What is Active Meditation?

If you’ve tried meditating before, or I should really say, if you’ve tried seated, silent meditation before, you might have noticed that sometimes your mind is racing a thousand miles a minute and there’s no way in hell you’re going to find a gap of silence. This how many people try meditation, walk away from meditation, and never look back…

So years ago, around the 1980’s, a wonderful, awakened teacher known as Osho Rajneesh, AKA Osho, realized that the meditation techniques available in the East did not work so well for the people of the West. He understood that our fast paced, busy, multitasking culture resulted in buzzing minds. And that these distracted minds needed help “coming down” before the possibility of sitting down and finding inner peace could be considered.

So Osho went to work finding ways to help us westerners meditate. Pulling from various practices and through his own innovation, he developed over 200 meditations that integrated active components. Most of the meditations are about an hour long and often are split into various stages that have specific instructions. The meditations vary in intent and activity, while simultaneously focusing on the need to distract the mind in order to be able to find the place of letting go.

From gibberish, to jumping up and down, to shaking, to dancing, I tend to think of Osho’s meditations as psychotherapeutic. They offer catharsis and release, a place to go “consciously crazy,” as he would say. We don’t realize how much we are holding inside our bodies and mind until we finally have an opportunity to release, finally giving us a sense of lightness and ease.

May you find lightness and ease.

Here is Osho talking about active meditation.

Love,
Gavrila Nikhila