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Published by Inner Traditions
Distributed by Simon & Schuster
Table of Contents
About The Book
• 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 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.”
• 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 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.”
Excerpt
PART 1
The Liberation of the Radiant Body
The Somatophobic Entrapment
OURS IS A CULTURE that is lost in the dark passageways of thought, both bidden and unbidden, and out of touch with the felt radiant presence of the body. In order to conform to the quality of consciousness that passes as normal, and to live in the airy orbits of word and concept, we have to introduce patterns of holding and tension into the tissues of the body that in turn suppress the body’s inherent felt radiance. Being lost in thought and present in awakened body are entirely at odds with each other. You can’t be both at the same time. You’re either one or the other, and within our culture’s somatophobic bias thought always wins.
Somatophobia is exactly what it says: a phobia directed toward the soma, the felt presence of the body, the intricate shimmering web of minute sensations and felt wavelets that course through a relaxed and awakened body like water in a stream. Agoraphobics can’t deal with wide-open spaces, claustrophobics just the opposite. Arachnophobics are terrified of spiders, and someone deeply enmeshed in the grip of somatophobia is both terrified of the potent felt energies of the body and irritated by how they keep on incessantly knocking and pounding on the door of awareness, begging to be let in. These altogether natural sensations and energies are potent, they’re life promoting, and they want to be felt, but somatophobia doesn’t want to open the door, welcome them in, and set them free.
The quality of consciousness that passes as normal in the world depends on somatophobic entrapment, and so we live shut in inside the inhibitions that the somatophobic bias implants in our body. We dial down the innate radiance of the body in order to promote a consciousness that is all too often lost in thought and wholly identified with the speaker of those thoughts.
unbidden thought is what happens
when felt sensation abdicates
radiant presence is what happens
when unbidden thought dissolves
through the reawakening of sensations
sensations and thought
are mutually repellent and incompatible
sensations melt thought
just as thought sends sensations into exile
Under the anesthetizing spell of somatophobia we all have the same name as everyone else. We call ourselves I, as I, after all, am the speaker of all those pesky thoughts. When felt presence is powerfully awakened the exclusively egoic perspective of the mind starts getting diluted and weakened, and the prospect of the dissolution of our egoic identity and self-image is terrifying to that identity and image. When the body awakens, when it once again makes its presence felt as a radiant glow of felt shimmer, the unrelentingly fixed singularity of the egoic perspective is revealed as not being a complete expression of “who I am.” Who are you when “I” no longer dominates your consciousness? Somatophobia doesn’t want you to find out.
The somatophobic entrapment that has taken up residence in all our bodies keeps us limited to but a fraction of our intrinsic radiance, and the shroud it throws over the world of awakened sensation and felt shimmer doesn’t just dim our light. It hurts. Somatophobia is akin to a despotic ruler who demands that the citizens of his country adopt a set of beliefs even if those beliefs hurt them.
On every part of the body, down to its smallest cell, minute, subtly tingling, buzzing, carbonating, fluidly vibratory sensations can be felt to flicker on and off, but only if they’re allowed to make their presence felt, and the somatophobic bias of our culture doesn’t really want you to become aware of them, let alone support you in doing so.
Which begs the question: why? What could possibly be so offensive about the awakening of these altogether natural, often highly pleasurable, and powerfully healing energies and sensations? The simple answer is that their explosive awakening reveals a secret door beyond which the bias of somatophobia doesn’t hold sway. What’s on the other side of the door? Like being in a video game and moving to a new level, a path gets revealed that, if followed, can lead to a radical awakening of who and what you experience yourself to be and how you understand your relationship to the world you live in, and this new awareness will lead to an unraveling of somatophobia’s tight grip. It will eventually lead to a reckoning of everything that you are (sensations don’t lie): the good, the bad, the ugly, the beatific. As sensations start making their formerly hidden presence felt, the physical compression and tensions that support the somatophobic entrapment can expose themselves, and once felt, they can start coming undone.
To awaken radiance you’re asked to empty your pockets and leave at the door your beliefs about yourself, the yarns that the egoic perspective so compellingly, and effectively, spins about you. You’re asked to start feeling what you are directly and forgo the thoughts about what you think you are. You’re asked to relax your exclusive attachment to the egoic perspective—your sense of “I,” the most embedded thought of them all—and realize that it’s not the only setting on the camera lens of consciousness and doesn’t represent everything that you are.
So conditioned are we to worship our “I” and so completely are we identified with it that the prospect of its suspension and its replacement by something else—even if that something else is deeply healing of the body and salving to the soul—causes us to roll our eyes in disbelief as to why anyone would want that for themselves. This is how ingrained the amnesia of our somatophobic entrapment has become.
Children mimic their parents who mimicked their parents, and so the entrapped holding patterns of somatophobia get passed down seamlessly from one generation to the next. At every turn the somatophobic model gets reinforced right from the very moment of our entry into the world up to the moment of our passing beyond. We can’t escape it. We’re all somatophobics.
We worship superficial beauty (we idolize the personas of our stars and starlets, the impossibly fascinating-looking models who catwalk along the runway) yet remain compliant to an unspoken message to dim the body’s inner radiance. Our obsession with beauty at the surface of the physical body is inversely reflected in our antipathy toward the deeper energies that want to awaken and eventually burst forth in radiance, and this fear and irritation are strong enough, and so culturally dominant, that these energies are mostly kept contained, held in, unfelt, and unexpressed.
Somatophobia imprints its stamp on all of us. It shapes our body, our breath, and consciousness itself. Despite our individual differences and unique life stories, our personal aspirations and fears, it affects all of us in an alarmingly similar way and makes us very much alike. It’s as though a somatophobic cookie cutter has molded the doughy shape of all our bodies. Then we add the chocolate bits, the nuts, the raisins, the smarties that make each one of us unique as well. No two snowflakes may ever be identical, but on the surface they all look pretty much alike.
The way we stop ourselves from feeling anything is to freeze and hold the body still. Unsurprisingly somatophobia’s preferred strategy for blocking the inherent radiance of sensation is to implant a holding pattern of frozen stillness throughout the tissues of the body. The stiller you become, the less you feel sensations. The more effective you become at embodying a somatophobic holding pattern, the more you withdraw in to the corners of your mind where unbidden thought and egoic identity rule the roost. So pervasive is the imposition of patterns of tension and the frozen stillness that perpetuates those patterns, and so accepted as normal, that for the most part we’re not aware of it even though these ingrained patterns of constant tension cause pain.
Please don’t misunderstand. There’s nothing inherently wrong with the egoic perspective. This is the consciousness that allows you to function in the world of form where all objects are eternally separate (and I is a stern marker of separation), and it’s important that you get good at it. The only problem with the egoic perspective is that it believes it’s the only perspective that could possibly exist and is highly effective at making you believe that as well, and this is where ego’s deceptive fib entraps you and exposes itself as hopelessly narcissistic. Ego is in love with itself and wants you to honor that love with equally unwavering devotion, never allowing your affections to stray to the alternative perspectives of consciousness that naturally emerge out of a radiant awakening of the body.
The Liberation of the Radiant Body
The Somatophobic Entrapment
OURS IS A CULTURE that is lost in the dark passageways of thought, both bidden and unbidden, and out of touch with the felt radiant presence of the body. In order to conform to the quality of consciousness that passes as normal, and to live in the airy orbits of word and concept, we have to introduce patterns of holding and tension into the tissues of the body that in turn suppress the body’s inherent felt radiance. Being lost in thought and present in awakened body are entirely at odds with each other. You can’t be both at the same time. You’re either one or the other, and within our culture’s somatophobic bias thought always wins.
Somatophobia is exactly what it says: a phobia directed toward the soma, the felt presence of the body, the intricate shimmering web of minute sensations and felt wavelets that course through a relaxed and awakened body like water in a stream. Agoraphobics can’t deal with wide-open spaces, claustrophobics just the opposite. Arachnophobics are terrified of spiders, and someone deeply enmeshed in the grip of somatophobia is both terrified of the potent felt energies of the body and irritated by how they keep on incessantly knocking and pounding on the door of awareness, begging to be let in. These altogether natural sensations and energies are potent, they’re life promoting, and they want to be felt, but somatophobia doesn’t want to open the door, welcome them in, and set them free.
The quality of consciousness that passes as normal in the world depends on somatophobic entrapment, and so we live shut in inside the inhibitions that the somatophobic bias implants in our body. We dial down the innate radiance of the body in order to promote a consciousness that is all too often lost in thought and wholly identified with the speaker of those thoughts.
unbidden thought is what happens
when felt sensation abdicates
radiant presence is what happens
when unbidden thought dissolves
through the reawakening of sensations
sensations and thought
are mutually repellent and incompatible
sensations melt thought
just as thought sends sensations into exile
Under the anesthetizing spell of somatophobia we all have the same name as everyone else. We call ourselves I, as I, after all, am the speaker of all those pesky thoughts. When felt presence is powerfully awakened the exclusively egoic perspective of the mind starts getting diluted and weakened, and the prospect of the dissolution of our egoic identity and self-image is terrifying to that identity and image. When the body awakens, when it once again makes its presence felt as a radiant glow of felt shimmer, the unrelentingly fixed singularity of the egoic perspective is revealed as not being a complete expression of “who I am.” Who are you when “I” no longer dominates your consciousness? Somatophobia doesn’t want you to find out.
The somatophobic entrapment that has taken up residence in all our bodies keeps us limited to but a fraction of our intrinsic radiance, and the shroud it throws over the world of awakened sensation and felt shimmer doesn’t just dim our light. It hurts. Somatophobia is akin to a despotic ruler who demands that the citizens of his country adopt a set of beliefs even if those beliefs hurt them.
On every part of the body, down to its smallest cell, minute, subtly tingling, buzzing, carbonating, fluidly vibratory sensations can be felt to flicker on and off, but only if they’re allowed to make their presence felt, and the somatophobic bias of our culture doesn’t really want you to become aware of them, let alone support you in doing so.
Which begs the question: why? What could possibly be so offensive about the awakening of these altogether natural, often highly pleasurable, and powerfully healing energies and sensations? The simple answer is that their explosive awakening reveals a secret door beyond which the bias of somatophobia doesn’t hold sway. What’s on the other side of the door? Like being in a video game and moving to a new level, a path gets revealed that, if followed, can lead to a radical awakening of who and what you experience yourself to be and how you understand your relationship to the world you live in, and this new awareness will lead to an unraveling of somatophobia’s tight grip. It will eventually lead to a reckoning of everything that you are (sensations don’t lie): the good, the bad, the ugly, the beatific. As sensations start making their formerly hidden presence felt, the physical compression and tensions that support the somatophobic entrapment can expose themselves, and once felt, they can start coming undone.
To awaken radiance you’re asked to empty your pockets and leave at the door your beliefs about yourself, the yarns that the egoic perspective so compellingly, and effectively, spins about you. You’re asked to start feeling what you are directly and forgo the thoughts about what you think you are. You’re asked to relax your exclusive attachment to the egoic perspective—your sense of “I,” the most embedded thought of them all—and realize that it’s not the only setting on the camera lens of consciousness and doesn’t represent everything that you are.
So conditioned are we to worship our “I” and so completely are we identified with it that the prospect of its suspension and its replacement by something else—even if that something else is deeply healing of the body and salving to the soul—causes us to roll our eyes in disbelief as to why anyone would want that for themselves. This is how ingrained the amnesia of our somatophobic entrapment has become.
Children mimic their parents who mimicked their parents, and so the entrapped holding patterns of somatophobia get passed down seamlessly from one generation to the next. At every turn the somatophobic model gets reinforced right from the very moment of our entry into the world up to the moment of our passing beyond. We can’t escape it. We’re all somatophobics.
We worship superficial beauty (we idolize the personas of our stars and starlets, the impossibly fascinating-looking models who catwalk along the runway) yet remain compliant to an unspoken message to dim the body’s inner radiance. Our obsession with beauty at the surface of the physical body is inversely reflected in our antipathy toward the deeper energies that want to awaken and eventually burst forth in radiance, and this fear and irritation are strong enough, and so culturally dominant, that these energies are mostly kept contained, held in, unfelt, and unexpressed.
Somatophobia imprints its stamp on all of us. It shapes our body, our breath, and consciousness itself. Despite our individual differences and unique life stories, our personal aspirations and fears, it affects all of us in an alarmingly similar way and makes us very much alike. It’s as though a somatophobic cookie cutter has molded the doughy shape of all our bodies. Then we add the chocolate bits, the nuts, the raisins, the smarties that make each one of us unique as well. No two snowflakes may ever be identical, but on the surface they all look pretty much alike.
The way we stop ourselves from feeling anything is to freeze and hold the body still. Unsurprisingly somatophobia’s preferred strategy for blocking the inherent radiance of sensation is to implant a holding pattern of frozen stillness throughout the tissues of the body. The stiller you become, the less you feel sensations. The more effective you become at embodying a somatophobic holding pattern, the more you withdraw in to the corners of your mind where unbidden thought and egoic identity rule the roost. So pervasive is the imposition of patterns of tension and the frozen stillness that perpetuates those patterns, and so accepted as normal, that for the most part we’re not aware of it even though these ingrained patterns of constant tension cause pain.
Please don’t misunderstand. There’s nothing inherently wrong with the egoic perspective. This is the consciousness that allows you to function in the world of form where all objects are eternally separate (and I is a stern marker of separation), and it’s important that you get good at it. The only problem with the egoic perspective is that it believes it’s the only perspective that could possibly exist and is highly effective at making you believe that as well, and this is where ego’s deceptive fib entraps you and exposes itself as hopelessly narcissistic. Ego is in love with itself and wants you to honor that love with equally unwavering devotion, never allowing your affections to stray to the alternative perspectives of consciousness that naturally emerge out of a radiant awakening of the body.
Product Details
- Publisher: Inner Traditions (January 7, 2025)
- Length: 144 pages
- ISBN13: 9798888500491
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Raves and Reviews
“In this evocative and important book, Will Johnson teaches us how to enter fully into our human incarnation and our deepest experience of being alive. He shows us that meditation, when fully embodied, is not about disconnecting from life, but rather about liberating us for life in all its beauty, intensity, and nuance.”
– Reginald Ray, Ph.D., Buddhist teacher and author of Somatic Descent
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