WHY ZERO? WHY ZERO BALANCING?
“Zero is where the real fun starts. There’s too much counting everywhere else!” - Hafiz
Like all of Hafiz poetry, this is more than witty.
Well it would be funny too, like in a Seinfeld show, in which it is said nothing happens, to have a bodywork which is essentially about nothing and makes no claims and in which in some ways nothing happens.
Well…
How about these considerations?
The positive effects of Zero Balancing take place while you, the therapist, do nothing – you go to “zero”. Once you the therapist create the “fulcrum” – usually by pressing in with gently curved fingers until finding tension held in or on bone – you then pause and do nothing. It is important that you do nothing, so that the client’s awareness is free to go deep inside and to let go from inside out. So, when you do nothing, you provide the best opportunity for the client to take the lead in their own letting-go process.
Many of the bones we work with have a cavity inside, the medullary cavity, which is like an extended O within the cylindrical long bone or an open space like in the pelvic “bowl.” This is like the space inside the flute, the emptiness inside a bowl, this big extended zero in the bone. The openness inside is what allows the flute to make music, the bowl’s empty space to contain fluid or other nourishing substance. So we touch, with stillness, areas in the person that allow for vibration, flow, and for the person to feel filled with nourishing energy.
Since the client’s inner work happens while the therapist does nothing, the therapist themselves gets to experience sustained moments of doing nothing – the definition often given to Zen – “wu wei” – non-action. Doing nothing it turns out is of great benefit to the therapist as well as the client because 1) the therapist then repeatedly enters a state of meditation, which is inherently healthy; 2) the client learns how much value there is in doing nothing, just in being. We are, as they say, human beings, not just human doings.
All this can be seen as relating to the state known in Indian philosophy as “Shunyata” – most often translated as emptiness. “The Pāli Canon uses the term śūnyatā ("emptiness") in three ways: "(1) as a meditative dwelling, (2) as an attribute of objects, and (3) as a type of awareness-release." I am naturally intrigued by the term “meditative dwelling” in the light of my upcoming book which uses a similar term, “Memory Palace,” in its title.
Every Zero Balancing gives the therapist and the client a context for “meditative dwelling.” When we let go of effort, we are letting go of identification with the doing self, with ego, and we get to savor the healing moments of dwelling in a meditative state.
I’ve heard that Thich Nhat Hanh said, “the body is not only a temple; it is also the sage in the temple.” In ZB we can see every bone in our body is a “meditative dwelling,” every bone an energetic and structural member of the memory palace, the sacred temple that is the evolved human body and mind. The structure and energy of the evolved skeletal system is something you have inherited that embodies the wisdom, the solutions of countless ancestors in the biological and existential world. When we experience what a sacred gift our life is – that’s when healing is most possible. Then we see we are just a container, a big zero that is filled with the ancestral chi flowing through us. That conveys some of the excitement and inspiration in what we call and do in Zero Balancing.
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We have four Zero Balancing courses now enrolling at our school – combined in our path-breaking Intensive Certification Process beginning May 4. Click here for info and to apply: https://www.tlcmassageschool.com/tlc-intensive-zero.../. The four courses can be taken individually or together constituting the Certification Program.
