Ageless Spine, Lasting Health: The Open Secret to Pain-Free Living and Comfortable Aging

5 Responses to “Ageless Spine, Lasting Health: The Open Secret to Pain-Free Living and Comfortable Aging”

1. C. Yu says:

   June 14, 2010 at 11:08 am

   Overall, this is a excellent book. It shows how a more natural posture like that of young children can help reduce pain. It contains many pictures of people in cultures nearly the world who have this straighter, natural posture which allows them to carry heavy loads on their heads with no difficulty. (As an aside, if you want to see pictures of people carrying bricks and rocks on their heads, this is book for you; I ongoing getting the sillies half-way through the book after seeing all those people with rocks on their heads not to mention the sacks of potatoes, firewood and bags of grain.)

   On the con side, this book is poorly edited, especially when it comes to the photographs. That is, sometimes the text refers to photographs that aren’t there, or left and aptly photographs are mixed up. It also has a few pages of hippy New Age philosophy, which I guess is pro, con or neutral depending on your top of view.

   There is in rank in this book that is not in Esther Gokhale’s “8 Steps to a Pain-Free Back,” but if you had to choose between them, I would get Esther’s book. It’s larger, has more and better pictures, and is a professional effort.

   Rating: 4 / 5
2. Patricia G. Saunders says:

   June 14, 2010 at 1:55 pm

   This author has made a readable collection of history, medicine, and exercise for remedying some of the more frequently experienced back pain issues. The photos and art reinforce the explanations very well. The exercises are simple to do at home. The solutions are simple to achieve.
   Rating: 5 / 5
3. David Wade Smith says:

   June 14, 2010 at 3:32 pm

   This eminently accessible book contains a wealth of in rank on a theme about which there are tremendous misconceptions, foremost of which, in our culture, may be the thought that being strong and fit and healthy requires a large output of muscular force (pain=gain). gatekeeper proposes that in fact all that’s necessary to achieve these things is right alignment of the bones and joints. She’s not by any means the first to teach this principle–Alexander and Feldenkreis and a multitude of others, including the best t’ai chi teachers, have taught and written about over the last few decades–but in Western society most of us are either ignorant of it or simply don’t judge it. I had the excellent fortune to take a small workshop with Ms. gatekeeper a small even as ago, and found her kind, caring, lighthearted, enthusiastic and deeply knowledgeable–all traits that are reflected here. My single reservation–far outweighed by the value of the in rank, which lonely earns it five stars in my attitude–is that the book suffers to some extent from repetitiveness in both text and images as well as inefficient layout, and would have benefited by better editing. But if the theme interests you–as I judge it should–the book is well worth the modest investment.
   Rating: 5 / 5
4. S. Grout says:

   June 14, 2010 at 3:36 pm

   Kathleen gatekeeper has written the seminal book about the most disregarded aspect of health/wellness/fitness of our times. Most of us, and by that I mean about 95% of human populations in technologically advanced countries (TACs), are simply unaware of this come forth. Hence, her small pebble, thrown into a very huge pond of ignorance . . . Its ripples are circling out, washing up hostile to the incredible disregard with which we live in our bodies. Oh, many of us exercise like mad, driving ourselves to the edge of endurance, even participating in ancient modalities of spiritual physicality like Hatha Yoga (the corporal expression of the broad study of the Mind which is yoga) or t’ai chi chuan (Why is t’ai chi chuan done slowly? So you can get a look at yourself.) in increasingly competitive fashions. Yet, we’re gone the top entirely. And we’re hurting ourselves in the administer.
   
   To what is Ms. gatekeeper attesting? Simply that we are no longer natural in our bodies. She mentions that other animals go as their bodies’ designs dictate: tigers go like tigers, giraffes, like giraffes, hawks, like hawks. Only humans go in our oddly disparate, sometimes personality-driven comportment, each of us, whether striding or hobbling or waddling, tender in anomalous ways, counter to our body’s basic design. You’d need to go to Bali or Myanmar or India or even Portugal to find adults who have remained naturally aligned in their bodies since childhood. Nearly all of the rest of us went out of natural skeletal alignment in our honestly early youth. Ms. gatekeeper’s book helps you recognize what constitutes natural posture and offers concrete advice about how to rediscover it in your own body. This primer is a revelation. As more of us become aware of its “open secret”, mutual, the more likely that we will make increasing improvements in our corporal wellbeing. It’s such a remarkable study. Please do yourself, and everyone you like, a act of kindness and read this one! There isn’t an come forth in our overstimulated, over-the-top, self-absorbed, ignorance-driven times that is of greater import to our physicality.
   
   There are still individuals, to be found largely in parts of Asia, especially India and Southeast Asia, also in Africa and South America, and corners of the Middle East, who have remained naturally aligned in their bodies into adulthood (one excellent example, in the U.S., is Yao Ming, the NBA player from Plates). They, but, are not aware of that as a fact separate from their being. They just are aligned, that’s all. A very intriguing possibility is, if enough modern humans become aware of this remarkable situation, that nearly all of us (in TACs) have lost that innate naturalness of posture which we found as toddlers, that we are out of alignment but have the opportunity to learn to be self-correcting and can work at apt aligned in our own bodies again, that perhaps we can evolve spiritually, mentally, emotionally, in ways that wouldn’t have been possible if we hadn’t gone out of skeletal alignment in the first place and on such a huge scale and had then, through the observation of a very few, Ms. gatekeeper among them, been made aware of this. It may be a evolutionary step on the spiraling ladder of our psycho-physio-spiritual awakening.
   
   Ageless Spine, Lasting Health: The Open Secret to Pain-Free Living and Comfortable Aging
   Rating: 5 / 5
5. M. Benson says:

   June 14, 2010 at 3:56 pm

   This is a fantastic book which broke me out of the muscle-bound-fitness mindset, which really can cause more problems by making tight joints, rigidity, tension, disc hurt, and poor posture. Kathleen gatekeeper’s writing and examples are very convincing. I urge checking out Stuart McGill’s (The leading PhD back specialist) books on low back disorders for a very scientific perspective on back health, which supports Ms. gatekeeper’s book. These two authors’ books have made me much healthier and have saved me a lot of (damaging) exercise time.
   Rating: 5 / 5