According to Osho, when you can’t say yes to yourself, you live under inherited 'shoulds' that breed guilt and perfectionism; this splits you into either neurotic self-condemnation or hypocritical pretense. You turn against yourself, lose joy, and cannot truly love others. Healing begins by dropping perfectionist ideals and saying an unconditional yes to life’s imperfection, including yourself.
If you can’t accept yourself, you feel guilty or fake and can’t really love others, until you stop chasing perfection and say yes to who you are.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Osho, why can't I say yes to myself? I have the feeling that all my misery is rooted in this incapacity.
You have been told to love others, but you have neVer been told to love yourself. And you can love others only if you have loved yourself in the first place: if you don't love yourself you cannot love anybody else in the world. Loving yourself, you learn the art of love. And if you can love yourself with all your imperfections you will be able to love other human beings with all their imperfections. If you cannot love yourself with your imperfections, how are you going to love others with their imperfections? You will hate them! Parents hate their children, children hate their parents, wives hate their husbands, husbands hate their wives, for the simple reason that they can see the imperfections. Everybody is in search of a perfect person and you will not find a perfect person anywhere, except some fools who go on claiming that they are…
What stands in the way of my saying yes to life, to surrendering totally, and is it always right to say yes?
No, not always. No has its own utility. One should not be addicted to it, that's all. No is not bad in itself. There are moments when you have to say no, there are moments when you have to say yes. One should be free to say yes or no; that's what I have been telling you. One should not be addicted to either. A free person is one who looks at each situation and says yes or no -- whatsoever the response is, whatsoever he feels like in that moment. That yes and no should not come from the past, should not come from the memory. It should not be a reaction, it should be a response. A man was alone out in a rowboat on the Potomac, shouting, "No! No! No!" Somebody was watching: "Why is this man saying, 'No! No! No!'?" And there was nobody else, he…
Osho, all my life I have said yes and now that I am here with you and the yes seems really right, there comes only no. What is this no?
And the Master said, 'That's all that I can say or that I am allowed to say. You ask about the goal, I talk about the way, because the goal is so incomprehensible, so mysterious, that nothing can be said about it. I can simply sit in silence. If you have eyes to see, see! If you have ears to hear, hear! Hear my silence, and the song that my silence is, and the music that arises in it. If you cannot hear it, that simply shows you need meditation. So meditate.' The man said, 'Just this much -- one word, "meditation"? Won't you elaborate on it a little?' He wrote again in bigger letters: MEDITATION. That was his elaboration . The man was puzzled and he said, 'But you are simply repeating. Just writing it in bigger letters won't help.' So he wrote again in even bigger letters: MEDITATION.…
Osho explains the meaning of veet nisadha: beyond no, beyond negation.... Drop no-saying; become more and more of a yea-sayer.] Yes, say yes to life. And if one is aware, then one will be surprised that many times we unnecessarily say no... and we harm nobody except ourselves by saying that. No is fear-oriented; yes is love. When you say yes, you are in a loving mood; whenever you are in a loving mood, you say yes -- they both go together. When you say no, you reject life, and when you reject life, life rejects you. Then one becomes more and more sour, more and more bitter, and then there is a vicious circle. When you are bitter you say no more; when you say no more, life goes on rejecting you.
Just close your eyes and go into as deep sadness as you can, and if something happens in the body, allow it... be possessed by sadness. Let it penetrate, as deeply as possible... a dark night of the soul. [Osho had given a sannyasin, who habitually said 'no' to everything, a meditation to say 'yes' to everything for seven days. Tonight she reports back: Once I stopped saying no and started saying yes, and I felt all my confidence going and I felt really shaken, really at a loss.] Mm, that's bound to happen, because no has become your personality. That has become your definition. That's how you know who you are -- a no-sayer. That has become the very centre of your ego -- and no becomes very easily the centre of the ego. In fact, yes cannot become the centre of the ego.