William Yang has been teaching relaxation, breathing, meditation, and yoga exercises to cancer patients since the early 1980s. Inspired by the benefits patients reported in the hospital where he worked, he founded a center dedicated to these programs, which in a later phase went on to become the William Yang Foundation, based in the Netherlands. In 1995 he received the Dr. Marco de Vries award in bio-psychosocial medicine and in 2005 he became a knight of the order of Oranje Nassau, an honor bestowed by H.M. Queen Beatrix for his work with cancer patients and disadvantaged children in India. He lives in Nijmegen in the Netherlands.