According to Osho, the mother‑daughter relationship is not a fated psychological prison or the root-cause of your life; blaming the mother is a modernized fatalism. Consciousness is free and responsible: transformation begins when the daughter drops scapegoating and chooses awareness now. Respect history, but don't be ruled by it; your soul flowers through responsibility, not inherited scripts.
Don't blame your mom for how you are; you can choose to change yourself right now.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
I feel very identified with my mother. I tend to judge her as harshly as I judge myself, and blame her for my negativity. Can you talk about the nature of the mother-daughter relationship?
This is a new disease created by the psychoanalysts in the West. In a way it is very old and ancient, a very old trick of the mind. But the garb that psychoanalysis has given it is very modern. The human mind always tends to throw the responsibility on to somebody else. Then you arc freed of it. In the old days people used to throw the responsibility on to God, fate, kismet -- a thousand and one words they had found. Then they were no more responsible; then they were unburdened. But this unburdening is very dangerous, because once you feel that you are not responsible, then all doors for transformation are closed -- because to feel responsible is the very basic requirement for transformation. If I am not responsible for what I am, how can I be responsible for any transformation? If it happens, it happens; if it…
Osho, why is it so?
It is because we have accepted certain principles that are false. For example, we have assumed that we can make promises about the future; that is false. Promises cannot be made for the future. We cannot promise anything about tomorrow. To promise, “I will love you tomorrow,” is itself dangerous. Such a promise can never truly be fulfilled, because today I cannot say anything about tomorrow. It is not even certain that tomorrow I will be the same “me.” Yet the kind of life we have built rests on making promises to the future. Those become our bonds. And once we make promises, the ego clings to them. It says, “But yesterday I said I could not live without you—how can I speak differently now?” Now I am bound. So I begin to do two things at once: inside I know one thing, outside I do another. Then the whole…
Beloved Osho, soon I will be spending a few days with my two teenage daughters. They want a full-time mother and are angry that I have chosen to be with you instead of them. I am torn, because although I have been told that my greatest gift to them is getting free, it is only an idea. On the other hand, my desire for approval for being a good mother is very strong and I feel guilty being with you while they continue to suffer alone. Would you please talk about how to break free of society's conditioning about motherhood?
I said, "Wait! Does anything look like me? Am I here or not? You are being utterly disrespectful to me." He was shocked. He could not conceive that it would be a disrespect, because this is commonly done, every day, in every home: the child's eyes look like the mother's, his face looks like the father's. And they all feel proud; and nobody bothers about the child, whether anything looks like him or not. But I made it clear to him, "Just take your words back, because I can say to you that my eyes don't look like my father's. You have another look. And my face does not look like my uncle's -- how can it look...? I have my own eyes and I have my own face, and I am going into the world with my face and with my eyes." He asked to be forgiven. Later on…
A friend has asked: I said that the transformation of sex becomes love. So he asks, Osho, a mother’s love for her son—Is that also sex? Is that also kama?
Others have asked similar questions. It will be useful to understand this a little. If you have listened carefully, I said that the experience of sex has depths most people never reach. Let me tell you: there are three levels to the experience of sex. - One level is the body—the purely physiological. A man goes to a prostitute. The experience of sex he has there cannot go deeper than the body. A prostitute can sell her body; the mind cannot be sold. And there is no way to sell the soul. The body can be obtained. A man commits rape: even in rape, neither the other’s mind nor soul is involved. You can violate a body; no one has found a way—and no one can—to violate the soul. So even the experience there remains at the level of the body. The primary experience of sex does not go deeper…
After the activity, sit in silence together. You can hold hands and be in a circle, not doing anything. Just a few moments will revitalize you. You will be able to feel that the energy is not coming from you, but from something deeper than you, higher than you, greater than you. You are at the receiving end. It is not coming from you; it is being given to you. [A group member said he realised how much he missed his mother, and that he felt a deep split. He was visibly moved and tearful.] It has been very good.... The mother is the first love; and through the mother you start loving the world. Through the mother you start being capable of love, and whenever you come to love somebody, your mother's love will be present there. You have touched something very basic. Cry, and be happy about it.