If you have any pre-existing health concerns—such as back issues, heart conditions, or other medical conditions—it’s always wise to consult your physician before engaging in active or dynamic meditation methods. And if any particular pain continues for more than three days, it’s advisable to check with a doctor.
Here’s how Osho responded to a question about pain experienced during an active technique:
“Go on doing it—you will get over it.”
The reasons for pain in meditation are both simple and deeply rooted. On the surface, it’s physical. These methods are vigorous. They involve movement, breath, energy—your body must adjust. Just like starting any new form of exercise, for the first few days, your muscles may ache. That’s natural. But in a few days, the pain will pass, and your body will begin to feel lighter, stronger, and more alive.
But this isn’t the whole picture. There is something more fundamental, more deeply ingrained, at play.
Modern psychology now recognizes what mystics have long known: the body is not just physical. It stores emotional and psychological impressions. Every time you’ve suppressed anger, fear, sadness, or even joy, it hasn’t just disappeared—it has entered your system, seeped into your muscles, your tissues, your nervous system. The body is not separate from the mind; you are not two—body and mind—you are a bodymind, a single integrated organism.
Whenever you suppress a strong emotion, it doesn’t simply vanish—it gets buried in the body. Take anger, for instance. When an animal is angry, it expresses it fully—growling, biting, or escaping. But when you feel anger, society, morality, and etiquette interfere. You’re taught to smile, to “stay composed.” Outwardly, you act calm. Inwardly, the body is primed for action—ready to fight or flee—but you repress that energy. The muscles tighten; the energy has nowhere to go. This creates tension and eventually becomes chronic holding. Over time, your body becomes a battlefield of inner conflict. You smile on the surface, but your body is screaming inside.
This happens not just once—but over and over again, year after year. Slowly, the body becomes stiff, lifeless, blocked. Your nerves are no longer flowing freely. They’re entangled, numbed, dulled. And so when you begin meditation—especially active or dynamic techniques—all that buried energy begins to surface. The poisons of the past begin to release. Where the body has become frozen, it begins to thaw. This is not a gentle process. It is intense. The body starts melting, reawakening. And yes, it can be painful.
After decades of living a certain way, suddenly you introduce chaos through meditation. Naturally, the body goes into upheaval. But this is a good pain. It is the pain of healing, of unwinding years of repression.
Psychologists talk about the “body armor” we all wear—a kind of muscular shell created by unexpressed emotion. When you get angry, your teeth clench, your fists tighten, your shoulders rise. That energy wants to be released. If it’s not allowed to move, it stays locked in the body. Your fingers become stiff. Your handshake feels cold, lifeless. There’s no real touch, no aliveness—because your body is no longer open. It’s armored.
Meditation breaks this armor. It brings back life. It reopens what has long been shut. And when that armor breaks, when poisons begin to exit the system, you may feel pain. You may feel emotional turmoil. But welcome it—it’s a necessary part of the process.
You have become toxic from years of emotional suppression. And now, through meditation, you are shaking the whole system. I am deliberately creating this inner chaos, because only through breakdown can re-creation happen. You must be undone—dismantled—as you are. Only then can something fresh, something true, be born.
So let the pain come. Don’t resist. Let the body pass through this agony—it is old energy being released. If you allow it, it will go. And once it goes, for the first time you will know what it means to have a body—not just a shell or a prison, but a living, flowing, sensitive body. Right now, what you carry is more of a burden than a body.
In this chaotic meditation, I am helping your body to become alive again. Many internal blocks will dissolve. Systems that had gone rigid will become fluid once more. Yes, there will be pain—but that pain is a blessing. Keep going. Don’t stop. Don’t give in to fear or to the voice of the mind that says, “This hurts—don’t do it.”
I’ve seen hundreds of people go through this exact process. And when the pain lifts—and it will—you’ll discover something beautiful: a subtle joy that begins to surround your body like a soft glow. Even in stillness, you’ll feel a quiet bliss vibrating within you.
This joy cannot appear while the pain remains. And most of that pain is already there—you’ve just become numb to it. It has been with you so long that you’ve grown unconscious of it. Meditation brings it to the surface. That’s why it feels like meditation is causing it—but meditation is only revealing what was hidden all along.
So don’t stop. Let it come up. Let it pass. And when it does, you’ll find something astonishing: that beneath all that pain was a body waiting to be reborn—joyful, fluid, alive, and utterly free.
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