WHAT’S IN THE BOX?

Like millions of people I have excitement when it comes to boxes around holidays.  The box itself plays a crucial role in the gift.

 It guarantees the present stays unknown until the day of opening.

It is beautiful with wrapping.

It keeps the gift safe from harm.

It requires time to unwrap, during which time the suspense builds.

The box is an essential part of the gift.

Like skin, like fascia, like clothes – these inner and outer wrappings and containers are an essential part of the gift of being.

I think my childhood openings of presents started a lifelong fascination with looking at everything as if it could contain a treasure.  Often I talk to my massage students in our internship how, especially since they rarely know who their next client will be, it’s just like unwrapping a present. Every person is a treasure. A miracle. Often they themselves have forgotten that. It is part of our job to approach our clients with the mindset and heart set on the treasures, the miracles, they are.

We discover the biggest present inside the box of ourselves is our self.

As a child, I watched “Amahl and the Night Visitors” every Christmas, an opera by Gian Carlo Menotti.  It depicted an evening during which the 3 Magi, while following the star to see the wondrous Child, ask to spend the night at a poor family’s house.  My favorite scene was the one in which the young Amahl, a crippled boy, is shown by one of the kings the wonderous contents of his box, “This is my box, This is my box, I never travel without my box!”

Go to 1:54 of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAZlS9ZogQE&t=6s

So it is for the containers we all enjoy in our lives, So many treasures!

II.

In Zero Balancing we engage the person through systematic touch.

First, we center ourselves, then we take out the looseness in the soft tissues, then we “take up the slack,” making a crystal-clear experience of the joint, bone or soft tissue, then with a gentle additional engagement, we enter “the box.”

The box is a very plain name for the transformative experiences that may arise from high-quality mindful touch.  It bespeaks of the humbleness as well as the child-like wonder that was a lovely part of the nature of Zero Balancing’s founder, Dr. Fritz Smith.  It was he who called this potentially transformative realm of the experience, simply “the box”. He used to give out little decals at the end of each workshop.  He called these “box tops” that were treasured items from his childhood.  Cereal boxes then commonly had prizes within them.  And if you sent in the tops of the cereal boxes, as proof of purchase, you could get an even more special radio premium.

So each fulcrum that we build in ZB and in Deep Massage, is a container for experience, a “box”, from which may arise an infinite number of gifts: memories, dreams, reflections, visions, embodied new experiences.

The greatest of gifts is this precious human life. As Walt Whitman said, we “contain multitudes.” Lewis Hyde said, “Our gifts rise up from pools we cannot fathom.” So it is in the boxes that are containers for potentially new and wondrous experiences, that actually are multidimensional existential nexuses for the miraculous bodymind that each person is. We open the box of oneself from within.

Feldenkrais said a person can not change unless they have a new experience.  New experiences potentially arising from the fulcrum, from the box, often are astonishing – “This is indeed that unknown person I was – and so close to me!”