Anubuddha shares his insights on touch.
Touch always happens in ‘just this moment’
I can think of no better way to share meditation and compassion with another person than through Arun Conscious Touch, the method Anasha and I have created. And for this insight and experience, I can only thank and sing praises to Osho, who I lived with, meditated with, and worked with for 15 years between 1976 and 1990. For me, there is no way to measure the positive influence that Osho, and his thousands of creative friends, are having on the world-wide vision and sharing of spiritual therapy, human touch, the body (as a vibrating electro-magnetic energy field), uplifting music, and meditation.
[portfolio_slideshow id=39318]
For me, touch is synonymous with life itself. Human touch is a very big subject, rich and complex beyond measure, multidimensional and amazing in its potency and implications. Touch always and only happens in ‘just this moment’… never in the past, nor in the future. Conscious touch can never be a technique – it is always here-now, and no two touches are ever the same. Conscious (and unconscious!) touch flows in and out of all our senses, and in fact, we touch with much more than just our hands and feet. The English expression ‘being touched’ is used very significantly. You may use it without understanding what it means, when we say we were ‘touched’ by a person or experience. Our whole daily life consists of ‘touching and being touched’: our eyes touch what we see and we are touched by what we see; the vibrations of our voice and our breath touch others and we all are touched by the vibrations of sound all around us; food touches and renews our energy; water touches; heat touches, cold touches…. I could go on and on.
Thoughts touch;
your thoughts affect your moods,
your muscles, your nerves, your heart
and they immediately affect and
touch the people and things outside of us.
Love touches;
Fear touches.
Meditate over this.
Touch implies two
A real turning-point in my comprehension and awareness of how meditation and touch can be joined together happened for me in India, in 1988. We all did many things in the commune, but my main work was guiding his Dynamic Meditation, teaching Yoga, Rebalancing, and Cranio Sacral Balancing – and I had already helped train thousands of people. In 1985, Osho was arrested by the US Government on trumped-up charges, and for 12 days, he ‘disappeared off the map’, imprisoned by Ronald Reagan’s government. None of his over one million friends (including many top-flight lawyers) knew where he was for over a week. When he was finally released, you could see that something grave had happened to his body.
We later were able to confirm that Osho had been poisoned with very well-measured doses of thallium, so the effects would be gradual and fatal. Osho had gone ‘too far’ in exposing the hypocrisy and lies and – what was worse – he showed how humanity could live in love, peace, vibrant health, and abundance. 25 years ago, it was a little difficult for us to believe that something like ‘poisoning’ could be done in America to a non-violent man who was offering humanity freedom from pain and suffering, nowadays it’s like, “Duh! Of course they would do that!”
So in 1988, when I was 36 years old, Osho asked me to function as his ‘touch-based doctor’ and help see what we could do for his body. I gave him about 150 individual sessions, each one unique. And I also used a variety of electro-magnetic acupuncture devices with him like the ‘Mora Machine’, ‘Indu-Med’, and ‘Bi-Com’ high frequency inventions.
While touching Osho, something obvious became conscious for me. That is: while I was touching Osho, he was touching me! And I not only refer to the energetic and spiritual reality when I say this, although he was definitely touching my heart and my soul.
Anyway, ask yourself this: is it possible for you to touch anything without it simultaneously touching you? The very word ‘touch’ implies ‘2’. Anything that I touch is in that same moment also touching me. We cannot accurately say that only one is ‘giving the touch’, while the other is ‘receiving the touch’. Or can you? So I began experimenting with this new awareness and trying to fathom the hidden implications. It is very interesting, to say the least…
Giving and receiving
needs to flow equally.
It needs an innocent loving heart,
and a very deep understanding
of electro-magnetic energetics:
we are made of vibrations and light.
When you touch something knowing that it is also touching you, a new and transformational possibility opens. You really start listening, allowing, and responding moment to moment. The touch travels from the hands into the body, radiates towards the centre, and rebounds back into your energy field. For instance, you could probably create a graph showing how much ‘energy rebounds’ when your touch carries 10 kilograms of pressure as compared to a touch carrying 10 grams of pressure; the body touches you back differently, and you can learn to interact minutely with what you perceive.
And all of the primary ‘involuntary body rhythms’ can be touched – which means that you can become sensitive to the ‘rebound touch’ of the heartbeat, the breath, and the cerebro-spinal fluid waves inside the human energy field. When you are simultaneously giving and receiving, a new alchemy of healing and meditation becomes available that is impossible to predict and an effortless pleasure to share.
Did you ever observe that the way you ‘touch’ the people, the animals, the plants, and the objects around you, clearly demonstrates how you feel about them? The human hand is a place where our inner love and awareness meets and interacts with what is outside of us. Our whole personal history and present psychology is ‘in our hands’. The average person has never taken the time to intimately feel and become aware of the life force in their own hands ‘from inside’. If you do, it will transform your life!
Love and awareness simultaneously flowing through your hands, in whatever activity, always brings joy.
Meditative touch
Each touch is like your breath – it only happens once, and can never be repeated. Try not to compare ‘this touch’ to any other touch. When you compare, you lose presence. There is giving and receiving in each touch. For the touch to be truly meditative, it needs to be non-judgmental, and have the quality of tathata, which is Buddha’s word for ‘unconditional acceptance of what is’. (This is almost impossible for the average body worker! Most systems train you to depend on judging and analyzing, in one form or another.)
If you learn to use the touch ‘to watch inside’ (without trying to change anything) moment to moment, without fear, and without expectations, you will be amazed! Feel each touch with all your senses and centres of perception open and alert. Trust your intuition, trust human touch, relax and enjoy! No need to be serious… Love, awareness, radical acceptance, and the natural wisdom inside the body is what heals.
My path and my work
Your body is the greatest mystery
in the whole of existence.
I have been creating and teaching various forms of touch-based healing consistently and passionately since 1982, and began learning and practicing back in 1973. My path has been full of meeting inspired teachers, and ‘being in the right place at the right time’. I was one of the creators of Osho Rebalancing in 1980, of Cranio Sacral Balancing in 89, and of Hara Awareness in 89. All of these methods are still popular and practised throughout the world today. In 1993, Anasha and I co-created and began teaching Arun Conscious Touch every year – in Spain, Japan and other parts of the world.
For a multitude of reasons, I feel that what happens through Arun Conscious Touch has tremendous value and hidden alchemical potentials, and that with the ‘right education’ this can be learned and utilized by anyone. I also feel that what transpires, or comes to the light, through the conscious human hand, and touching, is one of the greatest mysteries and miracles in all of existence.
Arun Conscious Touch is a gift from the enlightened ones… and is lovingly dedicated to the on-going, conscious evolution of creative human touch. An Arun individual session could also be called ‘inter-active meditation’, where the presence and awareness of the ‘giver’ as well as the ‘receiver’ is equally essential. This is what makes Arun Conscious Touch so unique among all bodywork or healing arts approaches. It flows through and incorporates the entire rainbow, or spectrum, of touch possibilities. Under the direct guidance of Osho, Anasha and myself have created a meditative fusion of all the great Eastern and Western healing discoveries.
Sometimes, we use very soft, silent touching – focusing on the natural breath in the body, or the precious heartbeat, or the oceanic breath of the Cranio Sacral system. In an individualized progression of sessions, we include whole body massage, promoting relaxation and inner tranquillity; we use moving, rhythmic, liquid touches, focusing on spinal rebalancing, sensory nerve flow, and each individual musculo-skeletal articulation. Sensitive deep pressures, 3-dimensional touches, focusing on energy lines of Thai Yoga Massage, Indian Tantric Yoga, and Japanese Hara Awareness are employed to release and transform tension and fear and pain in the deep intrinsic muscles and organs of the body. Running as a thread through all the sessions in the touch of metta (or loving kindness in the words of Buddha), and with this sensitivity we bring energy to the face, head, and heart chakra, as well as the other glands and centres within the human energy field.
The body is the door,
the body is the stepping stone
to the inner consciousness –
and our body is always
in the present.
In my opinion, Arun shares the ‘touch of meditation’. During the trainings, Dynamic and other active meditations created by Osho, silent sittings, lying down with presence as well as guided touching and inner living anatomy exercises enable the participant to understand and appreciate the value and beauty of ‘watching inside’ and just being oneself, without trying to change anything. We use the touch to promote health, flexibility, sensitivity, and more importantly, as a door to expanded consciousness. Arun is a loving touch that is relaxed, alert, and non-judgmental.
Anubuddha, Osho News – www.arunconscioustouch.com
Read Anubuddha’s insight: Easy is Right
Comments are closed.