Keep your palms open.

Bring to mind something you have been carrying. Not to examine it — just to feel the physical sensation of holding it. The subtle tightening in the chest. The slight forward lean of sustained effort.

Now, without forcing anything, set it down.

Not by declaration. Not by will. The way you'd lower a stone into still water — feeling it leave your hand, watching it sink, noticing the rightness of the return. What you've gathered dissolving back into something larger than you. Heat releasing into cool air. An exhale completing itself.

Feel your palms as if they just opened. Because they did.

Breathe into your chest — not to inflate it, but to feel it widen. Notice that expansion is already a kind of release. The body already knows this.

Now step fully into this: you are someone for whom the releasing is already done. Not someone reaching toward it. Not someone on the verge. Someone inside it — the release finished, settled, real.

What does that person's body feel like right now? Where is there ease in the shoulders? Softness in the throat? A looseness in the belly that wasn't there when you sat down?

Let those sensations be true. They are true. When you inhabit a state in feeling — fully, bodily, without hedging — you are not pretending. You are practicing the inner reality that becomes the outer fact. The imagination, held in the body as present and complete, is the seed of what arrives next. This is how it has always worked.

Stay here for several breaths. Open palms. Wide chest. Long, slow exhale.

When you're ready, bring your hands gently together — not to grip, but simply to rest — and open your eyes.

What has been gathered, you have given back — and in that giving, something in you has come home.