My wife, Pat, and I are in our seventies.  During the past decade and a half, an astonishing number of our friends, acquaintances and family members have had hip and knee replacements, as well as back, shoulder, elbow and wrist surgeries.

It has almost become a fad.  For instance, one of Pat’s bridge-playing acquaintances told her that he and his wife have had five hip and four knee replacements, and he hinted that they expected that another replacement might be in the offing.

After our friends have endured the grueling aspects of the surgery and weeks or even months of physical therapy sessions,  some of them are still bothered with pain and use assorted pharmaceutical products to dull it.

We also noticed that surgery didn’t significantly improve our acquaintances’ sense of well-being and nimbleness.  Therefore, we couldn’t understand why anyone would opt for surgery.  And across the years,  our anti-surgery perspectives are doubly reinforced when we read front page stories in the “New York Times,” such as the one that appeared on Dec. 28, 2011, proclaiming that “artificial hip failures [are] expected to cost billions”  and the one about problematic hip implants on Feb. 15, 2011.

Coupled by what we witnessed and read, we gradually  came to the conclusion that we wanted to avoid surgery and pain killers. Because we have always had minor proclivities to be  health-food and alternative medicine advocate, it seemed to be an intuitive decision.

“It really boils down to this: that all life is interrelated. We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied into a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. We are made to live together.” - Martin Luther King Jr.

Community is nearly impossible in a highly monetized society like our own. That is because community is woven from gifts, which is ultimately why poor people often have stronger communities than rich people. If you are financially independent, then you really don’t depend on your neighbors—or indeed on any specific person—for anything. You can just pay someone to do it, or pay someone else to do it.

In former times, people depended for all of life’s necessities and pleasures on people they knew personally. If you alienated the local blacksmith, brewer, or doctor, there was no replacement. Your quality of life would be much lower. If you alienated your neighbors then you might not have help if you sprained your ankle during harvest season, or if your barn burnt down. Community was not an add-on to life, it was a way of life. Today, with only slight exaggeration, we could say we don’t need anyone. I don’t need the farmer who grew my food—I can pay someone else to do it. I don’t need the mechanic who fixed my car. I don’t need the trucker who brought my shoes to the store. I don’t need any of the people who produced any of the things I use. I need someone to do their jobs, but not the unique individual people. They are replaceable and, by the same token, so am I.

That is one reason for the universally recognized superficiality of most social gatherings. How authentic can it be, when the unconscious knowledge, “I don’t need you,” lurks under the surface? When we get together to consume—food, drink, or entertainment—do we really draw on the gifts of anyone present? Anyone can consume. Intimacy comes from co-creation, not co-consumption, as anyone in a band can tell you, and it is different from liking or disliking someone. But in a monetized society, our creativity happens in specialized domains, for money.

To forge community then, we must do more than simply get people together. While that is a start, soon we get tired of just talking, and we want to do something, to create something. It is a very tepid community indeed, when the only need being met is the need to air opinions and feel that we are right, that we get it, and isn’t it too bad that other people don’t … hey, I know! Let’s collect each others’ email addresses and start a listserv!

Community is woven from gifts. Unlike today’s market system, whose built-in scarcity compels competition in which more for me is less for you, in a gift economy the opposite holds. Because people in gift culture pass on their surplus rather than accumulating it, your good fortune is my good fortune: more for you is more for me. Wealth circulates, gravitating toward the greatest need. In a gift community, people know that their gifts will eventually come back to them, albeit often in a new form. Such a community might be called a “circle of the gift.”

Fortunately, the monetization of life has reached its peak in our time, and is beginning a long and permanent receding (of which economic “recession” is an aspect). Both out of desire and necessity, we are poised at a critical moment of opportunity to reclaim gift culture, and therefore to build true community. The reclamation is part of a larger shift of human consciousness, a larger reunion with nature, earth, each other, and lost parts of ourselves. Our alienation from gift culture is an aberration and our independence an illusion. We are not actually independent or “financially secure” – we are just as dependent as before, only on strangers and impersonal institutions, and, as we are likely to soon discover, these institutions are quite fragile.

Given the circular nature of gift flow, I was excited to learn that one of the most promising social inventions that I’ve come across for building community is called the Gift Circle. Developed by Alpha Lo, co-author of The Open Collaboration Encyclopedia, and his friends in Marin County, California, it exemplifies the dynamics of gift systems and illuminates the broad ramifications that gift economies portend for our economy, psychology, and civilization.

On a less tangible level, any gifts we give contribute to another kind of common wealth – a reservoir of gratitude that will see us through times of turmoil, when the conventions and stories that hold civic society together fall apart. Gifts inspire gratitude, and generosity is infectious. Increasingly, I read and hear stories of generosity, selflessness, even magnanimity that take my breath away. When I witness generosity, I want to be generous too. In the coming times, we will need the generosity, the selflessness, and the magnanimity of many people. If everyone seeks merely their own survival, then there is no hope for a new kind of civilization. We need each others’ gifts as we need each others’ generosity to invite us into the realm of the gift ourselves. In contrast to the age of money where we can pay for anything and need no gifts, soon it will be abundantly clear: we need each other.

In honor of Martin Luther King Jr’s life, I’d like to
invite you to embrace this paradox -

You and I are equal.
You and I are different.
You and I are the same.

This combination moves mountains, shifts cultures,
and makes heroes for the ages.

You and I are equal. My dreams are as important as yours.
Your pain is as vivid to you as mine is to me. My differences
from you do not make me inferior. You may not understand me.
You may not feel what I feel, but what I feel is just as important.
Sounds easy, actually difficult. All human children have an instinct
of “me first.” It’s a survival instinct. But how do you mature out of that?

You and I are different. ”Equal but different” can be difficult to process.
When we find people equal to ourselves, we tend to assume that they
are the same. But they’re not. That’s the paradox. You and I are each individuals,
with our own experience, our own needs, and our own freedoms.
Appreciate that I am different from you, and that the way I see the world
is different from the way you see it.

You and I are the same. Once you appreciate someone’s difference
and their equality to you, with what emotion, what energy do you act
on that insight? Is it simply an intellectual observation? Or does it change
the way you live? This is where Dr. King became a leader for all ages.
He insisted not only on equality, but on brotherhood. In other words,
there is an underlying passion and love for the other’s being. It’s not
just about tolerating differences. It’s about appreciating them, relishing them,
and protecting your brother’s or sister’s right to be who they are. Beneath
the difference and equality, there is universal love.

Forward head posture is very common.

Correct Functional Posture

The stomach and liver are attached to the diaphragm, and the suspensory ligament of the diaphragm is the pericardium, especially of the right side, which finally attached to the anterior part of the lower cervical spine. Because of this anatomic make-up it is possible by simply correcting the position of the head, to raise the diaphragm, stomach, and liver one inch or more. If the diaphragm is lowered as a result of the habitually forward position of the head, the movement of the diaphragm in respiration must be less than normal. The effect of this upon the breathing, as well as upon the circulation, especially in the large abdominal veins, to say nothing of the function of the other organs, must be apparent.

Anterior-kyphotic posture - Kendall

Posterior pelvic tilt, flat lumbar spine and kyphosis - Kendall

Swayback posture causing forward head - Kendall

Bad sitting posture

Lower cervical flexion and upper cervical hyperextension.