The Radical Path of Somatic Dharma

The Radical Path of Somatic Dharma by Will Johnson offers a pathway to radiance through deeply felt, sitting meditation.

It shares practices to show how sitting meditation can be reconnected to lived, bodily experience and help you rediscover your natural somatic radiance. The book explores how the modern thought-focused frame of mind introduces patterns of holding and tension into our bodies.

Drawing 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, this work reimagines the practice of seated meditation. What began as a living, vibrant, and felt practice—the primary practice of the Buddhist path to spiritual realisation—has become a frozen stillness, disconnected from bodily experience.

Will Johnson presents a revitalised understanding of this essential spiritual practice through a deeper connection with the body. He argues that the thought-focused mode of consciousness inherent in modern rigid seated meditation introduces patterns of holding and tension into our bodies, virtually guaranteeing that awakening will not occur. He explains how focusing on thought, rather than an embodied experience, results in a numbing of our physical connection and the dimming of the body’s natural somatic radiance. This disconnection often leads to chronic pain, a general sense of malaise, and an inability to get comfortable in our own bodies.

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. He draws 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.”