Bill Gayner provides an update on Touching the Earth, a non-teacher-centric, democratic self-help community for cultivating mindfulness as an embodied social practice. Practices include meditation, journaling, sharing and exploring meditation experience in triads or dyads, and then gathering back in the larger group to reflect on the process.
Touching the Earth groups aspire to treat participants as equals, where no one is paid to lead or facilitate, and each participant takes responsibility for cultivating their own path and for supporting others in cultivating theirs. The basic format involves meditation, journaling one’s meditation experience, and then exploring the meditation in triads.
Emotion-Focused Mindfulness Therapy (EFMT) is a new psychological approach to addressing internal conflicts like harsh self-criticism. The approach emerged out of a dialogue between Emotion-Focused Therapy (EFT) and the secular and contemporary Buddhist perspectives of Stephen Batchelor, Winton Higgins and Jason Siff.
