[A new sannyasin said she would like to learn T’ai Chi.]

 

 

T’ai chi is very good, mm? But when the body is unburdened of repressed emotions and energy starts flowing, then T’ai Chi is just the right thing to do. But just wait… Just wait a little, mm? Always remember, everything has a particular time, a particular season and a particular climate. First create the season and the climate. Let there be spring, then flowers come very easily. Otherwise sometimes in the wrong season, in the wrong climate, you can go on working hard and nothing will happen.

 

My experience with T’ai Chi is that if a person has many repressed emotions, those emotions become like a wall around the diaphragm. He cannot feel the hara, the T’ai Chi centre. Even if you tell him that it is there, just below the navel, two inches below the navel, he cannot feel it. He can believe it, he can imagine it, but he cannot feel it – and unless you feel it exactly where it is, t’ai chi doesn’t start. You have to be focused there, centred there – there is the source of your ’chi’, your energy.

 

But unless one has thrown all the repressed emotions …. Anger, greed, jealousy, and a thousand and one things are there and we go on piling them up in the stomach because that is the only empty space in the body. So whatsoever you want to throw, you throw it there – either throw it out or throw it in; only two are the ways.

 

Catharsis means throwing it out so it doesn’t spoil your system. If a person is in a situation where he wants to scream and he does not – maybe there are so many people and it will look odd; they will think him bizarre, mad, crazy and he himself thinks that it is crazy – where will he throw it? Where will the scream go? He will push it down inside the stomach, he will sit upon it.

 

Now the scream will be pressed like a spring: you can sit upon a spring, but the spring is there and any moment that you go away the spring will uncoil. You go on repressing millions of things every day in this way – the stomach is too much burdened – then suddenly you start T’ai Chi. You cannot feel where your ’chi’ centre is. You have lost all contact, because between you and the ’chi’ centre there is such rubbish, a mountain of rubbish.

 

That mountain has to be removed first. Once it is removed – once your ’chi’ centre starts functioning well and you can see it directly; you can relate to it not in imagination but actually, you can start feeling your life energy bubbling there – then things become very simple and T’ai Chi comes very very easily.

 

So just finish a few groups and then I will suggest you do T’ai Chi, but go on asking me so I remember, mm?

 

-Osho, “This Is It, #3”

 

 

 

 

[A sannyasin who is teaches martial arts in Taiwan says: I found in the encounter group I did, that certain emotions brought out anger, and I could see how to use T'ai Chi for love, but things like pain and fear, I cannot come in contact with.]

 

T'ai Chi can be used for many many things, and for this also, because each movement of the body can have some relevance to the emotions. That's why they are called 'emotions' -- because they are connected with body motions: each emotion has a particular body gesture related to it, corresponding to it.

 

[Osho describes the James Lange theory that was evolved in the beginning of this century which proposes that in a situation that could be fear-provoking, it is the running away that causes fear, not the other way round. There is some truth in it, Osho says, because the fear and the running are deeply connected... ]

 

When you become angry your eyes have a certain gesture, your hands have a certain gesture, your teeth have a certain energy, your jaw is more aggressive; you are ready to destroy, to be aggressive. The energy accumulates in the hands and in the teeth, because when man was an animal that was the only way to be angry. Still animals are angry with their teeth and with their nails; we still carry that mechanism.

 

If you try to be angry without using your hands and your teeth and your eyes, you will be in an almost impossible situation -- you cannot be angry. That particular gesture in the body is a must. And what precedes what cannot be said, so lange is also true. In fact it is just like saying: 'Which comes first? -- the hen or the egg.' Does fear come first and then the gesture of being frightened, or does the gesture come and then the fear? They both come together; they are simultaneous.

 

You can work it out... but t'ai chi masters will not be of much help because they have not used it in that way. T'ai Chi has many potentialities which have not been used in the past. In fact, T'ai Chi has been used to repress, not to express.

 

All the eastern techniques are in a way repressive. Rather than expressing your anger, your sadness or your negativity, the techniques have been made in such a way that you can very very politely persuade them to go into the unconscious, to the basement.

 

So T'ai Chi masters won't be much help... but you can work it out on your own. Learn T'ai Chi from them but then you can work it out in a very cathartic way and you can throw negative emotions through T'ai Chi movements; they can be thrown out. You can develop that thing and it can be helpful for others too. It can become a new dimension in T'ai Chi. I have always been thinking that some time or other, that dimension has to be developed in t'ai chi. As it is, it doesn't exist right now.

 

So don't talk about it otherwise they will say no... because the east is very orthodox. They have a certain use and they have used it down the ages and they have become very fixed; they are not even exploring new possibilities.

 

The same is the case with yoga in India -- it has become a frozen science: for three thousand years, not a single development. So is the case with T'ai Chi: for three thousand years not a single improvement. It remains exactly where it was three thousand years before... as if three thousand years have not passed.

 

The East is very very orthodox: once it finds that a certain thing works it uses it only in that way. The west is very very exploring, hence the West could reach from the bullock cart to the space jet. The East could not, the East still carries the bullock cart; it is the same bullock cart! In the same bullock cart Buddha was moving, in the same bullock cart Patanjali was moving, in the same bullock cart Lao Tzu was moving, and in the same bullock cart the East is still moving.

 

-Osho, “Far Beyond the Stars, #25”