Glenn Hartelius, PhD
Honorary Research Fellow
Email: glenn.hartelius@aleftrust.org
Personal website: glennhartelius.com
Biography
Glenn Hartelius is an internationally known scholar in transpersonal psychology. As editor of the International Journal of Transpersonal Studies (IJTS), he has developed this publication into a leading transpersonal journal, bringing it from fewer than 25 subscribers to 80,000 unique visitors per year.
As co-editor of the Wiley-Blackwell Handbook of Transpersonal Psychology, he has helped envision, organize, and produce the most current and most comprehensive scholarly overview of the transpersonal field; there are current efforts to translate this work into Spanish, Russian, Portuguese, and Chinese.
Glenn serves as Associate Professor for the East-West Psychology department, and is the founding Director of the online Ph.D. degree in Integral and Transpersonal Psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, CA, where he also teaches. He has also taught graduate-level courses at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, Naropa University, and Saybrook University.
Research interests
Glenn Hartelius’ research focuses on development of constructs and processes that are key to transpersonal psychology. Based on an analysis of literature, his research with colleagues (Hartelius et al., 2022) identified states of consciousness as the central construct of the transpersonal area, yet the scientific study of these states has been hampered by limits in how reliably they can be measured. Glenn uses the more current term, global cognitive states, and has pioneered a method for describing and measuring meditative states based on the associated attentional stance—an advance that offers many new opportunities for research on transpersonal phenomena such as meditation. His most recent paper uses empirical methods to identify the attentional stances likely associated with vipaśyanā and śamatha, two states associated with the Buddhist practice of mindfulness. Glenn is also part of a team that has received funding from the Canadian government for the study of psychedelic therapies utilizing ketamine and psilocybin with First Nations communities, with treatment to be applied not in medical clinics, but in the context of community, culture, and ceremony.
Key publications
Hartelius, G. (2023). What is transpersonal psychology? A concise definition based on 20 years of research. International Journal of Transpersonal Studies, 41(1), 5-19. https://doi.org/10.24972/ijts.2022.41.1.5
Hartelius, G., Likova, L. T., & Tyler, C. W. (2022). Self-regulation of seat of attention into various attentional stances facilitates access to cognitive and emotional resources. Frontiers in Psychology, 13, 810780. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.810780
Muscat, S.-A., Hartelius, G., Crouch, C. R., & Morin, K. W. (2021). An integrative approach to ketamine therapy may enhance multiple dimensions of efficacy: Improving therapeutic outcomes with treatment resistant depression. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 12, 710338. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2021.710338
Friedman, H. L., & Hartelius, G. (Eds.). (2015). The Wiley-Blackwell handbook of transpersonal psychology. John Wiley & Sons.
