Swami Rama, born as Brij Kiśore Dhasmana or Brij Kiśore Kumar, was an Indian yoga guru who claimed to have been raised in the monasteries and holy caves of the Himalayas by his personal guru, Sri Madhavananda Bharati. He claimed to have obtained degrees from various universities, including the University of Oxford, and to have served as the Shankaracharya or spiritual leader at Karvirpitham in Karnataka, South India. However, there were allegations that part of his official biography had been fabricated and that his academic background could not be verified.

Swami Rama moved to the United States in 1969, where he initially taught yoga at the YMCA before founding the Himalayan Institute of Yoga Science and Philosophy in Illinois in 1971. The institute later moved to its current location in Honesdale, Pennsylvania in 1977. Swami Rama became known for his ability to control his body in yoga nidra and authored several books, including Living with Himalayan Masters, an autobiographical work.

However, from the 1970s onwards, Swami Rama was accused of sexually abusing his followers. In 1997, a woman won a lawsuit against him for multiple sexual assaults.

After arriving in the United States in 1969, Swami Rama began teaching Hatha yoga at the YMCA and in private homes. He was concerned that the YMCA presented yoga solely as a physical fitness program, so he included philosophy and meditation in his classes. In 1971, he founded the Himalayan Institute of Yoga Science and Philosophy in Glenview, Illinois. The headquarters of the institute was later moved to Honesdale, Pennsylvania, which was purchased in 1977. The institute now has branches in the United States, Europe, and India. Swami Rama also founded other teaching and service organizations, including a large medical facility in Dehradun in Uttarakhand, India, to serve millions of poor people in the nearby mountains who had little access to health care.

Swami Rama was known for his ability to control his body during yoga nidra, a guided meditation that means "yogic sleep." His abilities in yoga nidra were experimentally measured at the Menninger Foundation in Topeka, Kansas, in 1971. He was able to produce different brain waves at will and stay aware throughout the meditation. In another experiment at the Menninger Foundation, he voluntarily stopped his heart from pumping blood for 17 seconds. He also created a temperature differential of 5 degrees Celsius between two areas on the palm of his right hand. These psychosomatic states gained him widespread attention in the media, and he acquired a reputation for achieving remarkable feats of autonomic control. However, he criticized the tendency for yogis to use supernatural feats to demonstrate their enlightenment, arguing that these only demonstrated the ability to perform a feat.