According to Osho, the Hatha Yoga practice of tensing and releasing muscles is only a mechanical aid; effort is inimical to real relaxation. At most it relaxes the body superficially. True relaxation is existential: it happens when the doer is absent through understanding tension and being in the body. Dynamic Meditation uses activity only as a device to ignite awareness; the real shift is non-doing and the body’s own wisdom relaxing itself.
Squeezing and letting go may help a bit, but real rest comes when you stop trying, feel your body from inside, and let it relax by itself.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Question: in hatha yoga there is an exercise in which one tenses every muscle in the body and then releases the tension and becomes relaxed. Is this similar to what happens in dynamic meditation?
You are not aware of the spiritual because you have so much tension in the body, so much tension in the mind. But if you are not tense in the physical and mental realms, you will automatically know the bliss of the spiritual, the relaxation of the spiritual. It comes to you; it has been waiting for you. Your whole attention is so absorbed by the physical and the mental that there is no attention left to divert to the spiritual. Only if the body and the mind are not tense can you delve into the spiritual, can you know the bliss of it. The spiritual is never tense; it cannot be. There is no spiritual tension, only bodily tension, only mental tension. Bodily tension has been created by those who, in the name of religion, have been preaching anti-body attitudes. In the West, Christianity has been emphatically antagonistic toward…
What is dynamic meditation?
The first thing to be understood about Dynamic Meditation is that it is a method of creating a situation through tension in which meditation can happen. If your total being is completely tense, the only possibility that remains is relaxation. Ordinarily one cannot go directly into relaxation, but if your whole being is at a peak of total tension then the second step comes automatically, spontaneously: silence is created. The first three stages of the technique are done in order to achieve this climax of tension throughout all the layers of your being. The first layer is the physical body. Beyond that is the prana sharir, the vital body: this is your second body, the etheric body. Beyond it is the third body, the astral body. Your vital body takes in breath as its food. If the normal intake of oxygen is changed, the vital body is bound to change.…
Sometimes in the second stage of dynamic meditation I start doing asanas. I can't tell whether I'm doing them because I want to practice them or whether they are coming of their own accord. How is one to know the difference?
If you discipline yourself from without, there is every possibility that you will never come to know the unconscious. And the conscious mind is no mind at all, it is not life at all. It is just a utilitarian instrument developed because of society; it is not you. But because we have to live with others, we need certain things that can be known about us and can be relied upon: discipline, a particular character. The conscious mind exists because of the relationship between you and others. It is just a link between you and all those with whom you are related, but it does not help you in relating to yourself, in knowing yourself. I remember a story. King Ashoka sent his son to Ceylon to take them the message of Buddha. He met the king of Ceylon and asked him a question: "There are people in the world…
So did they get any particular benefit?
No, no—if you can, by all means do it; that is not the point. That is not the point. If it is possible, do it and move on from it. What I am saying is this: hardly one in a thousand can go straight into non-doing. Then I had to consider, what is the difficulty? It had never occurred to me, because for me going into non-doing is so simple that going into doing is not that simple. So I found myself in this difficulty: what is going on? I make a thousand people do it; sometimes one, two go deep. The remaining nine hundred and ninety-eight remain empty. So it occurred to me that these nine hundred and ninety-nine people cannot go straight into non-doing. First they have to be taken into the full tension of doing. When they reach the full climax of doing, then, by letting go…
Question: but doesn't meditation mean akarma, no activity?
The fourth stage of Dynamic Meditation is just akarma, no activity, but the first three stages are active. The first, second, and third stages are of intense activity. In the first stage, your vital body, your breathing, is in intense movement, in extreme activity. By being in extreme activity in your vital body, in your prana-sharira, in your breathing, the second step becomes possible: you become intensely active in your physical body. And in the third stage, after being totally active physiologically, it becomes possible to be active in the mental body. So in three bodies -- the physical, vital, and mental -- you create a climax of activity, a climax of tension. You become more and more tense. Your whole existence becomes a whirlwind, a whirlpool. The more intense it becomes, the greater the possibility of being relaxed in the fourth stage. The fourth stage is total relaxation. It…