Bright Lights: Srikumar Rao Brings Ancient Spiritual Teachings to Businesses

When Srikumar Rao, the son of a highly spiritual mother, was growing up in India and Burma (now Myanmar), it wasn’t unusual for people like the late Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the creator of Transcendental Meditation, to visit his home. “This was before he was discovered by the Beatles and [actor] Mia Farrow, so he was not a global celebrity,” says Rao, now 73. “He was just a guy who had wandered off the mountains. But his spiritual presence was very strong.”

Many disciples of the direct disciples of the Indian Hindu mystic Ramakrishna were also regular visitors to his home. “I didn’t understand their spiritual power. They were just like uncle figures who patted me on the head and gave me sweets,” Rao says.

At a young age, Rao also discovered the book A Search in Secret India by the late Paul Brunton, a British philosopher who left his career as a journalist to live among yogis, mystics, and holy men to study Eastern and Western esoteric teachings. As it did for people in the West, Brunton’s book introduced Rao to Ramana Maharshi, the well-known Indian sage.

“I was strongly attracted to Ramana Maharshi, and I have since become more and more drawn to his teachings,” Rao says. “He has been the greatest single influence on my life. Much of what he taught has moved from intellectual understanding to visceral reality.” Those teachings, combined with the presence of the spiritual giants he met as a child, rubbed off on Rao. He brings all of what he’s learned to The Rao Institute, where he helps executives, entrepreneurs, and professionals all over the world discover their true purpose, overcome obstacles, and “plug into their hardwired happiness.”

Rao works one-on-one with people, holds workshops, leads group programs, gives talks, and offers programs online.

“I’m just the messenger guy,” he says. “The teachings don’t come from me. They come through me—and I’m a damn good translator. I can translate the messages of the masters so that they’re acceptable and understandable to intelligent people in a postindustrial era.”

Drifting Through Life

But in his early 20s, Rao says, he was “rebelling against everything that I had grown up with—my traditions, my mother, and all the rest of that. I thought it was all mumbo jumbo and useless.” In 1972, after earning an undergraduate degree in physics and an M.B.A. in India, Rao moved to New York City to earn a Ph.D. in marketing at Columbia Business School.

“I was drifting,” he says. “I was allowing life to unfold. I didn’t have any strong notions that this was what I wanted.” While at Columbia, Rao met Ram Dass, an American spiritual teacher who then lived near campus.

“I’m tremendously grateful to Ram Dass because, in a real sense, he gave my culture back to me. He enabled me to say, no, this is not useless. In fact, this is priceless and is part of my heritage, so I ought to examine it more.”

While he had a good experience at Columbia, Rao found that much of what he was studying for his Ph.D. in marketing was pointless and even worthless. Still, he earned his degree and began his marketing career at Warner Communications. There, he helped create the advertising strategy for the 1973 blockbuster film The Exorcist. His contribution: the iconic image of a man with a hat and a briefcase standing before a half-open door and casting a long shadow.

In 5,000 years, we’ve advanced tremendously, materially, technologically—in every way you can think of. But our fundamental nature has not changed. The things that bothered people at the time of Jesus, the time of Buddha, and before are still the things bothering people now.

The success of that movie catapulted his career, but he quickly became burned out by corporate politics. Rao pivoted and went into academia, but the feeling of burnout persisted. Rao immersed himself in spiritual and mystical readings that would take him to a wonderful place, but he found returning to the real world was a letdown.

“I remember feeling all of this is useful only if you’re sitting quietly thinking peaceful thoughts but not in the hurly-burly of life,” he says. “But somehow I knew that wasn’t true. Somehow I knew it was very valuable. I just hadn’t figured out how to make use of it.”

Changing Lives

Rao came up with the idea of taking the teachings of great masters, stripping them of religious and cultural connotations, and adapting them to be relatable in modern days. He designed a course called Creativity and Personal Mastery.

“That effort made me come alive,” Rao recalls. “Initially I felt like a fraud because I was creating a course on how you can make use of these concepts, and I hadn’t figured out how to make use of them myself.”

While the class was offered through Columbia Business School, where he was teaching, students from across the university enrolled in it.

“I stated right in the syllabus that this course will profoundly change your life. If it doesn’t, we have both failed,” he says. “People were initially skeptical but later said, ‘Oh my God, this is true. It does change lives.’ They moved from being skeptical to believers, and quite a few became evangelists.”

He went on to teach the course at other prestigious business schools like Kellogg, Berkeley, and the London Business School. The course was featured in The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Business Week, Time—“virtually every major business publication in the U.K. and North America covered it,” he says. Once Rao decided to teach the course privately, he founded The Rao Institute.

“Gradually, I morphed into coaching, but I never set out to be a coach,” he says. “People just heard about me and said, ‘Hey, I want to work with you.’”

He only works with successful, highly driven people—typically senior executives and entrepreneurs—who, Rao says, “want to have an outsize impact on the world but also have a spiritual bent. They know that life is about more than getting the biggest or the most expensive toys, and they want to bring that spiritual understanding into every facet of their lives, including their business.”

The spiritual teachings he brings to his clients are still relevant today, he says, because the human condition hasn’t changed. “In 5,000 years, we’ve advanced tremendously, materially, technologically—in every way you can think of. But our fundamental nature has not changed. The things that bothered people at the time of Jesus, the time of Buddha, and before are still the things bothering people now.”

His message? “It’s the message of the great masters. I’ve changed the examples. I’ve converted many of them into exercises, and I use language that the persons in my milieu—major corporations, entrepreneurial companies, business schools—can accept and feel comfortable with. The teachings are not mine. I just put them in a form people can understand and relate to. It’s an immensely practical approach to the manifold problems they are facing.”

This article appeared in the March/April 2025 issue of Spirituality & Health®: A Unity Publication. Subscribe now.