Swami Rama

Indian yoga guru

Swami Rama (Svāmī Rāma; 1925 – 13 November 1996) was an Indian yoga guru. He moved to the US in 1969, initially teaching yoga at the YMCA, and founding the Himalayan Institute of Yoga Science and Philosophy in Illinois in 1971; its headquarters moved to its current location in Honesdale, Pennsylvania in 1977. He became famous for his ability to control his body in yoga nidra, writing many books including the autobiographical Living with Himalayan Masters. From the 1970s onwards, there were persistent allegations of sexual abuse of his followers; to a northern Indian Brahmin family in the village of Toli in the Garhwal Himalayas. He claimed that he was raised somewhere in the monasteries and holy caves of the Himalayas by his personal guru or master Sri Madhavananda Bharati. However, in 1987 two of his closest followers left his Himalayan Institute when they learnt that part of his official biography had been "fabricated"; further, Vanessa Webber of the Cult Awareness Network has stated that his academic background could not be verified. Swami Rama founded other teaching and service organizations, including a large medical facility, in Dehradun in Uttarakhand in the north of India, to serve millions of poor people in the nearby mountains who had little access to health care.

Swami Rama's abilities in yoga nidra, a guided meditation whose name means "yogic sleep", were measured experimentally at the Menninger Foundation in Topeka, Kansas in 1971. He was seen to be able to produce different brain waves at will. As he relaxed, he created alpha waves by "imagining an empty blue sky with drifting clouds". He then produced the longer theta waves of dreaming sleep, and finally the slow delta waves of deep sleep, staying aware throughout and able to describe accurately what had happened in the laboratory although he had been lying in the laboratory "snoring". In another experiment at the Menninger Foundation, he voluntarily stopped his heart from pumping blood for 17 seconds. He did this by increasing his heart rate to 300 beats per minute so that the ventricles stopped pumping and the atria just fluttered. He was further seen to create a temperature differential of 5 degrees Celsius between two areas on the palm of his right hand. All the same,
he was critical of the tendency for yogis to use supernatural feats to demonstrate their enlightenment, arguing that these only demonstrated the ability to perform a feat. which describe the path he took to become a yogi. He discusses the philosophy, practice and benefits of yoga and meditation. In an early co authored book, Yoga and Psychotherapy (1976), he presented Hatha Yoga with reference to western psychology. His best known work is Living With Himalayan Masters; the cultural historian Alistair Shearer calls it "an influential autobiography".

Swami Rama has been accused and convicted of sexual abuse. The journalist Katharine Webster stated in Yoga Journal in 1990 that women had since the early 1970s made claims of sexual abuse against him, and that since the matter had never been investigated, she had spent two years researching it. She heard "numerous former students say they left the [Himalayan] Institute because they were sexually exploited by Swami Rama or knew someone who was". This was one of the first convictions of a yoga guru for unlawful sexual activity with a devotee.