Zero Balancing

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Zero Balancing uses skilled touch to address the relationship between energy and structures of the body. With finger pressure and gentle traction, the practitioner addresses areas of tension in the bones, joints and soft tissue by creating still points around which the body can relax and reorganize. This gentle, yet profound, treatment addresses the densest tissues in the body, while also affecting soft tissues and the body's energy fields.

Zero Balancing helps the body find its own balance – not the mythical "perfect" balance. As we live our lives, our bodies adapt to the many stressors we experience; our bones and muscles adjust to specific activities and demands we place upon them. These demands vary from person to person, dancer to football player, carpenter to office-worker, musician to bronco-rider. Our bodies also adapt to injuries, sometimes leaving altered postures or holding patterns long past their usefulness. Zero Balancing helps us each find balance in our own bodies, facilitating healthy adaptation to permanent structural changes and eliminating unhealthy adaptations to outdated challenges.

Zero Balancing focuses primarily on the foundation joints of our skeleton -- those that conduct and balance forces of gravity, posture and movement. By addressing the deepest and densest tissues of the body along with soft tissue and energy fields, Zero Balancing helps to clear blocks in the body’s energy flow, amplify vitality and contribute to better postural alignment.

Because Zero Balancing works at the interface of energy and bone, it also affects our energy bodies by inviting organization to chaotic energy fields. In this way, it also supports us in adapting to stressful lifestyles in a healthy way. A Zero Balancing session leaves you with a wonderful feeling of inner harmony and organization.

How can Zero Balancing help you?

Zero Balancing can help relieve body aches and pain, release restrictions in movement, and provide lasting relief from emotional distress to improve overall quality of life. Zero Balancing can also be helpful with specific goals such as relief from back pain, improving concentration or sleep, releasing unwanted stress, eliminating old behavior patterns, or boosting well-being. Zero Balancing works in conjunction with medical and physical therapy and is not a substitute for it.

What to Expect:

A Zero Balancing Session takes between 45-55 minutes. Your first session is likely to take a full hour, and you should allow an additional ten minutes for initial paperwork. Your practitioner will assess your current condition and discuss your goals for the session before beginning the balancing work.

Zero Balancing is a subtle but deep therapy. You will lie, fully clothed, on a massage table, while your practitioner works under your body, providing gentle pressure and subtle movements. to release held tension in your bones, initiating an energetic shift in your body.

A Zero Balancing session leaves you with a wonderful feeling of inner harmony and organization. The changes you experience are only beginning during the session, and things may keep moving and shifting subtly for the next 24 hours.

Where there is a lot of held tension, Zero Balancing will relieve that tension in layers, and thus it is recommended that you receive three weekly sessions to achieve the best effect. Thereafter, maintenance sessions can be spaced further apart.

Other Questions are Answered Below: Feel free to ask YOUR questions, and I'll update the page with answers as soon as I can.

How often and for how long would ZB typically be recommended?
How can ZB help with specific injuries or surgical recoveries?
How can ZB help with specific emotional issues and/or in the psycho-emotional realm?

How often and for how long would ZB typically be recommended?

I always recommend that anyone new to ZB start with a series of three sessions, one week apart.  ZB facilitates the release of held tensions (and organizing thoughts and emotional energies) by peeling away layers {like an onion}. With three sessions, layers of superficial tension will melt away allowing us to work deeper with each subsequent session. Each session will peel through one or more additional layers, until the meat of the issue is reached.

Additionally, since ZB facilitates, but does not “cause” change, some people don’t feel significant relief in their first session. This is particularly true for those who are used to modalities in which change is imposed on their bodies; some people need more time to process the ease into which they’re being invited. Occasionally, that first session will allow them to discover that they are ready after all, and then the second session will yield more obvious and more lasting results.

Thus, some people feel instant relief; others won’t feel much until the second or third session.  If, after three sessions, the you still do not feel any difference, it may be that ZB is not right for you at that time, and additional sessions would not be recommended in the short term.

After your first three sessions, the frequency of sessions and the duration of treatment depend entirely on you, and the conditions that you are working with.  If you have a lot of old issues, even though you will feel significant difference after the first three sessions, it may take weekly sessions for several more weeks to really enjoy the full extent of your changes.

ZB is also good for maintenance, and a monthly or even bi-weekly session can help you enjoy continued relief, and freedom from pain.  Additionally, maintenance sessions will allow you to achieve and maintain ease from emotional tensions as well.  The more sessions you have, the more  time you spend in the “ZB field" which lets you step outside of your mind and your preconceptions of your limitations so that you can become more of what you want to be. Since we keep living our lives, and experiencing physical and emotional challenges, we’ll keep slipping from our best balanced selves unless we do something to help maintain it.  Regular (whether every other week or every other month) ZB can help do that.

How can ZB help with specific injuries or surgical recoveries?

After any injury or surgery, the healing process necessarily includes compensatory actions (limping, guarding, and over-use on the opposite side).  In time, these compensatory movements cease to be beneficial, and become chronic and even problematic.  ZB allows the body to return to a normal balance, relinquishing those compensatory restrictions, and returning to a place of ease and mobility.  Thus ZB allows a more complete recovery from specific injuries.

If we encourage a body to return to that place of balance while also building core strength and re-building muscle in injured areas, the total recovery can happen faster, and with less pain.  While ZB would not be recommended immediately after surgery or an injury, once the body has had time to heal the primary trauma, it would be an excellent part of the long term recovery process.

Additionally, although ZB is not used to “treat” specific conditions[1], ZB does have specific protocols and fulcrums (specific ways to place our hands to provide either pressure or traction) for all of the foundation joints (joints over which we do not have voluntary control)[2], semi-foundation joints (joints over which we have some voluntary control)[3], as well as a number of fulcrums designed to relieve imbalance in the freely movable joints[4].  This means that when a client has a specific issue with one joint, we have the means to release held tensions in that joint, as well as in other places that might be referring restrictions.   The ZB extended protocols include  specific fulcrums for wrists, elbows, shoulders, ribs, the neck (both the full range of motion from C7 and the atlas/axis joint), the sacro-iliac joint, hips, knees, ankles, and foot joints.  Each of these fulcrums is designed to help the body re-find ease, and release old compensatory restrictions to return to balance.

How can ZB help with specific emotional issues and/or in the psycho-emotional realm?    

Our bodies hold emotional pain in their tissues. Many times, we are unaware that we are storing pain, fear, worry, grief, sorrow, anger, or other “negative” emotions in our bodies. Because ZB works with the entire body – the energetic field as well as the structural field (bones), and because it specifically works to allow the body to release long held tensions, ZB allows our entire system to release old held emotions that may be limiting us in emotional or psychological ways (and also physical ways).

Many times, when we are emotionally overwhelmed, or psychologically strained, our emotional energy becomes chaotic, and frenzied, and that sinks into our tissues. ZB encourages order by aligning not only our physical bodies along their lines of balance, but also our energetic bodies. It does this in part by interfering with the feedback loop in the brain that defines how we feel – by using hedonic fulcrums (the ones that hurt but feel good at the same time). Additionally, because ZB encourages the recipient to fully relax, and to stop thinking and just feel, it encourages the mind to let go (or space out) a little bit – which we refer to as being “expanded”. By encouraging, or at least allowing, this expansive state ZB helps disengage the monkey-mind from the process; this means that the body can change without the limitations of the mindset that says “I am a person whose hip doesn’t work right”. When the you return to the present, your body will feel different enough that a system check is in order, and your mind can discover that the “problem” has changed.

Similarly, that “expanding” separates the mind from the belief that the you ARE “stressed” or “anxious” or “short-tempered” long enough for that system check to reveal that your system feels less that way, so that it CAN change. In this way, ZB allows the emotions room for balance, and ease. This is why, when setting up for a session, we discuss both emotional and physical issues, and why when we discuss how you want to “feel” after the session, we try to include words that can apply to emotional states as well as physical ones, or a physical and an emotional/mental/psychological goal.

You can book your appointment here.

[1] Ralston, Amy Louise, “Zero Balancing”, Wholistic Research Company, http://www.wholisticresearch.com/info/artshow.php3?artid=104, (2001) accessed 4/30/2014

[2] Some joints in the feet, SI, and cranial joints, and some joints in the hand.

[3] Intervertebral and costo-sternal and costo-spinal joints.

[4] Ankles, knees, hips, shoulders, neck, wrists, hands