The Healing Journey of Tenkara

Rediscovering Fly Fishing and Identity

Article by Mike Garrison

Four years ago, I picked up a tenkara rod for the first time in what felt like a new lifetime. That moment unknowingly began a slow, meaningful journey, one of healing, rediscovering fly fishing, and redefining parts of myself that had once been lost to both personal and professional wounds.

Fly fishing has been a passion of mine for most of my life and I will never forget my dad teaching me the sport. I had, however, been away from it for almost 20 years after my son’s extremely premature and traumatic birth and subsequent chronic disabilities.   

I got back into fly fishing because of a gift from a friend and longtime client but the rod and reel, while great, didn’t fully restore me. I needed something different, something quieter, simpler, stripped of ego and expectation. Tenkara became both a form of therapy and a lesson in identity.

Recently, while fishing a steep, high-gradient mountain stream in southwestern Virginia with my friend Mitch, a fellow tenkara devotee and a veteran, I was reminded of just how far that journey has brought me. 

I had decided, somewhat mischievously, to fish a traditional rod and reel that day, just to change things up. Yet, watching my friend cast their long, delicate fixed-line rods, I felt the tug of something deeper. The ease. The rhythm. The intimacy with the water. I realized that no matter how I fish, my heart now beats in cadence with tenkara.

Luckily, Mitch had brought a spare tenkara rod (DRAGONtail Mizuchi… one of my favorites) and I was able to borrow it and was immediately in a different space.  

Why Tenkara Speaks to Me

There are practical reasons I love to fish this way, and there are aesthetic ones. Together they form a philosophy that feels right for who I am today.

Practically speaking, I’m an older angler who occasionally battles vertigo. When you spend your days navigating slick rocks and fast currents, balance matters. Every time I take my hand off my wading staff, I risk a cold baptism, or worse. In fact, I had to end my day early last week because of a fall.

The simplicity of tenkara minimizes that risk. With just a compact telescoping rod, a line, and a single fly, I’m carrying less, thinking less, and focusing more.

Tenkara fits easily into a hip pack or inside a small backpack… like those made by my friend Chris Zimmer of Zimmerbuilt fame. It’s light, elegant, and beautiful, all words that at this stage in life, describe how I want my fishing to feel even if my body doesn’t represent that.

That minimalism is also freedom. When I fish tenkara, I’m not lugging half a fly shop on my back. I’m not cycling through five fly boxes or tinkering with split shot and indicators. Instead, I meet the stream on its own terms. My casting and presentation become the tools of adaptation, not the gadgets in my bag.

There’s also practicality in economics, tenkara gear is affordable (at least when compared to western rod and reel). I can own several premium tenkara rods, each with subtly different flex and feel, for the price of a single high-end Western setup. These rods become companions suited to different moods and waters, extending that sense of harmony I feel when I’m part of the flow.

I always, always, come back to tenkara as the primary way I want to fly fish because at the end of the day, fly fishing for me is about peace and beauty. I am not selling all my western gear, but I am using it less and less, and that’s okay.

The Aesthetics of Connection

But the heart of it, for me, is aesthetic. Few sensations are as pure as feeling a wild trout through a fixed line on a tenkara rod, the unfiltered pulse of life transmitted directly to your hand. It’s electric and almost sacred.

I’ve come to define a good day on the water less by the fish netted and more by the moments felt. Sure, with a rod and reel you might net more fish, especially big ones. But sometimes, when a trout slips the hook at the perfect instant, that’s enough. Release before the release, and it still counts in my heart and soul.

Tenkara brings me closer, to the stream, to the fish, and to myself. It forces creativity and patience, elements often lost in the fast, analytical pace of modern life. Each cast becomes an act of mindfulness. Each drift, a meditation.

Community and Belonging

Beyond the water, the tenkara community has given me something rare, a sense of belonging without judgment. In the broader fishing world, we often categorize ourselves: rod-and-reel purists, dry fly disciples, Euro nymphing tacticians. For a long time, I felt pressure to fit neatly into one of those boxes, constantly asking myself, “Am I this kind of angler or that kind?”

Tenkara never asked that question. It simply invited me to be fully present and fully myself.

The people I’ve met through this practice, friends like Rob Worthing, and countless others whose names I’d love to shout across a mountain stream, have shown me that fly fishing can be about community, creativity, and compassion as much as technique. 

Together, they’ve offered encouragement that runs deeper than rods or rivers.

At the end of the day, tenkara has given me permission to just fish, to love fly fishing for its own sake, to love wild places, and to see the reflection of healing in moving water.

That is, and always will be, enough for me.

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Mike Garrison, when not fly fishing or dreaming about his next time on the water, is a husband, dad, author and business coach. You can follow him on Instagram: @blueridgeflyguy

This article originally appeared in the 2026 print issue of Tenkara Angler magazine.

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