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 heart, 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.