Thanks for Being Excellent!
At daybreak on March 28, 2026, Owen Williams embraced the inscrutable universe, the ground of being, becoming one with the ancestors yet as intimate as our next breath. He died/transitioned peacefully at home with spring blossoming and love surrounding him.
Owen was a dear friend to many, a passionate and gifted psychotherapist and relationship coach, a generous community-builder, and a lover to the lucky. He grew up on a farm in Wales not far from the sea along with three older sisters. Their parents taught them how to love and draw goodness from the land. Owen immigrated to Canada in his early twenties as a professionally trained chef. He never lost his devotion to creative cuisine. On a serpentine path trying on and shedding several careers, the ‘call’ of healer, catalyzer or midwife to the soul soon sang deeply in him—he seemed to dance instead of work. In his late thirties, he had the vision to start a soon flourishing healing arts centre called Inner Directions in the Beaches of Toronto. His focus was on psychotherapeutic workshops, men’s groups, couples’ intensives and various encounter groups. Over the years, he invited several co-facilitators to share their talents. His practice thrived for over 35 years. In 2009, Owen published The Relationship Revolution, a book of impactful wisdom encouraging conscious relationships.
Owen was a person of deep integrity, a life-long learner and a magnetic extrovert who seemed to carry his own bonfire. When we faltered, Owen had a way of reaching out a hand inviting us forward. His warm, steady, perceptive, and quietly transformative presence lives on in the many lives he touched. Owen cherished his full-circle life on Quadra Island with his partner, Matthew, their dogs and occasional chickens. They lived a glorious decade on the Salish Sea surrounded by ancient mountains, comforting forests, dear friends, a huge vegetable garden, the best seaweed and manure-fed soil, two greenhouses and innumerable secateurs (what he called pruning shears). His body strengthens the land at the island’s green burial grounds. On our brief journey through this wondrous life, Owen reminds us that as Human-kind… be both.
Honouring Owen’s Perspective on Relationships
Any relationship can work.
In The Relationship Revolution, Owen calls on couples to stop working in their relationship and start working on it.
When couples work in their relationship, they compete against each other. They justify themselves, play the blame game, and compare each other’s level of effort. It’s not long before they say, “A relationship that takes this much work isn’t worth saving.”
When couples work on their relationship, they co-create the relationship they both dream of. Their focus is on the needs of the relationship. Instead of fixating on their individual shortcomings, they concentrate on the potential of what they can build together.
Then, as they discover what their relationship needs, each individual is naturally drawn to what keeps them from offering their best to the relationship. Before long the two — individually and together — evaluate their beliefs about themselves and the world.
While relatively untroubled relationships can easily fall apart under the first approach, relationships marked by infidelity, loss, betrayal, or long-term disconnection can make the journey back to health under the second.
Welcome to the revolution.