Many people come to yoga carrying a tension they cannot name. The body loosens on the mat, the breath slows, and still something at the centre stays clenched. A seeker once put this to Osho very honestly: he was aware of a tension deep at his core, and suspected he had probably never been totally relaxed.
Osho's answer is one of the clearest maps of relaxation I have come across, and I want to share it here in his own words, with a few notes on how it meets us on the mat and off it.
What tension actually is
We usually treat tension as a symptom - tight shoulders, a restless jaw, a mind that will not settle. Osho points instead to its roots:
Tension means hurry, fear, doubt. Tension means a constant effort to protect, to be secure, to be safe. Tension means preparing for the tomorrow now, or for the afterlife - afraid tomorrow you will not be able to face the reality, so be prepared.
Read that slowly. Almost every tension we carry is time-shaped. It belongs either to a tomorrow we are bracing against, or to a yesterday we never finished.
The past that was never lived
This is the part of the teaching that tends to land hardest:
Remember one very fundamental thing about life: any experience that has not been lived will hang around you, will persist: "Finish me! Live me! Complete me!" There is an intrinsic quality in every experience that it tends and wants to be finished, completed. Once completed, it evaporates; incomplete, it persists.
Osho's diagnosis is that we bypass our own lives - living everything partially, lukewarm, without intensity, "like a somnambulist, a sleepwalker." So the past hangs on, the future frightens us, and between the two the present, the only reality we actually have, gets crushed.
Start where you are: the circumference
Here is the practical heart of it. You cannot begin at the centre.
You cannot be totally relaxed right now. At the innermost core a tension will persist. But start relaxing. Start from the circumference - that's where we are, and we can start only from where we are.
The circumference is the ordinary, visible surface of your life: how you walk, how you eat, how you speak and listen.
Relax the circumference of your being - relax your body, relax your behaviour, relax your acts. Walk in a relaxed way, eat in a relaxed way, talk, listen in a relaxed way. Slow down every process. Don't be in a hurry and don't be in haste. Move as if all eternity is available to you - in fact, it is available to you.
The four steps, in order
Osho is insistent that the sequence matters. Most people fail at relaxation, he says, because they begin in the wrong place.
1. The body. Through the day, check inwards: is there tension held somewhere - the neck, the head, the legs? Go to that part with closed eyes, travel from toe to head, and speak to whatever you find as you would speak to a friend.
Tell it to relax, and tell it, "There is nothing to fear. Don't be afraid, I am here to take care, you can relax."
You will be surprised, he says, that the body listens. It is your body.
2. The mind. Only once the body has become "utterly relaxed, like a small child" do you turn to the mind. And the reason to wait is not moral, it is practical: having felt the body respond, you now trust yourself. That trust is what the mind answers to. It takes longer, but it happens.
3. The heart. Then the world of feelings and emotions - subtler and more complex again, but approached now with confidence. If it was possible with the body and possible with the mind, it is possible here too.
4. The centre. Only after those three can you go to the innermost core, beyond body, mind and heart. That relaxation, Osho says, brings the greatest joy possible.
Many people start with the mind and they fail; they fail because they start from a wrong place. Everything should be done in the right order.
Slowness as a doorway
The smallest changes are the most useful, because habit lives in the small things. Your walking pace is automatic. Your eating pace is automatic. Change them deliberately and awareness has to wake up.
Buddha used to say to his disciples: "Walk very slowly, and take each step very consciously." If you take each step very consciously, you are bound to walk slowly. If you are running, hurrying, you will forget to remember.
Try walking very slowly for a few minutes. Eat one meal slowly. Not as an achievement, simply to break the old pattern.
Everything else already knows how
The whole of existence is dancing, except man. The whole of existence is in a very relaxed movement - movement there is, certainly, but it is utterly relaxed. Trees are growing and birds are chirping and rivers are flowing, stars are moving; everything is going in a very relaxed way - no hurry, no haste, no worry, and no waste. Except man.
Relaxation is bigger than it sounds
We tend to hear "relaxation" as the absence of effort. Osho describes something far richer:
Relaxation is one of the most complex phenomena - very rich, multidimensional. All these things are part of it: let-go, trust, surrender, love, acceptance, going with the flow, union with existence, egolessness, ecstasy. All these are part of it, and all these start happening if you learn the ways of relaxation.
He also had a warning about the guilt that religion so often installs in us, and which becomes its own kind of tension. His counsel was to drop the fear of hell and the greed for heaven alike:
All that exists is this moment. You can make this moment a hell or a heaven - that certainly is possible. Hell is when you are all tense, and heaven is when you are all relaxed. Total relaxation is paradise.
Bringing it to the mat
This is, in essence, what a yoga practice is for. Asana is the circumference: relaxing the body consciously, part by part. Pranayama steadies the breath and begins to settle the mind. Savasana and meditation open the doors further in. The order Osho describes is the same order the practice itself follows, which is perhaps why it feels so familiar to anyone who has stayed with it for a while.
Start small. Relax one shoulder. Walk to the kitchen a little slower today. Let the next exhale be longer than the one before.
If you would like guidance with relaxation, breath and meditation as part of a complete practice, explore our classes or reach out for a conversation.
Credits: All quoted passages in this article are the words of Osho, from the chapter "Tension and Relaxation" in From Medication to Meditation. Minor punctuation has been regularised for readability; the words are his. Deep gratitude to Osho and the Osho International Foundation for these teachings. The reflections and practice notes between the quotations are our own.