Centering Through The Body
Your body has its own wisdom – it carries the wisdom of the centuries in its cells.
Your body is feeling hungry and you are on a fast, because your religion says that this day you have to fast – and your body is feeling hungry. You don’t trust your organism, you trust a dead scripture, because in some book somebody has written that this day you have to go on a fast, so you go on a fast.
Listen to your body. Yes, there are days when the body says, “Go on a fast!” – then go. But there is no need to listen to the scriptures. The man who wrote that scripture has not written it with you in his mind, not at all. He could not have conceived of you. You were not present to him, he was not writing about you. It is as if you fall ill and you go to a dead doctor’s house and look into his prescriptions, and find a prescription and start following the prescription. That prescription was made for somebody else, for some other disease, in some other situation.
Remember to trust your own organism. When you feel that the body is saying don’t eat, stop immediately. When the body is saying eat, then don’t bother whether the scriptures say to fast or not. If your body says eat three times a day, perfectly good. If it says eat one time a day, perfectly good.
Start learning how to listen to your body, because it is your body.
You are in it; you have to respect it, and you have to trust it.
It is your temple; it is sacrilegious to impose things on your body. For no other motive should anything be imposed! And this will not only teach you trust in your body, this will teach you, by and by, a trust in existence too – because your body is part of existence. Then your trust will grow, and you will trust the trees and the stars and the moon and the sun and the oceans: you will trust people.
But the beginning of the trust has to be trust in your own organism. Trust your heart.
A sannyasin is one who trusts in his own organism, and that trust helps him to relax into his being, and helps him to relax into the totality of existence. It brings a general acceptance of oneself and others.
Trust gives a kind of rootedness, centering. Then there is great strength and power, because you are centered in your own body, in your own being. You have roots in the soil.
Otherwise you see people uprooted, like trees that have been pulled up from the soil. They are simply dying, they are not living. That’s why there is not much joy in life. You don’t see the quality of laughter; the celebration is missing.
In your very body, in your very being, this very moment, the divine is there – and you have not celebrated it. You cannot celebrate.
Celebration has to happen first in your own home, at close quarters.
Then it becomes a great tidal wave and spreads all over existence.
Osho, The Heart Sutra, Talk #10
