Taking up Whitehead’s Invitation to Explore Our Immediate Experience | Bill Gayner

Bill Gayner, BSW, MSW, RSW is a social worker/psychotherapist in downtown Toronto, Canada. He is exploring orienting mindfulness to a process relational philosophy of the implicit integrating Alfred North Whitehead and Eugene Gendlin with contemporary emotion theory. Bill developed Emotion-Focused Mindfulness Therapy and Touching the Earth, a community-based mindfulness approach. These integrate transformational experiential and emotion-focused processes into meditation, journaling, and how we can explore and reflect on meditation experience together. Bill led the first randomized controlled trial that indicated possible psychological benefits of mindfulness for people living with HIV. His work has won a couple of awards. He is President of the Board of the International Focusing Institute and founding President of Touching the Earth Mindfulness Ontario, a mindfulness practice community for psychotherapists and counsellors. Bill embraces John Cobb Jr.’s complementary transformative pluralism. To his surprise, over the years, he has discovered himself on a mystical Christian-Buddhist path with ancient Greek Dionysian influences.

Greg Walkerden, PhD is Honorary Senior Research Fellow in the School of Communication, Society and Culture at Macquarie University in Sydney. His disciplinary roots are in philosophy, psychology, and environmental management. He designs practices for environmental managers and for felt sense-centred reflective practice, and he has published extensively on both environmental management and reflective practice, with a particular emphasis on climate change adaptation, professional sensibilities, and reflective practice experiments. He worked for 18 years as an environmental manager, using professional practice as a medium for action research, and has taught felt sense-based decision-making to environmental professionals for over 25 years. His work has won a number of awards. Greg has been a Buddhist practitioner and member of the Uniting Church in Australia for 40 years. Greg is co-editor of Practicing Embodied Thinking in Research and Learning (Routledge 2024, Open Access) and co-author of Reflection for Learning: A Scholarly Practice Guide for Educators (Advance HE 2020, Open Access). See also his web page at Macquarie University.