‘Feel-Good’ Panel Held in Low Esteem : New Age: After three years and $735,000, the state’s task force on self-esteem is promoting “yuppie evangelism,” San Diego’s lone representative said.

San Diego County’s lone representative on the much-lampooned state Task Force to Promote Self-Esteem says that the group’s proposed final report is tantamount to “yuppie evangelism.”

Yogi devotee David Shannahoff-Khalsa, neuroscience researcher and director of the Khalsa Foundation for Medical Science in Del Mar, says that, after three years of hearings and $735,000, the controversial panel has yet to find proof that there is a link between self-esteem and the solution to social ills such as teen-age pregnancies, gang violence and drug abuse.

In addition, he says the report, scheduled to be released in mid-January, is sorely lacking in practical advice to help those on the lowest rungs of society.

Case in point: Task force members rejected his suggestion to include guidelines for special breathing exercises, which Shannahoff-Khalsa says help reduce stress, fear, anger, addictions, obsessive-compulsive disorders and dyslexia.

“I feel (the report) is a bunch of yuppie evangelism,” he said in a telephone interview Thursday. “It is superficial in content, and I don’t think that it has the depth of understanding to make a difference.”

A draft copy of the final report was circulated at a task force meeting Monday in Sacramento. The panel voted to approve the document and send it to the printer for its expected Jan. 16 public release.

Shannahoff-Khalsa, a 41-year-old biologist-turned-devotee of kundalini yoga, was nominated for a spot on the 25-member panel by Sen. William Craven (R-Oceanside) and has attended every one of the task force meetings since it began in early 1987 to explore the social ramifications of self-esteem.

Since then, Shannahoff-Khalsa said he has grown disillusioned with the group because of its reluctance to go beyond feel-good buzzwords, like “esteeming,” and boldly go where no New Age committee has gone before.

“When I saw this task force, I believed that what it was mandated to do was look for the mother lode of cure for these social problem areas,” said Shannahoff-Khalsa. “And ultimately, I find the final report not to be acceptable, that it is an ineffective prescription for those most in need.”

For starters, the Del Mar meditation expert said, the task force is mistaken in its conviction that self-esteem is the key to alleviating many of today’s social plagues. Research in the link between a good self-image and being a good citizen is, at best, incomplete and inconclusive, he said.

“The task force has wanted to hang its hat on a positive causal relationship, or strong linkage,” he said. “Unfortunately, the findings of the academic literature cannot support that.”

Shannahoff-Khalsa also said that the task force became so engrossed in the concept of self-esteem that it virtually ignored the more difficult questions of what a person should do to feel good about himself in the first place.

“You just can’t tell somebody to be creative. You can’t tell somebody to be spiritual. You can’t tell somebody to appreciate their mind,” he said.

“But you can teach them ways to learn to have a conscious relationship with it, and there are a lot of techniques that are out in the community at large that lend instruction in that way.

“If you are suffering from anxiety, and you use one of these techniques, and five minutes later you can reduce the anxiety and feel a stillness and a peace of the mind, you’ve engaged yourself to lift yourself out of your own negativity,” he said. “If you can lift yourself out of your depression, you may not suffer from problems of drug and alcohol addiction.”

One such technique, he said, is informed breathing.

Shannahoff-Khalsa--the latter an adopted Sikh surname that means “consciousness and purity”--said he tried in vain to interest his task force colleagues to include breathing exercises in their proposed final report. One of the techniques he suggested would be a simple way to check for the side of the brain that is in charge at any given moment.

Those under the influence of the left side of the brain would be more prone to defense, aggression and up on their verbal skills; those under the influence of the right side would tend to be more sensitive to others, attuned to their health and possessing a “global perspective of what is right.”

The way to know which one is the strongest is by the “congestion-decongestion response” in a person’s nostrils, said Shannahoff-Khalsa. If the right nostril is the more congested, the left brain is calling the shots, and vice versa.

Simple, but would the task force take heed? Not a chance.

“Why are their eyes closed to it?” he asked. “Why are their ears closed to this approach? And it is certainly nothing new, and I don’t think it would shock the media if findings were addressed in the task force approach. I think it is more shocking that it was left out.”

Shannahoff-Khalsa said he is especially disappointed with the task force’s reaction in light of the fact that the National Research Council has hired him to write a report on how meditation can help military personnel perform better under stress.

Robert R. Ball, executive director of the task force, said Thursday that task force members “bent over backwards” to accommodate Shannahoff-Khalsa’s views, and at one point agreed to the Del Mar resident’s request that the final report recommend a Sikh drug and alcohol rehabilitation center in Tucson.

“He wanted a ‘how to’ (in the task force report) on breathing, place the tip of your tongue on the roof of your mouth and so forth,” Ball said. “Those are very specific exercises related specifically to his group that the task force as a whole did not feel were appropriate for a document that would be sent out to the whole state.”

But Shannahoff-Khalsa said such decisions were politically safe and resulted in a report that, in New Age terms at least, was pretty vanilla.

“This task force is an effort to look beyond the mainstream of thought,” he said, “but, from my perspective, we’re still in the middle of the stream.”