Whole Body Well Being

Body Ease • Serene Mind • Joyful Heart

Tag Archives: wellness


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Core Zero Balancing I in Charlottesville, VA

Class open for registration!!

Core ZB I Friday- Sunday, November 7- 10 9am-4:30pm  

I welcome you to a valuable course for your professional practice and great principles and tools for your everyday life. You will learn a simple and unique way to touch someone so that it feels safe, effective, comforting and with practice is easier on your body than most direct pressure methods.

Enjoy discovering how the body signals that it is making energetic and structural shifts that enhance an over all sense of well being and simultaneously addresses joint and muscular imbalances and calms the nervous system! Please see https://wholebody-wellbeing.com/zero-balancing-classes-and-events/

or to directly register https://www.zerobalancing.com/ev_calendar_day.asp?date=&eventid=692

You will need to create a login account so that you can easily make changes to your registration or get detailed information about other classes and events.


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Classes scheduled

I’m excited to share these two opportunities to learn Zero Balancing in a beautiful country setting just 20-30 minutes away from most of Charlottesville.

In just a few hours you can be introduced into the theory of ZB and practice a short sequence to use in an existing practice or as a quick but very effective stand alone treatment for family & friends.

One Day Introduction to Zero Balancing

Next class:
Saturday, February 8th 10am-6pm   Markwood Road, Charlottesville, VA 22936

Interested in what Zero Balancing might provide your clients? Just need a few CE’s for re-certification? Want to help friends and family but don’t have a health care practice yet? This class  gives you a great day of hands on learning and enough theory to familiarize yourself with the basic principles of Zero Balancing. You go home with a short protocol that can be used alone or easily integrated into any client treatment.

CE Hours: 6 NCBTMB/NCCAOM approve

Check with your state’s professional organizations if they have approved Zero Balancing courses for continuing education. We can provide forms for you to submit to receive CE credit. Your organization may charge a fee.

Click here to register: https://www.zerobalancing.com/ev_calendar_day.asp?date=2/8/2025&eventid=607

.Freely moving shoulder

In late March I’m thrilled to teach my favorite class over 4 days. Freely Movable Joints is one of the advanced courses that Dr. Smith created to fulfill the requirements for Zero Balancing Certification. I often encourage students to choose it next after their Core ZB courses as it deepens the touch theory and expands techniques for the hip and shoulder girdles including extra fulcrums for the scapula, knees, lower arms and hands that aren’t specifically included in the Core protocol but can really help a recipients quality of life

Freely Movable Joints

Next class:
Thursday-Sunday, March 20-23 9:30 am-5:30pm   Markwood Road, Charlottesville, VA 22936

Freely Movable Joints is an advanced level Zero Balancing course that expands the focus of Zero Balancing from the foundation and semi-foundation joints of the body to include the “freely movable joints” of the body. Zero Balancing principles and techniques are taken beyond the Core Zero Balancing protocol into other arenas. The freely movable joints present unique therapeutic challenges because of the variety of their anatomy and their great ranges of motion.

By the end of the program you will have the skills to evaluate and balance freely movable joints and the knowledge to devise your own fulcrums to meet the specific needs of a given situation. In Freely Movable Joints we will review basic ZB principles and highlight their application to a number of joints in light of their specific anatomy. The skills and education inherent in this course will broaden your Zero Balancing abilities and will improve your Zero Balancing sessions.

  • CE Hours: 25 NCBTMB/NCCAOM approved


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New Avenues

Just in time to celebrate the beginning of March! My stage 2 basement renovation is complete and I welcome visitors and students of Zero Balancing to enjoy Peaceful Retreat ZB Studio! I am ready to identify dates in late May to study ZB in Pickerington, OH near Columbus accommodating up to 6 students for Core ZB classes. One day Intro to ZB and Advancing Skills Days can have 8 students attending in this space. There are 2 dedicated bedrooms on the main floor for out of town students sharing one bathroom. Look for an update in a couple of weeks to be able to register! Please contact me for more information and to get on my email list for future classes. learnzb@wholebody-wellbeing.com

My son and I after the last finishing touches, Relief!

Please click the link below too watch a demonstration of a full Zero Balancing session by our founder, Dr. Fritz Smith. I’m very excited to share this because the person receiving has been my client and became so enamored with the power of Zero Balancing that she became my student and pursued her studies to become a certified ZBer. She also studied with Dr Smith for a couple of her classes. She mentions me by my nickname, Cindy.

Full Zero Balancing session with commentary from the founder of the Zero Balancing principles and protocol.
May 2017 at the annual Zero Balancing Benefit at the Claggett Center in Buckeysville, MD

I’m always touched with the depth of held tension that Dr. Smith is able to help a person uncover and with the clarity as well as tenderness that he brings to skilled touch. It has been such a privilege to study under him for the last 25 years and with other faculty for 4 years before that! I will always be a perpetual student of Zero Balancing myself, as many fellow faculty members bring their personal insights into the classes they teach. I also appreciate the input of fellow students in these classes, who may have been studying for a few days or even longer than I have. And really, the most amazing aspect of Zero Balancing is that with awareness and practice, even non-certified ZBer’s can support their clients in profound shifts that can be life changing.


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Spring tuning

I have been reveling in morning spring walks along Meadow Creek. It is so amazing to see the energy flowing up through the soil and into the plants. One day the sprout structure transforms into a leafy plant and in just a few more days buds form and then our come the blossoms.

The same processes are occurring in our bodies. As we take in the plants, (I love to graze on chickweed or taste a pine needle with a raindrop still on it as I meander back up the hill to my backyard!) the nutrients spread out into our cells that are being replenished, repaired or replaced. And so the earth energy can flow into us as well. In Traditional Chinese Medicine and other ancient healing traditions the understanding of how foods nourished us was by the ways the energetic qualities affected our bodies. As a very simplified explanation we all know how a spicy salsa or Thai curry can bring a sweat to the brow. So we say the energy of chili peppers is warming. In much the same way we get  warm from an electric heat pump as energy is transferred from one form to another in our cells from the skin inward rather than food warming us from our internal organs out to the skin.

Energy constantly moves and changes forms and that principle of nature is what we take advantage of in Zero Balancing. When we put even light pressure on the body by lifting or tractioning we encourage the energy that is already present to move and flow through nearby cells and tissues. Physiologists refer to this pressure initiated energy as piezo-electricity which is a property of the collagen in our skin, muscles, ligaments and bones. So while we have a standard protocol for Zero Balancing sessions what happens in an individual is unique each time.

The touch each client receives is based on the practitioner’s evaluations of the body and awareness of the change that is occurring under our fingers. We say we follow the energy of the client and then hold our position stationary until the place we are touching changes in quality. The change may be felt as warmth or a softening and sometimes we don’t notice anything for a few seconds and then we just continue with the protocol until the next pause at an area that may feel knotty or too dense or tight. The protocol addresses all the joints, so by the end of a 35-45 minute period on your back on a massage table you have been touched head to toe. Upon sitting up clients faces are much more relaxed and oftentimes they remark how different they feel. Relaxed, peaceful, lighter, more grounded, connected, or energized in a refreshing way are regular comments on how people feel the energy change after the session and for quite sometime in many instances. With regular sessions those changes last for longer and longer, stress and many physical complaints lessen and sometimes go away completely.

To experience a session with me in Charlottesville, VA you can book an appointment at my scheduling site https://www.timecenter.com/wbwb/ If you are outside of Central Virginia you can go to www.zerobalancing.com and click on the find a practitioner menu. By entering your zip code you can locate certified practitioners.


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A clearing gift

I’d like to share a timely and pertinent gift I received today. I hope you will find it helpful too!

After 10 years of the multi-tasking roles of wife, parent of an active young child, carpool driver, country dweller with pets and large animals, devoted daughter caregiver, home renovation manager, small business owner, student and spiritual seeker, my living spaces have become over filled with materials and memories that were once much needed and still have potential value. I have always been a fan of spring cleaning and joyfully tackle whole rooms, garages, garden sheds and closets with gusto 2 or 3 times a year. But after becoming a parent and shortly thereafter a caregiver to my mother more possessions were added. The major daily distractions, most of them completely enjoyable, reduced my time to thoroughly clear out to a few minutes or maybe a few hours per month- usually when not sleeping well very early in the morning.

After completing my required course of study for massage therapy (part time for 3 years) I found I had some time & space at last. But how to go about dispersing the build up of stuff? It was hard to know where and how to start. Because I have inherited my grandparents and parents thriftiness caused by living through the Dust Bowl in the Great Depression I am programed to save useful and valuable things which I thoroughly organized and plan how to use or share. BUT now I don’t need half of it or know exactly to whom I could give it! So a web search turned up A Year to Clear What is Holding You Back! by Stephanie Bennett Vogt distributed through DailyOM.com.

 She calls her method of clearing clutter, the slow drip method. She uses all the major tools that most home organizers use but she weaves in looking for underlying emotional attachments and habitual patterns that may underpin our gathering instinct/logic borrowed from others. So I enrolled for a daily “lesson” for a year for a very reasonable cost. Often a lesson consists of a couple of sentences and a moment of contemplation building up to an exercise or video for 10-30 minutes once a week. (You can go back to the ones you’ve completed too.) It is totally doable and yet very empowering.

Today’s lesson was spot on for me, something that surprises me when I catch on to the fact that it is happening. Negative self-judgement or the poor “pitiful me” inner whisperings. Who doesn’t occasionally have it? Her post took it further into the underlying negative feedback loop “Things are against me to do well today.” There is a very subtle self-victimization that I want to STOP and clear out the mental clutter. Since I usually think of myself as a very positive person, I want to focus a laser beam to catch myself when I move into this space. Here is Stephanie’s personal experience of how she reframes the conversation. If you like this look further. She has several youtube videos. Try this one and go from there! https://youtu.be/By2IHlqxhC0

Happy clearing

A Year to Clear What is Holding You Back!  by Stephanie Bennett Vogt
Lesson 136: Zip It, Zap It

Stopping a mind that thrives on drama and is stuck on a default setting of doom and gloom, takes awareness, and lots of practice. If you took some of the stringy stuff I’ve been known to chew on over the years (with sound-effects included), here’s what detaching might look like (on paper):

  • [Aghhh] The traffic is terrible, we’re going to be late to the airport, we’re going to miss our plane, our vacation is shot. Strike that.
  • [Ugh] This task is taking forever. I don’t think I’ll ever finish clearing my piles. It’s time to check my emails. Strike that.
  • [Groan] I have no time, there’s no food in the fridge, the house feels cold, I’m fried, this day has gone from bad to worse. Strike that.

What you don’t see, but is the key to the success of this practice, is me acknowledging and feeling the tightness around my shoulders; me noticing that my breathing is halting and shallow; me feeling out of control, afraid to make a mistake, hungry and running on vapors because I haven’t eaten all day and didn’t get much sleep the night before.

What unsupportive thoughts can you zap (nip, lance, strike) today? Right this second?


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**Dynamic**

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You know that little spark you get when someone touches you just right? Dr. Smith built that into a Zero Balancing session. Through awareness of the rhythm and tension in the skeletal system many of the places that Zero Balancing practitioners fingers lift into have a little zing. At other times you may feel deeply quiet and spacious. These are just two ends of the scale of your body’s harmony. I like to call them the “Feel Fabulous” sensations. When you feel energized and relaxed at the same time your body is in wellness mode. Stop by Tabor Presbyterian in Crozet this Saturday 10-2 for a chance to feel your Whole Body Well Being.  See my previous post for more details.