The healing touch
A mother and daughter are practitioners of the same healing practice in different parts of the world, reports
In Hawaii, Rebekah Harbour lives in a tree house surrounded by a prolific vegetable garden. In rural Manawatu¯ , her mother, Susan Hawes, also lives with nature at her doorstep, in a regular house, but one that boasts its own indoor banana tree.
Harbour and Hawes walk their own tree-lined paths, but as mother and daughter they share common threads that come together a few times a year.
Both are practitioners of zero balancing, an alternative therapy Harbour found when she was looking for something to help people feel better ‘‘and have better lives’’.
‘‘I’d always thought that helping to ease the suffering of others made more sense to me than anything else,’’ Harbour says.
‘‘We are all connected and my happiness is connected to the happiness of others.’’
The practice of zero balancing is said to focus on key joints of the skeleton that its creator Fritz Smith believes conduct and balance forces of gravity, posture and movement. The therapy has its skeptics, but Harbour says from her experience ‘‘it works and on an emotional level too’’.
In primary school, Harbour was the go-to kid for advice. She could see when people were stuck and she liked to help them find a way out, so, when it was time for university, she studied psychology.
‘‘But in that world people were treated like minds that were separate from their bodies and that all mental and emotional health was all neurological, and my experience of life told me that it wasn’t that way.’’
Harbour was brought up in a household where music and dance, art and colour were prominent. Hawes studied spiritual philosophies in the United States and her children were encouraged to be free thinkers.
And free souls. Harbour followed hers to South America.
‘‘I went to find myself, as you do.’’
She hiked the Inca trail, ‘‘in really bad, cheap hiking boots’’. But the boots, in a roundabout way, led her to zero balancing.
‘‘I was going through some difficult stuff in my life, feeling really ungrounded and I had a lot of knee and foot pain from the walk, so I had a ZB session from a family friend.’’
‘‘After the session, I felt that I could start being OK again. I could even feel the pieces of me going back together enough to realise how not OK I had been feeling. I wasn’t all fixed, but I knew I could start to heal.’’
Harbour came home and got an everyday job as a research and evaluation analyst, but says it didn’t feel fulfilling. She went to a zero balancing course in Wellington and decided to keep on studying the practice.
‘‘I thought I’ll do it until I’m bored or I don’t agree with something.’’
That was 15 years ago and she is now a certified teacher and practitioner. Her journey has taken her back to the US, where she studied with Smith, who founded the practice in the 1970s.
‘‘It was amazing to be around leaders of acupuncture and physical therapy, osteopathy and chiropractors who were all excited to be learning this. We were talking about energy in healing that made so much sense to my Westerntrained, scientific mind. I’d heard about things that were sort of esoteric and woo-woo, but this just made sense and it worked.’’
Over the years Hawes watched what her daughter was doing with increasing interest, proud of her for finding something she was passionate about, but also wondering how she could apply it to her life.
‘‘I was weary of it being her thing, but I did my first course and it felt to me like the manifestation of everything I had been learning about – who we are and what we do in the world.’’
The human anatomy and physiology aspect of the studies were a challenge, says Hawes.
‘‘I hadn’t studied in what felt like a million years.’’
But Hawes figured out her own way, applying herself the same way she has to her musical disciplines over the years, ‘‘working through it and sticking with it’’.
‘‘And I surprised myself and found that I really enjoyed it.’’
Hawes set up her own practice a few years back and she sees clients at her Colyton home and in Palmerston North as well. Harbour always brings new techniques with her when she visits and together they guide each other’s ongoing learning.
Harbour thinks everybody has a ‘‘superpower’’ and says her mother’s has always been teaching and having intuition. And her own? She thinks about that before she says: ‘‘Taking abstract concepts and turning them into metaphors and words that work for the person in front of me.’’
She is also a yoga teacher and sees yoga as zero balancing in action.
‘‘People can take what they learn about their bodies and themselves from a ZB and learn to create that experience for themselves and drop into the state.’’
Harbour likes the ‘‘down to earth’’ nature of both practices. She grew up with her mother and Vivian Gander, Hawes’ partner, on an organic farm in the backblocks of Colyton and she is now living on the side of the Haleakala volcano in Maui, making a living from her practice and managing an organic fruit orchard.
Alongside her partner, Harbour teaches mindful martial arts at a local school and they sell their produce at a farmers’ market.
‘‘We sell whatever tropical fruit is ripe that week – bananas, plantains, oranges, cherimoya, lychee, loquat, guava and lots of creative cooking too. Our favourites are volcano juice shots, made from fresh Hawaiian chilli peppers, turmeric root, lemon and orange juice. I’m having so much fun exploring tropical agriculture and finding out how to prepare breadfruit, and taro, and all kinds of new food offerings from this land.’’
But home is still New Zealand and Harbour is here now running a meditation and yoga retreat from her mother’s house and huge garden, Waiata.
Hawes takes on cooking duties and her partner is the organic gardener and ‘‘head taster’’. He is known to share some wisdom on appreciating what nature gives us as well.
And mother and daughter fall back into step, doing what they do, helping others in what Hawes says is a way that people are really helping themselves.
Harbour describes it as realising that you still have your hat on inside, ‘‘when you were wondering why you were having trouble seeing’’, she says, laughing. ‘‘It’s a beautiful thing.’’