Introduction to Zen Focusing – Zoom Course
Introduction to Zen Focusing
6 once-a-week classes, a Zen Focusing Manual, plus a once-a-week Zen Focusing practice session.
Classes led by Roshis Genmitsu & Genki
Learn an essential, emotional healing, Core Practice of the Zen Garland Order and access to untapped creativity. Master the Practice during SPRING ANGO.
Course Dates: 6 Fridays, 5:30 – 7:30 pm ET
March 7, 14, 21, 28; April 4, 18, 2025
Cost includes 6 classes, organized practice sessions in between classes & The Zen Focusing manual:
Cost $175
Zen Focusing is a meditative way of awakening to, reintegrating, and healing wounded and un-acknowledged parts of ourselves that many spiritual practices do not address, but bypass! The Zen Garland Way is to turn toward what’s difficult, what blocks us, what causes us to engage in repetitive harmful behaviors.
From a healing perspective, rather than to deny, repress, transcend, or ignore the difficult and unknown, Zen Focusing allows us to become aware of unexplored aspects of ourselves. Threads of problematic memories, difficult emotions, distorted beliefs and problematic behavior patterns intertwine and are stuck in a knot (klesha). When applying Zen Focusing to access new, creative ideas and approaches, attention to somatic sensations related to our focus brings forth new associations, insights, and forward moving energies.
Zen Focusing is not psychotherapy, but a self-directed practice of emotional exploration through attentive presence to somatic sensations done with a companion. This can be used to access astonishing creativity as well as to reclaim lost parts of ourselves.
Zen Focusing is based on the work of Eugene Gendlin, a philosopher and psychotherapy theorist and practitioner who worked with Carl Rogers at the University of Chicago.
Zen Focusing is not simple awareness of our mood or state of being. Nor is it simple cognitive reflection on present past or future situations. This work accesses and draws upon information stored in the neurological and biological processes of the body. Eugene Gendlin called this realm of the near-conscious, not yet named or known cognitively, the Implicit. This somatic approach holds a Felt Sense open with interest and curiosity while suspending for a time naming, judging, and criticizing. We meet what comes with interest, curiosity and compassion, in an openness held in “not-knowing” that allows the surprising emergence into consciousness of new “information”: memories, images, fantasies, snatches of a song, unexpected associations come into consciousness with a movement toward integration and new ways forward.
Zen and Focusing both teach a way of being, The Practice of Presence to what is. Reality!
Enlightenment is not something we attain, but something we do that brings us into intimate connection with the flow of life. This is an essential part of a holistic spiritual practice that can transform our lives and our way of being in the world.
One of the leading Zen masters of our time, Roshi Paul Genki Kahn augments traditional Zen practices with modern psychology, philosophy, science, and socially engaged service to marginalized communities. He has developed a thorough and profound holistic approach to Zen practice that offers personal and inter-relational development for skillful living in the world. He is Co-founder with his wife, Roshi Monka Genmitsu Kahn, of the International Zen Garland Order. Along with his duties as the Spiritual Director of the Zen Garland Order and the Ancient Oaks Zen Community, Roshi Genki maintains a private psychotherapy practice in Savannah.
Roshi Monika Genmitsu Kahn is a Zen Master Teacher and Zen Buddhist Priest. Together with her husband Roshi Paul Genki Kahn she is the co-founder of the Zen Garland Order, the Ancient Oaks Zen Community and the Practice of Zen Focusing. Originally a Swiss mountaineer she is also the lineage holder in Zen Garland’s Red Path Zen trained and transmitted by Grandfather Shook Sings-Alone Roshi.
Genmitsu works as a professional Compassionate Bereavement Care Counselor and Family Services Coordinator for the MISS Foundation and the Selah Carefarm, providing services and aid to traumatically bereaved families in their difficult grieving process.