Esther Gokhale (Go-clay) has been involved in integrative therapies all her life. As a young girl growing up in India, she helped her mother, a nurse, treat abandoned babies waiting to be adopted. This early interest in healing led her to study biochemistry at Harvard and Princeton and, later, acupuncture at the San Francisco School of Oriental Medicine.

After experiencing crippling back pain during her first pregnancy and unsuccessful back surgery, Gokhale began her lifelong crusade to vanquish back pain. Her studies at l’Institut d’Aplomb in Paris and years of research in Brazil, India, Portugal and elsewhere led her to develop the Gokhale Method, a unique, systematic approach to help people find their bodies’ way back to pain-free living.

Gokhale practiced acupuncture and taught posture, dance, and yoga in her Palo Alto wellness center for over twenty years. The Gokhale Method continues to grow as qualified Gokhale Method teachers now teach the method worldwide.

Gokhales book, 8 Steps to a Pain-Free Back, has sold over 100,000 copies and has been translated into eight languages. In 2010, Gokhale hosted the nationally televised program Back Pain: The Primal Posture Solution (available on DVD).

Gokhale has taught at corporations such as Google, IDEO, Varian Medical Systems, and Facebook Inc. She has also presented at conferences including TEDx(Stanford), Ancestral Health Symposium, WestonPrice Foundation Conference, and PrimalCon. She continues to speak with physician groups including Stanford, PAMF, UCSF and has consulted for the trainers of the SF 49ers and several Stanford sports teams.

In May 2013, The New York Times featured Esther in an article giving her the title, “The Posture Guru of Silicon Valley”.

Esther Gokhale lives on Stanford University campus where she raised three children with her husband Brian White, chairman of the Math Department.

The Gokhale Method uses healthy posture and movement to help you restore your structural integrity and regain a pain-free life.

You have a right to a pain-free back, neck, hips, knees, feet...
We are marvelously designed creatures. We have inherent grace and strength, like every other creature on the planet. Our bodies heal spontaneously, and if we respect our natural design, we can function well for close to a century.

The Gokhale Method addresses the root cause of muscle and joint pain.

Most pain can be attributed to how we hold ourselves and how we move. Since we arent born with a user’s manual, we rely on our culture to guide us.

About a century ago, our culture took a wrong turn.

As a result, in the United States:

• 90% of adults experience back pain at some point in their lives.
• This year, 50% of working Americans will experience back pain.
• Back pain is now the leading cause of disability in people under 45 years old.
• By age 15, more than 60% of all adolescents have experienced back and/or neck pain.

We have lost sight of what constitutes healthy posture; in fact, many popular guidelines for “good posture” are just plain wrong.

We can re-learn what we once knew:

• Our ancestors knew how to move without pain.
• Babies know how to move without pain.
• Some cultures still know how to move without pain.

This method educates you in a way that your culture does not, so that you can live a fully-functional, pain-free life.

Benefits

You learn techniques to:

• Reduce or eliminate back pain, neck pain, and other muscle or joint pain
• Prevent muscle and joint degeneration and injury
• Increase your energy, stamina and flexibility
• Reduce stress and improve your appearance

Effects are immediate and last a lifetime.

Our multi-pronged approach will profoundly change your habits through simultaneous visual, kinesthetic and intellectual learning. You can forever reclaim the pain-free body you were born with. Most students find relief following the first lesson.

Achieve results without time-consuming exercises or special equipment.

By emphasizing everyday movement rather than periodic exercise sessions, the Gokhale Method gives you ample opportunity to practice without taking time out of your day. You naturally incorporate your newfound body wisdom into your daily activities and physical pursuits. Every movement becomes an effective exercise to strengthen and stretch.

How it works

You will learn to sit, sleep, stand, walk, and bend in ways that protect and strengthen you instead of wear and tear you.

• Sitting will be comfortable, either with a backrest when you place your back in therapeutic traction (stretchsitting) or without a backrest, when you stack your spine on a well-positioned, anteverted pelvis (stacksitting).
• Sleeping will be comfortable and provide hours of restorative traction, whether lying on your back or side (stretchlying).
• Standing will be a resting position for most of the muscles of the body with the weight-bearing bones vertically stacked over the heels (tallstanding).
• A retroverted pelvis leads to tense back muscles or slumping.
• An anteverted pelvis facilitates healthy posture.
• Bending will involve hinging at the hip rather than the waist, exercising the long back muscles and sparing the spinal discs and ligaments (hip-hinging).
• Actions that challenge spinal structures, such as carrying or twisting, will involve deep layers of muscles in the abdomen and back (inner corset) to protect the spine.
• Walking will be a series of smooth forward propulsions, challenging the muscles of the lower body and sparing the weight-bearing joints throughout the body (glidewalking).

In relearning these everyday actions, you will reposition and reshape your shoulders, arms, neck, torso, pelvis, hips, legs, and feet the way they were designed to be. You will develop a high level of confidence in and sense of control over your well-being.

Once you have learned the basic principles, you integrate them into all positions and movements. Your everyday activities will once again become therapeutic.