According to Osho, you should not hold back at all in self-expression—drop hesitation, fear, and calculation and let your being flow totally and authentically. Withholding fragments your energy and breeds inner conflict; full expression aligns you with your truth, invites presence, and allows love and creativity to move through you. Be wholehearted, spontaneous, and complete in whatever you say, feel, or do.
Don’t keep anything inside; share your true self openly and completely.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
To be spontaneous means not to act out of the past, because out of the past is all cunningness, cleverness, calculation, arithmetic. When you act in the moment and it has no reference to your past, the action has a beauty, a purity -- the same as a small child's act. Whether he laughs or cries or goes into a tantrum or becomes angry, all his acts have purity -- it is uncalculated. His anger is hot and not cold. The calculated anger is cold. His anger is natural, a responsiveness. He has not brooded over it, he has not planned it. He is just in the hands of nature -- hence the beauty. He is surrendered to his nature; he is not trying to control his life.
[A sannyasin said that she had not been meditating for the past few months as she felt the presence of a force almost like a person's presence when she started to meditate, and in fear she would have to open her eyes. Osho checked her energy.] It is nothing to be worried about. Rather you should be happy that it is happening... but fear comes. Nobody is there. It is just your expansion of consciousness that you feel around you -- and particularly near the shoulder Sometimes it happens in deep meditation that your body aura becomes bigger than ordinarily. Ordinarily it is close to the body, clinging to the body like clothes. When you are deep in meditation -- and it will happen particularly in Dynamic meditation because much energy arises, and so much is flowing inside -- the aura becomes bigger.
Beloved Osho, while reading your books and listening to your tapes when I am alone, I become immensely happy and I weep, cry and dance in aloneness. But I can't express my feelings in the presence of others, even though I wish very much to do so. Please tell me what to do.
But this certainly hurts millions of people who are around you. They cannot accept the idea that you have achieved something which they have missed. They will try in every way to make you miserable. Their condemnation is nothing but an effort to make you miserable, to destroy your dance, to take away your joy -- so that you can come back into the fold. One has to gather courage. And if people say you are crazy, enjoy the idea. Tell them, "You are right; in this world, only crazy people can be happy and joyful. I have chosen craziness with joy, with bliss, with dance; you have chosen sanity with misery, anguish and hell -- our choices are different. You be sane and remain miserable; leave me alone in my madness. Don't feel offended; I am not feeling offended by you all -- so many sane people in the…
Osho, for most of my life I have held myself aloof, separate and isolated, and I have therefore been protected from people and situations. My innermost fear has always been that if I opened my heart totally the vast love that I feel would rush out like water from an overflowing well and be lost, diverted or rejected. My essence is like a delicate flower and if it blossomed in the wrong terrain it could easily be badly bruised or destroyed. This is my fear. Is this the time and place to open my heart totally?
It is one of the most basic fears of all human beings. This is the fear that has created the monks and the nuns. The whole past of humanity has been dominated by this fear -- like a cancer of the soul. It looks very logical that if you share your love you will be wasting it and soon you will become poor. This is the ordinary law of economics: if you want to have more money don't share it, be miserly. Get as much as you can and give as little as possible. Then only can you accumulate, then you can be rich. This is true as far as the outside world is concerned, but this is absolutely untrue about the inner world; there a totally different law functions. The inner law is: if you don't give you will lose; if you give you will keep. The more you…
Osho, every time after speaking I feel I have been dishonest; only when I remain silent do I feel honest—completely honest with myself. Why is this?
At Harvard University, psychologists ran an experiment. They split a class into two groups. To one half, in a separate room, they said: “The problem on the board is very difficult. There is hardly any hope that any of you can solve it. Even students in higher classes struggle with it. Only great mathematicians can solve it. We’re giving it just to see—by chance, perhaps—there is no assurance at all—maybe one of you might head a little in the right direction. Solving it completely is impossible, still try.” They tried. Out of fifteen students, only three solved it. To the other fifteen, in another room, they said—about the same problem—“It’s very simple. So simple that if any of you fail to solve it, it would be surprising. Students in lower classes have solved it.” Amazingly, twelve solved it; only three failed. What happened? Your confidence is borrowed—others hand it to…