Thoughts on 30 days of zhan zhuang practice
Editor’s note: I started practicing zhan zhuang on 9 November 2024 and collected these thoughts over the subsequent month of practice. Some of the mania has waned.
When I first encountered it (day of), I thought zhan zhuang probably worked because it:
challenges the postural muscles
stretches tissues whose tightness typically pushes people into bad posture
disencumbers the breathing mechanism
and because it does (a)–(c) in a self-correcting way
It's much harder to hold the zhan zhuang position with bad form, so (b) and (c) naturally become more true if you follow gradient descent into an easier posture to hold.
I no longer believe this. It's not that it's not zhan zhuang doesn't improve posture, and it's not that those aren't the mechanisms for that change. But… well, long-time qigong practitioners describe the sensations of energy flows across the body. I believe these energy flows are a balm for the mind, a tonic for the nervous system, and a cure for psychosomatic ailments. See (5) and (6).
Uhh, I find it this practice very addictive? I assume the zhan zhuang posture at least once every few hours. In the past month, I've watched a half dozen tutorials, read two books and a smattering of articles, gotten 5 friends to try it (this is the majority of my friends), and decided that it would be the cure to my aging parents' ailments. A friend’s parter has described it as my idle animation.
When I try to think carefully, I think I'm probably being irrationally exuberant. My specific health issues have to do specifically with standing (POTS) and breathing (asthma, covid), and it's almost certainly true that there's been some psychosomatic component to those. As one of the 5 friends who were underwhelmed by the experience of trying zhan zhuang said to me, I “have standing trauma”. So, zhan zhuang seems designed to work on my specific (t)issues.
Working directly on your issues is hard! The first week I did zhan zhaung, I was too tired to get any work done. At first I thought this was because of my difficulties standing. But a few days in, I had an extremely emotional night reliving some of the worst moments of my acute illness with covid, and I felt something unravel. And after another few days, I was breathing better and had noticeably more stamina. Look, I'm not saying I'm cured, but we’re going to celebrate every increment of improvement.
Here is a quote from River’s description of his experience with ayurveda:
There are some other things I’ve experienced with Ayurveda that are honestly weirder than I want to talk publicly about right now, partly because I don’t think some of you would believe me unless you experience it yourself, and partly because I wanna keep collecting data and seeing if they remain true for a longer time before I say them in public.
One of the ones on the border that’s just a little weird: A couple months I started a series of medicines whose stated purpose was to scrape out old metabolic waste that had gotten stuck in particular tissues of my body. I cycled on and off of these a couple times, and every single time I started taking them, the next day I’d be awash in old memories from a very specific period of my life, a difficult period that I’d never really dealt with and processed. I spent a lot of time those days having those old emotions wash over me and process through my system.
…As far as I can tell, the medicines that were physically scraping out wastes were also releasing and scraping out trapped emotional waste from that very specific period in my life, which was related in ways I won’t get into here, but… I don’t know man, it was weird. I didn’t expect the mind-body connection to be that direct and that strong, just from an herbal mix with a fun name and some basic dietary instructions.See (2).
Most video tutorials for zhan zhuang are low in detail or low in information density. I've found two exceptions (one, two), which have been most helpful. Master Lam Kam Chuen's series gets an honorable mention for being short and entertaining.
The way I'm currently thinking about form is:
The goals of zhan zhuang are accomplished when the hips are level, the abdomen is relaxed, the spine is lengthened, and the head sits gently on top.
The purpose of the arrangement of the legs and feet is to provide stability, free the hips, and allow the abdomen to relax. If the abdomen has to tense to keep the hips level, then the legs aren't arranged well.
The purpose of the arrangement of the shoulders and arms is to provide torque so that the back muscles can lengthen the torso and so breathing is unencumbered.
I expect that there will come a time when I find high-level metaphors more useful for guiding my practice than focusing on nitty-gritty details of alignment. Ioannis Solos spends a lot of time in his book discussing various bubble visualizations, which I currently get no value out of. But with my approach, body parts shift out of alignment when they're not the focus of my attention, so I spend my stands shuffling my attention around playing whack-a-mole with errant joints. Hopefully with practice I'll be able to intend at a higher level of abstraction.
In the meantime, I've been getting a lot of mileage out of attending to the feet. I encountered the idea of the three points of balance a long time ago, but never explored it. Different instructions will say, “distribute the weight 60 to the back of the foot and 40 to the front” (or vice versa), but for me there's a distinct point where my weight feels perfectly balanced and the whole foot feels alive. When I get it right, there's a specific muscle in the medial part of the arch that engages and feels like it lifts the whole foot up.
There's a tendon at the outside of my ankle that often gets sore when I start running. It's a real annoyance, because it's often limiting in how much I want to run (well, it was before I got covid). Interestingly, this tendon has also been getting sore during my stands. My current enthusiasm around zhan zhuang has me believing that this tendon soreness will resolve with a few more days/weeks of practice; hopefully that will translate to not being bothered by it if I ever get back to running.
Yes, I get fluctuating sensations of heat and coolness and tingling in the nerves. There's a temptation to ascribe value to them, and maybe get a little attached to them as markers of progress, which I'm resisting. I expect that the tingling and rushing coolness will cease with time. I'm basing that expectation off of this helpful chart from Yu Yong Nian's book:
Yes, random tissues are sore afterwards. Recently, a lot of the little tissues around my ribs have been sore. It's common for people new to wrestling to have sore ribs from getting their bodies mashed into the ground (I wrestled very, very briefly in HS), and the soreness I've been getting from zhan zhuang feels exactly like that.
Turns out your phyical activity can't just consist of zhan zhuang and laying around all day. Tissues that aren't occasionally lengthened get short, and most tissues aren't placed anywhere near the ends of the ROM in zhan zhuang. I've also noticed my legs carrying residual tension, but I think this would happen less if I were better at zhan zhuang.
I do think it would be good for my parents.
