Ethical Maturation & Zen Focusing
ETHICAL MATURATION
Ethical Maturation is the Zen Garland Order Core Practice through which spiritual awakening is embodied as wise, compassionate discernment and action in the complexity and uncertainty of everyday life.
Ethical Maturation is concerned with how spiritual awakening is lived through ethical discernment, choice, and action amid the complexity of everyday life. This practice does not treat ethics as rule-following, moral identity, outcome-driven calculation, or idealized virtue. Instead, Ethical Maturation emphasizes a personal, developmental training grounded in lived practice and real situations.
Ethical training asks us to discipline the body, steady and clarify the mind, strengthen the capacity to remain open, responsive, and humane under pressure, and align intention with values. It involves learning to pause rather than react, to stay present with discomfort, to notice when old patterns are shaping our choices, and to act without hiding behind rules or certainty. Over time, this kind of training opens insight into the inseparability and mutual influence of self, others, and world—so that ethical action arises from participation in life as it is, not from fixed positions or abstract ideals.
One central method within Ethical Maturation is Zen Focusing, an embodied approach that works directly with the somatic felt sense of a situation or issue. Rather than deciding in advance what is right, Zen Focusing invites careful, receptive attention to how a situation is lived in the body—where meaning, emotion, and motivation are implicitly held. By staying with this felt sense without forcing conclusions, new understanding, ethical direction, and the energy to act can emerge organically from experience itself. In this way, Zen Focusing supports the transformation of reactive, habitual patterns and grounds ethical action in lived reality rather than in fixed concepts, moral certainty, or abstract ideals. Zen Focusing functions in continuity with the Order’s other contemplative, relational, and ethical trainings.
The Zen Garland Order is grounded in the values of Engaged Buddhism, which brings Buddhist insight, ethical discernment, compassion, and non-attachment to bear on social, economic, political, and ecological suffering. From this perspective, awakening is not a private achievement nor an inward state apart from conduct, but is continually shaped, tested, and expressed through ethical participation within the interdependent conditions of life—affirming lived reality itself as sacred.
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. Focusing brings to Zen a meditative way of awakening to, reintegrating and healing wounded and split-off parts of ourselves that most spiritual practices do not address, but bypass!
See our Upcoming Events page which lists when Zen Focusing will be offered online and in person from our various communities.
The practice of Zen Focusing allows us to be aware of and listen to the dysfunctional aspects of ourselves where the threads of problematic memories, difficult emotions, and distorted thoughts and behavior patterns intertwine and are stuck in a knot (klesha). These stuck confluences are often unknown to us but serve as destructive templates for the ways we relate to ourselves, others and situations in our lives. These historical and deeply personal tangles require a special attention and practice that meditation, koans, and the study of sacred texts cannot alone undue and free. Such psychological blocks must be dealt with on the path of spiritual and human development.
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 not yet named or known cognitively. This somatic approach holds a Felt Sense open with interest and curiosity while suspending for a time naming, judging, and criticizing. This openness held in “not-knowing” allows the surprising emergence of memories, images, fantasies, unexpected associations to come into consciousness with fresh, rich information that helps unfold stuck places, bring them back to life with a forward movement toward integration and resolution.
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.
Buddhism is bringing powerful transformational practices to the west that can help illuminate and resolve the destructive effects of the underlying philosophic, religious and cultural traditions of simplistic, ignorant duality. However, Buddhism and Zen do not have an adequate psychology. Psychology and psychotherapy are cutting-edge disciplines Western practitioners are bringing to and integrating with traditional Buddhist practices.
Today most Western Buddhist teachers can recognize when a psychological problem is impacting a significant area of a student’s life and functioning and refer that student for professional help. But are the rest of us emotionally fully integrated? Roshi Dennis Genpo Merzel stated, “Don’t ask if you are stuck; ask where you are stuck.”
We do not have or do not make time to reflect deeply on our daily experience. We live like flat rocks flung and bouncing across the surface of a lake. Our fellow-travelers in the 12-Step movement remind us to slow down and “smell the coffee!”