When a big feeling comes, especially a good one, let it out gently instead of pushing it down so you feel clearer and calmer.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Krishnapriya has asked, "So in such a situation, what guidance would you give?"
I am always on the side of the predominant feeling. Whatever strong feeling arises, do not suppress it. And when such an auspicious feeling is arising, then certainly do not suppress it. Let it be expressed. This will increase your purity, enhance your clarity, and the likelihood of its recurring will lessen.
A second friend has asked: Osho, in the practice of awakening, of awareness, fear arises, and there is a constant worry that the routine of life may fall into disorder. It also seems that when anger, sex, etc., arise, if one acts on them, they are finished in five to seven minutes—one feels free of them. If you don’t act, their after-echo, their waves, keep resounding within for days. Then it feels as if it would have been better to have done it and been done with it. So what should one do? Is such awakening not repression?
Two things. First, if through “awakening” your anger—which would otherwise be over in five minutes—goes on for two days, understand it is not awakening; it is repression. Repression makes things spread. It creates even more disturbance than indulgence. If sexual desire arises and is over in a moment, but with your so-called awakening it drags on for days, grows dense, and becomes a burden on the mind, know that it is not awakening, it is repression. Many of us don’t rightly understand the difference between awakening and repression. Understand it. Repression means: what has arisen inside, you press it down inside; you don’t allow it to come out. Indulgence means: you let it out on someone. Get the difference clear. Repression means: you force it down upon yourself; indulgence means: you unload it onto the other. Awakening is a third thing—letting it out into the void: neither pressing it down…
Osho, you have earlier said, “Live moment to moment, live in the present.” Now you are saying, “Return to the past.” What should we do?
So it is with the mind—there are ruts. The past means endless grooves. However much you understand, your intellect agrees, you make decisions, you resolve—at the moment of resolve you feel something is going to change. But not even an hour passes before your decision breaks. Then only self-condemnation is produced, nothing else. Your saints, your fakirs, your priests and pundits—most of the time they only succeed in producing self-condemnation in you, nothing else. Their words are logically correct. You cannot even say they are wrong; you have to admit they are right. In that admission you take a decision. But against what are you deciding? Inside are grooves carved since who knows when, deep tracks. Walking in them has become a habit. It is easy to walk in them. They will pull you again and again. The meaning of returning into the past is: these grooves must be erased.…
Osho, everything goes well, and then in a weak moment my entire past engulfs me like a storm and seems to say, I will not let you go. All the nerves in my head tighten. In discourse I find a solution, but then, upon returning to the world, the same forces try to assert themselves again. Pratibha has asked.
It is natural. Here you are in a wave; you flow with my tide. When you go back into the world, you become alone again. You do not yet have the art to take me with you there as well. I am ready; in time, that too will happen. Here you are in an atmosphere. This is a world of its own for these ochre-clad sannyasins. It has its own rhythm, its own breeze. In this breeze you effortlessly rise into the high sky. Left alone, you do not yet trust your own wings. Along with me you take a far flight; but when left to yourself you become frightened, full of doubt. Trust does not arise in you; self-confidence does not lift enough for you to live at such a height. When you return to the world, there is a crowd and all kinds of people. The air there…
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.