Kundalini Yoga Research in the News!
Research for the Kundalini Research Institute, Dr. Sat Bir Singh Khalsa continues his work with Kundalini Yoga and insomnia at the Harvard Medical School.

Sadhu Khalsa is successfully using yoga and meditation to help veterans and soldiers traumatized by war.

Mukta Khalsa runs Superhealth, one of the premier drug treatment programs using Kundalini Yoga.

Dr. Dharma has gotten great results with Dr. Andrew Newberg, at the University of Pennsylvania, on how Kundalini Yoga Meditations help Alzheimer’s patients.


Breathwalk® and Fibromyalgia:
A University of Utah Research Study
The Kundalini Research Institute will soon be funding an exciting new research project at the University of Utah. Fibromyalgia, an often debilitating disease that leads to depression, sleep disturbance, and pain, is an elusive illness that is difficult to treat with conventional methods. Dr. David Bradshaw is initiating a pilot investigation into the possible treatment efficacy that Breathwalk® may provide to patients who live with this life-disrupting disorder.
 
Breathwalk® is an innovative yogic technique that was developed by Yogi Bhajan and Dr. Gurucharan Singh Khalsa. It combines the simple exercise of walking with specific breath patterning and meditative awareness. The study seeks to compare this method to simply walking alone, in order to determine any effects that Breathwalk® may have on the reduction of fibromyalgia symptoms. The study is very well designed and is likely to lead to larger future studies that will tease out the exact aspects of Breathwalk® that contribute to the healing process.
 
This study, and others like it, has the capacity to contribute greatly to the body of knowledge on pain disorders, as well as the overall body of literature regarding the powerful effects of Kundalini Yoga. By investigating these mind-body-spirit practices, researchers are furthering the frontier of science, medicine and the behavioral arts so that patients may cultivate healthy, happy, holy lives.
The University of Utah has agreed to match any funds that KRI can raise toward this research project. Our initial goal is $25,000. If you would be interested in helping fund this research project, or others, please contact us.


Meditation for Health Purposes, Bethesda, MD
July 8 & 9, 2008 The Director of Research for the Kundalini Research Institute, Dr. Sat Bir Singh Khalsa, has just returned from a 2-day NIH-NCCAM (National Institutes of Health and National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine) workshop on research and meditation, where he presented Yoga: A Meditative Discipline. He discussed the fundamental components of yoga practice: meditation, posture and breath along with the history of yoga practice in the United States and its progress in mainstream culture as well as its growing interest within alternative and allopathic health care models. He posed some specific questions for researches to focus future studies on and presented current research findings from studies as wide as breath observation and meditation in insomnia cases, to auditory response of musicians and yoga, to the effects on the frontal lobe and the use of japa (or repetition). This was a remarkable and historic workshop in that a variety of researchers involved in meditation research disciplines were gathered together to discuss the future directions for meditation research. Attendance at the workshop was by invitation only, and many of the leading researchers were present, including:

Josephine Briggs, Director of NCCAM
Jack Killen, Deputy Director of NCCAM
Susan Folkman, Director of the UCSF Osher Research Center
Margaret Chesney, University of Maryland and former co-director of NCCAM
Richard Davidson, University of Wisconsin, a leading mindfulness meditation researcher currently working with the Dalai Lama