Relaxing Into Awakening
Coming Soon…
“Meditation lost its traditional sense of going deep to finding Nibbana,” says David Johnson, a longtime practitioner and senior teacher at the Dhamma Sukha Meditation Center in Missouri, about what he sees as the drift of modern practice away from the Buddha’s original intention. In this conversation, he traces his understanding of meditation through the countercultural experiments of the 1960s, the early Western Vipassana movement, and the rediscovery of a gentler, more natural path rooted in relaxation rather than effort. He explains how the methods he has encountered over the years clarify, contradict, and ultimately illuminate what he believes the Buddha actually taught about the mind’s capacity for liberation.
David recalls growing up as a young teenager in an era saturated with psychedelics, alternative spirituality, and an atmosphere of exploration that convinced many young people that consciousness is meant to be expanded. He describes experimenting with LSD in those early years, taking it with curiosity and care, but noticing even then that heightened states didn’t necessarily bring understanding. He also remembers seeing Ram Dass on the library steps at Evergreen College, speaking not about getting high but about making inner clarity stable, and he describes how this message resonated with him. With this in mind, David began reading about spiritual topics, in particular Carlos Castaneda’s Yaqui teachings and Yogananda’s yogic journey of insight, and through this, his sense of the possible expanded. David began to sense that meditation, rather than chemicals, offered a more reliable doorway into the mind.
Another book drew his attention, Beginning to See, which was by a young American monk, Sujata, who had studied in Sri Lanka. He learned Sujata was teaching a thirty-day Vipassana retreat in Colorado, and he joined. The retreat was difficult: David became sick, the conditions were rough, and the center sat on the edge of a culture where psychedelics and spiritual experimentation overlapped in ways that he felt didn’t always lead to wisdom. Yet, despite the challenges, something in him recognized the depth of what meditation could bring. So at nineteen, he left college and followed Sujata to the Still Point Meditation Center in California, where he cooked meals, cleaned retreat kitchens, and lived in a community of young Americans trying to learn the Buddha’s teachings. This was many years before meditation became more “mainstream.”
David describes those years as a golden era, when teachers such as Joseph Goldstein, Jack Kornfield, and Munindra stayed at Still Point. He remembers Munindra wearing white, radiating generosity, and handing food from his plate to others with the conviction that giving was the heart of practice. He understood watching and being with Munindra that Buddhist training was grounded in human warmth as much as in technique. These memories remain vivid for him, shaped by the sincerity of a generation discovering Buddhism through books, conversations, and teachers whose presence communicated as much as their words.
David explains that the culture of those who might be drawn to meditation began to change in the late 1970s; psychedelics faded and cocaine became popular; disco replaced folk; young people shifted their interests. Retreat attendance dwindled until one retreat at Still Point had only a single participant! Among the visitors to Still Point in those final years was a tall, red-haired carpenter. David remembers working and talking with the man, whose name was Marvel Logan, and who would, years later, dramatically reappear in his story.
Still Point eventually closed, and David returned to ordinary life. He worked the field of technology, joining the early years of Silicon Valley, where each new wave of innovation captivated him. He enjoyed the emergence of video, the rise of the internet, and the arrival of early artificial intelligence, recognizing how each shift rewired human communication. Although he continued meditating, he did so without the support of a teacher or community; years passed before meditation re-entered his life in a transformative way.
He then recounts how, decades later, someone researching Munindra contacted him, and another person wrote to say that a Bhante Vimalaramsi was trying to find him. It turns out that Vimalaramsi was none other than Marvel Logan, who had ordained after spending twelve years in Burma, Thailand, and Malaysia. Johnson was invited to Vimalaramsi’s center in Missouri, Dhamma Sukkha. There, Johnson encountered a teaching that emphasized relaxation, kindness, and learning directly from the suttas rather than Visiddhimagga interpretations. He joined retreats; when he saw how well this method worked and how easy it was to follow, he left his technology career in 2010 to join Dhamma Sukha and help teach what Vimalaramsi said he had rediscovered as the real teaching of the Buddha.
David then takes a step back and reflects on the broader vipassana landscape, and explains how it is an outgrowth of the twentieth-century Burmese reform movement. He notes that Mahasi Sayadaw’s method, widely taught across the West, rests in part on the Visuddhimagga, a fifth-century commentary compiled by Buddhaghosa. He recalls practicing this method in his youth, using noting and observing sensations as they arose and passed. He followed the map of Sixteen Stages of Insight, knew where he was in the system, and sometimes felt progress. But he also remembered not seeing lasting transformation from these cycles, as though insight rose and faded without permanently softening the mind.
Touching on the Goenka tradition, which built on U Ba Khin’s emphasis on feeling body sensations, Johnson suggests that Goenka—who is Hindu by birth—interwove Indian influences that shaped the technique’s philosophical frame. To him, the organization seems to be more of a seed-spreading tradition; he says he has spoken with long-time teachers in that lineage who privately acknowledge this. David finds value in these other vipassana systems yet perceives their limits, especially when he compares them with what he sees in the suttas and practices at Dhamma Sukkha.
Looking into how mindfulness has been affected by contemporary culture, David notes how phones, apps, and social media fragment attention instead of clarifying it. Students arrive at his center unable to detach from their screens, and he observes that meditation often requires detoxifying from overstimulation these days. Although mindfulness has become more widespread than ever before, to the point that it is even used commercially, he now finds much of it stripped of its depth, and disconnected from the Buddha’s goal of liberation.
Returning to the story of Bhante Vimalaramsi, he notes that his turning point came when Ven. Punnaji, a Malaysian teacher, urged him to put aside the commentaries and study the suttas directly. So he retreated to a cave in Thailand and spent months experimenting directly with the suttas’ meditation instructions, and there he discovered that relaxing mental tension allowed the mind to collect naturally. Certain instructions that rarely appeared in Visuddhimagga-influenced teachings began to stand out to him. In the Ānāpānasati and Satipaṭṭhāna texts, for example, Vimalaramsi saw repeated emphasis on relaxing bodily and mental formations, softening tension, and allowing effort to drop. Here David emphasizes that he also had never encountered such instructions in his earlier meditation practice, either. He points out that the suttas describe jhāna as a collected, soft, open and aware state rather than the deep absorption found in the commentaries. These discoveries eventually formed the basis of Vimalaramsi’s Tranquil Wisdom Insight Meditation (TWIM). One of the hallmarks of TWIM is the Six Rs: when one becomes distracted in meditation, one Recognizes the distraction, Releases it, Relaxes, Re-smiles, Returns to the meditation object, and Repeats the cycle as needed.
David speaks about seeking the historical Buddha. He describes visiting India and seeing the Ashoka pillars—massive stone columns carved in the third century BCE that memorialized the Buddha’s teachings. These monuments anchor the tradition historically, confirming that the Buddha was a real person who lived, taught, and inspired a lineage that has stretched across two and a half millennia. David also saw how monastics preserve the teachings orally, passing them from generation to generation; this strengthened his conviction that the suttas offer the clearest window into the Buddha’s original method.
He next discusses the origin of the English word, “mindfulness.” He explains that T. W. Rhys Davids, a Pali scholar who started the Pali Text Society, coined the term in the nineteenth century as an approximation of the Pali term sati. David says that sati actually means “remembering”: remembering to track where the mind is moving in the moment. He contrasts this with how mindfulness is often taught as narrow concentration in Western circles. As a way to illustrate this, he remembers returning from a long Vipassana retreat, where sati had been equated with singularity of focus, and feeling irritated when someone interrupted his attempt at mindful eating. “I would get mad at them, like, ‘Hey, leave me alone! I’m trying to be mindful here!” He then immediately realized, “That’s not being very mindful!”
As a contrast to this, he outlines the full Brahmavihāra path: loving-kindness growing as warmth in the heart; joy marking the first jhāna; subtler joy the second; contentment the third; quiet equanimity the fourth. Compassion arises next, blending into the expansiveness of infinite space; sympathetic joy corresponds to infinite consciousness; equanimity aligns with the vast stillness of nothingness; and finally the quiet mind appears as subtle vibrations without thought. When conditions aligns, the mind drops into cessation. He notes the unmistakable afterglow: clarity, joy, and the falling away of the first three fetters (doubts about the Path, attachment to rights and rituals, and personality view). “When you come out of this state, the mind is completely rested,” he says.
David explains forgiveness meditation, a practice refined at Dhamma Sukha to help students whose emotional wounds block progress. “There’s something getting in the way of meditation for everybody, and that’s emotional blocks,” he says. He describes guiding students to forgive themselves for not understanding, to forgive others for the same, and to let old memories soften. He shares how forgiveness transformed his own past wounds—humiliations at work, childhood resentments, even the grief of losing his father. These hurts can appear in any form—Bhante Vimalaramsi, he notes, once had to forgive his father for dying when he was young.
David also acknowledges the role of neuroscience in validating meditative states. Practitioners such as Delson Armstrong participate in EEG and fMRI studies where brain activity sometimes dropped dramatically or even flattened during cessation. Johnson sees these results as confirming that ancient Buddhist descriptions correspond to observable neurological shifts.
David ends by affirming his confidence in the Buddha’s path and the transformation it brings. “I am so much happier now than when I was younger,” he says, pointing to the compassion, clarity, and ease that shape his life today. He emphasizes that liberation is possible and that the path rests not on force but on understanding. “There is a way out of suffering!” he affirms, expressing the same hope for others that began his own journey.