Puran Bair

Puran Bair has personally changed tens of thousands of lives over the past three decades, having led thousands of meditation workshops and retreats, and co-founded the 20-year-old Institute for Applied Meditation. He is also the co-author of a new book, Energize Your Heart In Four Dimensions, which highlights a ground-breaking method that utilizes unique heart-centric meditations to decrease stress, reduce disease risk, and energize the body. Puran is an American mystic, one of the foremost meditation teachers and a pioneer in bringing heart-based meditation to the public. An author, scientist and businessman, the curriculum he's designed applies authentic spiritual teaching to health, relationships and accomplishments. His first book, Living From The Heart, was praised by Random House as being "one of the most important texts ever written on meditation." Puran came to his mystical experiences the hard way -- 30 years of discipleship including a 28-day retreat, fasting in solitude in a cave in the Alps with around-the-clock meditation -- and it's his hope that his teaching will make the path shorter for his students. He is one of the successors of Hazrat Inayat Khan, the first Indian sage to bring to the West the message of universal brotherhood and the union behind all religions. The Tucson-based meditation master has traveled across the nation and Europe, teaching Heart Rhythm Meditation to CEOs, teams and individuals at numerous conferences and programs. He has taught meditation to executives at multi-national companies and to celebrity singers and actors. He also teaches through four web courses he created for The Institute for Applied Meditation, Inc. using innovative software to integrate the instructional material with a worldwide forum for dialoguing with a live teacher on a daily basis. He has also worked with leading researchers to document the physiological changes that occur during the different stages of meditation, including metabolism, heart rhythm, brain waves, light emission and electromagnetism. Known as the "Whistling Dervish," Puran's music is enchanting, a direct transmission of his inner state to his audience. He sings his original songs as part of his teaching, and demonstrates and teaches his method of high-speed whirling as an ecstatic dance. Puran's background is in technology and business, and his teaching often refers to applications of the heart in business. Until 2003, he was the president of BAR Systems, Inc., the developer and vendor of a computer system for portfolio analysis, still used by several mutual fund companies. For fifteen years he was an analyst for Fidelity, Putnam, and Merrill Lynch, becoming a vice-president of MFS, a mutual fund company in Boston. Previously, he worked as a computer scientist for IBM, Burroughs, EG&G and AT&T. He has developed several environmentally-sound inventions. He holds one patent in wind-energy power, with a second patent pending in high-speed, computerized composting, both from companies he started in those fields. Through that work he was invited to speak several times to the United Nations Environment Programme at the UN building in New York. Puran holds an MS degree in Computer Science from the University of Pennsylvania and a BS degree in Electrical Engineering from Bucknell University. He was born in 1944 and has five children.