Bowing is expression of your no-self or nonself-centeredness. You lift everything up on your hands. It seems like a very exact expression of the liberation of all not excluding yourself, because nothing is left, you are not left behind. My master said that this is lifting the whole body of the Buddha. On your two hands there are the two feet of the Buddha, and you lift him up. In childhood time I was taught like that. I was thinking about this big thing I was lifting up. Don't you feel such feeling, too? You feel, "Oh, this is a hard thing." Our ego tells us, "Don't do that! That's an unusual, shameful thing to do. You must keep your head up straight!" This is what you have been taught. But after you raise your body with inhalation, you surely have to appear as a liberated existence each time.
When you bow on the cushion and when your forehead touches the ground, a few times you meet the ground with your head, and at that time at the end of exhalation in a very empty light feeling of nothing you lift everything up. With your hands you really lift everything up. You don't open the fingers of your hands but keep them together so that you don't miss any single being. If you face to somebody, you really sense that I'm lifting this existence. Opening your hand like this is gesture, mudra, of acceptance. When you receive something, you can feel this same gesture, you can feel you are holding the whole thing by your hand. And slowly you move your hands back to the ground. Inhalation begins when you bring your palms together and keep gassho.
At the end of inhalation you make sure that you really stand up, not shouldering the past, not leaning to something, some idea, or leaning to the future. You stand up straight.