According to Osho, inner strength arises when repression ends—especially around sex—and one’s natural energies are accepted as normal. Granting freedom in love dissolves shyness and indecision; the inner fight stops, and a unified, “one solid individual” emerges. From this wholeness comes decisiveness, confidence, and vitality; you don’t need training, only permission to be natural, playful, and unafraid.
Stop fighting your natural feelings (especially about love and sexuality), accept them kindly, and your confidence and clear decisions will grow on their own.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Beloved Osho, I think I am growing to love and accept myself, and then I recognize how much I hold back and keep separate from other people to hide myself, and I am ashamed. I try to show others how strong I am. Why can't I be strong, why can't I accept that I am weak? Why can't I even accept that I am not willing to show my weakness?
It is the society, the culture, the civilization in which you are born which gives you wrong ideas. Those wrong ideas go on haunting you from the cradle to the grave. There is nothing wrong in being weak. But this society trains every child to be strong. Just across from my house in my village there was a gymnasium. My uncles and my father were all going to the gymnasium -- it was the best in the town. They tried to persuade me. I said to them, "The idea of the strong man is primitive. It comes from the days when people were hunting. I am not going to be a hunter!" And I don't think that you can ever be so strong that the need for being stronger disappears. Even the strongest people have found weakness, disease, old age, death... There was one man in India, Gama, who was…
Question: First question: Osho, “बलं वाव विज्ञानाद् भूयः; अपि ह शतं विज्ञानवतां एको बलवान आकंपयते। स यदा बली भवति, अथोत्थाता भवति, उत्तिष्ठन परिचारिता भवति, परिचरन उपसत्ता भवति, उपसीदन द्रष्टा भवति, श्रोता भवति, मन्ता भवति, बुद्धा भवति, कर्त्ता भवति, विज्ञाता भवति।।” Strength is superior to science, for a single strong man can terrify a hundred scholars. Only when a man is strong does he rise to stand; rising, he serves the master; by serving, he becomes worthy to sit near the master; by sitting near, he becomes a seer, a listener, a contemplative, a buddha, a doer, a knower. Osho, please compassionately explain in detail the intent of this seemingly strange sutra from the Chhandogya Upanishad. What had to be known? The knower had first to be known. One did not know one’s own self, and went on knowing everything else!
Osho, is there any method to increase willpower?
So do not take a very big resolve all at once, one that you already know is beyond you—and this is what often happens: those who set out on the journey of resolve take resolves beyond their limits. Your own mind counsels you, “Yes, take it.” And then you get stuck, and you fall. Then the same mind says, “Now drop it. You’re not anyone’s slave; you took it yourself, now leave it.” Why does the mind do this? Because the greater your resolve becomes, the smaller your mind becomes. The day a resolve is fulfilled, the mind dies; it cannot survive. Mind and resolve are opposing forces. Mind is the name of your weakness; resolve is the name of your soul. Mind is your disease; resolve is your health. Therefore the mind will keep putting you in difficulties. It will say, “Take a big one.” When you take it,…
Beloved Osho, I am a weakling. Yet I have the feeling that I can, for the first time, relax into my weakness here. Must I be strong and courageous?
But how, by becoming a president, can you be powerful? Deep down you will know that your weakness is there. In fact it will be felt more, even more than before, because now there will be a contrast. On the outside there will be power, and in the inside there will be weakness -- more clear, like a silver lining in a black cloud. That's what happens: inside you feel poor and you start grabbing, you become greedy, you start possessing things, and you go on and on and on, and there is no end to it. And your whole life is wasted in things, in accumulation. But the more you accumulate, the more penetratingly you feel the inner poverty. Against the riches it can be seen very easily. When you see this -- that weakness tries to become strong -- it is absurd. How can weakness become strong? Seeing…
Man is weak and helpless what can he do to find strength?
Imagination has the power to take you somewhere. If you just allow it to go, it will move into the future. It will go to the moon and to planets and to stars and anywhere. This is one dimension of movement: Call it the dimension of time. Ordinarily our imagination travels only in one dimension: the dimension of time. It goes into the future or the past. It moves in time. With observation, there is a change. Imagination begins to move in space not in time. That is the change that observation creates. The arrow of imagination moves from 'there and then' to 'here and now'. Space is always here and now: it has no expansion in time. So imagination has two dimensions to develop in. Without observation, it goes from the past to the future and from the future to the past. With observation, it goes into space. If…