It's the season for changes in the Board of Directors. We bid a fond farewell to Veronica Urioste - she has written a lovely note below. And we are excited to welcome two new members to the TIFI Board, Bill Gayner and Tom Larkin.
Tom Larkin is from Dublin, Ireland. He has been a member of the Membership Committee for about a year, and for three years prior to that, he served as one of the Core Team running the Focusing Weeklong. With his background in psychology and meditation, he was interested right away when he found the book Focusing in the 1990s. At that time, he took a couple of workshops on Focusing, but his life really changed when he was able to study regularly with Sister Mairead O’Brien beginning in 2005. She mentored him as a Coordinator-in-Training until she died in 2015 and in 2019, René Veugelers became his Mentoring Coordinator so that Tom could be finally named a Coordinator. He brings Focusing into his work as a special education teacher and as a therapist, as well as leading many Focusing workshops and courses. He was part of the team which established weekly online gatherings for Focusers in Ireland during the pandemic and helped bring the Irish Focusing Network to life.
Bill Gayner is a social worker and psychotherapist from Toronto, Canada. For a number of years, he has been a passionate student of Focusing, Thinking at the Edge (TAE) and Gendlin’s philosophy and has been a presenter at a number of Focusing conferences an events. He gave a recent Focusing Highlight called "Touching The Earth: Focusing and Meditation" and he presented on “Orienting Emotion-Focused Mindfulness to Gendlin’s Philosophy of the Implicit” at the 2023 Gendlin Symposium on Deliberative Transformation. He was certified by TIFI in 2023 and is one of the first to receive the new TAE Proficiency Award. He has substantial experience in teaching and leading groups and is the founding president of Touching the Earth Mindfulness Ontario. He has developed Emotion-Focused Mindfulness Therapy, which integrates mindful experiencing with experiential and emotional processes to enhance how we make sense of our feelings, resolve inner conflicts and unfinished business, navigate our lives, and cultivate growth and fulfillment.
The Board is delighted to welcome both of them and is grateful for their willingness to serve!
Farewell from Veronica
I am writing to let you know that after two years as a Member with the Board of Directors at TIFI I have stand down from this responsibility at our last meeting in May 2024.
This decision was taken because I have now retired from all work. To mark this important phase in my life and honour all my working years I made the decision of taking a 6 month sabbatical when I will be travelling visiting friends and family in different parts of the world. I decided to stand down because it would not be possible to be fully present and engaged as I have been with the role I had with the Board of Directors.
To this day I do not know who nominated me to be part of the Board of Directors. I want to say a personal thank you to that person and thank you to the Nominating Committee for reaching out. In accepting to be a member of the Board of Directors, I knew I was stepping outside my comfort zone, and I am glad I did it. Life has taught me that great learning comes from stepping into new pastures, we meet amazing people, we connect with new places within us, and we connect with the much more that life can offer. My gratitude goes to all the Board Members who have not only welcome me wholeheartedly but taught me so much during our monthly interactions in Board meetings during the last two years.
Being part of the Board of Directors at TIFI has been a real honour and pleasure. My time at the Board has been rich, it has enabled me to experience directly the professional work that the Board specifically does and has given me a greater sense of the work that all volunteers do for TIFI. Their time, dedication and commitment is truly amazing. They all contribute in different ways and forms towards the continuity of Focusing and the spread of Gendlin’s philosophy of the implicit. It has been a privilege to have insightful conversations with many wonderful people that have contributed and continue to work with Focusing and Thinking at the Edge in so many different contexts, countries, cultures and situations.
For the moment, it is a farewell. My intention is to continue supporting TIFI in other ways when I return from this time out. Until we meet again… May you be well.