Screaming the Way to Stillness: Osho Dynamic Meditation

My next stop on my quest to find stillness: screaming my head off for ten minutes on the island of Koh Phangan

It’s been a while since I’ve posted a travel blog, and I’ll be adjusting the format slightly to focus on sharing shorter posts about specific stories or singular adventures, so things might not be so chronological or comprehensive from here on out. But I have indeed been traveling steadily for the past two months, and I’m picking up where I left off in August. After leaving my mental health retreat and taking the night train down from Chiang Mai to Bangkok, I then traveled to the island of Koh Phangan. Here’s what happened next…

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I am screaming my head off in a darkened room.

Around me, everyone else is doing the same thing. I throw a pillow on the ground; I pound my fist into it. I wail. I squeeze my eyes beneath my blindfold. Music blasts from huge speakers at top volume. 

Then all of a sudden the music stops, and methodically we all begin to jump up and down. We do this for ten minutes without stopping. Then a voice says “FREEZE,” and we do.

It is just after seven in the morning.

Let me back up a bit.

I arrived on the island of Koh Phangan, Thailand fresh off a mental health retreat and a long train ride, and when I arrived at my cabin by the sea, I was all ready to continue the spiritual wavelength I was on. Somehow, though, I had failed to realize that it was the night of the Half Moon Party, a legendary celebration that, while not as grandiose as the Full Moon Party, is perhaps the island’s largest attraction.

I thought about heading over there, but eventually decided against it. I had begun a new life at New Paradigm, after all, and a sticky wild party on the beach didn’t feel aligned with that — and also, I just didn’t feel like going alone. I decided to stick to my pattern of waking up early. 

The next morning, I awoke refreshed and took a long walk across the beach, wading through the shallow waters, which glowed an ethereal blue. At one point I saw a man wearing flowing blue robes standing many meters out into the waves. He looked like Jesus, aloft on the currents. Later, when I looked again, he was gone.

That day I headed over to Samma Karuna, which I’d chosen to visit mostly because it offered Osho Dynamic Meditation. After my difficult recent Vipassana experience, I was determined to find a type of meditation that worked better for me and my perfectly unique mind, and I thought Osho’s style might help. I wanted a form of meditation that made the seemingly endless stream of emotions and thoughts inside me easier to handle, and Osho Dynamic Meditation — which involves screaming, dancing, and standing still with your arms above your head — seemed to fit the bill.

The Indian guru Osho invented this practice as a way to make meditation more accessible to Westerners, who he believed needed to release thoughts and errant energies before being able to actually settle into stillness. My aunt, who had stayed at Osho’s ashram in India back in the 1990s, recommended Osho meditation to me, and when I saw it was being practiced on a Thai island, I leapt at the chance to visit.

I’d actually first encountered Osho in the mind-blowing documentary Wild Wild Country, which describes Osho’s move to the American west. He brought his commune, his red-clad devotees, and their free-love ethos with him, which didn’t jive with the locals.

Unfortunately, some of Osho’s leadership got out of hand, and things went out of control when his second in command, Ma Anad Sheela, attempted to poison locals in order to win an election. Eventually Osho was at the center of an FBI manhunt. He also apparently owned over 90 Rolls Royces.

So Osho was imperfect. From my understanding, most of the really messed up stuff was the product of his followers, though he definitely had flaws of his own.

But I really just wanted to finally understand this whole meditation thing. 

So the next morning I showed up at the center’s one air-conditioned hall at seven in the morning. The teacher, however, did not. We all waited. And waited.

I was about to leave, but then someone told me he was coming — long story short, he did not show up, and another classmate explained the technique to me even though it was just his second time practicing it.

For some reason, it really bothered me that this classmate had just jumped on the chance to teach a technique he barely knew about and therefore might teach incorrectly. I normally would have shut down this feeling, but I was trying to be more open to my own emotions.

The first thing you do during Osho meditation is breathe. Heavily. For ten straight minutes. I’d eaten nothing beforehand, and I felt a bit faint and light-headed as we headed into the practice. The classmate who had appointed himself as our de facto teacher kept yelling at me to breathe harder and faster. 

I thought about something a teacher had said during a class I’d taken the day before. Boundaries are love, he said. Because if you have no boundaries, then you let everything in — but with boundaries, you are letting in only what you really want, and that is real, conscious love.

So I put my hands up in front of myself in the sign we’d learned for stop, and he went away. This felt like a big step for me somehow. A step towards lovingly taking back my own space. 

The second thing you do during Osho Dynamic Meditation is scream, and I was about ready to scream at that point. My voice sounded faint in my throat, but soon I was hollering along to the blasting music, punching my pillow, stomping on the floor. It was exhausting. And cathartic. And probably exactly what I and everyone else in the room needed.

After that, the music changed and we all put our hands up and jumped up and down, breathing out HA as our feet hit the ground. This was the most exhausting part for me. It actually hurt quite a lot, and I found myself putting my arms down over and over. I was done with the whole meditation-as-extreme-suffering thing, after all; hadn’t I come here to escape that mentality?

Then we were supposed to hold our arms above our heads for ten minutes, and the same thing happened. I put them down. Put them up. My arms ached. Pain spiderwebbed across my skin. It came. It went. I sweated and sighed.

Then, all at once, it was over.

During the last ten minutes, we were allowed to dance, and I happily did a ten-minute joyful groove. All my anger and pain disappeared, gone to the place all sensations eventually go — into the past, which, of course, is not real.

The next day, the real teacher was present. He didn’t correct me at all or yell at me during the meditation. But he did give us a much fuller explanation of the purpose of the technique.

It is designed to clear our minds, he said, and suffering is part of that. By holding our arms up and observing the pain, we learn to detach from the sensation. Then, once we’ve gone through the ringer of the first half hour, we can reach actual stillness and silence during the ten minutes where we stand with our arms aloft, unmoving.

This is actually quite similar to the mentality behind Vipassana: observe all suffering with equanimity, know yourself as the observer, don’t be attached to any sensation, understand everything is impermanent.

I did Osho meditation four times during my six-day retreat, and each time, it became significantly easier. By the last one, I was actually able to hold my arms above my head without too much of a problem. And though my mind never really stopped whirling around at warp speed, I definitely found myself feeling fantastic after every session and for the rest of the day.

Still, I don’t think I’ll become an Osho meditation devotee. I am honestly still searching for the stillness that meditation’s myriad advocates are constantly valorizing. Of course, all meditation teachers would say that searching for stillness is antithetical, and you will only find stillness once you stop looking for it and simply settle into the infinite space of where you are.

I do think Osho’s technique reminds us that sometimes we must involve our bodies in meditation. And that we can alter meditation in order to fit the needs of our specific mindsets and worldviews. And that silent meditation is not the only way to get to that elusive space of silence and clarity that meditation can lead us to.

Meditation, I have learned on this long and sweeping search for stillness, can be anything. It can be walking through the woods. It can be writing and creating. It is anything as long as it is done mindfully. And it should always be rooted in self-compassion, which is really a portal to pure selflessness.

There is not one right way to do anything. You can get to the same place through screaming, dancing, or sitting in silence. There is no one-size-fits-all path.

No guru has all the answers. No meditation technique is right for everyone. We are all just dancing, screaming, jumping, shaking, and laughing our way through this strange and exhilarating ride called life.

To be continued…