I purchased Emotions: Freedom from Anger, Jealousy, and Fear by Osho to see what I could learn in preparation for my Meetup session on jealousy. It’s a small pocketbook of only 150 pages, and the font is very liberally spaced on those pages making the book seem even shorter than it actually is. I think the book was required to have at least ten comma splices on each page; it’s enough to make a former English teacher like me insane.
The book itself is filled with nuggets of wisdom that I found interesting to contemplate. Osho uses a combination of prose and poetry to share his ideas. Both have powerful results in some parts of the book. I really enjoyed the section on jealousy. The section on fear was shorter and weaker than the other two sections; it felt only partially developed. One of the final chapters of the book on transformation was nothing more than a redux. Furthermore, I found Osho’s perspective to be seriously lacking in an understanding of the mind-body-spirit connection. While that’s not unusual for a Western medical doctor, for a mystic, it feels like a sign of denial or ignorance. His active meditation ideas in the back were different, but none were compelling enough to make me want to try them. A great number of them involve physical motion which is difficult at this time for me, but it may be perfect for others who have difficulty with sitting still and meditating.
Most frustrating for me was the section on anger. Osho’s view of anger is very simplistic. He believes anger requires two people, yet that fails to explain why we can have anger at ourselves. Equally errant is his belief that one can release anger in only a few minutes by changing one’s thought patterns. Either Osho is not a naturally angry person or anger does not work the same in men as it does in woman. I can go to bed, dream all night about different topics, and then wake up the next morning furious again about something that happened a day or two before. I found most of Osho’s suggestions for releasing anger (such as punching a pillow or running one’s self to a point of exhaustion) to be simplistic and pointless: They aren’t going to actually relieve the cause of the anger and often for me this type of tactic doesn’t even remove the energy of the anger either. Physical exertion just makes me tired and sore on top of being angry.
Despite all of those complaints, I do think there was a great deal of wisdom in the book. Osho is great for “sound bites.” I found many quotes that made me stop and think for a few minutes as I encountered them. I saved many of those bits of inspiration for future mantras for my blog. I’ll also be using some of his poetry about jealousy to open my Meetup session on the topic because it is incredibly beautiful.
© 2015 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC
The book itself is filled with nuggets of wisdom that I found interesting to contemplate. Osho uses a combination of prose and poetry to share his ideas. Both have powerful results in some parts of the book. I really enjoyed the section on jealousy. The section on fear was shorter and weaker than the other two sections; it felt only partially developed. One of the final chapters of the book on transformation was nothing more than a redux. Furthermore, I found Osho’s perspective to be seriously lacking in an understanding of the mind-body-spirit connection. While that’s not unusual for a Western medical doctor, for a mystic, it feels like a sign of denial or ignorance. His active meditation ideas in the back were different, but none were compelling enough to make me want to try them. A great number of them involve physical motion which is difficult at this time for me, but it may be perfect for others who have difficulty with sitting still and meditating.
Most frustrating for me was the section on anger. Osho’s view of anger is very simplistic. He believes anger requires two people, yet that fails to explain why we can have anger at ourselves. Equally errant is his belief that one can release anger in only a few minutes by changing one’s thought patterns. Either Osho is not a naturally angry person or anger does not work the same in men as it does in woman. I can go to bed, dream all night about different topics, and then wake up the next morning furious again about something that happened a day or two before. I found most of Osho’s suggestions for releasing anger (such as punching a pillow or running one’s self to a point of exhaustion) to be simplistic and pointless: They aren’t going to actually relieve the cause of the anger and often for me this type of tactic doesn’t even remove the energy of the anger either. Physical exertion just makes me tired and sore on top of being angry.
Despite all of those complaints, I do think there was a great deal of wisdom in the book. Osho is great for “sound bites.” I found many quotes that made me stop and think for a few minutes as I encountered them. I saved many of those bits of inspiration for future mantras for my blog. I’ll also be using some of his poetry about jealousy to open my Meetup session on the topic because it is incredibly beautiful.
© 2015 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC
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