Have you ever tried to talk about Zero Balancing with someone unfamiliar or skeptical regarding energy-related healing arts? It can be challenging for practitioners and clients alike to be met with skepticism or disbelief. And our response to disbelief can determine whether the conversation stops or continues. What if we were to view this experience in terms of differing worldviews, differing paradigms? A Christmas Carol, the Charles Dickens story that’s omnipresent at this time of year, can help us approach talking about ZB to people unaccustomed to experiencing themselves as energy and structure.

A Christmas Carol is a story about a paradigm shift. When Scrooge first sees the ghost of his dead business partner Jacob Marley, he experiences a paradigm challenge. In his worldview or paradigm, ghosts do not exist. Yet he has just seen a ghost. His response is the archetypal human response…denial. Dickens writes Scrooge’s explanation for his experience as “…an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato.” The content of his explanation is irrelevant, actually. He needs to find evidence for his direct experience that fits within his worldview. Underneath his bravado, he’s terrified. Let’s call this Stage One of a paradigm challenge: denial. 

Let’s create a Stage Two of a paradigm challenge and call it wondering. As the story continues, he has more experiences and begins to feel safe enough to be curious and wonder about these ghosts.

Lastly, our Stage Three in this paradigm challenge model is a paradigm shift.  Ultimately, Scrooge changes his worldview to include the existence of ghosts. This is beautifully illustrated by his desperate plea for help directed at the Ghost of Christmas Future. He could no longer deny his sensory experience of reality and altered his worldview accordingly. His paradigm changed.

Many years ago while teaching at Simmons College, I had the opportunity to create a five week course on complementary therapies in rehabilitation for graduate students in Physical Therapy, Nursing, and Healthcare Administration. My first thought was how I was about to introduce healing modalities like Acupuncture, Zero Balancing and Herbal Medicine to people entrenched in the Western medical model. The course could have been called “Here’s a Paradigm Challenge!” 

My ultimate goal for the students in this course was Stage Two rather than Stage Three. I suspected that if I required them to shift paradigms, I’d lose them. They would remain stuck in Stage One, denial. I was explicit in my expectation that they didn’t have to believe anything they saw or heard. My request was that they become more conscious about their worldview and that they allow themselves to wonder.

We can use the same approach when talking about Zero Balancing. When we introduce someone to ZB, we are exposing them to a different paradigm. Like Scrooge, the archetypal response is denial. Denial may present itself as skepticism, disbelief, or even ridicule. It may be demonstrated by an attempt to categorize ZB through their current beliefs. “Oh, it’s like Reiki or Craniosacral or Osteopathy,” meaning “Oh, it’s like something I’m familiar with and can identify within my current paradigm.”  Their response is archetypal and we would respond the same way if our own beliefs were challenged. Knowing that in advance, we can modify both our response and our expectations. Our goal might become creating enough safety to allow them to feel curious, to wonder. Stage two. The key here is our awareness and flexibility to accept and adapt to the archetypal process of a paradigm challenge.