According to Osho, the 'Osho Shake' has no technique or choreography—the secret is your love. He says he doesn't even know dancing; it is the immense love of his sannyasins that moves his body into celebration. Feeling unworthy yet showered with love, he simply responds; the dance arises as gratitude to your collective heart.
It happens because your love makes Osho so happy that he naturally starts to wiggle and dance.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Beloved Osho, the way you dance is absolutely unique and outrageous. What is the secret behind the Osho shake?
I have never thought in my life that there is going to be someday the Osho Shake! I don't know dancing, so it is going to be outrageous. And the secret is very simple: It is your love. I don't think any man in the whole history has been loved so much by so many intelligent people. Your love makes me dance. The secret is with you. I cannot believe it, because I don't deserve any love even from a single human being. But one million sannyasins around the earth -- it surprises me! And you are showering so much love that what else can I do? I can do a little Osho Shake!
Osho, I am dancing here. I, who never danced. Far from dancing—I had never even thought I would dance. I am astonished at myself. I ask: what has happened to me?
Love has happened to you; religion has happened to you. You have begun to come toward your home. You have turned back. You have set out toward your source. The Ganges has started flowing back toward Gangotri. The current has reversed. Your first steps have begun to fall in the direction from which you came. And when the first steps fall that way, dance is born. The farther you go from the divine, the more dance is lost; gloom, frustration, melancholy spread through life. When you are very miserable, understand that you are very far from the divine. The rishis have described the divine as sat-chit-ananda—being, consciousness, bliss. Saraha says, Tilopa says: it is mahāsukha, the great bliss. That means the more you are in sorrow, the farther you are from it. The proportion of your sorrow is the proportion of your distance. The measure of your sorrow is the…
Beloved Osho, what is it that happens when you dance with me? You say you are an ordinary man, but dancing with you is no ordinary experience. It is unlike anything I have felt before.
Who told you that I am an ordinary man? It must be me! Only an extraordinary being can have the guts to say that he is ordinary. Every ordinary person thinks in himself that he is extraordinary, although he has not the guts to say it. I am extraordinary! Otherwise there is no reason for all of you to be here with me. What the hell are you doing here with an ordinary man? Yes, while dancing with me you must have experienced something that you cannot experience with anybody else -- because it is not a dance of two bodies, not a dance but a deep, very deep meeting. Don't listen to my words. Trust what you feel with me. That dance has given you the right dimension which I cannot give you with words. Words are ordinary, but the silence, the beautiful dance -- mingling, meeting, merging into…
Osho, when does dance happen? You are always speaking of dance—what dance? And when does this dance happen?
Certainly I speak of dance, because for me dance itself is worship. Dance itself is meditation. There is no method more effortless than dance, no samadhi so natural. Dance is the most effortless, the simplest. For nowhere else can you melt your ego as easily as you can in dancing. If you can dance with a full heart, you will vanish. You will be effaced in the dance. Dance is a wondrous path of self-forgetfulness, a miraculous alchemy. And dance has another beauty: as you dance, your life-energy begins to flow. You have become inert. You were born to be a river; you have become a stagnant pond. You were born to flow; you have become blocked. Your life-energy must flow again, must gush forth again. Let the waves rise again. For a river one day reaches the ocean; a pond never does. A pond remains closed within itself. That…
[NOTE: This is an unedited tape transcript of an unpublished darshan diary, which has been scanned and cleaned up. It is for reference purposes only.] Love is the most healing force in the world, nothing goes deeper than love. It heals not only the body, not only the mind, but also the soul. If one can love then all one's wounds disappear. Then one becomes whole -- and to be whole is to be holy. Unless one is whole one is not holy. The physical health is a superficial phenomenon. It can happen through medicine, it can happen through science. But the innermost core of one's being can be healed only through love. Those who know the secret of love know the greatest secret of life. Then there is no misery for them, no old age, no death.