Introduction to Zen Focusing

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.

Join us this coming February to enter the stream of this vital Core Practice in The Zen Garland Way.