Osho - Fear of Women

Osho - Fear of Women is basically the Fear of the Mother

Question: In a Therapy group that i did recently, I discovered a lot of Violence in myself, and a Fear of women. My feeling is that the Fear of Women is connected with my birth, which I re-experienced In the group and Which was very Painful to me.

Osho: They are all interdependent and connected. The fear of women is basically the fear of the mother. And everybody has to come to a reconciliation with the mother. Unless you are reconciled with the mother you will never be reconciled with any woman, because every woman again and again reminds you of your mother. Sometimes it may not be consciously, but unconsciously it will hit.

And every birth is painful now. Civilisation has completely destroyed natural birth. No child is born naturally. The mother is so tense that she does not help the process of birth. In fact she starts obstructing it. She does not allow the child to go out. She starts closing her womb. This is in tune with the whole tense life that we are living. The modern idea, the basic idea on which all anxiety is founded, is that we have to fight with life and with nature. So it is nothing special to you. Every child more or less has suffered birth.

So the only way is to relive it, to make it completely conscious again. Once you can live it consciously, you can understand and forgive your mother, because that poor woman was suffering. It is not that she has done anything to you. She was herself a victim. Nobody is at fault because the whole situation is faulty. She was loaded with her own birth and she again re-enacted it with you. That is the only way she knew how to do it. So once you become alert, conscious, aware, you can forgive. Not only that, you can feel compassion for her.

Once compassion arises in you for your mother, reconciliation has happened. Then you don't carry any grudge. And dropping that grudge suddenly will help you towards other women. You will not be afraid; you will be loving. A woman is one of the most beautiful phenomena in the world; not to be compared with anything else. The woman is the masterpiece of god. So if you are afraid of woman, you will be afraid of god. You will be afraid of love, afraid of prayer. You will be afraid of all that is beautiful, because woman personifies beauty and grace.

And once this happens -- that you start flowing towards feminine energy around you -- then your violence will disappear. Violence is nothing but the energy that has to become love and is not becoming love. Violence is nothing but love unlived. A violent person is one who has too much love-energy and does not know how to release it. Love is creative, violence is destructive, and creative energy turns into being destructive if not used. The group has made you aware of some very beautiful, meaningful things.

Many people come to me. They say that they are afraid of women, very afraid. Because of that fear, they cannot make a meaningful relationship, they cannot relate; the fear is always there. When you are in fear, the relationship will be contaminated by the fear. You will not be able to move totally. You will relate halfheartedly, always afraid: the fear of being rejected, the fear that the woman may say no. And there are other fears.

If this man goes on trying Emile Coue-type methods, if he goes on repeating, 'I am not afraid of women, and every day I am getting better,' if he tries such things he can suppress the fear temporarily, but the fear will be there and will come again and again and again. A man who is afraid of women shows that he must have had some experience with the mother which has caused fear, because the mother is the first woman. Your whole life you may be related with many women as wife, as mistress, as daughter, as friend, but the image of mother will persist.

That is your first experience. Your whole structure of relationship with women will be based on that foundation, and that foundation is your relationship with your mother. So if a man is afraid of women, he has to be led back, he has to step backwards in memory, he has to go back and find the primal source from where the fear started. It may be an ordinary incident, very minor, he may have completely forgotten it. But if he goes back, he will find the wound some where.

You wanted to be loved by the mother, as every child wants, but the mother was not interested. She was a busy woman. She had to attend many associations, clubs, this and that. She was not willing to give the breast to you because she wanted a more proportioned body. She wanted her breasts to be intact and not destroyed by you. She wanted her breasts to be always young so she denied the breast to you. Or, there may have been other problems in her mind. You were not an accepted child; like a burden you have come, never wanted in the first place.

But the pill didn't work and you were born. Or, she hated the husband and you had the face of the husband -- a deep hatred, or something or other. But you have to go back and you have to become a child again. Remember, no stage of life is ever lost. Your child is still within you. It is not that the child becomes the young man, no. The child remains inside, the young man is imposed over it, then the old man is superimposed over the young man, layer by layer. The child never becomes the young man. The child remains there, a layer of young man comes over it.

The young man never becomes the old; another layer, of old age, comes over it. You become like an onion -- many layers -- and if you penetrate, all the layers are Still there, intact. Primal Therapy helps people to go backwards and become children again. They kick, they cry, they weep, they scream, and the scream is no more of the present. It doesn't belong to the man right now, it belongs to the child who is hidden behind. When that scream, that primal scream comes, many things are immediately transformed.

This is one part of the method of prati-prasav. Janov may not be aware that Patanjali, almost five thousand years ago, taught a system in which every effect had to be led to the cause. Only the cause can be resolved. You can cut the roots, and then the tree will die. But you cannot cut the branches and hope that the tree will die. The tree will thrive more. 'Prati-prasav' is a beautiful word; 'prasav' means birth. When a child is born it is prasav.

Prati-prasav means you are again born in the memory, you go back to the very birth, the trauma when you were born, and you live it again. Remember, you don't remember it, you live it, you relive it again. Remembering is different. You can remember, you can sit silently, but you remain the man you are: you remember that you were a child and your mother hit you hard. That wound is there, but this is remembrance. You are remembering an incident as if it happened to somebody else. To relive it is pratiprasav.

To relive it means that you become the child again. Not that you remember; you become the child again, you live it again. The mother is hitting you not in your memory, the mother hits you again right now: the wound, the anger, the antagonism, your shrinking back, the rejection, and your reaction, as if the whole thing is happening again. This is prati-prasav. And this is not only as Primal Therapy, but as a methodology for every seeker who is in search of the life abundant, of truth.

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