Will Johnson is available to see individuals, couples, and groups who wish to book private sessions with him. He is also willing, schedule permitting, to travel anywhere in the world where there is sincere interest in these practices. He prefers to offer workshops and retreats on a contribution basis or at a reasonable, fixed price so that no one need be excluded from these teachings.
If you would be interested in hosting a weekend workshop or multi-day retreat in your area, please contact Will Johnson at will@embodiment.net.
Gazing Transmissions
Will Johnson offers hour long private gazing sessions for interested seekers. The purpose of these sessions is to slowly guide you into what the Sufis call the consciousness of union through the practice of gazing. Having a direct experience of the profound connection that the gazing practice evokes allows you to go back to the loved ones in your life and invite them to enter into the consciousness of union with you. Often, a single session is all that you need to gain familiarity with this new and unusual, yet completely natural, condition of consciousness that most people experience as their birthright state. Other people may chose to do a short series of sessions during which the unconscious patterns that keep us from this condition are brought to light. Once we recognize our unconscious patterns, we can then consciously begin to release them. Suggested donation for the Gazing Transmission sessions is $100.
Sobhet
Sobhet is a Sufi term for a kind of mystical communication between sincere seekers and is my preferred format for working, privately and intensively, with individuals. Generally, people will come to enter into the sobhet for three or five days. During that time, we will spend four intensive hours a day in communion, conversing at length about the experiential matters that are of the greatest concern to the student. Oftentimes, the deepest conversations occur without words through the gazing or movement practices. Every day of the sobhet will also include a session of Rolfing. Please send me an email (will@embodiment.net) telling me of your interest in participating in this program. I prefer to offer the sobhet on a donation basis. As a guideline, donations for working with me this way have generally averaged approximately US $500 a day, but I have also been offered somewhat less than that, as well as substantially more. Most people who travel considerable distance to attend a sobhet stay at a lovely bed and breakfast, directly on the waters of Maple Bay, a short two block walk to my home. Don't be shy to inquire about setting up a sobhet. It's an opportunity to meet the practices directly, face to face.
I offer the following evening event on a regular basis. If you are interested in hosting an evening presentation, please contact me at will@embodiment.net:
Gazing at the Beloved: The Radical Practice of Rumi and Shams
Those of you who have been touched by the poetry of the 13th century Sufi mystic Jallaludin Rumi know that the pivotal event in his life was his chance meeting with a wandering dervish named Shams of Tabriz. When the two men met, something extraordinary began to transpire between them, and they immediately went into private retreat together, emerging several months later in a shared state of ecstatic illumination. While the relationship between Rumi and Shams is revered within the Sufi world, it is also presented as a profound mystery as no one supposedly knows exactly what occurred between the two or what practices they were exploring together behind the closed doors of their retreat room.
If you read Rumi's poetry, however, with an understanding of the practice that I call "gazing at the beloved," you quickly realize that allusions to this practice, accounts of his experience doing the practice with Shams, and even precise instructions on how to enter into the practice yourself appear everywhere in his writings.
In this evening workshop, I would like to share this practice with you. It is, at once, both extraordinarily profound and very simple. I will also read extensively from the passages by Rumi that I have found that shed light on this practice. While Rumi and Shams' relationship is presented as a great mystery, the only mystery for me is how it could have remained a mystery for so long!
This evening workshop is open to anyone. It is my hope that the information that I will share in this evening will encourage you to seek out a friend to explore the practice with so that you both can dissolve your experience of separation and merge together back into a shared awareness of Union.
I also offer the following weekend workshop on a regular basis. If you would be interested in hosting this event, please contact me at will@embodiment.net.
Embodiment Training for Couples
with Will Johnson and Pony Torch Dancer
This workshop will present the basic practices of Embodiment Training for couples who want their relationship to be the playing field of their spiritual practice. Couples will work primarily with each other throughout the entire weekend, exploring meditation and movement practices that take you into a shared awareness of your natural, embodied state. Unlike yogic practices that are primarily done individually, these practices are done in partnership. While couples will begin these practices as two, separate individuals in relationship, they quickly merge into a shared condition of Union that is palpable, extraordinary, and yet completely natural. This birthright condition has been described by some as "like coming home at last."
During the weekend couples will explore the gazing and movement practices in depth. In addition, we will speak very openly about how to take the practices into sexual embrace for couples to explore together when they return to the privacy of their homes.
The practices are very powerful and are appropriate for couples who wish to enter together into the deepest awarenesses of being. The workshop is not about fixing relationships that are broken, although the practice is capable of transforming relationships in a way that most of us don't even know is possible. The practice asks that we consciously accept our truth in the moment in the presence of our dearest friend, even if that truth takes us into wildly ecstatic states or plunges us into our deepest shadows and fears. If we can learn to relax into ourselves, and truly accept our experience as it is, real transformation spontaneously and organically can occur.
What do you want your relationship to be about? Security, convenience, relative comfort? There is nothing wrong with any of these, but most of us in relationship know that if we lose the sense of the grand adventure in which our relationship began, we run the risk of losing our relationship altogether.
While Pony's and my personal experience is limited to heterosexual relationship, the workshop is open to same sex couples as well, and even to spiritual friends who are not sexual lovers.
Two last notes. While we ask that participants in the workshop approach these practices with serious intention, you also need to know that participation in these practices can be a riotous amount of fun.
