It’s usually your deeper, spiritual heart waking up and spilling into the body; feel it calmly, but see a doctor if unsure.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
So many people at the ashram seem to be having something happening to their heart recently: pain in the heart, burning in the heart, feeling like their heart is about to break with love, with gratitude. I have a tickle in my heart. Sheela says that when your long arm hit her in the lecture the other day, she felt it in her heart. What is happening?
First: the physical heart is not your real heart. The real heart exists just behind the physical heart. The real heart is not part of your physical mechanism at all. The real heart exists in the soul -- it is the centre of the soul. The physical heart is the centre of the body and the spiritual heart is the centre of the soul. They both exist together, side by side. Just behind the physical is the spiritual heart. And it is going to happen to many people, this misunderstanding. When the spiritual heart starts opening, you will have ripples in your physical heart too. They correspond, they are very close together. When something vibrates in the spiritual heart, you will feel echoes in the physical heart too. In fact, you will first feel it only in the physical heart because you don't know anything about the spiritual heart. Your…
Won’t there be a heart failure? If heart failure happens, that would be sheer joy—so what! It’s precisely the one that never fails—let it fail. Let it happen; if the heart fails, then it’s delightful—so what! If you go on trying to save it, then when it happens it will be a failure. Don’t try to save it; let it happen. And at least there will be the bliss that it happened on the path of God. That is enough.
Those friends ask: what results will there be? Many—there will be many results. From meditation, the experiment I am calling meditation, there will be many physiological effects on the body. Many illnesses can bid farewell, the body’s lifespan can increase, there will be significant chemical changes. Many glands in the body that lie almost dormant can all become active. As we don’t realize, psychologists now say—and physiologists too—that in anger, special kinds of poisons are released in the body. But so far psychologists and physiologists are not able to say what happens in love. In anger, specific chemicals are released—poisons are released. The whole body becomes toxic. In love too, nectar is released. But because it is so rarely released, the person has not yet reached the physiologist’s laboratory; therefore they have not been able to find out. If the full result of meditation happens, then just as in anger…
Osho, for the past month something strange has been happening. When I begin meditation in the meditation hall—after bowing to you and remembering you beneath your picture—within moments my skin seems to vanish into emptiness, the circulation stops, the breath almost ceases. After an hour to an hour and a half, it takes another half hour to return to the previous state. Yet throughout, I experience an incomparable bliss and freshness. Kindly guide me.
When a flower laughs, remember: who knows how many drops of dew have become tombs in its laughter. Behind its smile the deaths of countless dewdrops are hidden. When someone attains the bliss of samadhi, many pains lie concealed behind it. To endure those pains with a feeling of grace is what is called austerity. Austerity does not mean to inflict suffering upon yourself—there is no need to. When you go on the inner journey, many sufferings come by themselves. The one who bears those sufferings as good fortune, as God’s grace, as blessing—he is the true ascetic. So, Anand Gautam, the auspicious hour has come—do not let it slip away. Continue exactly as you are doing. Proceed in the same direction in which the journey has begun. More will happen—deeper and for longer. Even if you are lost for hours, inform your friends and loved ones not to be…
So when I am saying love yourself, I am saying simply as if you are alone here in the whole of existence. There is nobody else, so there is no possibility of comparing. Respect yourself not comparatively; simply respect yourself, just respect yourself. And in that respect you will respect life because you are life, and in that love you will love life because you are life. And in that love and respect you will respect and love the whole existence. That's what prayer is all about, but it can arise only if you move in the right direction. Loving oneself, respecting oneself, is the right direction. And one then starts growing naturally. Growth is not something which has to be forced upon one. We have only to create the context and the growth happens.
Solar plexus is being, heart is feeling, head is thinking. Thinking is the farthest, feeling is just in the middle; that's why when you feel you are more alive, just a little more alive than when you think. Thoughts are dead things; they are corpses: they don't breathe. Feelings breathe, feelings have a pulsation but nothing to be compared with the first, primal mind. If you reach the solar plexus and be there and live from there, you will have a totally different kind of life -- the real life. The few moments you feel that you are real are the moments when you are at the solar plexus. That's why sometimes people seek danger, they go mountain climbing, because when danger is very real you simply go into the solar plexus. That's why whenever you are in a shock your solar plexus has the first pulsation.