Best Selling Author Will Johnson and his latest book “The Radical Path of Somatic Dharma: Radiant Body, Radiant Mind” Inner Traditions (January 7, 2025). Will is the director of the Institute for Embodiment Training and the founder of Bambu Hueco, a retreat center in Costa Rica that views the body as the doorway to spiritual growth and transformation.
Book Description:
The modern practice of seated meditation is in serious need of reformation. What began as a living, vibrant, and felt practice—the primary practice of the Buddhist path to spiritual realization—has painted itself into a corner of frozen stillness, divorced from lived, bodily experience.
Presenting an accessible and deeply felt guide to sitting meditation as an active exploration, Will Johnson offers a revitalized understanding of this essential spiritual practice through deeper connection with the body. Johnson argues that the thought-focused mode of consciousness of modern rigid seated meditation introduces patterns of holding and tension into our bodies and virtually guarantees that awakening will not occur. He explains how our focus on thought, rather than embodied experience, results in a numbing of our connection to our physical self and the dimming of the body’s natural somatic radiance, which in turn leads to the nagging presence of chronic pain, a general sense of malaise, and the inability to get comfortable in our own bodies.
However, this “consciousness of separation” can be overcome. Johnson presents a wide range of practices, including 14 meditations, to support the awakening of breath and presence in the body, drawing on techniques from Buddhist, Sufi, and somatic wisdom traditions as well as methods from his studies with Ida Rolf and Judith Aston.
Through the radical path of conscious sitting, Johnson shows how to transform your sitting meditation practice into a fully natural mudra of greater grace from which radiance will naturally flow. As the egoic perspective is dissolved, and chronic pain and discomfort are lessened, practitioners begin to feel a new, enlightened, bodily radiance—what Johnson calls “The Great Wide Open.”
Thoughts about Will Johnson and his new book:
Every time the Buddhist dharma (teachings) have moved to a new territory the form of the teachings have changed due to its interaction with the cultural/spiritual reality of the new territory. The gentle Chinese monks arrive on the shores of Japan where they encounter the samurai, and zen becomes fierce. The teachers from northern India climb up onto the Tibetan plateau where they encounter the shamanistic and animistic culture of the indigenous Bon-po, and suddenly images of wrathful and peaceful deities enter the Buddhist world. The teachings are now moving to the West, and there is no way that a uniquely Western Dharma—different from the forms coming over from Asia—won’t be created. Will Johnson’s new book is a forward visioning presentation of just what those changes will look like.