Saki Santorelli BIO
Saki Santorelli
Saki founding Oasis Institute in 2001. Oasis 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 mindfulness and 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 global affiliates network and formally launched the Center’s Inclusion, Diversity, and Equity Initiative aimed at creating greater access to MBSR and MBSR teacher education 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.