This evening we will explore emotion-focused mindfulness therapy and how highlighting the central role of emotions in mindfulness and life can help people deepen embodied emotional experiencing, make better sense of life, transform deeply conditioned maladaptive emotion patterns, and cultivate their own and others’ flourishing. The approach integrates emotion-focused therapy with secular Buddhist perspectives, including Stephen Batchelor’s translation of the Four Noble Truths into a pragmatic fourfold task.
The evening will include an introduction to emotion-focused mindfulness therapy and meditation, a 20-minute silent meditation, journaling, interviewing each other about your experience, discussion, followed by a presentation on the emotion-focused fourfold task, and more discussion. Please bring paper and pen or a digital device you can use to your journal your meditation practice.
Bill Gayner, BSW, MSW, RSW, is developing emotion-focused mindfulness therapy to address difficult emotional issues such as internalized stigma, shame, and trauma, and to provide secular clinical and professional training contexts for developing mature mindfulness practices. He is an Adjunct Lecturer in the Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social, University of Toronto, and a Mental Health Clinician in Psychiatry at Mount Sinai Hospital, where he teaches mindfulness to people living with HIV, psychiatric outpatients, and hospital staff, as well as providing psychotherapy for people living with HIV. He trains mental health professionals in emotion-focused mindfulness therapy through the Mount Sinai Psychotherapy Institute, the Health Arts and Humanities Program at U of T, and Mission Empowerment.