Why I Don't Say I 'Balance Your Energy'

For years, when someone asked what I do, I said I balance your energy. It was quick and it sounded finished, so nobody ever asked a follow-up question. That was exactly the problem with it.

The phrase that did all the work

I reached for it because it closed the conversation fast. Say I balance your energy to someone standing in a doorway, half listening, and they nod and move on satisfied. On a plane, or at a dinner table in Canggu when someone new asks what I do for work, it ends the exchange in one sentence. It sounds complete. It sounds like I know precisely what happens in an hour on the table, down to the mechanism, and that I can promise the result before we have even started.

I do not know that. I never did. What I know is what people tell me afterwards, and what I have watched happen in the room over nearly twenty years of doing this. That is a narrower kind of knowing than the phrase implied, and it deserves narrower language.

Why it stopped sitting right

Energy is a real word asked to do a vague job. It borrows the weight of physics without any of the substance behind it, and once I noticed that, I could not keep saying it the same way. I do not measure a field. I do not claim a mechanism for what happens in a session, and I am not going to start pretending otherwise now.

There is a second problem with balance, separate from the first. It implies something in the person is out of order and that I am the one setting it right. Most of the women who come to see me are not broken. They are exhausted. Some have not slept properly in months. Some are grieving, or wired at 2am with a mind that will not stop moving. Others are carrying a body that has been braced for so long it has forgotten how to unclench. Calling that imbalance flattens it into something clinical when it is really just a life that has been hard for a while.

It is also the kind of question that comes up in the first weekend of training, when a student asks what to say when a client wants a plain answer instead of a warm gesture towards one. I used to hand over the old phrase without thinking. Now I tell students to describe what actually happens instead, because that holds up under a second question and the old phrase never did.

What I say instead

Now I describe what actually happens, in plain terms: an hour lying down in a quiet room, with warm hands and a body that is finally allowed to stop holding itself so tightly. Then I tell them what people have reported afterwards, because that is the part worth passing on: sleep that comes more easily, and the tightness in a jaw or a pair of shoulders letting go.

I say those as things people report, never as things I promise. It is a longer sentence than I balance your energy, and it should be. Honesty about a nervous system takes more words than a slogan does, and I would rather give someone the longer, truer version than the shorter one that sounds more finished.

If someone wants the practical version of that, I send them to the sessions page, which lays out what an hour costs and what it involves without any of the old shorthand attached to it. If they are weighing it up more slowly, the page on energy healing in Canggu goes into more of the reasoning behind why people come.

The same habit, further back

This is not only about one phrase I have retired. It is part of a longer habit of dropping language that sounds impressive in favour of language that is actually true. I teach the chakra system to my students because it is a useful map, not because it is ancient: it is a twentieth century framework attached to Reiki decades after Mikao Usui, and I say so plainly in the piece I wrote on that. The same standard applies to the word energy. It is vocabulary I use because it is familiar to people, not a fact I could put in front of a doctor.

I would rather a student walk into training, or a client walk into a first session, with an accurate picture of what I offer than a romantic one. What I actually do holds up fine without the old phrase attached to it. It just takes a few more sentences to say, and I have made peace with that.