Professor Itai Ivtzan

The combination of Positive Psychology, Mindfulness and Spirituality, makes Dr. Itai Ivtzan’s heart sing. He is passionately convinced that if we befriend both of these practices, and succeed in sustaining them as daily embodied practices in our lives, that we will become the best versions of our super-hero selves. Through his personal experience, and through working with his clients, he believes that there is no better way to gain the super-strengths of awareness, courage, resilience, and compassion.

Dr. Itai Ivtzan is a positive psychologist, a Professor at Naropa University, and the founding director of School of Positive Transformation. For over 20 years, he has run seminars, lectures, workshops, and retreats at educational institutions and private events. He is a regular keynote speaker at conferences. His work has been worldwide, with a predominant focus in the USA and the UK. In his wish to globally empower practitioners with greater knowledge and skill, he established the School of Positive Transformation whose world-class courses teach students how to both transform themselves and their clients. Itai’s main areas of research and teaching are positive psychology, mindfulness, spirituality, and the deep relationship between nature and well-being. He has featured on TEDx, and has published five books as well as more than 50 journal papers and book chapters.

Itai’s relationship with nature is deep and meaningful, and it has guided his personal, as well as professional path for decades. To allow for Mother Nature to work her magic within his retreatees, most of his transformational retreats are intentionally run in outdoor or nature-based locations. When working in one-on-one processes with the clients who come to his practice, he intentionally undertakes many of his therapy sessions in nature.

Itai believes that nature opens our hearts and minds, and he and his wife have chosen to live in a rural area with rivers, forests and mountains. They are able to see all the way into the horizon, he is able to pursue his love for hiking whenever his heart desires, and their children run barefooted whilst chasing butterflies.