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| Overall a good bookOverall, this is a good 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 around 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 started 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 right 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 point of view.
There is information 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.
No More Back PainThis author has created 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 easy to do at home. The solutions are easy to achieve.
A valuable work, the title says it allThis eminently accessible book contains a wealth of information on a subject about which there are tremendous misconceptions, foremost of which, in our culture, may be the idea that being strong and fit and healthy requires a large output of muscular force (pain=gain). Porter proposes that in fact all that's necessary to achieve these things is correct 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 believe it. I had the good fortune to take a short workshop with Ms. Porter a short while 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 information, which alone earns it five stars in my opinion--is that the book suffers somewhat from repetitiveness in both text and images as well as inefficient layout, and would have benefited by better editing. But if the subject interests you--as I believe it should--the book is well worth the modest investment.
Waste of TimeThe books seems to try to prove to people the benefits of good posture. If you don't already know you probably wouldn't read the book. Then it provides little practical advice on the fixing the problem: to be precise, there is essentially only chapter out of a dozen dedicated to improving your posture.
Talk about the secret that hides itself!Kathleen Porter 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 issue. Hence, her little pebble, thrown into a very big pond of ignorance . . . Its ripples are circling out, washing up against the amazing 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 physical 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 missing the point entirely. And we're hurting ourselves in the process.
To what is Ms. Porter attesting? Simply that we are no longer natural in our bodies. She mentions that other animals move as their bodies' designs dictate: tigers move like tigers, giraffes, like giraffes, hawks, like hawks. Only humans move in our oddly disparate, sometimes personality-driven manners, each of us, whether striding or hobbling or waddling, moving 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. Almost all of the rest of us went out of natural skeletal alignment in our fairly early youth. Ms. Porter'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", shared, the more likely that we will create increasing improvements in our physical wellbeing. It's such a remarkable study. Please do yourself, and everyone you love, a favor and read this one! There isn't an issue 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 good example, in the U.S., is Yao Ming, the NBA player from China). They, however, 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 almost 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 becoming 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. Porter 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
Product DescriptionAgeless Spine, Lasting Health presents information about natural skeletal alignment that may be the most overlooked factor affecting long-term health, genuine fitness and aging. Included are simple guidelines for how to return our bones to an aligned relationship that provides for far greater ease of movement, fewer aches and pains and a process of aging that is more easefull.
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