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 and director of the internationally acclaimed Stress Reduction Clinic – the clinic of origin of mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) - 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. Blessed with such good fortune, he entered an apprenticeship with Jon. 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 thirteen languages and founder/director of the website and online community, Guest House Awareness.

Saki will lead a 1-hour session entitled "In the Guesthouse:"

Reality becomes poetry...

The Sufi teacher and poet, Rumi, tells us that “being human is a guest house.” He says, “whatever enters your heart is a guest.” He beckons us to “entertain it well,” reminding us that sometimes the guests “scatter the withered leaves from the bough of the heart so fresh green leaves may grow.”

Poetry becomes reality...

Unforeseen, unwanted “guests” have arrived at our doors: a viral pandemic, climate change, racial and gender injustice, loss. Challenges so big that they are easy to turn away from or that can cause us to forget just how capable and vast we really are.

And yet...

Even as these guests affect every one of us every day, we can make a commitment to turn from isolation to solitude, from loneliness to companionship, from fragmentation to solidarity, from darkness to luminosity, from conceit to common humanity.

This session is an invitation to enter the guest house of our lives, affirming the light and life that is our essential nature.

Everyone is welcome…

This special 1-hour session begins promptly at 12:10PM and ends at 1:10PM US Eastern Time.