Aneesha Dillon

Aneesha Dillon dances to her own drummer.

Born in 1949 in Long Beach, New Jersey, Aneesha knew intuitively from early on that she was “in heart and spirit” a California girl.  

Although she received her BA from Boston U., Aneesha spent junior year at San Francisco State with the intention of checking out the California hippie scene up close and personal. “We’re talking 1970,” she told me, “and everyone wanted to be here and experience the hippie lifestyle.” During her sojourn at SF State, Aneesha met Bill, the man who would become her husband. Though the marriage lasted only a few years, their lives remained intertwined, and they are still the best of friends.

For as long as she can remember, Aneesha has been on a search for personal freedom. This quest led her to become an ardent student of the human potential movement. While still in her twenties, she moved to LA to study at the Radix Institute with Charles Kelley, a philosopher and explorer of the dynamics of emotions. Kelley’s work was based on the earlier work of Wilhelm Reich, the Austrian psychoanalyst who had been a student of Freud’s.

Aneesha soon decided to dig deeper and study the work of Reich directly, focusing on sexuality from both physical and psychological standpoints.

“The presupposition of Reichian therapy is that as we are growing up and shaped by social conditioning, we learn many rules—I should do this and not that,” Aneesha explained. “Most of us are guided by well-meaning parents, but to be compliant and get our parents’ approval we often have to repress our authentic feelings. When not expressed, the energy of our repressed emotions creates tension in the body and we develop a kind of muscular armoring.  

“To put it another way,” she continued, “this type of repression deadens our system energetically—more akin to  a stagnant pool than a bubbling stream—so anyone who wants to become a bubbling stream might want to explore Reichian work!”

For most of her professional life, Aneesha has traveled the world to offer Reichian therapy sessions and workshops. “We start with gentle movement and breathwork,” she explained, “usually with the person lying down. I use many different techniques for working with the muscular body, encouraging it to loosen and relax. I watch very closely with a trained eye and invite deeper breathing into stuck areas, and this encourages a release of old, repressed feelings. I then invite the expression of those feelings,” she added.

“And what are the results of these sessions?” 

“Sometimes people who are depressed are packing in something held deeply inside the body, an effort to not break down and give in,” she explained. “If they allow the waves of feeling to come through, at the end of that wave the body is more relaxed and the issues/memories/pictures are seen more clearly and there is more understanding of the repressed feelings.

“Many people walk around with a lot of unexpressed feeling,” she observed. “Once they come in touch with the rage and injustice, the energy that was repressed is expanded and it feels like there is more internal space. People get to experience an energetic lightness they may not have felt since early childhood. Physical and mental relaxation result.”

Once her Reichian studies ended, Aneesha was drawn to be with the spiritual master Osho and lived in his communities in Poona, India, and in Oregon from 1976 to 2004. She then spent a few years with the Osho community in Denmark before coming back to California in 2007. During this time she traveled throughout the world—usually two weeks per month—to teach Reichian workshops.

However, during this period Aneesha was also deeply devoted to learning and practicing meditation. In fact, “when a really nice man at the ashram expressed interest in having a relationship with me, I told him that I didn’t want to be distracted from my spiritual path,” she said. This dedication also resulted in Aneesha’s decision to not have children, and to avoid any unwanted pregnancy she opted for sterilization. “When I woke up from the operation that clipped and cauterized my Fallopian tubes, I felt pain around my belly button, but as soon as I turned over on my side, I felt utterly in bliss,” she recalled. 

“Now I am free,” I said to myself. “Now no one and nothing can hold me back. I really experienced my freedom in that moment. My highest value in life is freedom.”

“What does freedom look and feel like?”

“To me, it’s the freedom to not be so engaged out there and just be engaged with myself,” she replied. “I went to be with Osho to learn meditation but with all that traveling to do workshops, I’ve never had the time to meditate without interruption in an intensive and focused way. I want to be free to do that; that’s what I’m working to make happen right now during the pandemic.”

“Is there anything you are worried about?”  

“Not really,” she quickly replied, almost surprised by the question. “The pandemic has been a very productive time for me. It’s been very worry-free. I’ve noticed that I’m much happier staying put than I am when I travel. I have peak experiences when I’m doing workshops, but I’m not sleeping in my own bed for months at a time and that is unsettling for me.” 

“Any regrets?”  

“Honestly, no, and that’s a form of freedom, too,” she said. “I’ve done with my life what I wanted to do, every step of the way. What I feel more and more is that there is a kind of intention about it—to flow with life where life takes me.”

Aneesha moved into Marin Valley in May 2015. She loves the community atmosphere and enjoys the neighborhood happy hour and movie night on her street­­­—with social distancing in place—of course! 

“After this experience of staying in place for a while, I’m wanting to stop traveling,” she told me. “To that end, I am taking a six-month course at the Celebrant Institute, training to be an officiant at life transitions, ceremonies and rituals like weddings, birthdays, funerals. I’m loving it,” she told me with a glowing smile. “That’s one of the things I’m planning to do when I definitely step back from offering Reichian workshops around the world.

“I’ve also been wanting to work with dying people for a long time,” she added. “A few years ago, I studied to be a death doula at the Conscious Dying Institute in Boulder.” 

From time to time Aneesha offers Park residents a workshop called The Forest Years: Transformational Aging. With a little luck, we can get her to offer it again. She is truly qualified!   ■