 So, in January this year, I traveled in Orissa, which is in East India, and Orissa is known for having a very rich collection of temples from different eras, and the, okay, and these, did I get that? Okay. And there are deities and rakshasas, demons, and animals, all in very colorful poses, and with excellent posture. Now tribal, Orissa is also known for being, having a great deal of tribal culture intact. The hinterland is quite inaccessible. You don't see many tourists there. And so, the tribal people, there are 62 registered tribes, these are the bondas, they're one of the oldest known tribes in Orissa, and they're still wearing their traditional garb. This is the only tribe where the women cut their hair short, and it has a really cool story that goes with it. But you see their traditional jewelry and the beads, they don't wear shirts at all, they just have a draped cloth, and you can visit almost any day of the week, within 100 miles, there'll be some market going, and this is a place where the villagers and the tribal people come, and they sell fruits and vegetables, and you see a lot of squatting, more about that later. You can identify the more traditional tribal people, because they don't wear the traditional choli, the short, sleeved, short, waisted shirt that is part of modern, kind of modern Indian garb. But you can see they don't have, you'll see people who don't have those shirts, and you can identify people from different tribes, often by their jewelry, how many nose rings, the placement of the nose rings, three or two, the earrings, the jewelry around the neck. And so I took to visiting these markets every day, sometimes on very rickety roads, but you can see that there isn't a tourist around. And by doing some very basic human interaction things, people were comfortable with me, and I was able to sit and talk and share bananas and ask stories. Now, unfortunately, though I speak Hindi and Marathi since I grew up in India, and my father's Indian, those languages don't carry very far in Orissa, and the next time I go, which I'm planning will be soon, I will have a translator who speaks Aurya, and maybe some of the tribal languages. So here I am sitting, and after a while I can photograph and film to my heart's content. I choose an iPhone because it's less intrusive, it draws less attention. They have seen tourists, and you look like just another tourist, and with a big camera I find that it draws a lot of attention. I got to have closer connections with the tribal people who were working in the hotel where we stayed. There is a hotel, it's out in the middle of nowhere, and so she is sweeping the area. That's done daily. My husband, Brian, there in the background, you can see. You see how her shoulders are rested behind her. And that's a very common thing with ancestral populations, indigenous populations, arms are heavy, and it's quite common to rest them someplace, be it on the hips or the back or the pockets or the belt, or even in the front, though I discourage my students from doing it this way because it easily becomes this, but it is very natural to rest the arms someplace. And you can see how she's doing a small hip hinge, more about that later. So with these particular people, I even got to use my little, the new posture device, posture reading device that my company has been inventing over the last four years, and it is now very useful, both as a teaching tool and as a research tool. So these are placed on the back, and they give you a real-time read of the back shape. So I'll show you what that looks like. You see it here. So I have the device on my back, you can see. And it's giving me a real-time read of the shape of my back. And for research purposes with these people, it's really handy to record what sort of shape they actually have. For teaching purposes, we set ideals like I have set an ideal for myself a little earlier, and then it gives me a chance to work with my body to match that ideal. So you can imagine for students, after they've been placed on one placement, it's sometimes hard to recall where that was, and it gives them a chance to practice. And it also makes it very vivid why you want to do that, because when you arch your back, that's what happens on the inside. When you round your back, you're loading your desks and damaging them. And this is the reason. You don't want those kind of positions to be your baseline positions. Just a little detour for those of you who don't know my work. So what one of the, I think some of you, most of you, know that in the Galkley method we teach a J-spine rather than the conventional wisdom S-spine. So on the right, on the left, you see a picture from a modern anatomy book with the usual S-spine, you know, we're supposed to have curve in the lumbar spine. This is all in my book, and this lumbar curve here is the reason why all ergonomic chairs are designed with lumbar support, and your car seat has lumbar staff, and you're given lumbar rolls, because the thinking is that you're supposed to have a curve there. If you go back in time, as you can see from this illustration taken from an anatomy book published in 1911, there's not a lot of curve in the lumbar area. And I argue in multiple ways that that makes a heck of a lot more sense than does this. And so we, and I can, you know, this is what you find in populations that don't have back problems, that's one line of argument. This really reflects the average of the population today, and when you have an 85% incidence of back pain, you don't really want to copy the average. That's one line of argument. Second line is just anatomical. All these discs, the upper lumbar discs, are cylindrical, so it makes sense that they would have a cylindrical home, that's a good fit. The lowest disc in our spine, L5S1, is a wedge-shaped disc, and it makes sense that it would have a wedge-shaped house in the baseline. So when we're told to tuck our pelvises and stand up straight, we're actually doing damage, because that repeated, repeated wears the fibrous external layers of the disc and results in the kind of dysfunction we have in the discs. Also the bones, like if you keep jamming the edges of the bones, stressing them against each other, the result is arthritic change. And just because everybody has it, osteoarthritis, doesn't make it normal. And just because everybody has degenerated discs by the time they're 50, does not make it normal. And just because everybody has back pain, just about everyone, does not make it normal. So we want to go back to an earlier time when a better description of normal is available. So that's the broad brush, and I actually have an MRI of my spine from 1987. This was a less happy time where I had a huge L5S1 herniation. This is not fun. This is, I speak in your butt, can't do a thing, can't carry your baby, can't even carry a cooking pot, your mother-in-law has to come and bail you out, can't sleep at night for more than two hours without a huge amount of back spasm, and then you have to kind of walk and kind of work it out, and then you can go back to sleep. And then two hours later, you're still in spasm all over again. Horrible, horrible existence. Don't wish it on anybody. And in the end, because nothing was working, it was a huge herniation, I ended up with surgery. And then a year after that surgery, they wanted to do another surgery because I had re-herniated the same desk. But now, with my current wisdom, looking at that back, I'm saying, wait a minute, Esther, from 87, you are swaying your back quite a bit. And wearing the discs and so on. So if I take you back to my little app, exit here, technology works beautifully if you hit the right buttons. So I was, right now, you can see that I have a pretty nice J-spine, yes? But back then, this is what I was doing systematically. From my gymnastics days, from my yoga practice, I was very flexible. I used to be the model for all the visiting swamis. And I would do, in this particular group that my parents were involved with. And I would do back bends and grab my ankles and everyone would clap and sign up for the yoga classes. And I used to lie on my belly and put my feet on the floor. And no one realized that that's, I was not bending from the right place. There was a way to do that, but not the way I was doing it. And so I was just practicing like a lot of the gymnasts, female gymnasts, usually arching my back and it became a habitual sway, with short, tight muscles and a big problem. So that's what I was doing and, happily, I don't do that anymore. So let's go here. How does this work? So we've, so, you know, we teach people how to change the shape of their back. We actually, and we don't do it in the very, in the conventional ways of giving a whole bunch of exercises. But we do it by changing the, changing what they're doing in how they're doing their everyday life. You know? So the way you sit can change the length of your erector spinae muscles. And I can show that to somebody. Like, sitting has gotten a very, very bad name and I think it's much maligned. I agree that nobody should be sitting for eight hours straight like a lump on a log. That's no good. You got to change it up. But I actually think sitting is an excellent position. It's restful. It's, you can actually, there's studies showing you can have deeper, certain kinds of thought. Like my husband is a mathematician. I'm sure his theorems wouldn't be as good if he was never allowed to sit. And meditation, you know, there's a reason why all the traditional meditation techniques are done sitting. I think it's how you sit and what sort of support and furniture you use. It needs to be half decent and you need to change it up. You can't just sit. But if you just stand, that's also no good. There's lots of research showing that you have increased risk of varicose, hospitalization due to varicose veins, higher rates of atherosclerosis. Your fine motor skills are not as good. Standing is when you sit. Lots of things and people need rest as well. Yeah. So I think that all positions are good, done in moderation. And here's a biggie, done with good form. You know, there's standing and there's standing, you know. And that bodes very, very differently for the discs, right? So if I'm standing like that, that's not a great way to stand. Yeah. If I jay it out, then I'm, I think it's a fine position. Yeah. But if I had to do that all day, if I had to, I want to be able to. But I don't want that to be the only, you know, I don't want to not be able to do it. Neither do I want to do that all the time. OK, so back to, I'm going to do it this way. And we are going to look at some of the studies that we've been doing. And you can see, OK, let's play good. So we've been conscientious in the last year and done surveys. We have a six-lesson course. And we've been serving people using a standardized questionnaire, the Roland Morris pain questionnaire, at the beginning of our courses, at the end of the six lessons, and then four weeks out. And I wasn't sure what would happen four weeks out. I was pretty sure that it's going to show improvement based on anecdotal evidence. You know, people rave. It's like, wow, got rid of 10 years of back problems here. Like, she's dying. She just did it with reading the book. That's unusual, by the way. Most people, when they read the book, it's like reading a book to play golf. Or you read a book to play the piano. Usually you need a coach. There are a few exceptions who can do it. But usually you need someone to say, no, no, no, no, a little more on the left. Or when you're doing this, I see your rib cage is flaring up or so on. But we were very gratified to find that people keep improving beyond the course. You know, a lot of these techniques that we teach. And maybe I'll use you as a volunteer if that's OK. So I'll show you how simple they are. We start very, very simple. So for example, when people sit, we teach them to get rid of their excessive sways. Or if they've been slumping all along, they need extra length. Or if, like with older people who have lost two or three or five inches somewhere along the way, melted into themselves, kind of they have an eye spine. So whether you have a C spine for slumping or an S spine from being told to sit up straight, stand up straight all the time, and you've internalized that to some degree. Or an eye spine because your disc's degenerated and you sort of melted into yourself. You could use some length. That's always a starting point for us. It's like preparing the clay. You wanna remodel, prepare the clay first. Make it soft, don't leave it brittle and with discs kind of bulging and then you're gonna remodel and something could get pinched off. Not a good starting point. So we have a little implement here. Something I designed, which is a stretch sit cushion, could be a towel. Could be something simple in a pinch. It could be your shoe that you stick back there. Something that's sticky that you can hook to, okay. I used to pride myself in not having products but then people, my students would get annoyed. Like come on, it slips, it slides, design something. This was our first project. Now we even have a chair with this built in. So here, and I'm just gonna, because this chair is particularly badly designed, notice how it doesn't have room for your butt. You're supposed to not have a butt somehow. That's a lot of chairs. There's no place for your bum to go back. So using the back rest becomes unpleasant, yeah. So to make up for that, we're gonna bring this support out a bit. So she's got room for her bum and now she's gonna lengthen her back. So there's a little bit of a extra curve there and we're gonna take it out by curving forward and you're going to use your hands on the sides and while still curving forward, so it's the back that's lengthening, not the front. We're not interested in the front so much but the back, you can push the back, the top of you away from the butt. No, don't stick the chest out. See, this is the thing. Like beginners will, like we're so ingrained to think of this as good posture. It's hard to break people out of that habit and you actually wanna stay curved forward, yeah. And then gently push the back tall, that's it. You wanna climb the back, up against the back rest, hook yourself and now relax. See, and I know she succeeded because there's a pinch of skin above the point of contact. That means the skin is stretched, which stretches the flesh, which eases apart the vertebrae and then we like to finish with the little shoulder roll, which by the way is my favorite way to reposition the shoulders. You don't wanna pull back, it doesn't last and it's not healthy anyway and you certainly don't wanna do the sit up straight, stand up straight thing and now you just relax. You've done your due diligence, now your job is to do nothing. And this is gonna lift you, can you feel a little stretch and the complex geography of the shoulder joint will ratchet the soft tissue back a notch and just keep it in place. You can all do that, just little forward, up, back, totally relax and now it stays as opposed to when you yank it back and you let go, it doesn't stay, right? So this is, and I like one at a time because each shoulder has a little different trajectory and also because when you do two at a time the tight pecs tend to pull up your ribcage and arch your back again, you don't want that, you want your back staying steady and just the shoulder's getting reposition and now they're getting better blood supply, your breathing pattern has improved, lots of good things, you're not pulling on this portion of your back to make you increasingly hunched. Comfy? You can stay or go or please yourself. So these, so it's a string of small techniques that are nuanced, increasingly nuanced, especially when it comes to walking and then you ask this Roland Morris pain question and asks all kinds of questions like, do you go slowly down the stairs? Does it take you a while to get going in the morning? Is your sleep disturbed by pain and so on? So because of the name of the book, I mean this could have been called, in fact the name of the book originally was this, remember when it didn't hurt, which I thought was so charming, right? Fits this theme, remember from your childhood, remember from your ancestors, remember from your genetic endowment and my distributor in there, infinite wisdom, said, do you want to sell books? Do you want to have a poetic title? And so it became, eight steps to a pain-free back and here's a tip for anyone who writes a book, you will notice that the subtitle is jammed, natural posture solutions for pain in the back neck, shoulder, hip, knee and foot. It could have been any of those. It's about restructuring the body, really. And so it's how to use your nuts and bolts in a wise way, in a natural way. So we do attract a lot of people with pain and we've gone in that vein and we have even had third party research done on the effectiveness of our methods so we're very, very proud of our ratings on this website, healthoutcome.org, this is a good one to know about. This guy ran into major trouble with his leg in the 70s and being a statistician he tried to look for solutions for information and couldn't find good information and then he succumbed to the insistence of his surgeon that oh, he would be like just get the surgery done, you'll be marathoning in two weeks. Well, what happened was that he couldn't bend his knee for six years, he couldn't drive in a car, he couldn't do all his usual things and he vowed that he would reach people better information than he had. And so he's done this and he puts little Facebook ads and he's got it down to a science that only costs him $3 per participant now because he's gotten good at converting. And so this is actually up, the number of reviews on lower back pain are now up at 75,000 above that. And interestingly, a lot of the conventional methods are at the bottom of the list. You know, and it's 5,000 ratings and like physical therapy gets 1.9 or something. And surgery looks really one point, that's at the bottom of the list, very bottom. So Stanford did a study on this and it was called, it's recently published, it's called crowd sourcing, is this the new face of medical research? And their findings were that all the ratings here coincide with what the randomized control trials show, but it's heck of a lot cheaper and they have huge numbers. And there are some unexpected discoveries like posture and for back pain. And here you can see Gokle-Meta, we're very proud of this. We're way head and shoulders above all the interventions for effectiveness and lower back pain. Okay, back to the village in Orissa. I was right next door to Pottery village and see how she's got her shoulders back while she's weight bearing. Look at the way he's using his wrists, unbroken wrists while working. These are lessons you wanna learn. This is putting the slip on the pots just before the Sunday baking. Whole village gathers all their pots. Look at the hip hinge, gorgeous. That's how the men carry there and that's how the women carry. And so they have to put all these pots together, they walk about two miles and then they sell them, unpack them in the marketplace to sell. And here you can see these women hip hinging and they stay there for a long time. They're checking their pots, bargaining. It's pretty cool. I'm just gonna run a whole bunch of slides by you so it'll imprint. This is not just one or two people, this is the way the professional benders in the world bend. And you wanna learn this and it's nuanced. They also squat, say something about that later, but look at those hip hinges and it is just beautiful. You know, they sell other things too. This is a Bonda woman with a huge wicker basket and they carry on their heads. So you wanna find the top of your head which is a sore little spot where the fontanelle used to be. And then you wanna imagine you're carrying a heavy load and push up against it. And now you're using longest cola. And for me, my voice always drops when I do this which tells me I had some tension in my neck before I did this. So even after all these decades, it's hard to know what's going on in your neck. And this is a very primal carrying on your head. We've been doing this for millions of years. And so the moment you put weight there, all your little stabilizer muscles, they know what this is about. They kick in, they know their job and it sets things well. So I actually made a little cushion because it's easy when I do emails and things, I put it on my head and I push up. And then when I take it off, I still feel a trace of it. So it reminds me like right now I feel my nail on my head and it's still there in some sense. And then with time you can develop your muscle strength and carry heavier loads. People carry amazing amounts of loads and it's beautiful to watch the elegance and the function, high level of function that you see here. The way they carry their babies, there's a lot to learn here. See how there's a little lift in the back and the bum is allowed to settle. And she's settling the baby behind her midline as much as possible. Like certain, not in front because it's closer to the spine, less torque. Her shoulders are open, makes a lot of sense. And there are all kinds of lessons about this. I could go on for hours, the feet, they have a shape. And this is something like we walk around barefoot willy-nilly sometimes. And you really wanna accompany that with good weight-bearing wisdom and good gait because otherwise ligaments are not elastic tissue and you can overstretch ligaments and make your feet grow, grow, grow. Two sizes with pregnancy is typical. With barefoot, without knowing what you, if you're gonna stand like that, I don't think barefoot's a great idea, actually. Because then you're putting a lot of load in the ligaments, then you want the shoe to at least give you some support. But if you know what you're doing, then it's great. If your feet know what to do and they're due, look at the muscular strength there, right? This is another thing. Squatting, this is how the professional squatters do it. Notice that their back is really quite straight and they do this for hours. If you grew up going to the toilet, squatting, and eating cross-legged on the ground, and then you have this form. When you're born, this is not bone, this is cartilage. And if you grew up sitting on a Western-style toilet and eating at the dining table, I believe that the way this all ossifies is different from if you were doing this all along. I don't see many Westerners, modern Westerners, who can do this. It's usually this with a lot of load on the discs and then the feet pronate and that's hard on the ligaments in the foot. So my feeling is, B-squat, semi-squat, partial-squat, but full-squat is rarely available and forcing it does sometimes more harm than good. This is a lesson to me in, you know, you can say it's posture, it's so many things, but we are mimics, we copy each other and we've arranged our lives historically to watch each other. So everybody's in a row and it's like a dorm. We do it right in the dorms, you know, where you have a hallway and very accessible. Now the moment you start to have gated communities and it's way recessed there and somewhere back there, there's someone maybe, you lose that, you know, but the thing of being able to observe and bounce off each other in multiple ways is I think a very natural thing. You see it in their planning. There was a talk on a question about music, whether it's natural and missing and it's just so evident that this is part of their lives. Beautiful. I'm gonna end with the sound is missing, but check out their J-spines, all of them. See the pelvis antiverted, see that groin crease, see their shoulders. This is really enchanting and then when you see it we are missing the music, but that's okay. So that's something I think is really cool, important and missing in our culture. You know, their culture has suffered a lot. They are put to, they have deforested lands, they're put to work that is not natural, longer hours, heavier loads and things start to fall apart. But this is something that can help a culture stay intact and to me this picture says a lot. It's a mother and a daughter and you can see the mother is barefoot. She doesn't wear a choli. She is very old school, tribal. Her daughter is wearing something much more modern. She has slippers, but look what she's managed to pass on. Look at that sense of self, look at that stance, look at that carriage, it's gorgeous. She's a self-possessed young lady, a teenager at that. Yeah, and so it's not all and nothing and the pieces that we can conserve and preserve are priceless and you don't have to have pristine cultures to learn these things. So encourage you all, it's around you, open your eyes, travel, expose yourself to this beauty and educate yourself on it so you have the eyes to see it. Thank you. Okay, I think we have time for one quick question. Can you come down over here? Yeah. Oh, you wanna go down? I haven't speak, I'm loud enough. I haven't followed you for a year, so I'm a fan. And I try to explain some of this to my clients and I laugh and queues all the traditional ones like how can you tell what your power is? You have a few hours or days. I wrote a book and that's just to learn in your own body the beginning. This we use as a textbook in our course. It's a six lesson course. I put a huge amount of effort into doing this well. So I train people to a very high level and it's not trivial. When people read the book and then come to our course they're usually shocked at how nuanced it is. And then when those people show up for teacher training they're once again shocked. And I'm talking about PTs and physicians and chiropractors, people who are very used to fitness trainers used to working with the body, but they come and they're whoa, this is really different and nuanced. So I don't know a shortcut to do what you're asking, I leave alone a shortcut to explain to other folks here how to do it in their body just like that. It's nuanced and once you've lost it it needs like you're here, you wanna go there and you need some help charting a healthy, safe trajectory because for example like sticking your bum back would be a really bad idea. Yeah, you can pinch discs and stuff. So come and learn. And then you will automatically change some things over time. Okay, thank you Esther. Very welcome.