A meditation Osho gave to his disciples in the early Pune days – described by Madhuri
In August 1974 I’d just moved into a flat in Boat Club Road, and was fully engaged in all the meditations on offer. I’d shaved off my San Francisco haute-hippie shag perm and was busy dismantling everything else about my past that I could. The force of Osho’s presence made this happen – I watched while, day by day, bits of me fell clanging about my feet. The process was excruciating and exhilarating both… and I wasn’t going to miss a moment of it.
I heard through the lively grapevine that there was going to be a weekly gathering to do something called Madness Meditation; it was to be held in in an old wooden bungalow right round the corner from where I lived, owned by an older Indian woman who, people said, had been with Krishnamurti. The meditation came directly from Osho. And so, of course, I went.
We sat in a big circle on the floor in a large room – maybe 25 or 30 of us. The elder woman, whose name I forget, explained what we were going to do, and we began…
We made horrible faces! Every sort of contortion our faces could get themselves into! For 15 minutes we just sat there letting our faces go wildly crazy. And of course, for a 21-year-old girl, extremely interested in fashion and adornment, it was incredible to just let myself be ugly! Like, hideously weird! Grimaces, tongue-thrustings, eye-squinchings, cheek-puffings, wrinklings all over, etc etc – while the hands and arms helped by moving too. (We did not make sound.) I could feel old selves, uptight and prim, stiff and careful, faces bequeathed by the 50’s I was raised in, and the 60’s that were meant to be free but weren’t, and most of all by my parents, tragic, stoic, repressed, hiding – breaking up like cornflakes and falling away. I loved it! I was madly in love with the freedom of all this dismantling!
Afterwards we sat still with closed eyes for 15 minutes. And that was it!
The Theory
We have madness in us, and when we express it safely, we are left with the spacious silence that is closer to the core of our being.
The Method
You can of course do this meditation alone, but I recommend the ego-confronting buzz of doing it in a circle with others. I suppose the very daring could try it as a partner meditation…
Sit with straight spine on a cushion or chair. Ding a bell to begin, and for 15 minutes everybody simply lets their face go into an ever-shifting variety of horrible contortions. Make awful faces! Really terrible! Be extreme! Let your hands help! Dig deep into yourself for the worst and most bizarre stuff in there! Let it out on your face!
Don’t make sound – let all the energy go into your face and what it’s doing.
Your eyes are neither closed nor open – they will participate in the faces, so will run the gamut from wide to closed, and everything in between. But the meditation is very inward – circle members are not relating to each other or staring deliberately at each other.
After 15 minutes ring the bell again.
Everyone sits silently for 15 minutes, with closed eyes. This gives space for inner integration of what has happened to you, and lets you rest in the pool of very-alive energies that are moving and settling. Just observe them… and enjoy!
Ding! The meditation is over.
I credit this meditation (and of course Dynamic) with freeing me so hugely from fears of looking weird or ugly, that my face became much more mobile and expressive – forever! Life is too short to live all pinched up and poker-faced! Let it all hang out, flowing as a rubber band! That’s what I got out of this – and have never regretted it.
And if we don’t feel that we can afford to look like an idiot, ever… there is no hope for us! Who is not an idiot? The universe is vast, and what, Jeez Louise, can we really know? Better to wear our foolishness openly, and give it the space to morph and change, exuberantly! And then we can sit in blessed silence…
Featured image by Blake Cheek via unsplash.com
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