The first few days of active meditation tend to tighten muscles, causing pain everywhere. Is there any way to get over that?

Go on doing it! You will get over it.
The reasons are obvious. There are two reasons. First, it is a vigorous exercise and your body has to get attuned to it. So for three or four days you will feel that the whole body is aching. With any new exercise it will happen. But after four days you will get over it and your body will feel stronger than ever. But this is not very basic....
The basic thing goes deeper, and the basic thing is what modern psychologists have come to know: your body is not simply physical. In your body, in your muscles, in the structure of your body, many other things have entered through suppressions.

If you suppress anger, the poison goes into the body. It goes into the muscles; it goes into the blood. If you suppress anything, it is not only a mental thing; it is also physical because you are not really divided. You are not body and mind; you are bodymind "–" psychosomatic. You are both together. So whatsoever is done with your body reaches the mind, and whatsoever is done with the mind reaches the body, as body and mind are two ends of the same entity.
For instance, if you get angry, what happens to the body? Whenever you get angry certain poisons are released into the blood. Without those poisons you will not get mad enough to be angry. You have particular glands in the body, and those glands release certain chemicals. Now this is scientific, this is not just a philosophy. Your blood becomes poisoned.
When an animal gets angry, he gets angry. He has no morality about it, no teaching about it. He simply gets angry and the anger is released. When you get angry, you get angry in a way similar to any animal. But then there is society, morality, etiquette, and thousands of things. You have to push the anger down.
Then what will happen to all those muscles that were ready to be aggressive? They will become crippled. The energy pushes them to be aggressive, and you push them back not to be aggressive. There will be a conflict. In your muscles, in your blood, in your body tissues there will be conflict. They are ready to express something and you are pushing them not to express. You are suppressing them. Then your body becomes crippled.
This happens with every emotion. And this goes on day after day for years. Then your body becomes crippled all over. All the nerves become crippled. They are not flowing, they are not liquid, they are not alive. They have become dead; they have become poisoned. They have all become entangled; they are not natural.

So when you start meditating, all these poisons will be released. And wherever the body has become stagnant, it will have to melt, it will become liquid again. And this is a great effort. After forty years of living in a wrong way, then suddenly meditating.... The whole body is in an upheaval. You will feel aching all over the body.
But this aching is good, and you have to welcome it.
Allow the body to become again a flow. Again it will become graceful and childlike; again you will gain the aliveness. But before that aliveness comes to you the dead parts have to be straightened, and this is going to be a little painful.
Psychologists say that we have created an armor around the body, and that armor is the problem. If the anger is not released, that anger is blocking and love cannot come out of it....
Now I am creating chaos again. This meditation is to create chaos within you so that you can be rearranged, so that a new arrangement becomes possible. You must be destroyed as you are; only then can the new be born. As you are, you have gone totally wrong. You have to be destroyed and only then can something new be created. There will be pain, but this pain is worthwhile.
So go on doing the meditation and allow the body to have pain. Allow the body not to resist; allow the body to move into this agony. This agony comes from your past but it will go. If you are ready it will go. And when it goes, then for the first time you will have a body. Right now you have only an imprisonment, a capsule, dead. You are encapsulated; you do not have an agile, alive body. Even animals have more beautiful, more alive bodies than you.
We have done much violence to our bodies.

In this chaotic meditation I am forcing your bodies to be alive again.
Many blocks will be broken; many settled things will become unsettled again; many systems will become liquid again. There will be pain, but welcome it. It is a blessing and you will come over it. Continue! There is no need to think what to do. You simply continue the meditation. I have seen hundreds and hundreds of people passing through the same process. Within a few days the pain is gone. And when the pain is gone, you will have a subtle joy around your body.
You cannot have it right now because the pain is there. You may know it or you may not know it but the pain is there all over your body. You have simply become unconscious about it because it has always been with you. Whatsoever is always there, you become unconscious about. Through meditation you will become conscious and then the mind will say, "Don't do this; the whole body is aching." Do not listen to the mind. Simply go on doing it.

Within a certain period the pain will be thrown out. And when the pain is thrown out, when your body has again become receptive and there is no block, no poisons around it, you will always have a subtle feeling of joy wrapped around you. Whatsoever you are doing or not doing, you will always feel a subtle vibration of joy around your body.
Really, joy only means that your body is in a symphony, nothing else "–" that your body is in a musical rhythm, nothing else. Joy is not pleasure; pleasure has to be derived from something else. Joy is just to be yourself: alive, fully vibrant, vital. A feeling of a subtle music around your body and within your body, a symphony "–" that is joy. You can be joyful when your body is flowing, when it is a river-like flow.
It will come but you will have to pass through suffering, through pain. That is part of your destiny because you have created it. But it goes. If you do not stop in the middle, it goes. If you stop in the middle, then the old settlement will be there again. Within four or five days you will feel okay "–" just the old, as you have always been. Be aware of that okayness.

Osho: "The Supreme Doctrine"

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