everything wrote:Looking back at translations of the taiji classics, I'm always a bit confused by the phrase "raise the spirit" especially "to the headtop". I take the raising spirit part to mean roughly "alive", "alert", "ready", "in the moment", "paying attention", "very aware", like a cat in readiness, the opposite of "sluggish". Does that seem right to you? But what about the headtop business?
One of the reasons Taiji Quan is classified as an internal martial art is that it uses internal mental imagery to guide/create certain qualities of movement. In modern parlance, this is called mind-body integration exercise.
In the old days, people's understanding of human physiology (detailed anatomy, the various systems and how they all interact) were very limited. But through sheer quantity of practice and experimentation, they discovered that, just as external movement can lead to internal change, we can use the mind (internal, invisible) to create external, measurable physical changes. This is done through using mental imagery, and focusing the mind on certain parts of the body during various parts of physical movements. This is an easy way of producing the correct results without spelling out detailed instructions for every part of the body, or explain why (which they couldn't anyway).
So what is "raise the spirit to the headtop"? Knowing what we know above, the real question is "why"?
Martial art is art of movement. In movement we want to have 2 opposite but complementary qualities, stability and agility. Both are achieved by maintaining the correct body alignment, whether in stillness or in motion. Stability means your center of balance cannot be easily moved. It also means you'll be able generate the maximum power possible. Agility means the ability to make changes quickly. In fighting everything goes so fast, so you must react and change appropriately in time.
In Chinese philosophy, we say stability is a yin (heavy, downward, unchanging) quality, and agility a yang (light, upward, dynamic) quality. So if you just focus on 'sinking your qi to dantian', 'hooking your toes like talons into the ground', or 'spreading your roots all the way to the river of death', you may have good stability, but little mobility. "Raise the spirit to the headtop", and my favorite hard-to-understand analogy "head suspended from above" are mental imagery that help your counterbalance these downward energies.
Since these traditional analogies are so difficult to understand today, let me try to explain this in modern terms. Why do we need to have this upward feeling, physically, what does it do exactly? The answer lies in anatomy of spine and the head. The head is this 12-15 pound weight balanced on top of your central skeletal system. Imagine you're balancing a bowling ball on top of a long pole. Any shift in that weight will have a noticeable effect on everything below. It is important that we align that weight properly. So what is the optimal alignment?
image from Alexander Technique Education siteThe diagrams above illustrates why having this intent of exerting a force to the top of the head is important. Because when we have a weight on top of our heads, we naturally stand in the most balanced, neutral, and relaxed (all the spaces between the joints of spine are open) manner. We have no choice - we cannot carry a weight on top our heads if we have poor posture. Notice how in cultures where people carry weight on top of their heads, how good their postures are, how comfortable, free their movements look:
This is one of those things that, until you tried it, seems counter-intuitive: just like carrying a bag on one side of the should raises instead of compresses that shoulder, putting a weight on top of head lengthens instead of compresses the spine.
Even in the absence of that weight, if we project an upward force to the top center of the head, it helps our entire skeletal system to align itsef in the most optimal manner, allowing it to be stable and agile at the same time.
Wuyizidi