Osho – T'ai Chi is very good But when the body is unburdened of repressed emotions

Osho – 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?

Source: from Osho Book “This Is It”