Introduction to Zen Focusing – Zoom Course
Introduction to Zen Focusing 2026
Led by Roshi Paul Genki Kahn and Dharma Holder Rev. Dr. David Shiho Rosenstein, assisted by a staff of Zen Focusing Mentors
Online 12 Week Course: $125 USD
6 Biweekly Online Classes
on Saturdays from:
8am to 10am EST USA,
7am to 9am CST USA,
3pm to 5pm SAST, South Africa
6 Biweekly Private Practice Sessions with a Personal Mentor (to be scheduled day/time by the Student and Mentor)
February 14 – Class: Lecture, Q&A, Practice in Breakout Rooms.
Week of February 21: Schedule Private Practice Session with Your Mentor.
February 28 – Class: Lecture, Q&A, Practice in Breakout Rooms.
Week of March 7: Schedule Private Practice Session with Your Mentor.
March 14 – Class: Lecture, Q&A, Practice in Breakout Rooms.
Week of March 21: Schedule Private Practice Session with Your Mentor.
March 28 – Class: Lecture, Q&A, Practice in Breakout Rooms.
Week of April 4: Schedule Private Practice Session with Your Mentor.
April 11 – Class: Lecture, Q&A, Practice in Breakout Rooms.
Week of April 18: Schedule Private Practice Session with Your Mentor.
April 25 – Class: Lecture, Q&A, Practice in Breakout Rooms.
Week of May 2: Schedule Private Practice Session with Your Mentor.
About Zen Focusing
Zen Focusing is a body-centered, meditative process for awakening to, reintegrating, and healing the wounded and split-off parts of ourselves that are often bypassed in spiritual practice. It is one of The Zen Garland Order’s Eight Core Practices, bringing psychological depth directly into our Zen path.
Grounded in the work of Eugene Gendlin—philosopher, psychologist, and collaborator with Carl Rogers—Zen Focusing adapts the Focusing method as a developmental spiritual practice aligned with Zen’s Three P’s: radical practice, radical perspective, and radical purpose.
Practiced with a partner as a reflective witness, Zen Focusing invites us to listen to all aspects of our experience—painful, difficult, nurturing, and joyful. Zen Focusing is more than mood awareness or cognitive reflection. It engages the felt sense—the implicit, pre-verbal knowing carried in the bodymind. By holding this felt sense in an attitude of curiosity and not-knowing, new images, meanings, memories, and possibilities can emerge, offering a forward movement in life.
In terms of healing, we engage felt sense to gently contact the problematic “knots” (kleshas) where painful memories, emotions, and distorting beliefs intertwine and trap us in repetitive behavior patterns. Sensing these knots somatically sparks a process of their unfolding with new clarity and the possibility of integration. This same process can also open pathways to fresh insight and creativity.
Gendlin’s philosophy, drawn from Western phenomenology, pragmatism, and experiential psychotherapy, independently converges with many Zen insights into the nature of human being and the dynamics of existence. Zen Focusing brings these strands together in a direct, practice-based way. But Focusing is rarely taught and practiced from the philosophic findings and perspectives of Gendlin’s philosophy.
Zen Focusing and Gendlin’s Focusing both teach an experiential way of being in the world, The Practice of Presence to what is. Zen Focusing opens channels to intuition and creativity. Enlightenment is not something we attain, but something we do, enacted moment by moment as intimate participation in the emergent flow of life.
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.