Silk Reeling exercises

Silk reeling exercise (aka chan si jing) is part of the warm up exercises I  get to do every Saturday when I turn up for class, rain or shine. These exercises are key to building up internal energy. That's what I was told when I first started learning Taichi.

Though simple, the repetitive spiral movements are somewhat stressful on the knees for beginners especially when you do this with your knees bent.

Two over years into these set of exercises and just when I think I get the hang of it to achieve continuous movements, my senior made a point during last week's training which dawned on me I may not have carried out the movements using the right method.  I have been doing the spiral movements all this while with arm movements and the arm and leg movements are not connected. 

The right way of silk reeling requires sensing of the dan tien and use it to move the body, from the feet , the kua to the waist and then lead the hand movements. So the movements are automatic and in effect circular. Isn't this a perfect representation of chi energy flow, alternating between Yin and Yang as expressed in Taichi symbol  ?