Hi all, apologies for the long message and thanks for reading it!
I've been practicing regularly zhan zhuang for about year (on and off for longer than that), following mainly The Way of Energy for the practical part and Hara by Durckheim for a more theorical guidance. I am self thought, unfortunately I wasn't able to find a good teacher in Barcelona, Spain - open to suggestions for one if anyone is from around here
Let me start with a short introduction: my posture has always been bad, in my opinion mainly caused by emotional trauma in my early years. A bit slouched over, but the main issue was a tilt on the pelvis that basically ruined all my symmetry. A huge percentage of my weight was on my right leg exclusively, my right shoulder was raised, the neck was tilted on the left and so on.
This posture made me develop a few issues with chronic pain in my upper and lower back. No doctors/MRIs/physiotherapists(...) were able to help. I'm happy to say that, thanks to zhan zhuang (I mainly practice in wuji and I "hold the balloon" from time to time), my upper back pain is almost completely gone, and the one in the lower back is maybe 25% of what it was.
Good news, then. So, why the post? Well the issue is that, since I started releasing the tension in the pelvis, and being able to distribute 50/50 between the two legs, the left one (the one not used to carry the weight) has developed an edema.
It started in the ankle, and I thought it was normal (after all the modified pelvis position was changing the angle between my leg and my foot), but with time, the whole leg stared to swell, from the thigh to the foot, included.
I was sure since the very beginning that the swelling was caused by the practice. I'm a 42M, active, in very good shape (except for the big leg!), traditional martial arts practitioner, vegetarian, no junk food and so on. Still, I saw a few doctors (you can imagine how hard it was to try to explain to them what zhan zhuang does to the body ) and went through some exams to exclude other causes - Echo doppler to rule out vein thrombosis, CAT scan to check everything was ok. And well, all the exams are perfect and the doctors, of course, have no idea why this is happening.
The edema has been going on for around 4 months I'd say. I thought it was temporary but I'm starting to freak out a bit. The leg is still way bigger than the other one, I believe the size hasn't changed much in the past few months but at least the skin isn't as hard anymore, so I believe that part of the liquid has at least been reabsorbed.
I'm sure I haven't reached symmetry yet so that might be the reason why this is still ongoing. I try to keep the leg elevated as much as I can, but it's not helping that much.
Ok, that's a good overview. Apologies again for the length but I wanted to be as thorough as possible
Has something similar happened to any of you guys? Any suggestion or advice will be immensely appreciated. Happy to provide more details if needed.
Thanks a bunch for your help. If you read all this but can't help, well, thanks anyway for reading