LAWRENCE EDWARDS, PHD, has practiced and taught meditation for over thirty-eight years. He is the founder and director of Anam Cara, Inc., a nonprofit organization dedicated to teaching meditative practices. He is also the president of the Kundalini Research Network (kundalininet.org), a nonprofit organization that provides information on kundalini and offers international conferences to gather people researching and writing on the transformative processes of kundalini awakening. His book, The Soul’s Journey: Guidance from the Divine Within, describes this process and sets it in a context that westerners can easily understand (thesoulsjourney.com). Dr. Edwards is also trained in biofeedback and neurofeedback and has been on the faculty of New York Medical College as a clinical instructor in the Department of Community and Preventive Medicine since 1998. In 1986 he earned his doctorate in psycho-educational processes from Temple University where he was honored as a University Scholar. He was a disciple of Swami Muktananda’s from 1976 until Muktananda took mahasamadhi in 1982. For the next twelve years he continued to study, teach, and serve under Gurumayi Chidvilasananda’s tutelage. At Swami Muktananda’s ashram in Ganeshpuri, India, he served as clinic manager and helped to run the mobile hospital that provided care for the desperately poor native villages in the rural area surrounding the ashram. Dr. Edwards has studied and practiced in the kundalini yoga tradition and Tibetan Buddhist and Huichol Indian shamanic traditions.
BONNIE GREENWELL PHD,is a transpersonal psychologist, writer, and educator known internationally for her specialization in assisting people in kundalini and spiritual awakening processes for over twenty-five years. She authored Energies of Transformation: A Guide to the Kundalini Process, based on her doctoral research, which is published in six countries. She was a founder and director of the Kundalini Research Network and frequent participant in programs of the Spiritual Emergence Network. She has worked for thirty-five years with energy and awakening systems both ancient and modern, including astanga and kundalini yoga, Jin Shin Do acupressure, Radiance and Holotropic breathwork, and Advaita Vedanta, and for the last eight years has been a student of the nondual Zen teacher Adyashanti. She now teaches in his lineage and has established Shanti River Institute in Ashland, Oregon, to support nondual students in the awakening process. She has consulted with more than a thousand people about their kundalini process through national and international seminars and programs, and on the Internet, as well as in personal counseling sessions. Currently she is writing two sequels to her groundbreaking kundalini book, The Kundalini Guide and The Awakening Guide. She can be contacted through her Web sites kundaliniguide.com and awakeningguide.com.
BRUCE GREYSON, MD, is the Chester F. Carlson Professor of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences and director of the Division of Perceptual Studies at the University of Virginia. He was a founder and past president of the International Association for Near-Death Studies, and for the past twenty-six years has edited the Journal of Near-Death Studies. He was formerly on the board of directors of the Kundalini Research Network. Dr. Greyson graduated from Cornell University with a major in psychology, received his medical degree from the State University of New York Upstate Medical College, and completed his psychiatric training at the University of Virginia. He held faculty appointments in psychiatry at the University of Michigan and the University of Connecticut, where he was clinical chief of psychiatry, before returning to the University of Virginia, where he has practiced and taught psychiatry and carried out research since 1995. His research for the past three decades has focused on near-death experiences and has resulted in more than seventy presentations to national scientific conferences, more than one hundred publications in academic medical and psychological journals, and several research grants and awards. He was coeditor of The Near-Death Experience: Problems, Prospects, Perspectives, and of Near-Death Experiences: Thirty Years of Scholarly Inquiry; and coauthor of Irreducible Mind: Toward a Psychology for the 21st Century.
PENNY KELLY is the owner of Lily Hill Farm and Learning center in southwest Michigan where she teaches courses in developing the gift of consciousness, getting well again, and organic gardening. She maintains a large counseling practice, works as a consultant to schools and corporations, and raises organic vegetables. Penny is one of the founding members of the Tipping Point Network and is currently working with them to move sustainability from 2 percent to 10 percent of global market share and create a global network of consciousness centers that support the transformation to higher consciousness and sustainable living. Penny holds a degree in humanistic studies from Wayne State University, a degree in naturopathic medicine from Clayton College of Natural Health, and is currently working toward her PhD in nutrition from the American Holistic College of Nutrition. She is the mother of four children, has written five books, and is working on a sixth. Her current books in print are The Evolving Human; The Elves of Lily Hill Farm; Robes: A Book of Coming Changes; From The Soil To The Stomach: Understanding the Connection between the Earth and Your Health; and Consciousness and Energy, Volume 1: Multi-dimensionality and a Theory of Consciousness.
SAT BIR SINGH KHALSA, PHD, has practiced a yoga lifestyle for over thirty-five years and is a certified kundalini yoga instructor. He is currently the director of research for the Kundalini Research Institute and an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. His current research interests are in basic and clinical research on the effectiveness of yoga and meditation practices. His central research project funded by the National center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine involves clinical research trials of a kundalini yoga treatment for insomnia. Dr. Khalsa is intimately involved with the international yoga research community and also teaches an elective course at Harvard Medical School in mind-body medicine.
GURMUKH KAUR KHALSA is the cofounder and director of Golden Bridge, A Spiritual Village both in Los Angeles and New York City. For almost four decades, students in Los Angeles and around the world have sought her classes in this most powerful style of yogas, kundalini yoga and meditation as taught by Yogi Bhajan, including pre- and post-natal classes and teacher training. This inspiring world yogini is a pioneer in yoga and the mind-body-spirit connections. She met her teacher, Yogi Bhajan, thirty-seven years ago. Under his guidance she has devoted herself to a path of helping people in many ways, from finding spiritual success in their careers and relationships, to helping them consciously deliver healthy children and start their families with a strong foundation. Gurmukh is the author of the best-selling book, The Eight Human Talents: The Yogic Way to Restore Balance and Serenity within You, and the must-have guide for a healthy pregnancy, Bountiful, Beautiful, Blissful: Experience the Natural Power of Pregnancy and Birth with Kundalini Yoga and Meditation. Her DVDs include an energizing practice, Kundalini Yoga with Gurmukh, and prenatal and postnatal yoga. She currently lives with her husband of twenty-six years in Los Angeles. Her daughter, age twenty-five, helps to run the Nite Moon Café and Retail Store at Golden Bridge Yoga in Los Angeles.
GURUCHARAN S. KHALSA, PHD, is a psychotherapist, teacher, and writer and is a world-recognized expert in kundalini yoga as taught by Yogi Bhajan. Dr. Khalsa is an authority in the mind and in the applied psychology of meditation and peak performance. For twenty-five years he was in clinical practice with his focus on executive coaching, conflict resolution, stress management, creativity, and the interface of high information technology with optimal human performance. He bridges two perspectives: the hard sciences, which he learned in mathematics and chemistry at Harvey Mudd College and graduate mathematic studies at Claremont Graduate School; and the human sciences, which he studied at Boston University for a master’s degree in counseling. He later completed a doctorate in psychology. Gurucharan is an educator and has instructed in universities, including MIT and the University of Guadalajara, for over twenty years, and has been affiliated with the center for Psychology and Social Change at Harvard University. He has done original research on the cognitive and physiological impact of meditation and has designed social programs. He speaks and writes on the use of yoga techniques for therapists, health care providers, and organizations. In addition, he has trained thousands of yoga teachers and conducts classes and seminars in kundalini yoga around the world. For more information go to: kundaliniresearchinstitute.org or gurucharan.com.
SHANTI SHANTI KAUR KHALSA, PHD, is founder and director of the Guru Ram Das center for Medicine and Humanology. A yoga instructor since 1971, she began to specialize in teaching kundalini yoga and meditation to people with chronic or life-threatening illness and their family members in 1986, under the direction of Yogi Bhajan. The center provides direct client services and yogically based programs for people with diabetes, cancer, heart disease, chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, HIV, anxiety, depression, and life transitions. It also offers professional training and conducts outcome studies on the medical effects of yoga practice. Dr. Khalsa is a Registered Yoga Teacher with extensive experience, a Yoga Alliance Standard, KRI-certified yoga teacher trainer, and a charter member of the International Association of Yoga Therapists. She provides training to health professionals and yoga instructors on the application of yoga and meditation to the spiritual, psychological, and behavioral aspects of getting and staying well.
GOPI KRISHNA (1903-1984) was born in a small village in India about twenty miles from the city of Srinagar, to parents of Kashmiri Brahmin extraction. He spent the first eleven years of his life growing up in the beautiful Himalayan vale of Kashmir. In 1914, his family moved to the city of Lahore in the Punjab, which, at that time, was a part of British India. He spent the next nine years completing his high school education. Illness caused him to leave the torrid plains of the Punjab and return to the cooler climate of the Kashmir Valley, where in succeeding years he secured a post in the Public Works Department of the state, married, and raised a family of two sons and a daughter. In 1967, he published his first major book in India, Kundalini: the Evolutionary Energy in Man, which was published a year later in Great Britain and thereafter in the United States and then in more than a dozen major languages. The work presented to the world for the first time a clear and concise autobiographical account of the awakening of kundalini, which he had experienced in 1937. In 1972 Harper & Row published his The Secret of Yoga and The Biological Basis of Religion and Genius. A forty-six-page introduction was written for the latter by Professor Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, the renowned German scientist and director of the Max Planck Institute at Starnberg. Gopi Krishna died of a lung infection in July, 1984, leaving a literary legacy of some eighteen books that will serve to guide scientific investigations into the phenomenon of kundalini for centuries to come.
GENE KIEFFER established the Kundalini Research Foundation, Ltd., in 1970 at the request of Pandit Gopi Krishna. The Foundation’s primary mission is to make accurate and reliable information on kundalini available to the public and to scholars and scientists. He graduated from the University of Iowa with a degree in journalism and subsequently worked for more than five years at the Des Moines Register, after which he started an advertising/public relations agency in Des Moines. In 1969, he moved his offices to New York City, and a year later met Gopi Krishna in Switzerland. They worked together on a daily basis for fourteen years until Krishna’s death in 1984. Mr. Kieffer has interviewed, in person or through correspondence, more than two thousand individuals who described their kundalini experiences to him as part of the Foundation’s ongoing research project.
OLGA LOUCHAKOVA, MD, PHD, is an associate professor and the director of the Transpersonal Education and Research Specialization at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology. She is also the founding director and principle investigator at the ITP’s Neurophenomenology Research center, and the World Wide Learning Exchange Program. Working as a senior scientist at the Pavlov Institute of the Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg, Russia, Olga invented a method of early diagnostics of autoimmune diseases of the nervous system. At the same time (late 1980s), she became a spiritual teacher in the Russian underground school of Kundalini yoga. Later, she taught spiritual awakening seminars in Europe, Latin America, and United States and developed a gentle therapeutic breathwork method and a Hridayam® approach to guiding human psychospiritual development (which she trademarked). In 1992, Olga was invited as a visiting professor to the California Institute of Integral Studies in the philosophy and religion program, and became a core faculty member at ITP. Professor Louchakova conducts broad-scale research in electroencephalography and cognitive changes in meditation and states of heightened awareness. The other focus of her studies is in the comparative religions and phenomenology of the heart-self. She is a mandated spiritual teacher of meditation, kundalini yoga, vedanta, and Prayer of the Heart. Louchakova also teaches courses in culture and consciousness, phenomenology, neuroscience, engaged spirituality and awakening, human development, kundalini yoga, Christian mysticism, and Sufism, and conducts annual meditation retreats. She has had a private practice in kundalini process counseling in San Francisco since 1994. Her publications can be found at hridayamyoga.org/papers.html and can be reached at olouchakova@itp.edu.
DAVID LUKOFF, PHD, is a professor of psychology at the Institute for Transpersonal Psychology and coauthor of the DSM-IV diagnostic category “Religious or Spiritual Problem.” His areas of expertise include treatment of schizophrenia, transpersonal psychotherapy, and spiritual issues in clinical practice. He is author of seventy articles and chapters on spiritual issues and mental health and copresident of the Institute for Spirituality and Psychology and of the Association for Transpersonal Psychology, and he maintains the Spiritual Competency Resource center at spiritualcompetency.com.
ANDREW B. NEWBERG, MD, is currently an associate professor in the Department of Radiology and Psychiatry at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania and is a staff physician in Nuclear Medicine. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine in 1993. He is board certified in internal medicine and nuclear medicine. He has been particularly involved in the study of mystical and religious experiences as well as the more general mind-body relationship in both the clinical and research aspects of his career. Much of his research has focused on the relationship between brain function and various mystical and religious experiences, and he is the director of the University of Pennsylvania center for Spirituality and the Mind. His research also includes understanding the physiological correlates of acupuncture therapy, meditation, and other types of alternative therapies. He is the author of a new book, Born to Believe: God, Science, and the Origin of Ordinary and Extraordinary Beliefs (Free Press). He also coauthored the best-selling book, Why God Won’t Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief (Ballantine), and The Mystical Mind: Probing the Biology of Belief (Fortress Press), both of which explore the relationship between neuroscience and spiritual experience.
STUART PERRIN, born in 1942, has trod the spiritual path since he was sixteen. He studied literature, philosophy, acting, and poetry and lived a Bohemian life in Europe and northern Africa until he was twenty-five years old, when he met his spiritual teacher, Albert Rudolph. Better known as Rudi, this iconoclastic spiritual teacher gave Eastern spirituality a new American slant, and Stuart has been carrying that slant forward ever since Rudi’s death in 1973. His studies with Rudi gave Stuart a deep insight into how kundalini yoga can be applied in day-to-day living. The author of five books and an expert in Oriental art, Stuart ran a meditation center in Texas for nine years before moving back to New York City, where he continues to teach spiritual work in the lineage of Rudi. For more information on Stuart Perrin, go to his Web site: stuartperrin.com.
SWAMI SIVANANDA RADHA (1911-1995) is regarded as one of the most profound and practical spiritual leaders of the twentieth Century. Born in Germany, Swami Radha moved to Canada after World War II, and traveled to India in the mid-fifties to meet her spiritual teacher, Swami Sivananda. Initiated into sanyas in 1956, she then returned to Canada and dedicated her life to selfless service and interpreting the ancient wisdom of yoga for Western minds. Swami Radha is a respected author of more than ten books, several of which have become classics in the field of yoga, most notably Kundalini Yoga for the West and Hatha Yoga: The Hidden Language. Her published works represent a living legacy of yoga practice based on forty years of personal study and compassionate teaching. Swami Radha founded the Yasodhara Ashram and a number of international Radha Yoga CENTRES, and has published-timeless books, and ascent magazine. Her work continues in the devotional spirit in which it was created, maintaining the quality and integrity that were the essence of her life.
JOHN SELBY came of age in the sixties and was lucky enough to become friends with a number of spiritual teachers from that time forward, including Krishnamurti, Ram Dass, Bhagwan Rajneesh, Alan Watts, Kriyananda, and the modern-day Sufi saint Samuel Lewis. Selby’s primary spiritual teacher was the Burmese master Thakan Kung. Selby studied psychology and comparative religion at Princeton University, U.C. Berkeley, the Graduate Theological Union, and the San Francisco Theological Seminary. He completed formal research into the meditative experience at the National Institutes of Health and the New Jersey Neuro-psychiatric Institute working with Dr. Humphrey Osmond, and also conducted LSD research at the Bureau of Research in Neurology and Psychiatry. He has written more than two dozen books on yoga, meditation, spiritual awakening, and integrated wellness, including Kundalini Awakening; Seven Masters, One Path; and Quiet Your Mind. Recently, working with Senn-Delaney Leadership, he has developed awareness-management (i.e., meditation at work) programs for the corporate world. He currently heads Awareness Management Systems and BedRockVideo Productions. For more information please visit www.iUplift.com.
STUART SOVATSKY (AB, PRINCETON; PHD, CIIS), a marriage therapist for thirty years, was first choice to codirect Ram Dass’s “prison ashram” and first in the United States to bring yoga to the homeless mentally ill in the 1970s. Copresident of the Association for Transpersonal Psychology and twenty-year trustee for California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS), he was initiating co-convener of the forty-country World Congress on Psychology and Spirituality in Delhi, India, where B.K.S. Iyengar and Sri Sri Ravi Shankar keynoted. Author of Eros Consciousness and Kundalini, Words from the Soul:, Your Perfect Lips, Columbia Desk Companion Reference on Eastern Religion (edited by Robert Thurman), and numerous articles and chapters on psychotherapy and tantra yoga, he has presented his work throughout the United States, India, Europe, and Russia. A thirty-year adept at anahata-nad spontaneous yogic chanting, he has three CDs with Axis Mundi.
DOROTHY WALTERS spent most of her professional life as a college professor of English and women’s studies in various midwestern universities. She has published an account of her own kundalini awakening in Unmasking the Rose: A Record of a Kundalini Initiation (Hampton Roads). She has also published two books of spiritual poetry: Marrow of Flame: Poems of the Spiritual Journey (Hohm Press, 2000), and A Cloth of Fine Gold: Poems of the Inner Journey (Lulu Press, 2008). She now lives and writes in Boulder, Colorado, where she maintains a blog of poems and reflections on the spiritual path at kundalinisplendor.blogspot.com. She invites readers to contact her there and is able to offer to many advice and encouragement as they move ahead through their own awakening process. As she often remarks, “If this [spontaneous kundalini awakening] could occur to me, sitting in my living room on an elm-lined street in Kansas so long ago when little was known of this esoteric phenomenon, then what is not possible for us all?”
JOHN WHITE is an author in the fields of consciousness research and higher human development. He has published fifteen books, including The Meeting of Science and Spirit; What Is Enlightenment?; A Practical Guide to Death and Dying; and, for children, The Christmas Mice. His books have been translated into ten languages. His writing has also appeared in the New York Times, Saturday Review, Reader’s Digest, Science of Mind, Esquire, Omni, Woman’s Day, and various other newspapers and magazines. He lives in Cheshire, Connecticut.
WHITEHAWK’S professional life began in broadcasting and video production, then segued into software development as a writer for applications produced by Microsoft, Apple, the entertainment industry, an environmental organization, the medical field, and others. She then aligned her career more directly with her soul’s calling by producing consciousness-raising media and events, and founding an organization to support wisdom sharing, networking, and peer mentoring for spiritually oriented creatives. Recently emerging from a kundalini-initiated hiatus, she anticipates continuing her immersion education with the hyper-potentiated quantum field (“deep light”) taking root on earth, and exploring how to apply and assimilate the new energetic frequencies in service to personal and interpersonal healing, collaborative creativity and manifestation, community building, and peace. Contact is invited via her blog: http://wingingwithwhitehawk.wordpress.com.
BARBARA HARRIS Whitfield is a respiratory therapist and massage therapist. She is the author of five books: Full Circle: The Near-Death Experience and Beyond, Spiritual Awakenings: Insights of the Near-Death Experience and Other Doorways to Our Soul, Final Passage: Sharing the Journey as This Life Ends, The Power of Humility: Choosing Peace over Conflict in Relationships, and The Natural Soul. Barbara was research assistant to psychiatry professor Bruce Greyson at the University of Connecticut Medical School, studying the spiritual, psychological, physical, and energetic aftereffects of the near-death experience. She is past chair and member of the board of the Kundalini Research Network and has sat on the executive board of the International Association for Near-Death Studies. She is a consulting editor and contributor for the Journal of Near-Death Studies. She was on the faculty of Rutgers University’s Institute for Alcohol and Drug Studies for twelve years, teaching courses on the aftereffects of spiritual awakenings. She is a faculty member of the center for Sacred Studies where she coteaches a course with Charles Whitfield called Unity in Practice. Barbara was a key subject in Kenneth Ring’s groundbreaking book on the near-death experience, Heading Toward Omega. He writes about her again in his latest book, Lessons From the Light. Barbara lives in Atlanta, Georgia, with her husband, author and physician Charles Whitfield. They share a private practice where they provide individual and group psychotherapy for trauma survivors, people with addictions and other problems in living, and spiritual seekers. For more information, see barbarawhitfield.com.
CHARLES L. WHITFIELD, MD, is a pioneer in trauma recovery, including the way we remember childhood and other trauma and abuse. A physician and frontline therapist who assists trauma survivors in their healing, he is the author of fifty published articles, and ten best-selling books on trauma psychology and recovery, including Healing the Child Within. He lives and practices addiction medicine, trauma psychology, and wholistic psychiatry in Atlanta, Ga. For more information please visit cbwhit.com.
KEN WILBER,author of more than two dozen published books, has created what is widely considered the first truly comprehensive Integral Map of human experience. By exploring and integrating the major insights and conclusions of nearly every human knowledge domain in existence, Ken created the AQAL Integral Framework, a framework that is grounded in millennia of human understanding and yet still grows and expands to embrace new information. In 1997 Ken founded Integral Institute (integralinstitute.org), a nonprofit think tank that brought together literally hundreds of the brightest integral thinkers alive. It was in this highly creative atmosphere that individuals shared how the integral model might be modified and improved, based on real-world application. In 2003 Ken started recording some of these cutting-edge conversations—all with people at the top of their profession, like Michael Crichton, Deepak Chopra, Tony Robbins, Genpo Roshi, Larry Dossey, and others—and made them available weekly on Integral Naked (integralnaked.org), which has nearly six years of the finest integral audio and video content available anywhere. In 2005 Ken created Integral Spiritual center, and its yearly gatherings have consistently brought together more than forty of the world’s finest spiritual teachers, all of whom are dedicated to exploring a truly integral spirituality. Wilber’s latest endeavor is Integral Life (integrallife.com), with CEO Robb Smith, a for-profit extension of Integral Institute dedicated to offering practical, easy-to-understand ways to live a genuinely integral life and to create a place for integral community to take root and grow. For the latest news, blogs, and writings, check out kenwilber.com.