Article - Feeling Alive with Osho Pulsation
by Aneesha Dillon
Once, when I was working as a Pulsation therapist in Denmark, a woman I will call Jane came to me complaining of chronic stomach pains. She already had had several medical check - ups and it was clear that there was nothing physically wrong with her. Through our initial conversation it became apparent that her pains had nothing to do with her digestive system but were due to tensions in her diaphragm and belly muscles. She also had fluctuating pain in the back, the area around her heart, and other places in her body. To explore what might be the emotional content of these pains, we agreed to do a series of ten individual Pulsation sessions and two Pulsation weekend groups over a three - month period, during which time she would participate in daily active meditations.
Osho Pulsation is a method of psychotherapy which has evolved from two important streams in the human potential movement - a group which made a radical breakaway from conventional psychotherapy in the late '60s. One stream is neo-Reichian breathing and body work, as taught at the Radix Institute in Southern California. The other is from the Osho vision. The breathing and bodywork that constitutes Pulsation is rooted in the deep emotional release process developed by Wilhelm Reich, the Austrian-born psychoanalyst and one time student of Freud. His pioneering experiments with life energy and human sexuality have influenced many of today's humanistic psychotherapies.
The common thread connecting Osho and Reich is their abounding love of life combined with groundbreaking discoveries about how to free the imprisoned human spirit. They insist on the rights of all beings, young and old, to live according to the body's natural instincts. They honor and celebrate our human longing to love and be loved. Both Reich and Osho recognize that the denial of our sexual and psychological needs lies at the root not only of our neuroses, but also the more serious mental illnesses. The disowning of what is natural has caused a widespread crippling of human nature.
We are all psychologically, socially, and religiously conditioned. Most people are not even aware of it. Parents and family, the schools and churches, all force children to live and think and feel in a restricted way, far below their potential. We learn that boys are not supposed to cry and girls should not be angry. We are told that everyone must hide their sexual and loving feelings - or better yet, not even have any. We do what they want because we need their love and approval to survive: we strike a bargain for that approval. In order to be good, we become emotionally dishonest and cut off from our real feelings - in other words, phony. We grow up fearful, guilty, angry, and depressed, twisting ourselves out of shape to fit into someone else's ideas of who we should be. But trying to fit into someone else's mold creates tension and ultimately rage. Who wants to be forced into a fixed shape against their will?
As a result we become sick, both physically and psychologically. But what exactly is repression? Many of us have an inkling of it, but few of us have a grasp of how it relates to our own lives.
Repression requires us to renounce what is vibrant inside us, and to become dull both energetically and emotionally. Our breathing becomes shallow. We swallow our tears, we hold back our anger, we even suppress joy and laughter. We force our unexpressed feelings into the unconscious where they remain buried alive, festering secretly, like suppurating wounds.
Repressions manifest as rigid character attitudes such as the man who becomes extremely anxious if he does not live his routine life precisely by the clock; or the woman who, in spite of her longing to share love with someone, rejects men out of an old unconscious fear of her own father's rejection of her. But they also manifest as muscular tension in the body, a tension that is maintained by the constant effort to keep at bay whatever is hidden in the unconscious. This brings us back to Jane whose chronic tensions in her diaphragm and belly were manifesting as severe pain. We both guessed they might be due to deeply buried defenses locked into her system that dated back to an early age when nothing less than her survival was at stake. But how to unlock them again? Pulsation is the technique we use. It helps us to feel these tensions and recognize them for what they are - repressions blocked in the physical body. The most basic technique of Osho Pulsation is the use of breath. Deep breathing gives people direct experiences of their own life energy. This is known in the East as prana orChi - or by Reich, orgone - powerful experiences which can open inner doors to strong emotions and offer moments of acute clarity. It also generates intense feelings of pleasure.
Also fundamental to Pulsation are Bio-energetic exercises, body and energy oriented exercises which begin to loosen up what Reich came to call the muscular armoring. With deep breathing the armoring intensifies, and the therapist's direct manual work on the muscles themselves - a kind of deep massage - combined with the client's uninhibited sounds and body movements, releases old tensions and blocked emotions.
"One of the greatest revolutionary thinkers of this age stumbled upon this armor," Osho has said about Wilhelm Reich. "Reich found that every mental disorder has a parallel part to it in the body. In the body something has gone solid and dead, and unless that part of the body is released and that block dispersed; unless your body energy again becomes a flow, it will be impossible to make your spirit free. The armor must be thrown away; the imprisonment must be broken." (from:Osho:"When the Shoe Fits")
My work with Jane followed a process of gradually releasing the muscular armor. We began with body-loosening and breathing exercises to help her mobilize a lot of stuck energy held inside her. As the weeks went by, layers of fear were released, especially from her eyes, jaw, and throat. This fear centered around an essential inability to be herself - to show herself, not only her anger and power, but especially her wild side, her sensuality. She had always felt judged and condemned by her parents and had never dared allow her true spiritedness to assert itself.
This fear gradually gave way to rage which exploded one day in a spontaneous, life affirming temper tantrum that had no doubt been lodged there inside her unconscious for years. After this session the pains and tensions seemed to ease, and she began to feel more and more alive and vibrant in her daily life.
After this came layers of pain and crying - a heartbreaking sadness which, when she arrived at the bottom of it, suddenly turned into longing: a reaching out and finally a feeling of receiving the love and acceptance that she never had. At the end of this session, Jane looked at me through shining eyes; unprotected, trusting, deeply in touch with her own being. It felt as if we had traveled together through layer after layer of her self-protection, like the peeling of an onion. She ended up at her pure and empty center, deeply relaxed and silent, yet pulsating with life. Pulsation had helped Jane to reconnect with her natural sense of her energetic well-being.
The Osho meditations are the methods for the work of which he speaks. Although they have been around for thirty-odd years already, these meditations are still unique. They are active, cathartic meditations designed for the modern man or woman who finds it difficult to sit silently and let the body and mind relax. People are too tense and stressed out, locked into their thoughts. Of these, the Dynamic and Kundalini Meditations, and others which use vigorous body movement, give us the chance to throw out all the physical tensions and mental noise which prevent relaxation and inner harmony. These meditations are an integral part of Osho Pulsation.
Osho Pulsation affirms the life of the body and our human longing to love and be loved. The work is to remove whatever has come to stand in the way of the positive, spontaneous flow of life energy to release the natural joy and celebration it brings. By giving people space to express the negative feelings that have accumulated through their life, the charge of these painful emotions can be released and dissipated as pure energy. What is left behind is a deep relaxation, a quieter mind, and a heart that is more open to love. The feelings that were rejected and disowned out of guilt and shame in early childhood are now accepted and embraced. What was out of balance finds inner equilibrium; what was fragmented becomes harmonious and whole again.
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Once, when I was working as a Pulsation therapist in Denmark, a woman I will call Jane came to me complaining of chronic stomach pains. She already had had several medical check - ups and it was clear that there was nothing physically wrong with her. Through our initial conversation it became apparent that her pains had nothing to do with her digestive system but were due to tensions in her diaphragm and belly muscles. She also had fluctuating pain in the back, the area around her heart, and other places in her body. To explore what might be the emotional content of these pains, we agreed to do a series of ten individual Pulsation sessions and two Pulsation weekend groups over a three - month period, during which time she would participate in daily active meditations.
Osho Pulsation is a method of psychotherapy which has evolved from two important streams in the human potential movement - a group which made a radical breakaway from conventional psychotherapy in the late '60s. One stream is neo-Reichian breathing and body work, as taught at the Radix Institute in Southern California. The other is from the Osho vision. The breathing and bodywork that constitutes Pulsation is rooted in the deep emotional release process developed by Wilhelm Reich, the Austrian-born psychoanalyst and one time student of Freud. His pioneering experiments with life energy and human sexuality have influenced many of today's humanistic psychotherapies.
The common thread connecting Osho and Reich is their abounding love of life combined with groundbreaking discoveries about how to free the imprisoned human spirit. They insist on the rights of all beings, young and old, to live according to the body's natural instincts. They honor and celebrate our human longing to love and be loved. Both Reich and Osho recognize that the denial of our sexual and psychological needs lies at the root not only of our neuroses, but also the more serious mental illnesses. The disowning of what is natural has caused a widespread crippling of human nature.
We are all psychologically, socially, and religiously conditioned. Most people are not even aware of it. Parents and family, the schools and churches, all force children to live and think and feel in a restricted way, far below their potential. We learn that boys are not supposed to cry and girls should not be angry. We are told that everyone must hide their sexual and loving feelings - or better yet, not even have any. We do what they want because we need their love and approval to survive: we strike a bargain for that approval. In order to be good, we become emotionally dishonest and cut off from our real feelings - in other words, phony. We grow up fearful, guilty, angry, and depressed, twisting ourselves out of shape to fit into someone else's ideas of who we should be. But trying to fit into someone else's mold creates tension and ultimately rage. Who wants to be forced into a fixed shape against their will?
As a result we become sick, both physically and psychologically. But what exactly is repression? Many of us have an inkling of it, but few of us have a grasp of how it relates to our own lives.
Repression requires us to renounce what is vibrant inside us, and to become dull both energetically and emotionally. Our breathing becomes shallow. We swallow our tears, we hold back our anger, we even suppress joy and laughter. We force our unexpressed feelings into the unconscious where they remain buried alive, festering secretly, like suppurating wounds.
Repressions manifest as rigid character attitudes such as the man who becomes extremely anxious if he does not live his routine life precisely by the clock; or the woman who, in spite of her longing to share love with someone, rejects men out of an old unconscious fear of her own father's rejection of her. But they also manifest as muscular tension in the body, a tension that is maintained by the constant effort to keep at bay whatever is hidden in the unconscious. This brings us back to Jane whose chronic tensions in her diaphragm and belly were manifesting as severe pain. We both guessed they might be due to deeply buried defenses locked into her system that dated back to an early age when nothing less than her survival was at stake. But how to unlock them again? Pulsation is the technique we use. It helps us to feel these tensions and recognize them for what they are - repressions blocked in the physical body. The most basic technique of Osho Pulsation is the use of breath. Deep breathing gives people direct experiences of their own life energy. This is known in the East as prana orChi - or by Reich, orgone - powerful experiences which can open inner doors to strong emotions and offer moments of acute clarity. It also generates intense feelings of pleasure.
Also fundamental to Pulsation are Bio-energetic exercises, body and energy oriented exercises which begin to loosen up what Reich came to call the muscular armoring. With deep breathing the armoring intensifies, and the therapist's direct manual work on the muscles themselves - a kind of deep massage - combined with the client's uninhibited sounds and body movements, releases old tensions and blocked emotions.
"One of the greatest revolutionary thinkers of this age stumbled upon this armor," Osho has said about Wilhelm Reich. "Reich found that every mental disorder has a parallel part to it in the body. In the body something has gone solid and dead, and unless that part of the body is released and that block dispersed; unless your body energy again becomes a flow, it will be impossible to make your spirit free. The armor must be thrown away; the imprisonment must be broken." (from:Osho:"When the Shoe Fits")
My work with Jane followed a process of gradually releasing the muscular armor. We began with body-loosening and breathing exercises to help her mobilize a lot of stuck energy held inside her. As the weeks went by, layers of fear were released, especially from her eyes, jaw, and throat. This fear centered around an essential inability to be herself - to show herself, not only her anger and power, but especially her wild side, her sensuality. She had always felt judged and condemned by her parents and had never dared allow her true spiritedness to assert itself.
This fear gradually gave way to rage which exploded one day in a spontaneous, life affirming temper tantrum that had no doubt been lodged there inside her unconscious for years. After this session the pains and tensions seemed to ease, and she began to feel more and more alive and vibrant in her daily life.
After this came layers of pain and crying - a heartbreaking sadness which, when she arrived at the bottom of it, suddenly turned into longing: a reaching out and finally a feeling of receiving the love and acceptance that she never had. At the end of this session, Jane looked at me through shining eyes; unprotected, trusting, deeply in touch with her own being. It felt as if we had traveled together through layer after layer of her self-protection, like the peeling of an onion. She ended up at her pure and empty center, deeply relaxed and silent, yet pulsating with life. Pulsation had helped Jane to reconnect with her natural sense of her energetic well-being.
The Osho meditations are the methods for the work of which he speaks. Although they have been around for thirty-odd years already, these meditations are still unique. They are active, cathartic meditations designed for the modern man or woman who finds it difficult to sit silently and let the body and mind relax. People are too tense and stressed out, locked into their thoughts. Of these, the Dynamic and Kundalini Meditations, and others which use vigorous body movement, give us the chance to throw out all the physical tensions and mental noise which prevent relaxation and inner harmony. These meditations are an integral part of Osho Pulsation.
Osho Pulsation affirms the life of the body and our human longing to love and be loved. The work is to remove whatever has come to stand in the way of the positive, spontaneous flow of life energy to release the natural joy and celebration it brings. By giving people space to express the negative feelings that have accumulated through their life, the charge of these painful emotions can be released and dissipated as pure energy. What is left behind is a deep relaxation, a quieter mind, and a heart that is more open to love. The feelings that were rejected and disowned out of guilt and shame in early childhood are now accepted and embraced. What was out of balance finds inner equilibrium; what was fragmented becomes harmonious and whole again.
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