meet the KRI Board of Directors

SS Gurucharan Singh (Claremont)

Board Chair

In 1972, searching for a home for his values, his heart, and his soul, Gurucharan Singh was led to the practice of Kundalini Yoga, as Taught by Yogi Bhajah.  A core message, “We are Spiritual Beings having a human experience.” Became a guiding value for his life. At his Teacher’s direction, Gurucharan went back to school to get his PhD in Clinical Psychology.  A practicing psychotherapist since the late 1970’s, Gurucharan helped to establish Kundalini Yoga based therapeutic programs in KRI’s early years. 
 
As a psychologist, his focus has been grounding – in the body, in relationships and in the Divine.  As a teacher and trainer in Kundalini Yoga, his focus has been to embrace the Divine and this Human Experience.  Professionally, Gurucharan worked in executive management with non-profits for 25 or so years. His arena was primarily program management, development, implementation, and evaluation. On the KRI Board, Gurucharan’s passion is on building community through outreach to the underserved and on exploring kundalini yoga through the insights provided by scientific research.

MSS Nirvair Singh Khalsa

Secretary

Nirvair Singh Khalsa began studying with Yogi Bhajan in 1971. He is a retired University Instructor at the University of Alaska Anchorage where he taught classes in Kundalini Yoga for 31 years.

He has authored nineteen best selling DVD’s/Videos and four books on Kundalini Yoga as taught by Yogi Bhajan. He has also taught classes, workshops and trainings throughout the Americas, Europe and Asia. He is a Yoga Alliance E-RYT 500 certified teacher trainer.

Nirvair lives with his wife of 40 years, Nirvair Kaur, in Tesuque New Mexico.

Gurusahay Singh Khalsa

Board Member

Dr. Gurusahay Khalsa has been in private practice since 1978 and is the director of the GRD Healing Arts Clinic, a multi-disciplinary health and healing clinic in Atlanta, GA. His specialties include acupuncture, gentle chiropractic care, nutrition, applied kinesiology, and yoga therapy. Dr. Khalsa educates and inspires people to improve the quality of their living by enabling them to take control of their own life physically, mentally and spiritually. He has lectured extensively for the last 25 years on Kundalini yoga and meditation, health care, nutrition, oriental medicine, stress management, goal setting, prosperity, and wellness and longevity.

Gurusahay is a Level 1 and 2 certified Teacher Trainer through the Aquarian Teacher’s Academy of the Kundalini Research Institute. He had the unique blessing and opportunity to study ancient healing arts with Yogi Bhajan as a member and co-founder of the Khalsa Chiropractic Association. He currently teaches weekly Kundalini Yoga classes and weekend Yoga workshops on various topics at the new GRD Yoga and Meditation Center in Atlanta.

Guru Jiwan Kaur Pascucci

Board Member

Guru Jiwan Kaur has been a Yogi Bhajan’s student since the beginning of the 80s and a Kundalini Yoga teacher since 1986. She is a KRI certified Teacher and Lead Trainer for level 1 & 2 & 21 stages and a Mentor.

Passioned about Humanology, she researches in depth the teachings about polarities, women & men, children, relationships, crisis management. She is a Conscious Pregnancy teacher & lead trainer. She is co-founder, trainer and teacher of “Yogare per crescere”, also known as “Yoging & Growing”, Kundalini Yoga program for children, and teachers training program, based on Kundalini Yoga teachings and western psychology and education. Student of Sat Nam Rasayan with Guru Dev Singh since 1990, she gives Personal Treatments and teaches in international courses of level 1 and 2. In 1990 Guru Jiwan Kaur created Shakti YogaLab, Kundalini Yoga & Sat Nam Rasayan center in Rome, Italy where she regularly teaches when is in town and also coordinates the activities of the teachers team.

She is the chairwoman of the no-profit Shakti YogaLab aps and is co-founder and didactical coordinator of the no-profit Kundalini Yoga Academy asd, which is dedicated to train Kundalini Yoga teachers and trainers. Expert and pleasant speaker, she regularly holds courses and conferences and participated also in TV programs on leading national networks. Guru Jiwan Kaur is also member of 3HO Europe Board. 

She is happily married with Karta Singh Giustiniani since 1990, and they have the blessings to be parents of their daughter Sat Kirn Kaur Chiara, born in 1995. Their home is in Rome, Italy but she is often traveling to spread the teachings in Italy and abroad.

Kirtan Mantra Kaur

Board Member

Sat Nam, my name is Kirtan Mantra Kaur, that who sings with joy, connecting with the vibration of the sacred internal sound. I truly believe that my life is blessed with the Highest Good and I live with this trust that guides me. I am a mother of two beautiful girls. Though I was born in Argentina, I consider myself a World Citizen after living and traveling for 20 years around the world and speaking 5 languages.

I am a certified Vinyasa Yoga Instructor (RYT-200, YA), a certified Kundalini Yoga Teacher Level 1 (KRI), and I’m in the certification process for Level 2. I am also certified in Childplay Yoga (Kundalini kids by Gurudass Khalsa). I have been a private yoga instructor since 2015.

Since I started practicing Kundalini Yoga, I realized that this was my path. Since then, I am on a mission to share with people my passion of this technology.

I started my career in Hospitality and after working in hotels around the world for over a decade, I found Yoga. My passion for sharing yoga led me to be a co-creator of the first Yucatán’s Peninsula Kundalini Yoga Women camp: www.lasmujeresde.com, as well as owning and managing yoga studios in the Riviera Maya including Yoga Studio Playacar and the Jivana Yoga Retreats.

My trainings are: Shanta Vira Yoga with Michael Stewart, Yoga by The Way, Teacher Training 2011 with Ellen de Jonge and David Campos, Playa del Carmen, member of Yoga Alliance International (RYT-200). Kundalini Yoga Teacher, by Sikh Center Mexico, with Arjan Kaur Khalsa and team. Kundalini Level 2 with Dr. Haridass Kaur Khalsa and team. Member of IKYTA and KRI International.

Dhyan Bhakti Kaur

Board Member

Dhyan Bhakti Kaur Khalsa is a KRI Certified Yoga Teacher based out of Boulder Colorado. Her aim is to provide a space where one can celebrate their lives more authentically. She advocates for diversity, beauty, and grace. She loves to create relevancy with ancient wisdom and share her studies in philosophy. She has served as faculty for 200 hour hatha yoga teacher trainings the past decade, been a Director of Human Resources in several Colorado businesses, and works as a consultant to educate companies who seek to improve their cultural competency around gender identity in the workplace. Dhyan Bhakti devotes her life to increasing radiance and health within her community and beyond.

Sohan Kaur

Board Member

Sohan Kaur is Lead Trainer for Kundalini Yoga. She has taught and trained throughout Europe. As the co-founder of SunGalaa, she works on adapting the depth of the teachings into easily accessible forms for urban yoginis & a diverse audience to give this yogic tool to help with the challenges of the times.

Sohan studied economics and mechanical engineering while taking her first Kundalini Yoga class in 1999. Only a couple of months later, she joined her first Yoga Festival in France, and a teacher training. She has worked in adult education, giving seminars in labour and social law and political education.

In 2002, Sohan began studying Karam Kriya in a Consultancy Training and has completed various professional further trainings in psychological counseling. She has also worked for over 10 years as a consultant for people with physical, mental & emotional impairment in public service.

By a further training in hypnoses therapy in 2016, she came in touch with neuroscience Since then, she has and continues to explore the connection of mental patterns, meditation, life style, habitual patterns and neuronal wiring. In 2020, she used the lockdown of the Covid pandemic to eventually realize her 20 years-old wish of translating the Japji into a modern, yogic German version.

Raj Karam

Board Member

I am Raj Karam (he/him/they/them) and I live in New York City and am a KRI Certified Kundalini Yoga teacher. My mission in this life is to spread kindness, treat every person with respect, and work to cultivate spaces where people can feel free to be their fully authentic selves.  Raj Karam means one who’s actions are guided by the flow of God’s wisdom, and I take this charge seriously, always seeking to inspire others to do the same.  
 
I first discovered Yoga in 2008 by reading the Upanishads.  I began practicing mostly Hatha and Vinyasa at that time until 2013 when I took a trip to India.  There I studied Kriya Yoga at the Bihar School ashram in Rikhiapeeth which was eye-opening, third eye-opening.  Upon my return to New York I became dissatisfied with the styles I had been practicing and gave up Yoga for a while until I was taken to my first Kundalini Yoga class.  That was a huge turning point for me.  Within a couple weeks I had already tried White Tantric Yoga and shortly thereafter enrolled in Level 1 teacher training at Kundalini Yoga East.  Since then, I have had the great fortune of studying under some incredible teachers in my Level 1 and Level 2 Kundalini Yoga teacher trainings including Sat Jivan Kaur and Sat Jivan Singh, Sada Sat Kaur, Awtar Kaur, Deva Kaur, Siri Sat Kaur and Guru Dharam, Dr. Haridass Kaur, Shiv Charan Singh and more.  I have also studied Gong with Mike Tamburo and served as a sevadar in a number of Level 1 Kundalini Yoga trainings.  
 
Additionally, I am a doctoral student in Adult Learning and Leadership at Columbia University and work at Hunter College managing a center for learning and scholarly technology.  For my dissertation I am interested in how Kundalini Yoga teacher trainers learned to form community online at the start of the pandemic.

Dashmesh Kaur

Board Member

Siri Pal Singh

Board Member

Joanna Dunbar-Webb

Board Member

Joanna became interested in the Eastern way of life as a child in early ‘90s Scotland, having grown up in a family of army medics and social workers. Joanna discovered Kundalini yoga in 2010 whilst living in Australia. Back in London in 2016 she felt called to teach this style of yoga as it aligns to her values and personal spiritual practice, following on from several personal challenges that called for a strong sense of self awareness and resilience.

Joanna begun her career as a lawyer and then realised that her professional future lay more within the people side of business given her passion for topics such as psychology, sociology, neuroscience, diversity, equity and inclusion. Her work nowadays, within organisational psychology, holistic therapy and international business, is deeply connected to her spirituality and the Kundalini technology.

Joanna’s professional and academic interests focus on neurodiversity (intellectual and learning challenges), chronic illness, and disability in the workplace. She appreciates first-hand how beneficial and life-changing Kundalini yoga can be in managing health, stress, relationships, communication, wellbeing, professional and social connections.

Becoming a KRI Board Member is a privileged opportunity to share her expertise, insights and ideas as part Yogi Bhajan’s continuing legacy, amid the subsequent transformation of Kundalini in terms of the ancient and modern sciences. research and teachings that KRI strives to provide within communities all over the world.

Shakti Parwha Kaur Khalsa

Emeritus Board Member

Known as the “Mother of 3HO,” Shakti Parwha Kaur Khalsa is the author of KUNDALINI YOGA: The Flow of Eternal Power. She has been teaching Kundalini Yoga since 1969 – specializing in teaching beginners. At “Masters Touch” courses, she trains teachers how to teach beginners.

Shakti was Yogi Bhajan’s first student in the United States. They met in December of 1968 when he first came to Los Angeles. Yogi Bhajan told her that she had been a student long enough; that she should be a teacher, and that he had come to “train teachers, not to gather disciples.”

She drove him to the various classes he taught, took notes (which later were printed as “Sadhana Guidelines”) and within two months she was teaching Kundalini Yoga at YMCA’s. When he began his lecture tours, Shakti took over his classes in Los Angeles and at Claremont College in Pomona. She served as his Executive Secretary and that of 3HO for over 30 years. She was ordained as a Minister of Sikh Dharma in 1974.

Born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1929 (two months before Yogi Bhajan), Shakti moved to Los Angeles with her mother and brother in 1943, graduated as Valedictorian from Hollywood High in 1947, attended UCLA, and married at 18. She gave birth to a son at 20; was divorced at 22.

She started investigating spiritual paths, reading Edgar Cayce, Ouspensky, Meher Baba — and studying with various teachers (Dr Judith Tyberg – Sanskrit; Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan – Sufi meditation), attending lectures at the Vedanta society in Hollywood, and Self Realization Fellowship in Pacific Palisades.

In her late ’30’s Shakti spent 40 days in India (December1966/January 1967) visiting different ashrams (Swami Chinmayanada in Bombay; Sri Satya Sai Baba in Bangalore; Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry.)

Shakti produced the 3HO Newsletter, “The Science of Keeping Up” for over 30 years, and now is a contributing editor for “Aquarian Times” magazine. She edits the IKYTA (International Kundalini Yoga Teachers Association) newsletter “Kundalini Rising” as well as the Sikh Dharma publication, “Prosperity Paths.” She created the “Toolkit for Teaching Beginners Kundalini Yoga” that is used in teacher training courses.

Satsimran Kaur

Emeritus Board Member

Satsimran Kaur was on Yogi Bhajan’s personal staff since 1971 and was his appointment and travel secretary until 1987, when he entrusted her to work with him to create the White Tantric Yoga videos. Over the years she worked in many capacities within 3HO Foundation and Sikh Dharma which she still serves. She is CEO and General Manager of WTY worldwide and has held the vision for the Library of the Teachings of Yogi Bhajan and supervises its development within KRI. She is a member of the Board of Directors of KRI and Humanology and Health Science.

Satsimran is a graduate of Coach University. Her 35 years-plus experience with Yogi Bhajan, and in human development and transformation as a Life Coach and group facilitator, as well as a Minister of Sikh Dharma, gives her the knowledge that anything is possible if we are mindful about achieving it and we have fun doing it!

Satsimran bases in Los Angeles, and spends a lot of time visiting and sharing with individuals and communities whose principles are founded on the teachings of Yogi Bhajan.