Led by Roshi Paul Genki Kahn and Dharma Holder Rev. Dr. David Shiho Rosenstein,
Online 12 Week Course: R 2,000.
February 14 – May, 2026
6 Biweekly Classes on Saturdays:
3pm to 5pm SAST, South Africa and private practice session.
▶︎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 21 – Class: Lecture, Q&A, Practice in Breakout Rooms.
Week of March 28: 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.
▶︎May 9 – Class: Lecture, Q&A, Practice in Breakout Rooms.
Week of May 16: 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 where practice and Enlightenment are one.
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 emotional awareness or cognitive reflection. It engages the felt sense—the implicit, somatic, 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 with a 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 that untangles these schemas and allows new clarity and perspectives to emerge.
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. However, the Focusing method is rarely taught or practiced with attention to Gendlin’s philosophic findings and perspectives.
Zen Focusing and Gendlin’s Focusing both teach an experiential way of being in the world, aPractice 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. The practice of Zen Focusing contributes wisdom and compassion to our personal efforts In The Zen Garland Order to be a Bodhisattva: a field of benefaction reclaiming the world as sacred.
▶︎Join us this coming February to enter the stream of this vital Core Practice in The Zen Garland Way!