Branza

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

Thanks everyone for your replies. I'll definitely start looking into all the resources you guys linked or described. @Taoist Texts, would you mind clarifying what you mean with the quoted text? It would be awesome if you could expand a bit, thanks so much!

Hi everyone, I'm a big time lurker (and big fan of this place, so many knowledgeable folks in here!) and I decided to register as I encountered an issue in my practice and I wanted to ask for guidance to you guys. I swear I used the "seach" function thoroughly before deciding to create a new topic Well, my question will arrive in a separate thread, but here's a short intro. I'm an Italian 42M, living in Barcelona Spain, and my interest in these topics probably started when I read (and loved) the book on Hara, by Durckheim. Since then I read and watched much more content, and found The Way of Energy by Lam Kam Chuen particularly useful, as it provides many practical details for the Wuji posture (my go-to stance so far). Thanks to Wuji, I was able to basically get rid of some back chronic pain I had for years. Doctors, physiotherapists, massage therapists (and so on) weren't really able to help, but thanks to Wuji I now probably have only 5% of the pain I used to have. I know chronic pain is only a little part of these practices, but as you can imagine, it was my first priority I gotta say I noticed incredible psychological/trauma release benefits with it. Until something happened...(more about in the separate thread, eheh). Well, I guess that's it for a first quick intro. Thanks for having me!