Roger Walsh

Roger N. Walsh was born in 1946 in Australia. After training in medicine and psychiatry, he became a professor of psychiatry, philosophy, and anthropology at the University of California, Irvine, within the College of Medicine’s Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior.

His scholarly interests centre on exceptional psychological health and wellbeing, the contemplative practices that cultivate them, and the role of meditation and altered states of consciousness in spiritual experience.

Walsh is one of the most prominent figures in transpersonal psychiatry, working to bring the study of meditation, contemplative practice, and the world’s wisdom traditions into dialogue with academic medicine and psychology.

His widely read book Essential Spirituality: The Seven Central Practices to Awaken Heart and Mind (1999), which carries a foreword by the Dalai Lama, distils seven practices, such as cultivating wisdom, ethics, attention, and altruism, that he argues recur across the major religious traditions as common paths toward psychological and spiritual maturity.

Throughout his work he treats meditation, virtue cultivation, and lifestyle as serious, empirically examinable means of enhancing wellbeing and expanding consciousness, while engaging thoughtfully with questions about psychoactive substances and altered states.