Swami Rama

Swami Rama was a Himalayan yoga master who demonstrated to Western science in the 1970s what yogis had claimed for millennia: that trained practitioners can exercise voluntary control over what were previously considered involuntary physiological processes. In landmark experiments at the Menninger Foundation in Kansas, he stopped his heart for 17 seconds, produced different brain wave states at will, controlled skin temperature in different parts of the same hand, and demonstrated other feats that forced Western medicine to revise its understanding of the relationship between consciousness and biology.

Born in the Garhwal region of the Himalayas, he was taken as a child by his master — referred to simply as Bengali Baba — and raised in the Himalayan ashram tradition. He studied under numerous Himalayan masters and for a period became Shankaracharya (the supreme religious head) of Karvirpitham in south India, a position he resigned to continue his travels and teaching. He came to the United States in 1969 at the instruction of his teacher.

He founded the Himalayan International Institute of Yoga Science and Philosophy in Honesdale, Pennsylvania, which became a leading centre for the integration of yoga, meditation, and modern psychology. His books — including Living with the Himalayan Masters — offer a window into a world of extraordinary teachers and teachings rarely accessible to outsiders.

His essential teaching is that the self we ordinarily take ourselves to be — the body-mind complex — is not our true nature. The true Self is beyond all these instruments, using them as tools but never defined by them. Through the practice of meditation, this recognition can be directly verified — not as a belief but as lived experience. His Himalayan lineage continues through the work of his students at the Himalayan Institute.