Find a comfortable and convenient place to stand, with your feet about shoulder width apart.

Soften your knees slightly so they're somewhat bent, and imagine - or rather create - a Golden Cord holding you up from the top of your head. Feel the support of that Golden Cord holding you up, and allow yourself to just relax into it. Just accept that support from above. Allow someone else, something else, to do the work of holding you up, so that you can relax.

You can allow everything to hang off that Golden Cord, your shoulders, your spine, your pelvis, your legs. Everything can just hang off that cord.

Now I'd like you to imagine your body as full of a heavy fluid, - your whole body. Your head, your shoulders, your neck, your arms, your chest, your back, your pelvis, your legs, your feet, full of this heavy fluid that is responsible both for the weight of your body and also for any tension that you may experience in it.

You can imagine this fluid as being a little heavier than water, maybe 20% heavier than water, and as you stand here supported from above by the Golden Cord, allow that fluid to start to drain out of your body.

It can drain out of your head. Perhaps you can even feel it draining from specific places in your head, out of the back of the neck down, down, out of the forehead, the nose, the eyes and the muscles around the eyes, the cheeks, the jaw, the front of the neck, down into the shoulders.

From the shoulders, some of the fluid can drain down into the arms, through all the joints of the arms, the elbows, the wrists, the knuckles, dripping off the ends of the fingers down to the ground.

Some of that heavy fluid can drain down from the shoulders into the chest and the back, from the chest and the back down into the tummy and the lower back, from the tummy and the lower back down into the pelvis, from the pelvis down into the thighs, from the thighs down through the knees, the lower legs, the ankles, the soles of the feet, and from there down into a reservoir about three feet under the ground. You can feel it like a steel tank or something like that, three feet under the ground.

All the weight of your body, and all the tension in your body, is now sunk down underneath the ground, and you can feel that like a strong, powerful, heavy counterweight. You can start to move your body, to move and sway in different directions, forward and back, side to side, and because you have that counterweight underneath the ground, you're much more stable, you can lean much further in different directions. You can be softer and more stable, you have much better balance. And if at any time you lose that stability a little, just sink even more of that fluid out of your body into that tank underneath the ground that serves as a counterweight.

When you've had a little fun with that, just come back to a central position, and feel again the support you're getting from the Golden Cord, feel the stability you're getting from this big counterweight, underneath you, three feet underneath the ground.

You can feel the duality between the Golden Cord holding up the crown of your head and the weight sinking down underneath the ground as it gently stretches you a little bit. The cord is lifting the crown of your head upward. Imagine a weight hanging from your tailbone and your tailbone is sinking downward, so you're getting a little taller, getting a little stretched, both from the top and the bottom, like a duality between the sky and the Earth, and yourself just in the middle, as a balance point.

You can intensify this stretching feeling by visualizing the vertebrae of your spine as a string of pearls on an elastic thread that is being slowly stretched from above and below.

If you spend a lot of time in a seated position - for instance, if you have an office job - you may want to try this in a seated position. Just sit down comfortably on a chair, perhaps the chair you normally use. Feel the support of the Golden Cord from the top and allow the fluid to drain out of your body. You can allow some of it to drain out through your arms and your fingertips, some of it through your feet, and some of it through those two little bones that you sit on. Allow it to drain down through your chair and even down through the legs of the chair, into the ground and underneath the ground.

This is a good exercise to do any time you feel yourself under stress at work, or if you're sitting in rush hour traffic and getting frustrated with it, just allow whatever that is that's upsetting you to drain out along with that fluid in your body, under the ground. And notice that it's still there for you, it's not like you get rid of it, you store it there, underneath the ground. If you need it it' s available, it helps your balance, it's a resource for you, it's just that you don't have to carry it, you don't have to use any of your muscles or your body to carry it.

So just in the same way as the Golden Cord means that your support is effortless, this counterweight underneath the ground means that your balance is effortless.