Sankalpa

The word combines a sense of conception or will with a prefix meaning joined or complete, and it is usually translated as resolve or intention. In practice it is one sentence, in the present tense, specific enough to be remembered an hour later: not a goal and not a wish, but a statement of what you are doing. The traditional advice is to keep the same one for a long period rather than inventing a new one each session.

What it is for is direction. An hour of movement without any frame can easily become an hour of self-criticism, and a stated intention gives attention somewhere to return to when it drifts — the same function the breath serves physically. It also makes the end of a practice concrete: you know what you came in with, so you can notice what changed.

In a KEO session, you may be asked for one silently at the start of a workshop or a long session, with no requirement to share it and no suggestion of what it should be. Ours are deliberately plain rather than elevated: stay for the whole hour, breathe through the hard part, do not rush the end. Then at the very end, before the bowls stop, it comes back once.