Cynthia Garner

Dr. Cynthia Garner is a mental health educator, mindfulness teacher, writer, speaker and the founder of Mindful Boundaries. Her work is devoted to helping people come home to themselves through practical mindfulness, healthy boundaries, somatic awareness and nervous system care. She works with therapists, educators, caregivers, leaders and others who spend much of their lives caring for people. Her belief is simple: caring for ourselves is essential to caring for others.

Cynthia was adopted as a young child after her birth mother left a violent relationship. She grew up in a family shaped by both love and trauma, where writing, music and time in nature became places of refuge. That history gave her a lifelong curiosity about belonging, resilience and the capacity to heal.

She has been a classroom teacher, a Fulbright Scholar in Guatemala, a leadership consultant, a mindfulness teacher, an author and a speaker. Her training includes a Doctorate in Body-Mind Health, a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Nonfiction, a two-year somatic psychotherapy program, and professional training in mindfulness-based approaches including MBSR and MBCT. She also completed the Mindful Schools Teacher Certification Program and the Inward Bound Mindfulness Education teacher training. She has more than twenty years of experience in education, coaching, workshops and retreats.

Cynthia teaches through coaching, workshops, retreats, guided meditations and her six-week Mindful Boundaries Foundations program. Her aim is a space where people can slow down, reconnect with themselves and build practical skills for presence, clarity and sustainable wellbeing. She is the author of Fierce Boundaries: Practical Skills and Somatic Exercises for Healing in a Traumatized World and the memoir Out of Grace, and she writes essays on Substack. Her themes include mindful boundaries, burnout prevention, belonging, adoption, relational healing and compassionate leadership.