150 Sat Bir Singh Khalsa: Academic Research & the Future of Yoga

Sat Bir Singh Khalsa, Ph.D. is the Director of Yoga Research for the Yoga Alliance and the Kundalini Research Institute,

Research Affiliate at the Osher Center for Integrative Medicine, and an Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

He has conducted research on yoga and yoga therapy since 2001 and has been a practitioner/instructor of Kundalini Yoga since 1973. His research has evaluated yoga for insomnia, chronic stress, and anxiety-related disorders, and in workplace and public school settings. He works with the International Association of Yoga Therapists promoting yoga research as scientific director for the annual Symposium on Yoga Research and as editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Yoga Therapy. He is medical editor of the Harvard Medical School Special Report Introduction to Yoga, and chief editor of the medical textbook The Principles and Practice of Yoga in Health Care.

We talked about:

(0:59) What trends happened in yoga in the last 50 years?

(4:21) The barriers for yoga to enter the mainstream

(6:38) Why do people enter yoga and why do people stay with yoga?

(9:38) Why people don't stay with their yoga practice?

(11:59) How did you stick with your discipline in the last 50 years?

(14:23) The limitations of modern medicine

(18:56) What's spirituality to you? How do you distinguish science and spirituality?

(25:11) How do you study mystical experiences?

(29:46) Have you seen any promising funding mechanisms to fund the spiritual aspects of yoa?

(33:33) How has being media savvy helped you with your research?

(40:49) How did you end up choosing your field of research?

(45:12) If you could design any experiments, how would you study altered states of consciousness through yoga?

(50:23) Is there a parallel between research about hallucinogens and research about yoga?

(52:29) Why is multi-discipline practice like yoga more beneficial than other single-discipline practices

(58:57) How do you find the yoga teacher, environment, and philosophy that best suits you?

(62:57) Why yoga is the better mind-body practice than others?