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.