According to Osho, mind and body are intimately linked through habit: the body’s constant micro-movements feed the mind’s restlessness, and vice versa. Break the loop by using posture—sit absolutely still, totally relaxed, like a corpse—for five minutes. When the body stops its routine agitation, the mind’s mechanical chatter subsides naturally, revealing quietness without effort.
Keep your body completely still for a few minutes and your busy mind will calm down, because they are connected.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Is the mind related to the body?
Yes, yes, there is a relationship. This posture is meant to break your routine habit. As you sit, you hardly notice that you don’t remain still even for a moment. Sometimes you move your legs, sometimes your hands, sometimes you nod your head, move your neck, lift your arms—something or other you are always doing. This habit of the body’s restlessness has, through years of habit, become joined with the restlessness of the mind. If you sit for a while leaving the body completely relaxed, you will be surprised how strong the urge will be to move it. But if you do not move, you will find that, along with the body’s restless habits, the mind’s restless habit also begins to change. If you can sit without moving the body for five minutes—absolutely without moving—you will suddenly find the mind has become very quiet. It has become a mechanical routine.…
Beloved Osho, since I have been here, one feeling gets stronger and stronger -- the only thing that I really want to do is sit on your lap.
USHA, JUST FAR OUT! But please don t start doing it. I have fifty thousand sannyasins: just think of me too, otherwise I will be killed in a stampede. But the idea is great, just as an idea -- don't practise it. The idea is symbolic: a great love is arising in you. It is good, it has to be so. Unless you are in deep love with me nothing is going to happen. Only through love, the transformation happens. And it is good that you have not projected it on me -- otherwise, that too happens... Just the other day, I read in the latest issue of YOUTH TIMES a statement of an Indian film actress, Pratima Bedi. She says,"Rajneesh is sexy." Now, I really enjoyed it! She came to see me once; she must have been there for four or five minutes in front of me. She says…
People live identified with the body; that's how the body becomes an imprisonment. Rather than helping you to grow towards the infinite, your identification with the body makes you very finite, very small. And that is one of the fundamental causes of misery; the body will get old, then you will feel afraid, scared -- you are getting old; the body will be ill and then you will be in tremendous fear -- and sooner or later the body is going to die. You may not think about it, but it is there. You see people dying -- you cannot deny it; you may overlook it but you cannot deny it. You may no look at it, you may bypass it, but still it is there and deep down you know that you have to die.
I have been thinking all day of a way to ask the question: how to stop thinking?
Mind is making almost no noise; goes on working silently. And such a servant! -- for seventy, eighty years. And then, too, when you are dying your body may be old but your mind remains young. Its capacity remains yet the same. Sometimes, if you have used it rightly, it even increases with your age! -- because the more you know, the more you understand, the more you have experienced and lived, the more capable your mind becomes. When you die, everything in your body is ready to die -- except the mind. That's why in the East we say mind leaves the body and enters another womb, because it is not yet ready to die. The rebirth is of the mind. Once you have attained the state of samadhi, no-mind, then there will be no rebirth. Then you will simply die. And with your dying, everything will be dissolved…
Osho, One thing I cannot understand: the way you sit, you remain exactly like that for a full two hours. No part of your body moves, only one hand moves. And we cannot sit quietly even for five minutes.
Amrit Krishna! Even that one hand has to move because of you—because of your restlessness. Otherwise there would be no need to move it either. If you were to sit silently, that hand would not move. When your mind is restless, its reflection falls on the body as well. Your body conforms to your mind; it is its shadow. Ananda asked Buddha: The way you lie down to sleep, you remain in that very posture the whole night! For many nights Ananda sat and watched—how can this be? Naturally, he was curious. He said: I examined you in every way. However you lie down, whichever leg you place over the other, it stays there all night. Do you really sleep, or even in the night are you keeping account so that the foot remains where it is and does not change? You never turn sides! Buddha said: Ananda, when the…