Practicing a reality for someone else is a skill. It is learnable, it is specific, and doing it well is different from doing it warmly.
Feel the news, not the life
Here is the distinction that changes everything. You are not living their life inside the practice. Their path belongs to them. What you enter is the moment you find out it happened: the call, the message, the face when they tell you. The relief. The delight. The rush of hearing that the scan came back clear, that the offer came through, that she is standing up on her own. Feel that, fully, as though it already arrived. The news belongs to everyone who loves them. The route there does not belong to you. Always hold it for their highest good and surrender the journey to them.
Story is the most common mistake
When you stay with a reality for a long time, imagination reaches for detail. Given ten minutes, it will start filling in how the outcome happens. That is where story gets in. A group once held a reality for me around finding a new home. Afterward, one person told me she had seen us buying a fixer-upper and felt the joy of my husband and me painting it together. We were moving because his business was expanding and our days were about to get very long. A fixer-upper was the last thing I would have chosen. She had added her story to my reality. She was generous and she was fully present. She was also building a life I had not asked for. Enter the outcome and let the details stay empty.
What to carry in your heart
Begin with feeling rather than solving. Move into genuine care for this person: warmth, tenderness, the way you feel toward someone you love. That feeling is available to you even for a stranger and it is the substance of what you are giving.
What to see in your mind
See them well. Not the diagnosis resolving, not the problem being worked through step by step. See them on the far side of it, laughing, steady, at ease, whole. Hold that picture in the present tense.
Holding for the world
Scale changes the image, not the method. Abstraction is difficult to sustain for ten minutes, so choose one concrete scene that stands for the whole: a city quiet at dusk, a forest still standing, a room of people at ease with each other. Let that one scene carry the larger thing.
When you do not know the person
Read what they wrote. Look at the image they chose, because that image is the outcome they are asking you to enter. Then hold it the way you would for someone you love. Their story is not the requirement. Your attention is.
You are giving time you cannot get back to an outcome that is not yours. That is the whole of it.