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Dear Dao Bums, I would love to hear your story and experience of serious, long term, daily standing practice The pros, the cons, was it worth while, what did standing do to you / for you? Physically, energetically and spiritually. In order to kick of this exchange of personal, lived experience, I will also share my own experiences. However, please refrain from sharing theories, opinions, views of different schools, your viewpoints, these are all interesting of course, but I would like to keep this thread completely clean of that, and instead solely focus on lived, personal experiences. The end goal is to collect actual "data" on standing from real people, and see which patterns emerge over time, with more and more people sharing their stories. My Own Experiences So Far, 4 parts 1) 2017, First Encounter With Standing I first heard about the idea of long, static, standing meditation in 2017 from Lam Kam Chuen's book "Way of Energy". One evening during my deployment to Africa with the UN, I couldn't fall asleep. I thought to myself "okay, let me try this standing thing". I stood up and did my best, and managed to stand for what felt "like a really long time", realistically it was probably between 10 and 40 minutes. My experience was that each time it felt like "it's impossible to stand any longer, my shoulders are burning too much, my legs are too tense" or whichever physical thing was annoying me, I used my willpower to keep standing anyway. Each time I managed to "hold on", it was as if a kind of breakthrough happened, and the physical tension was relieved by a surge of energy. This happened maybe 5-10 times, and each time I felt energy surging in my body. When I finally finished and laid down to sleep in my tent (yes, it was a primitive army camp), I had the best and deepest sleep since maybe my teenage years. When I woke up in the morning and felt so incredibly refreshed, I made a mental note to myself "I must remember this standing meditation, there is really something here, some day I will explore it further". 2) 2018, standing as a supplement to lovemaking In 2018 as part of a daoist lovemaking and sex qigong retreat in Asia, there were some general qigong exercises taught to supplement the sexual exercises. There were 2-3 moving exercises which took about 5-10 minutes, and the other part was 4 standing, static exercises, each held for 5 minutes, totaling 20 minutes. When I tried these 20 minutes of standing, the instruction was not to blink at all during the whole time if possible, but if the eyes started watering, you could blink. To be honest I didn't experience anything at all, other than it felt kind of weird to just stand still and stare. Every 5 minutes you switched position, which was a huge relief on the shoulders. At this point I made a mental note to myself not to explore standing any further, as I didn't feel like it did anything for me. 3) 2022, 1 hour squatting monkey standing challenge I heard that the fastest way to build the lower dan tien and open the microcosmic orbit was through 1 hour standing squatting monkey. I decided to give it a go. It took me about 1 month to work up to standing for 60 minutes. What I experienced progressively during that 1 month while practicing was that I would get warm, start sweating, I would feel qi surging through my body, I would feel warmth in my lower dan tien, I would feel vibration in my microcosmic orbit, and towards the end I started seeing a light between my eyebrows. So I felt a lot of stuff going on energetically and spiritually. However, the posture didn't feel healthy to me at all. It felt like I was training my body to be slouched over because of the way you're standing, and the shoulders are slightly forward too. Instead of putting my physical body into alignment, I felt like I was training it to be out of alignment. In the end my conclusion was that I would revisit the practice in the future if I ever became desperate to work on my third eye, but for now I would discontinue the practice, simply because it didn't feel good for my physical body. I felt other practices I knew were faster, easier and just felt better physically. 4) 2023, 100 days standing like a pillar challenge This is the most recent, and is in progress. This is also what prompted me to start this thread, simply because I would love to hear your experiences. I'm about 31 days in as of today, and have had some quite interesting experiences. The first 25 days were progressively getting more and more hellish. It felt like my body simply was not designed to stand. No matter what I did, I just couldn't get my body into proper alignment, and especially my shoulders were killing me, no matter what I did. I searched online (including on this forum), and read everything I could about standing. I actually felt like there was not too much quality information out there; most was people either bashing it as a waste of time or downright dangerous, or people praising it like the holy grail. That's also why I wanted to make this post, I want personal, lived experiences, not people ideologizing. I want us all to share our own experiences to over time build potentially build empirical evidence. The only reason I didn't quit, in spite of me feeling like I was going through meaningless suffering daily, was that I found a facebook group called "1000 hours of standing". I joined the group and started reading. Someone had made the general rule "10 hours of standing will give results, 100 will give good results, 1000 will give best results". However, I would say I found the majority in that group saying that long standing is meaningless and just creates more tension in the body, or even worse, injuries. At that point I had accumulated almost 9 hours of total standing time, and I wanted to quit. That 10 hour rule motivated me to try a bit more. Lo and behold, a day or two after reading that post, something happened during my standing. Suddenly I felt my left hip "pop open" is the best way to describe it. It was as if there had been some kind of tension in there, preventing my hips from "hanging", and thereby preventing my lower and upper body from being connected and aligned. That same day, just towards the end of my standing (about 40 minutes), my right hip popped open. I was shocked! It was as if my body had been multiple different compartments of tensions, and with this hip opening (thanks only to time and gravity, it was completely outside of my own volition to do), it felt like my entire body became one, connected, physical whole. The last 4-5 days or so have been shocking to say the least. The hips both now "fall" open by themselves after about 5-10 minutes of standing, my whole body falls into alignment, and I can just stand and stand completely effortlessly. Everything has fallen into place. I stood 60 minutes yesterday, completely effortlessly! I am shocked. So I have something physical to show for it, at least for my self. Before I started, I just couldn't stand no matter what I did, it was literal self-torture. However, now my physical body feels more and more like one integrated and well-aligned unit, making it possible for me to effortlessly stand. I am yet to see what will happen from here energetically and spiritually, but I can see now how standing lends itself to meditation. The body clicks into position, and I can completely focus on simply meditating. I also feel very grounded after standing. But there are still about 70 days to go, so I will just have to wait and see what will happen (if anything). However, I would love to hear your experiences from long term, daily standing The good, the bad, the ugly, everything, just your personal lived experience. If standing cured your cancer, I want to know about it. If standing killed your grandma, I want to know about it. Look forward to hear from you! All the best

Dear friends, I've been lurking around for some time here and wondered if you can help me with this question: I learned the basic Tai Chi Yang Style 24 form in 2017 with a local Chinese teacher. Studied for a year more or less and I've been practicing regularly for 30-40 minutes each day now. I've been curious of Zhang Zhuang and learned the form as well, and started to practice 2-3 weeks ago for 5 minutes so far. I usually do ZZ after doing Tai Chi and haven't noticed any ill effects. Recently I read about Fragrant Qigong and it resonated a lot, specially as a way to treat certain health ailments I'm having (sleep quality, digestive issues and muscular tension) that haven't improved noticeably with my Tai Chi practice. So I was wondering if it is advisable to combine the three of them (Tai Chi, ZZ and FQ) or not. I'm aware that you should not mix powerful QG practices because they can cause more problems than good. But having into account that ZZ is viewed as a "neutral" practice in terms of Qi generation and movement and Tai Chi is more oriented towards achieving flexibility, centering and balance, could FQ complement my routine? The plan is to practice for one hour in total every day, or a bit more if time allows. Your comments and thoughts are most welcome. Thanks a lot.