• Shares practices to show how sitting meditation can be reconnected to lived, bodily experience and help you rediscover your natural somatic radiance

• Explores how the modern thought-focused frame of mind introduces patterns of holding and tension into our bodies

• Draws on techniques from the Buddhist, Sufi, and somatic wisdom traditions as well as insights from the author’s own teachers and collaborators, including Ida Rolf and Judith Aston

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 and helps meditation practitioners find their own inner radiance 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 and 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 audio 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 from one of tension and struggle 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.”

Will Johnson 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. The author of several books, including Breathing through the Whole Body and Eyes Wide Open, he teaches a deeply body-oriented approach to sitting meditation at Buddhist centers around the world.

Introduction: Bound Slaves

PART 1
The Liberation of the Radiant Body

The Somatophobic Entrapment

Don’t Try

The Line

The Koan of The Line

Undulation

Breathing the Spine

Undulating Breath

Radiant Body, Radiant Breath

Virtual Acupuncture: The Portal Meditation

Breathing in the Six Directions

Breath as Bodyworker

Unwrapping the Breath

Surrendering to Current

PART 2
The Great Wide Open

The Consciousness of Felt Radiance

Uncorking the Wine

Let It Lead You

Mystery Space

The View

Look and See

Form and Emptiness

Rainbow Body

Rainbow Embodiment

This Very Body

Afterword: The Birthing of
Western Dharma

Addendum: Hollow Bamboo Breathing

Acknowledgments and Further Study

Index