To continue with my Matrix references because there’s
honestly no better way to describe this, you know the part where Neo is in the
all white room with Morpheus for the first time. Where he states that famous
line… “I know Kung Fu” and then the two break into some serious sparring? Osho
International was pretty much that, I mean, the Wachowski brothers must have
gotten some of their inspiration here- to say the least. First off, most of the meditations are
held in a massive football field sized, marble pyramid that fits up to 5,000
people equipped with a cutting edge surround sound Bose stereo system. A moat
of crystal clear water presents itself in front of the pyramid with a single
strip up the middle for everyone to glide up as if walking on water (with our
long dresses it definitely looks more like we’re gliding around this place than
a boring old walk). (Ha). The second you enter it’s as if something stripes you
of your density and you get to actually experience energy. Sure we can talk
about energy all day and can feel it here and there, but inside this pyramid
you become the energy you already are. It’s like you transform into a cell
within your own body and finally get to experience what it means when people
say: everything is energy. Your vibration truly becomes tangible. There are
pyramids all over the complex and everything has a purpose from the power of
using pyramids to the healing stones used to make them to the reason why we’re
all in maroon dresses.
Ninety percent of the time everyone is dancing. Every meditation has at
least 15 minutes of ecstatic dance included in it. Sometimes you’re dancing to
amazing trance, other times it’s to some serious drum and base, and at other times it
could be to some angelic violins. Again, everything serves a purpose and every
sound projected out is set to a certain frequency and holds a certain power to
help you release negativity as you dance your way back to your child-like
nature. I swear I danced more at Osho than I did at the Coachella Music
Festival two years ago and I was dead sober. Outside
they have this amazing white marbled dance floor that’s about half the size of
a football field, known as the Buddha Grove. Everyday at noon a deejay would
spin all sorts of unbelievable music from all over the world and people
couldn’t resist but be drawn to the dance floor. The exotic trees created a
lush canopy over the large stage as everyone melts into their own little, tiny
dancer for the hour. It’s incredible
to watch the awkward, enormously tall, Dutch man move his hips to the beat of
his own drum next to the small Japanese professional dancer who flows to
rhythm like silk in the wind. Then there’s the young, wild-child with the dirty
feet, head banging out of sync next to the exotically beautiful Indian elder,
whom shifts with defined poise. Behind her is the dreadlocked Euro-gypsy spirit
weaving (it’s a form of dance) with the picture perfect American ballerina, and
it’s all just proof we can re-learn how to be completely free through the power
of our own movement. Dance is
meditation.
Now, when I dive into the spiritually
weird you have to understand I don’t just stand on the sidelines, point fingers,
and laugh. Sure there’s definitely a lot of laughing and “this is bat shit
crazy” moments, but I’m also here to see if this actually works, to learn, and
of course to report back. Spread the word on insanity’s perhaps sanity. Therefore, I
went for it! Over the course of seven days I participated in anywhere from 4-6
hours of meditation per day. Four out of the seven days I woke up at 5am to walk half a mile, in the
blissful silence of darkness, by myself to the ashram for the 6am Dynamic
Meditation. This is Osho’s most powerful meditation and it’s so intense! Everyone has a
blindfold on because the experience is meant to be an individual one. Yes, you
are with other energies but you want to keep your eyes closed the whole time
because it’s about going in, external circumstances are irrelevant. This weird
frequency, high-pitched noise, blasts out and the first 15 minutes is spent
erratically breathing. The idea is to not make sense with your breath, to mix
it up and disrupt its flow as much as possible. To confuse its linear
pattern. You breathe hard, fast,
intense. Kinda like as if all of India was just a breath- fast, chaotic, no sense
of order yet continues to flow with such life. Next, you SCREAM! You scream at
the tops of your lungs, hit the floor, kick and punch the air, cry, howl, laugh... Whatever you feel like you need to do to get it out! 15 minutes of completely
losing your shit! And it’s just that… lose all that shit… all that negativity
that harbors inside of you. The insecurities, the hurt feelings, the sense of
loss, the anger, the fear that resides deep in your cellular memory- SHOUT IT
OUT! Release it with all your might. It’s called “consciously going mad”. Just
go for it, everyone else is and no one cares. They’re not even there, remember?
You’re alone and it’s a freaking soundproof pyramid! After that, the next 15
minutes is spent jumping up and down with your arms over your head shouting the
mantra hoo! There’s so much that goes into this part. Chanting hoo is
associated with Taoism, Sufism… it’s a specific vibration that resonates with
your earth center allowing you to activate your core. Opening your mind and
body up to the possibility of receiving new possibilities. Once you have hoo-ed it out you then stand completely
still for 15 minutes and just receive and feel the energy coursing through your
body. Let the awareness and messages come. After the
stillness is the celebration! The dance! 15 minutes of free movement, just
divinely dancing with yourself in whatever way feels necessary. At this point I
couldn’t help but sneak a peak to see a grown man twirling around next to a
woman sitting on the ground clapping next to another woman air guitaring next to… me, rolling on the ground.
Haha, it’s what I wanted to do.
Good thing we were all in red and not white or I would’ve questioned
the idea of whether or not I had been committed to the loony bin and didn’t
realize it.
This meditation was then followed by either Zen Archery class or Tai Chi
in the Buddha Grove to help calm you back down, bring you back to the reality
we must live in. Then the rest of the day was filled with meditations such as
gong and laughing class, chakra breathing, silent sitting, Sufi whirling, and
gibberish! The concept behind the gibberish meditation is to say everything
you’ve always wanted to say but could never say, but say it in another
language. This then confuses the
mind/ego and allows you to wipe it clean, to disrupt its normal way of
processing in order to allow room for clarity to come through in new ways. It’s
said that if you’re having trouble sleeping just do even a minute of gibberish
and you’ll be able to calm your mind to rest.
So where do I
stand with all this? Well, I’m not devoting my life to Osho or calling him my
guru or anything like that, but this process is no joke. I had so much come up
for me especially over the 4 days of Dynamic Meditation. This was the part of
the journey I was definitely seeking, the higher meditation techniques. Going
deeper within the mind. I went
through a lot of layers like getting myself to the point where I actually heard
myself cry the way I used to as an infant, as we all do as infants. I
screamed so much that certain ones took me back to past lives where I was
tortured and killed during the Middle Ages. At my very first Dynamic the thing
that came up the most for me was Catholicism. Being a “recovering Catholic,” as
Jillian likes to call it, (haha) I had so much emotion arise about how the Church
forbids its Priests to truly experience love by convincing us that we have a
God who tells us NO we can’t do certain things if we truly believe in him. It’s
a religion and by definition that means- comes with limits… It only allows the soul to go so far when there’s so much more personal power we have in the ability
to consciously co-create our lives with God. I studied Catholicism from
Kindergarten all the way through college where I was a Religious Studies minor
with a strong focus in Catholicism. Therefore, I'd like to think I can speak from an educated standpoint on
this feeling and no, this doesn’t happen to everyone, these meditations are not
secretly making you go against the Church or anything idiotic like that. It’s an
experience that is solely personal to me and my journey but it was a strong one.
Again, it’s about finding that inner child and realizing there’s true wisdom
inherent in all of us as children, but it’s through the clutter of knowledge
that we lose sight of that wisdom as we become adults. However, it’s through
meditations like these that we get to play again and find our own remembrance.
A
more pleasant moment was at the end of dancing one of the days, I opened my
eyes and saw this beautiful, older Indian woman with a single stripe of gray in
her hair, across the room. For whatever reason I absolutely had to hug her. It was weird because I was actually
thinking- am I really walking over to
this woman right now? Am I just going to hug her? What the hell am I doing?
But I couldn’t stop the feeling, it was too strong. Halfway through the walk over she made
eyes with me and knew what was happening. We hugged for a genuine amount of
time and I felt as if she were a mother to me. I had so much love flowing
through me that every pore was tingling. I was in pure ecstasy. We connected
eyes, holding each other with a stare, and then moved our hands to our hearts,
bowed, and went our separate ways. No worldly exchanges needed- my name is, I’m from, I
do this… just pure human connectedness. Afterwards I walked to my phone and wrote
the following: Once you open yourself up to the possibility that anything is
possible you can begin to play with the idea that you might in fact know the
very stranger that appears before
you. That you’ve traveled with their spirit before on this earth as we are spiritual beings having a human experience not human beings
having a spiritual experience. You can hug them for an extended amount of
time, exchanging no words or names, and know in that moment you are fulfilling your
spirit with a reconnection- a remembrance- as you dance your dance this time
around and they dance theirs, separate of each other. Does this all sound mad to you? Well that’s exactly
the point, going so far against the mainstream that the “stream” no longer exists
for consciousness has now become a river and the point is to get to the ocean.
Sat Nam.
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