Shalini Bahl, Ph.D.

Educator, Researcher, & Consultant
Certified Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction & Search Inside Yourself Teacher

About me…

Elected to Town Council in the first year of our town’s new charter, I was unprepared for the chaos of building a new form of government from scratch. I got through it and even thrived by implementing the basics of mindfulness in everyday situations. Prior to what I knew would be a contentious meeting, I spent 5 minutes in the car focusing on my breathing. Five minutes of breathing to quiet the mind: that is how easy it is to incorporate this practice into daily life.

I am often asked how a marketing professor ended up becoming a mindfulness consultant. The answer is simple: life. Entering the PhD program at UMass led to my discovery of mindfulness. I began doing extensive research on the nature of self and the workings of the brain. I had the opportunity to work with diverse groups of people from around the world and came to realize that regardless of background, age, culture, or profession, our brains share the same basic wiring. It’s not pseudo-science, it’s evolutionary biology. To ensure the survival of the species, the human brain was programmed for fight or flight. But how well is that hard-wired response working for us today? All too often, it is not.

I also learned that this neural wiring can be modified to allow for greater freedom in creating the kind of lives we want. Through the systematic training of mindfulness, we can develop the necessary skills to affect that change. Over the last decade, I have written a dissertation on self-awareness and articles on mindfulness for publication in top marketing journals. I have explored a wide variety of meditation modalities and received professional training from experts in mindfulness. Further, I have taught more than a thousand people across different ages, cultures, and professions on how to live more mindfully.

Always a researcher, I used my academic years to deepen my personal and professional training in mindfulness. I was fortunate to learn from some of the best teachers, such as Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn, Mirabai Bush, Chade Meng Tang, Mark Coleman, Dr. Dan Siegel and Dr. Rick Hanson. I received my formal training at leading institutes including the Center for Mindfulness at UMass Medical School (now located at Brown University) and the Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute, a mindfulness-based training organization born at Google.

I am most inspired when I hear from participants how learning to look at their minds has given them the tools for transformation. Another aspect of this work that brings me great joy is my studio. Here, I have created a safe space for people to collectively discover that we are all human – we have all been through the same emotions, we all want happiness, and we all want to belong. This inevitably creates a sense of shared humanity and compassion, which is empowering and authentically connects those in the room.

I invite you to read about the eight mindfulness qualities we can cultivate with the three mindfulness trainings. Feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions or can’t find what you are looking for on this website.