Dr Tina Basi teaches self-enquiry in the tradition of the Enlightenment Intensive and is the founder of Roam Within.
Foundation
Tina grew up in the Punjabi Sikh faith. She is not religious — her practice is deeply secular — but as a native speaker of Punjabi, she has something no training could provide: an ear for Sanskrit, the language in which Patanjali's Yoga Sutras were written. Where most readers meet the Sutras through translation, she meets them through lived experience.
Tina is a sociologist with a particular expertise in commercial ethnography and applied sociology. She holds a PhD from the University of Leeds. From 2011 to 2018 she led on knowledge exchange at the London School of Economics, where she also taught on the MSc Culture and Society until 2021. She has led and conducted research for the Department of Health, the Ministry of Justice, the Home Office, Intel, Facebook, The Trevor Project, Cartier and GlaxoSmithKline, among others. She co-convenes the Sociologists outside Academia group of the British Sociological Association, which launched a curriculum in applied sociology.
Lineage
Tina has practised in the Enlightenment Intensive tradition since 2009 and is a Master of the Intensive. She trained with Lawrence Noyes, who trained in the method directly with its originator, Charles Berner, and whose book remains its standard account; with Edda Carabello (France, 2024); and with Barry and Emma McGuinness (UK, 2026). She remains in close contact with all of them. From October 2026 she will lead Roam Within's own Enlightenment Intensives.
Training
Tina is a qualified teacher of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) and Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT). She trained at the Sussex Mindfulness Centre, the only teacher-training and clinical research centre embedded within the NHS, under the supervision of Dr Robert Marx and Dr Bridgette O'Neill. She has taught mindfulness for over ten years, launched an eight-week course in mindfulness and racial awareness with The Mindfulness Project in London, has published on the sociology of mindfulness, and co-convenes the Mindful Living Network of the RSA.
Arrival
For twenty-five years I tried things. Fitness, meditation, energy healing, astrology, tarot, volunteering, gardening, courses, books, retreats, silence. The full spectrum of what people reach for when they sense something is missing. I didn't study these things from a distance. I lived them.
In 2009, I took an Enlightenment Intensive. Three days. One question. Who am I?
For the first time, I contemplated and communicated without fear of judgement or interruption. Slowly the ideas in my mind loosened, long enough for me to have a direct experience — what the tradition calls kensho, or satori.
Then the pandemic came, and with it the questions I had been living with for years — about death, purpose, a life not fully lived or lived through a screen — became everyone's questions at once.
Roam Within is what I built in answer. My twenty-five-year search had confirmed I'd found the real thing. It is the simple act of telling the truth. Your truth.
Truth as a Social Good
But Tina's concern is not only personal. It is social.
She sees the degradation of truth as one of the defining crises of our time. In a world of noise, performance and ideology, truth — inner truth, relational truth, spoken truth — is becoming harder to reach and harder to share.
This is not a wellness problem. It is a social problem.
Roam Within is her response: a movement for truth as a social good. A coalition of people committed to the practice of surfacing truth, in company, as an act of resistance and repair.
“Roam Within is part of an emerging social movement focussed on nurturing inner life and discovering your truth. Our workshops are about building the capacity to come into contact with others, contemplate and communicate your truth, and listen without judging or commenting.
To live fully is not to seek certainty.
It is to cultivate a relationship with what cannot yet be known.”
