Swami Rama

Founder

Founder of Himalayan Institute Hospital Trust

Swami Rama is the founder of Himalayan Institute Hospital Trust (1989)[1], an Indian non-profit working on healthcare, education, palliative & cancer care and rural & agriculture from Dehradun.

Swami Rama (1925 – 13 November 1996) was an Indian yoga teacher and author who founded the Himalayan Institute of Yoga Science and Philosophy in the United States in 1971 and, in 1989, the Himalayan Institute Hospital Trust at Jolly Grant near Dehradun in the Garhwal Himalaya. The trust built a large teaching hospital and a set of education, rural development and outreach programmes serving hill communities with limited access to health care.

He became widely known in the West after taking part in physiological experiments at the Menninger Foundation in 1971, and wrote dozens of books, of which the memoir Living with Himalayan Masters is the best known.

Early life

He was born Brij Kishore Dhasmana in 1925 in the Garhwal Himalaya of northern India. He said he had been trained from childhood by a personal guru in Himalayan monasteries.

Career

Swami Rama founded Sadhana Mandir at Rishikesh in 1966. He moved to the United States in 1969, initially teaching yoga at a YMCA, and in 1971 established the Himalayan Institute of Yoga Science and Philosophy in Illinois; its headquarters moved to Honesdale, Pennsylvania, in 1977. In laboratory tests at the Menninger Foundation in 1971 researchers recorded him producing different brain-wave states at will and stopping the pumping action of his heart for about seventeen seconds. He wrote extensively on meditation, yoga nidra and Himalayan spiritual traditions.

In 1989 he returned to India and established the Himalayan Institute Hospital Trust in the foothills of the Garhwal Himalaya at Swami Ram Nagar, Jolly Grant, Dehradun. The trust opened the Himalayan Hospital, a multi-specialty hospital, in 1994; it was conceived to combine Western medicine with Ayurveda, homeopathy and yoga. The trust also works in medical and nursing education, research, and rural and community outreach, and its educational institutions later became Swami Rama Himalayan University.

He died on 13 November 1996.[2][3][4][5]

Himalayan Institute Hospital Trust

The Himalayan Institute Hospital Trust (HIHT) is a society registered under the Societies Registration Act 1860, founded in 1989 by Swami Rama at Jolly Grant, Dehradun. It runs the 750-bed Himalayan Hospital established in 1994, the largest hospital in Uttarakhand, along with a cancer research institute set up in 2006. Its constituent medical, nursing and management colleges now form Swami Rama Himalayan University.

Himalayan Institute Hospital Trust reports the following, on its own site:

Runs the Himalayan Hospital, a 750-bed multi-specialty hospital established in 1994 and the largest hospital in Uttarakhand
Its Rural Development Institute works in all 13 districts of Uttarakhand and has benefited more than 10 lakh rural people living in over 1,100 Himalayan villages