I was part of a group of playful sannyasins group when I had the experience of going into Vipassana in an ashram in a certain village called Ajol in Gujarat. The year was 1972, and the Sadhana was to be done for 21 days. The place was totally isolated within the greenfields, so we could never be disturbed by any human interaction from the outside world. We are quite far away from city life and its noises. Each individual was given a separate room, totally empty, just to be himself or herself. We were not allowed to keep anything in the room. except for the bedding, and a jug of water and the food was left at our doors at a particular fixed time by our helpers outside. We are not allowed to see them and pick up our food a little later after the providers had left. Happy Ho organizes best Meditation and Tarot classes in Noida and Delhi NCR area in India.
This way we did not see any human face–and remained face to face with ourselves for 24 hours. Those days there were no mobile phones, and we were not supposed to read any book inside the room–there was total emptiness in the room–the right space to fall back at yourself. Sit
or stand or walk inside the room as you feel–and just watch your breath whole day, watch your thoughts and emotions the whole day. The only thing that Osho recommended was one hour of an active meditation known as Osho Dynamic meditation. It was necessary to activate or prana, elan vital and then detox oneself by silently cathartic with our physical gestures, expressing our suppressed emotion and feeling the deep cleansing of our burdened and rotten modern psyche. After the Dynamic meditation, natural outcome was Vipassana happening by itself
the whole day.
Though I admit that the first 7 days were the journey into the hell–within myself. No one was there to provoke any anger–and the anger was there, no one was there to arouse sexuality–and it was there. It was all within me. I could face the heat and explosiveness of my strong emotions and their power over my being.
After 7 days of suffering all this–the hell within myself–and not escaping it but facing it in raw, the next seven days were a week of absolute ecstasy in between my Vipassana sittings. Heaven was within me as much as the hell was within me. I felt some divine energy in the room–it was no longer empty, it had become fully alive, it was no longer narrow confinement, but the vastness of consciousness.
The last seven days were the week of absolute peace, without any extremes of misery or ecstasy. I was at with myself. Recently, I read an article written on Forbes.com by Celinne Da Costa, who is a well-known writer, speaker, and brand story coach teaching entrepreneurs to become confident leaders with powerful stories, influential brands, international media coverage, and thousands of raving followers.
She recommends Dynamic meditation before Vipassana. She says: I was originally planning to attend a Vipassana retreat, which is a well-known meditation practice that requires people to sit in utter silence for up to 16 hours a day without exercise, movement, writing, reading, or any other type of mental or physical stimulation. This was a little aggressive for me, mostly because I had a lot of work to do and didn’t want to abstain from writing. Another option soon presented itself: my host’s cousin happened to work at a Dynamic Meditation center, and although I had never heard of the practice before, I decided to give it a try.
She elaborates: Specifically, the meditation is a “fast, intense and thorough way to break old, ingrained patterns in the body-mind that keep one imprisoned in the past, and to experience the freedom, the witnessing, silence, and peace that are hidden behind these prison walls.”
She got this insight from one of Osho’s disciples at Osho Tapoban in Kathmandu: As my teacher explained, these techniques are designed to unload our repressed emotions and generate high amounts of energy that we can then harness and channel into our meditative practice. In
short, exuding all of this energy makes it possible to sit quietly and focus on meditation.
Osho recommends that before we go into long hours of Vipassana, we should practice Dynamic meditation. 21 Days of Dynamic meditation will create the ground and then one can really go deeper in Vipassana effortlessly.
Vipassana can be done in three ways. The first is : Awareness of your actions, your body, your mind, your heart. Walking, you should walk with awareness. Moving your hand, you should move with awareness, knowing perfectly that you are moving the hand. You can move it without any consciousness, like a mechanical thing. You are on a morning walk; you can go on walking without being aware of your feet. Be alert of the movements of your body. While eating, be alert of the movements that are needed for eating. Taking a shower, be alert of the coolness that is coming to you, the water falling on you and the tremendous joy of it…. Just be alert. It should not go on happening in an unconscious state.
Osho
Vipaasana walk Picture courtesy Osho World
