10. Osho in a Nutshell? Dynamic Meditation and the Relationship of Bodily Performance and Meaning-Making
Embodied Reception - South Asian Spiritualities in Contemporary Contexts - Henriette Hanky
Henriette Hanky [+]
University of Bergen
Description
This chapter discusses the question of how contemporary performances of mind-body techniques relate to the authoritative figures, institutions, and discourses that created them. The case under investigation is OSHO Dynamic Meditation, the most famous meditation technique created by the controversial guru Osho (Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh) that has been practiced from the early days of the Neo-Sannyas Movement in the 1970s until today. Dynamic Meditation has five characteristic stages leading meditators from chaotic breathing, cathartic explosion and complete exhaustion to stillness and celebration. Both sannyasins and scholars have referred to the technique as a 'microcosm’ of Osho’s teaching and method (Urban 2015, 59). The chapter scrutinizes this claim and re-evaluates the relationship between teaching and bodily practice. The analysis is based on ethnographic observations and interviews from Osho-related meditation centres in Scandinavia, Germany, and India. A stable communicative form in an otherwise dispersed and diverse field, Dynamic Meditation has a specific affective dramaturgy tailored to induce experiences in need of interpretation. How meditators make sense of their experience varies according to contextual factors and can be detached from Osho’s authority. Still, the communities under investigation share discourses around therapy and meditation that are reproduced and legitimized through bodily techniques (such as Dynamic Meditation) that again socialize newcomers into the communicative milieu of the Sannyas scene.