This article examines a multinational community of meditators and therapists, now called the Osho International Meditation Resort. Based on 6 months of ethnographic fieldwork at this resort located in Pune, India, the article focuses on cathartic therapies and active meditations, analyzed as practices of self-formation affected by relations of power and ideology. The article provides new data about the institutional and ideological contexts that currently inform sannyasin practices, revealing how the organization paradoxically promotes and controls expressive behavior. The study introduces the notion of “psychic deterritorialization” as a way to conceptualize processes of catharsis and self-derailment verified among Western sannyasins and travelers. Moreover, it examines orientalist claims about the Indian self and culture that tend to obstruct Indian nationals from participating in therapy workshops. The efficacy of expressive therapies, as exemplified by the Osho resort, depends on historically shaped tenets of “repression/expression” that forge the Western subject.
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