kinesthetically done with an Alexander technique teacher, you're working, it's hands on work. It tends to be for many years that you're trained. And what I like about my technique is that there are these three components which are the intellectual component, the visual component and the kinesthetic component. So you've got hands on, you're understanding it, you're seeing it, you're feeling it. It's very efficient. I have six sessions to do my magic in. That's it. It's hard to convince people to come for years and years. So it has to go fast. And using all these channels at the same time helps that happen. The other thing about Alexander technique is there isn't so much of a description for the lower body. They don't really talk about pelvic positioning. And for me that is the base, that's the beginning. When you get this right, this is like the foundation of the structure and then the Rest can stack well. It makes it much easier to work up higher. But I have tremendous respect for, and I've incorporated some ideas from Alexander technique into the way I work. Now that you have a straight spine, how do you continue to have that.

At night when you're sleeping?

Any suggestions? Yeah, again, it's described in Eight Steps to a Pain Free Back, Lessons two and lessons four about sleeping. Lesson two is about stretch lying on your back and lesson four is about stretch lying on your side. And the basic idea is to get a lot of length and the right shape and you use your elbows. You actually dig in to make that happen. And it's quite simple. You can learn it in, you know, minutes. Great.

Thank you.

You're welcome.

Hi there. Can you talk about breathing a little bit? Singers are told to breathe with their diaphragm and it's okay to, you know, opera singers have a corset and they're actually supposed to push out their stomachs when they're singing.

But, you know, great questions.

You know, the tough guy look is, you know, no stomach. So do you have any thoughts?

You guys are honing in on every, you know, sort of unusual thing I say. And breathing is another one. What I talk about is not standard teaching. I describe a resting breath that involves primarily the chest and the back. I know that a lot of people are taught belly breathing is good, chest breathing is bad. And I don't agree. It's all good. But at rest you really want to. If you have relaxed muscles in your chest, your pecs, and you have relaxed muscles in your back, then those areas are going to give. You know, the lungs are like two balloons. They're going to expand in whatever direction offers least resistance. It's not like, you know, they know which way to go. You know, it's just so you want to adjust the resistances in the optimal fashion. So you want to relax here, you want to relax here and you want to have some tone here. When you have tone here, there's going to be. It's not. This shouldn't be the easiest way for the lungs to expand. You know, push down against all the organs in the belly and then push those, push against the belly wall. That's the easiest way. It's usually because these muscles are flaccid and these are tight and these are tight. Now it's different when you're active and you're running and so on. Then you need to expand in every direction possible. And so it's really useful to cultivate belly breathing for those times where you need it, you know, when you're running or you're. You need some extra avenues of expansion here, but for the resting breath, I really think it needs to happen here and here because these are therapeutic. This action increases and improves your ribcage, as I, as I demonstrated. This action massages your spine, and that's really desirable, too. That's like. It does as much for your spine as exercise does. You know, it sort of flushes it. I do a lot of yoga, and there's a lot of headstands in that. How do you feel about that? Handstands. Headstands. Headstands are a little tricky. I think this should be done like this. No, rather than like this. And the basis for that is that nowhere in the world do you observe people carrying the equivalent of their own weight on their head. You know, in traditional cultures, people carry. They limit themselves to less. Less weight than their own body in general. And it's only in forced situation, like you get someone in a. In a mine forced to carry a huge amount or so that they carry more. So I think the deduction is that it's natural to carry less weight. So that's one way of looking at it. And also in my own practice, I've actually treated a number of yoga teachers and so on who have had some calcium deposits in their necks and so on from extended head standing. I think it's a really great thing to once in a while get some bled into your brain by being upside down. But if you're doing it like this, your arms take some of the load, whereas if you're just like that, it's a little rough on this part, is my guess. But this is not. Yeah, set in stone. You mentioned that children, young children, instinctively have good posture. And I assume at some point, whatever takes over and they lose it, at least in this country. So at what age and. And what types of techniques do you suggest to prevent them from forming these bad habits? I love your questions. The change happens most dramatically when kids start going to school. You know, when they start sitting for long hours in a chair. And I don't blame the sitting for long hours as much as I blame the way they're sitting. And the way they sit is a continuation of the way they're carried. It's an extension of the way they're carried. And that's where I think it starts. Parents need to know how to carry their kids. And the short description of that is they need their tails out, they need their tails behind them, they need to not sit on their tails like an umbrella stroller does. Makes them. You understand what I mean? So you need to not cultivate this shape for a kid. You need to let them put their butts out behind them and then everything else will stack and they get used to that structure. Then they go to school and they're going to sit that way and they'll be fine. But if you've carried them like this or in an umbrella stroller and then they go to school and they sit the same way and now they're sitting for seven, six, seven, eight hours a day, then it's lost, you know, then they start getting used to that structure. Then they stand up and they also tuck their tails, they start walking like that and then it, you know, becomes rigid and fixed and problematic.

A lot of what you talked today is about the posture. Is there anything about nutrition that is, you know, healthy for the discs and for the back, which can also help with pain?

Sure. One of the most important things is to hydrate well. You want your discs plumped up and so on. And then there are other things, but I think those are fairly well understood in our culture. I'm not the expert in this field, so I won't go into. You can read up on that and I'll be happy to give you references. But yeah, sure, eating healthily and, and having just a healthy lifestyle in general is a good thing. But I think the biggest missing cornerstone of health in our culture right now is posture blind. We know about the importance of diet, we know about exercise, we know about emotional health. We don't know anything about posture. And I think it's as important as those others.

And one follow up question. What do you think about running? Do you think running.

Again, it depends how you do it. You use your inner core set, you've got your knees well aligned, you've got your hips well aligned, you've got your feet arches intact and so on. And your jaw, great. Good for you. Nice aerobic workout. If you're, you know, messing up your knees and your discs with every, every step you take, that's a problem.

So I asked you this question over lunch, but I think it's, it's good for the rest as well. I want to ask you about your story, how, how you came to do what you did.

I think it's a pretty common thing that you come at your passions in life by going through difficulties. Right. So I had an L5S1 disc herniation and it meant I was awake every two hours at night walking the block, trying to get out of agonizing pain. I didn't want to take pain medications because I was nursing my first child. I ended up having surgery, surgery. And then two years later I had sciatic pain all over again. And they were ready to do a second surgery. Now this doesn't bode well and here I am in my 20s and what's the rest of my life going to look like? So I was pretty desperate and I started casting around and studying techniques. And I was very lucky to come upon a technique called aplomb, which is a French technique technique. And Noel Perez has done a lot of pioneering work in anthropologically informed posture work. And I studied with her and her team and then. So that was where I got these ideas and the inspiration that, you know, this is the way to go. Study other cultures, study people who are functional. And that just took hold of me. And I been helping people, thousands of people help find their structure back. And the results are amazing.

Hi, my name is Zhiming and I came here late, so I did not get a whole talk. But if there is one thing that you'd recommend all of us to do, only one thing to get out from most of your talk, what would that be and can you just tell us?

I said it in the beginning. If you. If anything goes wrong, look for a solution, a simple solution. First, don't go for the complicated stuff. Don't start thinking heavy duty stuff until you've really explored fixing the way you sit, the way you bend, the way you walk, the way you lie down. Weed that out and you probably find that your problem is solved. That's my strongest message.