by David Lauterstein, LMT, Cert. ZB
Years ago I received the gift of hearing Martin Luther King speak in person. I hope you’ll excuse me if I bring some of his inspirational tone into this little essay. I just can’t resist.
The reason I can’t resist is I have a dream too. And I know you as a student or as a bodyworker do too.
It is the dream to help create through my work the most efficient route to health that I possibly can for my clients. We know, in the deepest part of us, that bodywork holds a precious key to human health and happiness. As Ida Rolf said, we are held back by literal thorns in literal flesh.
My dream is to help as much as I possibly can. Don’t you want that too?
After years of working with the myofascial and cranio-sacral systems, I was sure there was something I wasn’t quite getting my hands on. And that this something was the “final” frontier for my clients.
Then I received a Zero Balancing and some months later met its founder, Fritz Smith, M.D. and, please excuse me, but I saw the light – it was actually just like in one of those cartoons with the light bulb in a balloon over my head!
Here’s what he said – in my words.
We are alive. Therefore we are physical structures, but we are also animated, energetic beings. We have skin, muscles and organs, and bones.
Since we are both structure and energy, each of these layers of us has particular structural and energetic characteristics. As bodyworkers, we feel the skin and affect it through massage and hydrotherapy. And with training in myofascial release, shiatsu, cranial or visceral work, we affect as well the world of the muscles, fascia and organs. The missing piece Dr. Smith said and I simultaneously realized is –- the bones!
I had at that time no precise way to access this – the very core of us! And that’s what Zero Balancing is about – the deepest soft tissues connecting the bones and the energy being conveyed by them, in many ways the deepest energy in the body.
What are the unique structural and energetic characteristics of this layer?
The skeletal system supports us. It gives us the stability without which we couldn’t take a single step.
Energetically the bones are the deepest part of us. Being our most dense structure the skeletal system conveys a higher “voltage”, like the 220 line in your house. The deepest place of us is the interface between the energy that animates all life forms and our individual expression of it – what Oriental medicine calls “ancestral chi”. In this sense, the bones connect us to the community surrounding us in space and time. As electricity leaps through the synapse between nerves cells, as weight and energy get conducted through the open space of the joints, our deepest sense of connection is conveyed to us through the very bones of our being.
When we say, I just feel it in my bones; when we feel our convictions in our very marrow; when we want to tell our children what matters the most – we are coming from the core of our being. This deepest place in us is the place from which dreams arise.
As a bodyworker I cannot afford to be without the skill to touch this layer of being.
And that’s, bottom-line, what I heard Zero Balancing as being about. So, ever since – for over thirty years now – that’s the dream I have. The all important dream of humanity – that by connecting positively to all the people around us and by relating healthily to all the places within us, especially the deepest places – we will truly be able to say, “Free At Last.” Not just free as individuals, but free through our capacity and commitment to help each other as much as we possibly can.
I will be teaching Zero Balancing I and II as part of our 250-hour Advanced Program at The Lauterstein-Conway Massage School which begins Feb. 23rd.
For more information on the Advanced Program click HERE