What do we mean when we talk about energy in Zero Balancing?

You may have heard the word chi, often described as life energy. Energy isn’t something separate from us. It is our vitality, our being, the essence of who we are. When we talk about Zero Balancing releasing held energy, helping it to move more freely, we are talking about making more of ourselves available to us.

From a Zero Balancing perspective, energy can become stuck in bone. It can also remain held in the form of a past experience. In either case, that part of ourselves is less available for living our lives now.

A ball of yarn offers a way to picture this.

Do you still need that sweater?

Imagine a ball of yarn knitted into a sweater. The yarn is still there, but it is committed to a particular form. You can wear the sweater, but you can’t use that same yarn to make something else.

Perhaps you really needed that sweater at some point in your past. It kept you warm through a long, cold winter. It served you well.

But what if your circumstances have changed? You may no longer need it. You might need something quite different. Yet the yarn remains committed to being a sweater, whether that sweater presently serves you or not.

Something similar can happen with our energy. In Zero Balancing, energy is everything about us that is unseen, which includes our thoughts, our conditioning, our memories, our understanding of ourselves. A past experience may have affected us deeply and the energetic effects remain held in our tissues. That same experience may have required us to respond in a particular way. Our response may have been useful—even essential—at the time. But some of our energy can remain held in that form long after the experience has passed. 

We have changed. Our lives have changed. Yet that part of us is still bound up in something from the past.

Returning to possibility

One way to understand the work of Zero Balancing is through the image of unraveling that sweater.

As energy held in bone or in an old pattern is released, it becomes available again. The sweater returns to a ball of yarn. We can use it for whatever we want or need now.

We might knit a different sweater. We might make something entirely new. The value lies in having the choice.

This image also helps explain why we don’t necessarily need to identify or talk through a past experience during a ZB session. The practitioner works through touch, attending to where energy is held and inviting its release. The focus is on freeing that energy, making it more available to you.

The aim is to have fuller access to who we are—so we can bring more of ourselves to our relationships, our interests, our decisions, and the ordinary pleasures of daily life. We become more embodied, more self-actualized. 

What might become possible if you had more of your own yarn to work with?