Death and Life Meditation
January 12, 2009
15 minutes dying before sleep
15 minutes vitality after waking up
In the night before you go to sleep, do this fifteen-minute meditation. It is a death meditation. Lie down and relax your body. Just feel like dying and that you cannot move your body because you are dead. Just create the feeling that you are disappearing from the body. Do it for ten, fifteen minutes, and you will start feeling it within a week. Meditating that way, fall asleep. Don’t break it. Let the meditation turn into sleep, and if sleep overcomes you, go into it.
In the morning, the moment you feel you are awake — don’t open your eyes — do the life meditation. Feel that you are becoming more wholly alive, that life is coming back and the whole body is full of vitality and energy. Start moving, swaying in the bed with eyes closed. Just feel that life is flowing in you. Feel that the body has a great flowing energy — just the opposite of the death meditation. So do the death meditation in the night before falling asleep and the life meditation just before getting up.
With the life meditation you can take deep breaths. Just feel full of energy… life entering with breathing. Feel full and very happy, alive. Then after fifteen minutes, get up. These two — the life and death meditation — are going to help you tremendously.
Osho, excerpts from A Rose is a Rose #12
Osho book recommendations on meditation
Meditation: The First and Last Freedom
Everyday Osho: 365 Daily Meditations for the Here and Now
Meditation For Busy People: Stress-Beating Strategies To Calm Your Life
Discover the Buddha: 53 Meditations to Meet the Buddha Within
Gratefulness and Retrospection
December 24, 2008
Blessings of a new day
In the morning remember one thing, says Atisha, that a new day, a new opportunity, has again been given to you. Feel grateful. Existence is so generous. You have wasted so many days, and again one day has been given to you. In the morning remember it is a new day, a new beginning. Have a decision deep in your heart that “Today I am not going to waste this opportunity. Enough is enough! Today I am going to be aware, today I am going to be alert, today I am going to devote as much energy as possible to the single cause, the cause of meditation. I will meditate in all my acts. I will do all the activities, the usual day-to-day activities, but with a new quality: I will bring the quality of awareness to them.”
Welcome the new day. Feel grateful, happy that existence still trusts in you; there is still a possibility, the transformation can still happen. Start the day with a great decisiveness.
Even failure supports
In the evening again feel gratitude that the day was given to you, and feel gratitude for all that happened — good and bad both, happiness and unhappiness both, because they are all teachers. Everything is an opportunity. Taken rightly, every moment is a stepping-stone. Failure as much helps you to become alert as success; sometimes in fact failure helps you to become more aware than success. Success helps you to fall asleep. In happiness people forget; in happiness nobody remembers godliness. In unhappiness suddenly the remembrance comes.
So in the evening feel grateful for whatsoever happened during the day. Thank the whole existence. Remember when you failed in the day in being aware and being compassionate — just remember. Just watch again, take note when you failed in awareness — that will help you tomorrow, it will enhance your awareness. And take note when you failed in compassion — that will help you tomorrow to be more compassionate. And also take note when you succeeded in being aware and compassionate. Don’t feel any pride for it either — no guilt, no pride. It is not a question of guilt and pride. Nothing of the sort — just noticing back, what happened from the morning to the evening.
Osho, The Book of Wisdom #17
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Osho book recommendations on meditation
Meditation: The First and Last Freedom
Everyday Osho: 365 Daily Meditations for the Here and Now
Meditation For Busy People: Stress-Beating Strategies To Calm Your Life
Discover the Buddha: 53 Meditations to Meet the Buddha Within
