Dr Fritz Smith, Founder of Zero Balancing
Dr Fritz Smith
Fritz Frederick Smith was born in May 1929 in Cleveland, Ohio and his life integrates an incredible number of influences from the history of body-mind therapy. Growing up in a family involved with science and health practice, he was educated in the scientific community. For example, some eight years before he was born, his father Dr. Ernest Smith initiated the first four-year chiropractic training in the USA.
In 1955, Fritz Smith himself graduated from the College of Osteopathic Physicians and Surgeons, becoming a Doctor of Osteopathy, and six years later, he went on to graduate from the California College of Medicine in 1961 as a MD.
For a long time Dr. Smith had felt his medical understanding could not account for all the things he had experienced regarding the human body and healing, so he went in search of answers. In the mid-1960s, under the tutelage of Ida Rolf, he was one of the first medical doctors to be certified as a Rolfer. During the late-1960s, he regularly studied at the Esalen Institute in northern California, which hosted many of the forerunners of the body-mind therapy movement.
It was at Esalen, when he met Dr. JR Worsley, the founder of the College of Traditional Chinese Acupuncture in England, and while witnessing his acupuncture demonstrations, that Dr. Smith’s beliefs in a purely Western medical model were finally “cracked”.
As Dr. Smith wrote in Inner Bridges in 1986:
“My medical information was not incorrect, but was limited and constrained by the empirical method, the demand for proof, for tangibility, for causal relationships, for facts. Everything I had been taught up to that point ignored the intuitive and experimental side of life. It taught illness as an ‘event’ and not as a ‘process’ taking place within the broader scope of a person’s life. It did not recognize the tacit and intrinsic concept of ‘energy’ and the world of inherent movement, which have long been acknowledged in Eastern philosophy and other healing systems. I had accepted my medical model as the full story; now I knew it was only one chapter of the much broader subject of health, wholeness and human potential.”
After his experience with Dr. Worsley, Dr. Fritz Smith became a serious student, experiencer, practitioner and eventually a teacher of the use of “energy” in healing. His pivotal influence was his time studying in the UK with JR Worsley from 1971-78, receiving a BA and MA in Acupuncture. At that time, he also qualified as a California Certified Acupuncturist.
Dr. Fritz Smith in England during the 1970s.
Photo by Alan Hext.
Dr. Smith has been a student of Jack Schwartz, Brugh Joy, studied Jin Shin Do and Shiatsu and has also explored meditation, yoga, T’ai Chi and Qi Gong. All these influences came to bear in his medical practice as he began to integrate the world of inherent movement and energy with his scientific skills and understanding.
During this process of integration, Dr. Smith came to recognise a specific area in a person where movement and structure are in juxtaposition, similar to the situation in a sailboat where the wind (movement) and sail (structure) meet. Following the initial exploration of this interface, Dr. Smith formulated the structural acupressure system of Zero Balancing in 1973 to evaluate and balance the relationship between energy and structure in the body. The powerful and lasting effects he witnessed in patients following a Zero Balancing session led him to understand that the bridging of energy and matter exists in the level of the body, and the mind and the spirit of a person and that any, or all, of these levels can be addressed by Zero Balancing.
The implications of his new understandings and experience of this inspirational structural/energetic interface led him to specialise in the broader fields of health, wellness and human potential and thereafter to teach Zero Balancing to thousands of students over the past 50 years.
Dr. Smith is the author of countless articles and two books, Inner Bridges: A guide to energy movement and body structure and Alchemy of Touch: Moving towards mastery through the lens of Zero Balancing.
Dr. Smith remains Director Emeritus on the ZB Touch Foundation Board.