IN THE SUMMER OF 1971, shortly after I returned to New York from two eye-opening years as a Peace Corps volunteer in Kenya, my high-school friend Alex invited me to bum around Europe for a couple of months. Starting in England, we took in the primordial megaliths of Stonehenge, the soaring cathedral at Salisbury, the legendary Glastonbury Tor where King Arthur came in search of the Holy Grail. I was duly impressed by these sights, yet they had the curious effect of making me feel lost, unmoored, empty. I couldn’t connect my own existence to these marvels. For that matter, I couldn’t really seem to connect with anything in the world around me at this time.
Alex, a Gandhian political activist, had recently spent time in India and as our next destination had his heart set on a “Tibetan monastery” in Scotland. With little enthusiasm, I accompanied him on the long drive to a barren, windswept countryside where a former hunting lodge was now in use as a Buddhist meditation center. Feeling even more out of my element than before in this odd place, but also intrigued, I dutifully sat on a low cushion, joined in the strange chanting as best I could, and followed the simple instructions for silent meditation. As I sat there uncomfortably, and the minutes grew longer and longer, almost imperceptibly at first I began to touch something new in myself. There was no flash of light, no altered state of consciousness, but a different quality of awareness was dawning in me. I had no words for it, but knew I was experiencing something that had a rightness or realness, an actuality, that had been missing from my life.
Samye Ling was the name of the meditation center, and it included a small bookstore with a selection of the few books in English on Buddhism available at that time. One in particular caught my eye, a slender volume called Meditation in Action by Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, the young Tibetan lama who had started the center a few years earlier and who, I learned, was now living and teaching in North America. I read the little book on the plane returning to the States, and in October, that magical month when New England is aflame with multihued foliage and bright blue sky, I drove to northern Vermont to visit Tail of the Tiger (now called Karmê Chöling), the new meditation center established by Trungpa Rinpoche’s first American students. There I met my teacher, collected windfall apples and pressed them into fragrant cider, and began in earnest a lifelong study and practice of Buddhism.
The next summer, I moved to Boulder, Colorado, the old mining town and seat of the University of Colorado at the foot of the Rocky Mountains that Trungpa Rinpoche had made his new home and headquarters. In January 1974, after participating in Rinpoche’s first annual three-month advanced-teaching Seminary, I had the good fortune to become his private secretary, a role in which I served for more than nine years. This period marked the flood tide of Trungpa Rinpoche’s extraordinarily diverse creative contributions—including the founding of the Naropa Institute (now Naropa University) that summer—which have had such a profound effect on the development of Western Buddhism and contemporary contemplative practice in general.
These were also years of significant personal growth for me. I met and married my wife, Martha, our daughter Rebecca was born, and I made fast friendships that endure to this day. We left Boulder in 1983 to live in New York City, where I went to work at Schocken Books, the small but distinguished publishing company founded by my grandfather Salman Schocken. During this time I edited books, found and renovated new offices for the firm, and learned much about the challenges of the for-profit business world, including serving as president of the company for two years before its sale to Random House in 1987. There followed six years in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Trungpa Rinpoche’s new seat and today the headquarters of Shambhala International, the worldwide network of meditation centers under the guidance of Trungpa’s son Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche.
In 1993, I accepted an invitation from the pioneering Buddhist social activist Bernie Glassman, a Jewish-American Zen roshi, to join the Greyston Foundation, a mandala of for-profit and nonprofit organizations in Yonkers, New York, devoted to inner-city community development and human services. This was a refreshing return to the kind of service that had begun during my Peace Corps years in East Africa, now blended with my Buddhist contemplative path. The twelve years I spent at Greyston were a time of real fulfillment—yet somewhere in me, at a level I was only fitfully aware of, a sense of something missing was stirring, not unlike what I had experienced in my twenties. I wanted deeper access to my own feelings. Also, at this time I experienced my first serious, prolonged illness.
While browsing one day in a rural Vermont used bookstore, I happened upon a little mass-market paperback. Filling its entire cover was a slightly abstract photograph of stones of different colors, shapes, and sizes, seen through the surface of a gently rippling stream. The title was a single word: Focusing. The name of the author, Eugene Gendlin, was unfamiliar. Curious, I paid two-and-a-half dollars for the small volume.
As Meditation in Action had done years earlier, Focusing opened up for me a whole new territory of self-understanding. While mindfulness-awareness practice had illuminated many mental, physical, and emotional subtleties in my life I might not otherwise have recognized, core aspects of my makeup remained hidden. Meditation is wonderful for stepping away from the speed and complexities of everyday life and finding refuge in a calmer, more spacious quality of mind, but it can be insufficient to bring to light the deeper roots of feeling, memory, and belief, including sources of emotional and creative blockage. Also, given its emphasis on “bare attention”—merely noting what arises in present-moment experience, then letting it go—it is not the best tool for practical problem solving (the Buddha, after all, was a monk who renounced worldly life in order to penetrate to the root of human suffering and realize the ultimate nature of reality). The technique that Eugene Gendlin named Focusing supplied the link that had been missing for me: a simple but powerful means to bridge from sitting meditation practice to the nitty-gritty of everyday life. It was a contemplative method for uncovering and working with my deeper feelings and solving the specific, real-life challenges of work, marriage, parenting, and much more.
Mindful Focusing, the method for problem-solving and inner cultivation introduced in this book, reflects the personal journey I have described. I offer it as a new integration of a powerful introspective technique from modern Western philosophy and psychology with ancient mindfulness-awareness practices that originated in India three millennia ago.
I am profoundly indebted to the extraordinary teachers I have had the privilege to learn from and be guided by, first and foremost Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche and Eugene Gendlin. The seismic contributions of these two geniuses of the human experience are central to this book. Other thought leaders and cultural creatives who have influenced my work and provided personal guidance for which I am deeply grateful include Ashley Bryan, Allen Ginsberg, Arawana Hayashi, Robert Kegan, Otto Scharmer, Peter Senge, Daniel Siegel, and Francisco Varela.
I have been deeply influenced by the life-nourishing body-awareness work of Hope Martin, master practitioner of the Alexander Technique, who has been my personal teacher as well as my cocreator and teaching partner in the Embodied Listening program. My understanding of Focusing has been nurtured and shaped by master teachers Ann Weiser Cornell, Mary Hendricks Gendlin, Robert Lee, Kye Nelson, and my dear friend and Focusing partner Carolyn Worthing.
My heart holds a special place for the people and places that have sponsored, hosted, and published my work: Michael Chender and Susan Szpakowski at ALIA; Melinda Darer at the Focusing Institute; Diana Rose, Rob Gabriele, Tish Jennings, and Mary Pearl at the Garrison Institute; Julie Martin at Goddard College; Bernie and Jishu Glassman and Charles Lief at the Greyston Foundation; Patton Hyman at Karmê Chöling; Richard Brown, Susan Skjei, Mark Wilding, and Charles Lief (again) at Naropa University; Jim Kullander at Omega Institute; Tracy Cochran at Parabola; Dale Asrael, Adam Lobel, and other individuals too numerous to list at Shambhala International centers throughout North America and in Europe; Melvin McLeod, James Gimian, and Barry Boyce at the Shambhala Sun and Mindful magazine; Craig Richards, Robin Stern, and Aliki Nicolaides at Teachers College, Columbia University; Andrew Cooper and Sam Mowe at Tricycle; and Jim and Margaret Drescher at Windhorse Farm.
For encouragement, guidance, and support both practical and emotional, thank you Michael Baime, David Bolduc, Richard Brown, Michael Carroll, Gayna Havens, Evan Henritze, Carol Hyman, Roger and Susan Lipsey, Andy and Wendy Karr, Jackie Meuse, Susan Piver, Dan Rome, Rebecca Rome, Jim Rosen, David Sable, Rose Sposito, and so many more colleagues, friends, and family.
I am keenly indebted to a generous cohort of readers whose discerning comments at different stages of writing have rescued me from various faux pas and infelicities (while leaving me accountable for those that remain): Barbara Bash, Ann Weiser Cornell, Joan Klagsbrun, Ellen Meisels, Jerome Murphy, Martha Rome, Pamela Seigle, Donna Siegel, and Rona Wilensky.
Editor Dave O’Neal and his wonderfully talented and dedicated colleagues at Shambhala Publications have been both a privilege and a pleasure to work with, as has copy editor extraordinaire Tracy Davis.
This book would not exist were it not for F. Joseph Spieler, dear friend of many decades and my agent, whose admonishments over the years—“You have a book in you”; “Write what you know”—gave me the confidence to attempt it in the first place, and whose sage counsel and unfaltering faith guided it to fruition. Joe, I owe you more than words can express.
Finally, neither this book nor I as the person capable of writing it would exist without the love, loyalty, discernment, patience, impatience, and deeply nurturing companionship of my wife of thirty-seven years. Thank you, Martha, for making it all possible.