To be fair, I know little of higher stages of cultivation. I can't astral project, create talismans, work with roaming spirit entities... I still have a physical body, so I know there is a long way to go.
Yeniseri, I agree with you. It's practiced free flowing. Once you reach out to Heaven and Earth the breaths draws head and feet towards each other. Yes it's very mechanical and you can get into the anatomy. I was trying to explain some of my experiences. The body gets more and more elastic and free...
What I found very important:
Stretch the jaws excessively. Pull the ears and nose. Working on the jaw can be very painful. Feeling the auditory channel stretching is frightening and funny.
Open the neck and throat, shoulders, chest and upper back side to reach the lungs. The collarbones become accessible via the jaw. The lungs hang off the collars.
I'm still working on ribs. But my lats feel huge compared to earlier. Spine pops a lot.
The iliosacral joints, kidneys, bladder and pelvic floor kind of attach to breathing. Tissue moving. Squat, work the legs every day, train the footarches and toes.
Before this gets too long, another quick perspective:
In many schools a sort of heaviness is sought after, not to say lightness is excluded. Making your self heavy means taking more burden by your own decision. A noble act. This draws helpful and not so helpful spirits to you. The clue is separating the bad from the good ones.
By emptying the Heart, the self association domain or field is left open... Your Shen observes and commands as a literal spirit guide. Your sense of being alive resides in the lower Dantian. It's as if you look from the belly, one stage lower than usual somehow. Then you stop thinking conscious thoughts and even in a stream of thoughts you don't identify with anything and remain calm yet alive. This for me came after major stillness.
Then you get to decide which guests to invite and keep, which to be wary of and throw out.
Burdening your self to strengthen noble aspects, being upright and straight yet relaxed and bent.
Yeniseri, I understand you well!