Saki Santorelli

Saki F. Santorelli, EdD, MA is an educator, meditation guide, writer, gardener, and pioneer in integrating meditation and mindfulness into medicine, health care, and the broader society. In 2017, he retired as professor of medicine, executive director of the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society (2000-2017) and director of the internationally acclaimed Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Clinic (MBSR) (1996-2017) at the University of Massachusetts Medical School.

His entire forty-year career in medicine and healthcare has been oriented around the integration of mindfulness into public health fueled by an abiding trust in the innate brilliance and nobility of human beings. He has plumbed the nature of the healing relationship by working with thousands of medical patients, educating and mentoring generations of medical students, healthcare professionals, educators, and researchers of mindfulness and MBSR. Through his vision and leadership, the Center for Mindfulness transmitted the ethos, practice, teaching, and science of mindfulness to individuals and organizations around the world.

Saki has been a student in the universal Sufi lineage of Hazrat Inayat Khan for nearly fifty years. In 1980, his teacher, Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan, suggested he also become a student in the Buddhist Insight Meditation tradition. He did so. A year later, he met Jon Kabat-Zinn. As their decades-long relationship unfolded, they became colleagues, friends, and dharma-brothers transmitting the taste of mindfulness, the fragrance of the Sufi’s, and the vision of a grounded, lively contemplative science and education to people around the planet.

Saki teaches, writes, presents workshops, seminars, and leads retreats internationally. He is the author of Heal Thy Self: Lessons on Mindfulness in Medicine now translated into fourteen languages and founder/director of the website and online community, Guest House Awareness.com

Founding Oasis Institute in 2001, Saki formalized and extending the pioneering professional education programs of the Center for Mindfulness focused on educating healthcare professionals to become MBSR teachers. He and his colleagues did the hard work of developing curricula that

integrated experiential and didactic pedagogy with classical mindfulness meditation retreat training. They created admission standards, competency assessment criteria, and in-depth, life enhancing educational formats and support structures for more than 19,000 healthcare professionals from eighty countries. In 2003, Dr. Santorelli founded and, for twelve years, chaired an annual international scientific conference on mindfulness entitled, Investigating and Integrating Mindfulness into Medicine, Health Care and the Society, while establishing, in parallel, the John and Maria Kluge Translational Research Symposium on Mindfulness.

Intent on creating greater access to authentic mindfulness training while networking and supporting a global mindfulness and MBSR community, under the banner of the Center for Mindfulness’ leadership and workplace initiatives, he pioneered mindfulness retreats and worksite programs for leaders, innovators and entrepreneurs. Furthering this initiative, for five years he co-developed and taught Cultivating Leadership Presence through Mindfulness to executives at General Mills and more than thirty other Fortune 100 and 500 companies and non- profit organizations. He established the annual Fall Teaching Institute at the Center for Mindfulness expanding face-to-face, online, and blended MBSR programs to individuals and learning communities on six continents. In 2015, he Chaired an international conference entitled, Meeting the World: Exploring the Ethics, Values, and Responsibility of Bringing Mindfulness into Society, established CommonGood, the Center’s MBSR global affiliates network and formally launched the Center’s Inclusion, Diversity, and Equity Initiative aimed at creating greater access to MBSR for underserved, underrepresented people and communities. He is a Senior Fellow of the Mind and Life Institute, Fellow of the Fetzer Institute and founding member of the Consortium of Academic Health Science Centers for Integrative Medicine.