Swami Rama moved to America 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.
14 Facts About Swami Rama
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Swami Rama became famous for his ability to control his body in yoga nidra, writing many books including the autobiographical Living with Himalayan Masters.
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Swami Rama was born Brij Kisore Dhasmana or Brij Kisore Kumar, to a northern Indian Brahmin family in the village of Toli in the Garhwal Himalayas.
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Swami Rama claimed that he was raised somewhere in the monasteries and holy caves of the Himalayas by his personal guru or master Sri Madhavananda Bharati.
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Swami Rama further claimed to have gained degree-level qualifications from an Indian school of homeopathic medicine, the University of Hamburg, Utrecht University, and finally the University of Oxford.
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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.
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Swami Rama was seen to be able to produce different brain waves at will.
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Swami Rama 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".
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Swami Rama did this by increasing his heart rate to 300 beats per minute so that the ventricles stopped pumping and the atria just fluttered.
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Swami Rama was further seen to create a temperature differential of 5 degrees Celsius between two areas on the palm of his right hand.
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Swami Rama authored dozens of books, published in India and America, which describe the path he took to become a yogi.
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Swami Rama discusses the philosophy, practice and benefits of yoga and meditation.
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Swami Rama's best known work is Living With Himalayan Masters; the cultural historian Alistair Shearer calls it "an influential autobiography".
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Swami Rama wrote that their statements, two of which were on file with the Cult Awareness Network in New York, fitted a pattern of what she called "sex in the forbidden zone", with a guru, "coupled with institutional mechanisms of defense and denial".