What is the relationship between tension and relaxation?

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…

Please tell us something about the tensions and relaxation of the seven bodies.

Your body can be non-tense only when you are living a moment-to-moment existence. If you are eating and the moment has become eternity, then there is no past and no future. The very process of eating is all that is. You are not doing something; you have become the doing. There will be no tension; your body will feel fulfilled. Or if you are in sexual communion and the sex is not just a relief from sexual tension but, rather, a positive expression of love -- if the moment has become total, whole, and you are in it completely -- then you will know a positive well-being in your body. If you are running, and the running has become the totality of your existence; if you are the sensations that are coming to you, not something apart from them but one with them; if there is no future, no goal…

Beloved Osho, please talk to us of tension and relaxation. Usually, when I sit in front of you I relax all through myself. I lose any alertness I may have. When I am alert, there is a subtle tension which I need to maintain this wakefulness. It winds me up like a spring and then I feel horrible. How can I stay awake without all this tension? How to find the stillness, though busy? I watch you move and sit with such joy.

Anand Trinda, it is the same question that I was answering, just written in a different way. If you have listened to my first answer, your question has also been answered. I will just tell a small anecdote. One day a man from a small village in the mountains sees a tourist driving his car backwards up a narrow road towards the top of the mountain. The man stops him and says, "Why are you driving backwards?" The tourist replies, "They told me that there is no room to turn a car around on top of the mountain." The man says, "I have lived here all my life. I know there is enough space to turn around." Half an hour later, he sees the tourist driving down again, backwards. He stops the car and says, "What are you doing now?" The tourist replies, "You were right. There was enough room…

Beloved Osho, relaxation has always been one of the most valuable states of being for me. "watchfulness" seems to be possible only then, or at least so much easier. Beloved master, would you like to comment on how "relaxation" is connected to "awareness"?

But beginning from awareness is far easier, and particularly for those who can understand the process of awareness, which is very simple. The whole day you are using it about things -- cars, in the traffic -- even in the Poona traffic you survive! It is absolutely mad. Just a few days ago I read about Athens. Athens is even worse than Poona. The government made a special seven day competition for the taxi drivers and they had put golden trophies for those who were the best at following traffic rules, the second and the third. But in the whole of Athens they could not find a single person. The police were getting worried; the days were almost finished, and the last day they wanted to find anyhow three -- they may not be perfect, but those prizes had to be distributed. One man they found was following the traffic…

Anand means bliss, vishram means relaxation -- a blissful relaxation. The simple word "relax" contains my whole philosophy of life. To be in a relaxed state is to be in God. To be utterly relaxed is to disappear from the circumference and appear at the center. That is the only transformation; there is none other. When you are tense you remain tethered to the circumference of your life; when you relax you sink to the deeper levels of your being. And when the relaxation is total, suddenly you find yourself at the very core... and that's what God isl But man lives in a kind of constant tension, man is tension; a chronic state of tension, that's what man is. Man is not a being. Trees have more being, rocks too; animals and birds have more being than man.