Reflecting

After having a great weekend in the ZB Tent at the Tauranga Show Jumping Championships I got to thinking about all the beautiful show jumping we got the pleasure of watching.

Since studying ZB I seem to search for ZB Principles in nearly everything I do and the show jumping was no different. 

I would have to say my favourite principal would be that of the relationship between energy and structure and this is what we will be talking about today. 

So let's take the energy of the body and how it moves. Energy enters the top of your body and flows through, crossing sides at the sacrum and flowing through the legs and into the earth. This flow is noted by the way of the body's systems. For example if you have good energy flow then you will have good nerve function, meaning messages get sent from the brain and through the body efficiently and effectively.

A "clear" show jumping round is much like a well functioning body. Where the rider guides the horse carefully and rythmically around the course and it and all appears simple and is a beatiful thing. This is like the brain sending messages around our body and them all arriving on time and taking appropriate action.

However, if something goes wrong in a round of show jumping, say the horse spooks and knocks the jump down, the the rider has to hurriedly try to maintain focus, keep the horse from getting away and complete the task at hand. Sure, the rider will succeed in most cases but there is always something missing from the finished product...a little bit of the beauty may be lost. The same thing happens in our body when a trauma occurs, for example we fall off our bike and hurt our leg in some way. We can certainly get back up and make it to our destination but some of the beauty and effortless feel is most likely lost. 

All horse riders will know that if your horse got spooked and hit a jump you would check for injuries and rest the horse, if need be, then give it further training to aim for the that beautiful clear round.

If we don't give our body proper rest and continued training we end up in carrying this memory of the bike fall and pain with us and this may continue to impede the "flow" through our body for years, if not our lifetime. 

So let's take a minute to think of a time that you didn't give yourself the time you needed to heal and think about how you might find that healing.

One of the fundamentals of Zero Balancing is to find those areas of tension and to give the body and chance to heal and let go and this is something that I feel very lucky to be able to offer.