InternationalSpotlight

MediYogaYoga as Medicine
By Gran Boll

weden is a small country, yes, but

there is some very serious yogic
activity going on up here in Scandinavia! Yoga courses can be found everywherein workplaces, gyms, schools,
and in prisons, within the police and the
military, among the Fortune 500, and in
sports. Out of a total population of
10,000,000, an estimated 700,000
Swedes practice some form of yoga today.
The most popular yoga forms are Ashtanga, Power, Kundalini, and Medical Yoga.

Since 2010, when I first reported in

YTT on yoga in Sweden, even the
Swedish national medical system has
started to embrace yoga, in the form of
medical yoga, or MediYoga. Today, close
to 100 (out of a total of 1,000) hospitals
and primary healthcare clinics offer
MediYoga to various groups of patients.

I am the founder of the Institute for

Medical Yoga (IMY) in Stockholm, which
since 2000 has been a major center for
the education of teachers, instructors, and
yoga therapists in Sweden. MediYoga,
which I developed, is a therapeutic form of
yoga, springing out of the Kundalini Yoga
tradition, but tailor-made to include people
with various physical, mental, and emotional challenges. A yoga set in MediYoga
includes gentle movements, pranayama,
third-eye focus, mantra, mudras and
bhandas, deep relaxation, and meditation.
The exercises are very slow and are performed in rhythm with long, slow, deep
breathing.

I am often asked why it is called

medical, since all forms of yoga have an
inherent potential of self-healing. The
answer is that from the first moment I
started to develop this method, I had the
intention to focus on people who already
have medical skills. When students apply
to our trainings they need to have knowledge in anatomy and a Western perspective on health and illness, before they integrate the yogic/Eastern perspective.
Training in MediYoga is offered on
two different levels. First, the students
take a basic yoga instructor training
course over one semester, where they
learn a number of science-based, well-

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YogaTherapyToday | Winter 2013

established basic training programs and

how to teach them to various groups. The
second level, over three semesters, is for
students to become yoga teachers and
therapists. This level includes knowledge
of a yogic perspective on illness, the
chakra system, and ayurveda, and it is
where experts from the different traditions
come in and train the students.

The rapid development of MediYoga

in Sweden is primarily due to scientific
research. Scientific research in my country
is funded mainly by the government, its
various funding agencies, and the European Union. Many of our students also
have initiated studies of their own, supported by the IMY; we have created a
number of basic sequences, documented
on CDs, that have been tested in research
over and over again. The first study ever
on yoga in Sweden was on MediYoga: a
spine study done in 1998, conducted by
Professor Irene Jensen at the Karolinska
Institute in Stockholm. The results were
clear, with a significant reduction of pain
and insomnia, and with improved emotional wellbeing. Since then a dozen or so
studies have been conducted or are running on MediYoga in Sweden. Early in
2010, Danderyds Hospital started using
MediYoga as regular rehabilitation for their
heart patients. This was the result of a
pilot study in 20082009 with MediYoga
as a secondary prevention against

myocardial infarction. The hospital saw

that their study confirmed the results in
several larger, internationally published
studies on the same subject, and they
decided to start running the MediYoga
programs on a regular basis.

Media interest in MediYoga has also

been a part of the successful spread of
our programs. When a major business
magazine put me on its cover in 1996
due to my work with yoga classes in
workplaces, I realized it was not too difficult to get media attention and that it
helped to spread the message of medical
yoga. Since then, MediYoga has been
featured twenty-five to fifty times per year
in various media. In 2010, when the Danderyds Hospital took on yoga, the numbers picked up. Some 100 newspapers
and magazineseven BBC World
Radiohad pieces on hospital yoga in
Sweden that year. The media coverage,
still high today, accelerated interest from
other hospitals, and a number of them
booked in-house instructor trainings for
physical therapists and other groups of
employees. Two MDs, one in Sweden
and one in Norway, both trained yoga
therapists, have this year appeared on
national TV and spoken on the effects of
MediYoga.
At IMY, we have been training medical personnel to become MediYoga

www.iayt.org

International Spotlight continued

instructors since 2007. One of our aims is

to implement MediYoga into the medical
system, so training medical personnel
seemed like a natural step. Today more
than 1,100 people,
mostly from within the
Swedish medical systemnurses, doctors,
physical therapists, and
othershave taken our
MediYoga instructor
trainings.

Spinal flex in a chair as part of the MediYoga program.

www.iayt.org

In Norway trainings
started in 2009, and
now well over 300
instructors have graduated there. During
2014, instructor trainings will be starting up
in four new countries on
three continents:
Copenhagen in Denmark and Amsterdam in the Netherlands
for Europe; Tokyo in Japan; and San
Francisco, California, and Flagstaff, Arizona, in the United States. This expansion

is a result of the work we do, word of

mouth, media interest, and the fact that
the time is right for medical yoga now.
YTT
For more information contact Gran Boll,
MediYoga Sweden: info@mediyoga.se.
For information on international instructor
trainings contact Elisabeth Engqvist at
MediYoga International:
elisabeth@mediyoga.com. Website:
www.mediyoga.com.
Founder of MediYoga
and a member of the
IAYT Advisory Council,
Gran has cooperated
with the Karolinska
Institute since 1998
and has long-term
research engagements
with major hospitals in Sweden. Gran
lectures regularly in hospitals, universities,
and training centers all over Scandinavia.
Articles he has written have appeared in
the German publication Yoga Aktuell, the
British Yoga Magazine, and in Yoga
Therapy Today.

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