WHY ZERO BALANCING IS THE NEXT BIG THING IN BODYWORK

I’m not just being cynical or self-serving when I say Zero Balancing may be the next big thing in bodywork. It’s something I’ve been feeling and thinking for a while, without really knowing why. This morning, in that twilight state between sleep and wake, I suddenly knew some of the reasons why.

We say in Zero Balancing that there are certain things for which we have no effective defense. Shame is one of them. When you shame a child for instance, say they touch a flame and the parent says, “You’re a bad boy!” there is nothing they can do to defend themselves. That shame goes right to the core of their being. However, if you refer to their behavior, their doing, and say “You know, you can hurt yourself doing that. In the future take your hand back right away.” Now the child knows they are being asked for something they can do, they can defend themselves through an action. Changing a behavior can be done with the muscles, through an action. Reacting to being shamed goes immediately deeper, there’s little we can DO about it. It goes to our being, rather than our doing; goes, as Emily Dickinson said, to a feeling “at the bone.”

Now the things that we have been going through as individuals and in the whole world, especially during the last two years, have effects similar to shame. There’s very little we can do on a daily basis to protect ourselves from pathogens circulating around us. It’s incurred an enormous internal and external cost. Further, there’s little we can do to prevent the effects of increasingly widespread weather emergencies. There’s not much we can do to prevent the spread of lies, distortions and hatreds in the realms of politics and cultural conflict. The pandemic has forced many to contract and lessen the ease of contact with friends, family and community. It has affected the rhythm and scope of our daily lives. 

So much of what we have been going through has been something we can do little about. Therefore, like shame, it’s been affecting the very core of our being and beliefs.

So THAT’s where Zero Balancing comes in. ZB is unique in that works specifically with that core of the person – with the deepest energy within us which is experienced, structurally, as our skeletal system. Whereas most massage modalities concentrate on the muscles, those things we can use for defense, Zero Balancing focuses on letting go of tensions, pain, emotions, ill-at-easeness that have gone to our core.

How does it do this? First is, as I’ve said, the skeletal focus. We identify largely with our skin that we can see and with our muscles through which we can act. The bones are places within us that seem to transcend the “normal” experience of self. They underlie and support us in the deepest of ways. They are alive but we don’t sense them as such. They provide the marrow of our existence, but we don’t feel that. So when a Zero Balancers touch invites a person’s awareness to drop down into their bones, they drop into an unfamiliar place, yet still with wakeful awareness. What is more me than my very bones? ZB invokes an extraordinary invitation to take an internal respite from the usual experience of mind and body. As we abide in this “new” place with awareness, new paths of being and action can arise. The thousand mile journey does not really begin with a single step, as the saying goes. It begins by just being there, standing still, in the first place.

Second is the use of “fulcrums.” A fulcrum is a point around which we can balance, like a see-saw or a scale balancing around a fulcrum, a still point, in its middle. In Zero Balancing we build that fulcrum through a series of steps, engaging the surface of person, then pausing, then going deeper, pausing again – with each step we slow down or pause allowing the person’s mind/body to react, relax into the experience, and to feel truly safe. We then begin to introduce a gentle curve, tractioning out slightly or pressing in sensitively further, engaging the bone or joint more directly. Then we take an even bigger pause. This gives the receiver the full opportunity to let go of these deeply held tensions. It takes time to let go. Time, said Ben Franklin, maybe even more profoundly than he realized, is the stuff life is made of.

With Zero Balancing fulcrums, we give the person the gift of time to go deeply into themselves and to have an extended, unmanipulated experience of calm moments in which to let go.

Through the pauses incorporated in our fulcrums, we help bring the person dramatically into the present moment, where frankly there is, then and there, often no problem at all! Through ZB the gravity of the past and the pull of the future are both relieved.

Let go of worry, let go of agitation, let go of shame, let go of feelings of helplessness, let go of the now contracted everyday sense of self. Let go of negative predictions, let go of hopelessness, let go of tensions in the bone and joints that commonly radiate out into the more superficial structures – muscles, organs, skin. Let go of accumulated trauma “inherited” from past generations and let go of negative karma which can affect our children and future generations. Zero Balancing works explicitly with energy and structure. Energy, soul, spirit - all cannot be seen as easily as surface anatomy. This does not make them less real or less important in our lives.

When framed in this way, so that both therapist and client acknowledge the desire and possibility that the session is an open field in which the person can rest, finding a deep sense of safety, and experience the deep refreshment we all desire and need, then we can indeed see why Zero Balancing is the biggest and brightest thing we may be able to offer our clients these days.

Perhaps we could re-phrase Helen Keller’s famous saying about the heart to say: “The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen – they must be felt with the bones.”

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