Meditation summary

Osho meditations first gained popularity in the 1970s, and it’s not hard to see why. Its practitioners danced, played music, and seemed exuberantly happy and sexually liberated. It was quite unlike other forms of meditation, which tended to involve less movement and more solitude. 

If you’re intrigued by the idea of a dynamic form of meditation, then it’s time to have a look at Osho meditation techniques and the unique approach they offer. In these blinks, you’ll find tips and techniques to get you started, as well as a bold and unique approach to meditation that stands out from the rest.

In these blinks, you’ll learn

• how dancing and jumping can prime a person for increased awareness;
• how to take control of the ego and become the watcher; and
• how meditating on light and darkness can soothe the mind.

The next question is: How do you meditate? The truth is, there are countless techniques that help you meditate, but techniques aren’t meditation. In fact, doing isn’t meditation. Meditation is just being there, and not doing anything – no effort, no intention.

So, when you begin a meditation practice, you’ll undoubtedly be full of effort. You’ll be trying to do something. But with time and increased awareness, you’ll eventually find yourself in that space of not doing. You’ll become aware that you’re not doing anything and are simply being. That’s how you meditate.

The key message here is: To start your meditation journey, find the right spot and leave your concerns behind.

You should start by setting aside one hour for meditation. It might seem like a lot, but is one hour out of 24 really too much to ask?

Next, find a space for meditation. Ideally, you can find a spot in nature, away from the noises of modern life. If you can find a tree to sit under, that would be perfect. As Osho says, trees are always meditating.

Of course, for some of us, this is impossible. If a quiet spot in nature is out of the question, then find a quiet place indoors that you can devote to meditation. It’s best if this area is only used for meditation; the residual energy of other activities can linger in places and this energy can end up interfering.

Your meditation area should be treated as a sacred space. So before you enter it, take off your shoes. This can be a step in itself. When you take off your shoes, also remove your fixations, your desires and occupations. And with your shoes, leave the other 23 hours behind.

Chances are, immediately sitting down with a clear and calm mind won’t be so easy. This is why the techniques of Osho meditation often begin with action – or catharsis. You might be angry, sad, or anxious. So why not begin by shouting, dancing, or shaking that anger loose? In the following blinks, we’ll look at some fundamental techniques and see how movement and catharsis can help prepare the mind and body for meditation.

Meditation, awareness, being the watcher – this is all about passivity. But how can you be passive when your mind is swarming with thoughts, emotions, anger, and desires? You can’t. You can’t switch them off like a light bulb. So, these hindrances must be thrown away. Once that happens, meditation can become effortless and the world of the Tao and the Dharma can reveal itself.

The key message here is: The Osho Dynamic Meditation uses movement and mantra to promote catharsis.

There’s a series of meditations known as the Osho Active Meditations. In this blink, we’ll look at one of them, and in the next we’ll look at three more.

The first is known as Osho Dynamic Meditation. It lasts an hour and is broken up into five stages. The first three stages are ten minutes long, and the last two are 15 minutes each.

The first stage is chaotic breathing. Chaotic breathing and movement are useful tools to build up energy and raise awareness in your body. Breath hard and fast through the nose. Move around in a natural and instinctive way. Don’t think about it, and don’t do it rhythmically. Breath and move chaotically. Feel the energy building up and don’t let go of it.

After ten minutes, begin the second stage by finally letting go of all that energy you were building up in the first stage. Let it erupt! Laugh, scream, cry, shake, dance, jump – do whatever comes naturally. Again, don’t let your mind get in the way – just go with it. This is catharsis.

After another ten minutes of letting loose, the third stage begins. This involves jumping up and down with your arms raised for ten minutes. Every time your feet hit the ground, you shout the mantra: “Hoo! . . . Hoo! . . . Hoo! . . .” This is an unburdening and it’s designed to fully exhaust you and prepare you for the next step.

At the start of the fourth stage, you freeze your position completely. However you may be positioned, don’t move. Don’t blink. Don’t cough. If you feel an itch, don’t scratch, just observe it. Be a witness to your body and mind. Let all the energy generated from the first two steps move upward. No movement, no desire, just silent witnessing for 15 minutes.

The final stage is celebration. Dance, play music, express your joy and gratitude, and carry that positivity with you for the rest of the day.

The next meditation is the Osho Kundalini Meditation, and it’s considered the sister meditation to the Dynamic one from the previous blink. In this meditation, there are four stages and each one is 15 minutes long.

In the Kundalini Meditation, the first stage is all about shaking and letting go. Shake every part of your body and allow your energy to move up from your feet. The second stage is dance. Dance freely, move as your body insists, don’t let your mind interfere. In the third stage: be still. Either sit or stand, but be completely still, close your eyes, and witness what is happening both within and outside your body. Finally, in the fourth stage, keep your eyes closed and lie down.

The key message here is: There are a number of cathartic techniques in the Osho Active Meditations.

Many people find the dancing and free movement of the body to be a great way to get energy moving and release tensions and emotions that can stand in the way of meditation and awareness. In fact, dancing itself becomes the meditation in the Osho Nataraj Meditation.

This technique is one-hour long, and the first stage is 40 minutes of dance. You close your eyes and dance with abandon. No controlled movements, just free-flowing, playful dance. No awareness needed here, just be in the moment.

The second stage is 20 minutes long. With your eyes still closed, lie down and be completely still and silent. This is followed by five minutes of celebration and expressing your joy.

Finally, there’s the Osho Nadabrahma Meditation. Traditionally this is done early in the morning, but it can be an effective meditation at any time. It’s recommended, though, that you have an empty stomach.

The first stage lasts 30 minutes and you begin in a comfortable position, with your eyes closed. Then start humming loud enough for others to hear. Let this hum create a vibration that ripples and bounces through your body as if you were hollow. Let the hum reproduce itself effortlessly. And let yourself become the listener.

The second stage is two seven-and-a-half-minute sections. In the first part, you place your hands, palms up, at your navel, and then move them outward in a circular motion. Give your energy to the world. In the second part, have the palms of your hands facing downward and reverse the circle, so that they meet at your navel. Feel the energy from the universe being taken in.

Then, for 15 minutes, be completely still and quiet.

Anything can be meditation. Jogging and swimming can be powerful meditations as long as you’re not performing these activities on autopilot. If you’re just doing these things automatically, it’s not meditation. You need to be aware of each movement.

The author even helped a man quit smoking by turning the act of smoking itself into a meditation. Every movement was drawn out. Taking the cigarette out of the pack, tapping the end of the cigarette, lighting it, breathing in the smoke, exhaling. The meditation de-automatized smoking. After three months, the habit was broken.

This is the secret. By bringing awareness and no longer doing or thinking automatically, we can break the bad habits we’ve accumulated over the years.

The key message here is: You can bring meditation into every part of your waking day.

If you’ve heard about meditation, there’s a good chance you’ve heard about paying attention to breathing. Breathing can be a profound bridge into the benefits of meditation. There’s a technique called vipassana and it’s perhaps the most useful meditation there is since it is, as the author puts it, “pure essence.”

Vipassana is all about awareness. Be aware of how you move your body. How you bring food to your mouth when you eat. How you walk. Be aware of your emotions, feelings, and moods when they arise. Don’t judge, don’t interfere, just be aware.

And then, be aware of your breathing. When you breathe in and out, do you move your chest or your belly? In most Western cultures, men breathe with their chest. This is because they’ve been led to believe that a broad chest is good, whereas a protruding belly is bad. But in Japan, for instance, this isn’t the case. If you look at the Japanese Buddha, the chest is small, the belly is big, and he’s happy. No matter who you are, when you’re relaxed and about to fall asleep you breathe with your belly, not your chest. Try it and pay attention. Does it feel more natural and more relaxed?

Another technique you can use at any time is one that both raises awareness and releases tension. Basically, you go systematically through every part of your body, from your face to your feet. Each step, you tense up the muscles for a few seconds, reach a peak, and then relax the muscles. We can carry tension all day without being aware. This simple exercise helps break that habit.

We live in a world of polarities – happiness and sadness, darkness and light. There’s no avoiding it. Meditation raises the awareness of these extremities as well as their temporal nature and direct relationship to one another. You can’t have darkness without light, or happiness without sadness. But, happiness and sadness don’t last. None of these things are eternal. Only watching is eternal. Only being is eternal.

The key message here is: Meditating in extreme light and darkness, as well as simply listening, can help you become a watcher.

Both light and darkness can teach us a great deal. Try this: Lie down under a bright, cloudless sky. Stare up at the vast blueness. Don’t blink. If you can, just let your eyes water, but don’t blink. And don’t think about the sky, just be aware. Feel the barrier dissolve. Be the sky.

You can do this with darkness as well. Ideally, do this in real darkness, far away from city lights. Do it in the kind of darkness you’d find on a mountain on a starless night. Stare into the darkness. This is easier than it sounds. It can feel disorienting and strange to have your eyes open with nothing to focus on. But keep staring into the darkness. Let your eyes water and feel uncomfortable. You’ll begin to feel the separation dissolve. You’ll become one with the darkness.

This is good. We think of light as positive and darkness as negative, but, in the universe, darkness is a time of rejuvenation. Time in the light is full of effort. When darkness falls, we can regain our strength.

Even the simple acts of sitting and listening can change the way we live. These acts are fundamental Zen practices. There’s no benefit to this if you just sit for an hour today. But if you keep doing it, day after day, for a few months, you’ll be on your way to godliness, since sitting without doing anything is one of the hardest things in the world to do.

But try it. This exercise can work no matter where you’re sitting, but the best thing to do would be to sit without any visual distractions. For simplicity's sake, you can sit facing a plain white wall that’s only an arm’s length away. Do this for 30 minutes, and remain alert and aware while never focusing on anything in particular.

There's nothing complicated about the techniques in Osho meditation. But this can be a problem for some. The mind wants complicated things. It wants to concentrate on a problem, to find a solution. It doesn’t believe in easy answers. Sitting in front of a wall? Dancing? How can this help?

The mind is an amazing, wonderful thing, but it can also get in the way of enlightenment. The ego is powered by the mind. The ego tells us that we should be productive, make money, gain status, not learn how to do nothing. Doing nothing is completely antithetical to everything we’ve been taught by society, which is why the ego and the chattering mind are the two biggest obstacles to meditation.

The key message here is: Be aware of the obstacles to meditation.

Meditation is filled with contradictions. This is because every truth has a paradox within it. Essentially, meditation is about being passive but gaining control. Right now, your mind is in control. Your ego is in control. Your ambitions, your obsessions, your moods, thoughts and feelings – these are controlling your life, and they’re creating tensions and standing in the way of peace, relaxation, and happiness.

It doesn’t make sense to say that you can gain control by being passive, by being a watcher, but that’s exactly how meditation works. By being aware and being the watcher, you learn to become unmoved by anger and temporary moods. You become the master who’s in control of your life.

Even if you recognize the importance of dissolving the ego and starting a meditation practice, you might not know what to do about the chattering mind. Every time you try to sit and be aware, you’re bombarded by constant thoughts, emotions, moods, and frustrations. This is natural and you can take comfort in knowing that for most people it just takes time. Many Zen practitioners will sit for months and even years before they believe they’ve learned to simply listen properly.

It might help to think of meditation in the same way you’d think about love. There are no words for love. When you truly fall in love with someone, how could you begin to describe it? Meditation is precisely like that because the watcher has no words. The watcher doesn’t judge or define things; the watcher just is. Once words come into play, you’re no longer watching, you’re interfering. So think in terms of love. You can even visualize yourself without a head, and with your heart opening up and receiving an abundance of light. This is where meditation resides.