Cut the strings – There is only one string left at the Bai Hui point (crown point), everything else drops. Everything above your neck rises, everything below drops.

When we practice Tai Chi we want to relax and lower ourselves down into the center of our body. How do we achieve that?

Puppet on a string

One way is to imagine that we are puppets on a string.

Visualize all the strings that pull you up. The strings on your shoulders, elbows, hands, neck, everywhere… Feel how that pulls and tightens up all the wrong places.

Now imagine how you cut those strings one by one. Cut the strings on your hands and feel how your hands relax and drop. Cut the strings on your elbows and shoulder and feel how you let them relax and allow gravity to pull them down to a natural tension less state.

Cut all the strings except for one last string that remains: the string from your Bai Hui (百會) point or crown point on the top of your head. This one last string, or golden thread, pulls your head up and keeps your spine and body straight.

Let your head rise, let your body drop

The other way of visualizing the same principle is to think about an imaginary horizontal plane that sits at the level of your neck.

Now let everything that is above that plane (your head) rise up, while you imagine everything below that plane becoming heavy and relaxed and dropping down like water drops or like heavy weights falling off your body.

Straighten your spine, open your joints

Both visualizations help us to relax our muscles by visualizing how everything drops down, straighten our spine by having the golden thread pull up our Bai Hui point and ‘open up our joints’ by creating tiny spaces between the bones in our joints.

All of that greatly improves our relaxation, agility and energy flow.