access to health care. Yoga nidra Swami Rama's abilities in yoga nidra, a guided meditation whose name means "yogic sleep", were measured experimentally at the Menninger Foundation in Topeka, Kansas in 1971. He was seen to be able to produce different brain waves at will. As he relaxed, he created alpha waves by "imagining an empty blue sky with drifting clouds". He 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". In another experiment at the Menninger Foundation, he voluntarily stopped his heart from pumping blood for 17 seconds. He did this by increasing his heart rate to 300 beats per minute so that the ventricles stopped pumping and the atria just fluttered. He was further seen to create a temperature differential of 5 degrees Celsius between two areas on the palm of his right hand. Widely reported in the mainstream media, he acquired a reputation for achieving remarkable psychosomatic states; the New York Times journalist and author William J. Broad described him as "the star of autonomic control". The result was a sharp increase of interest in his teachings. All the same, he was critical of the tendency for yogis to use supernatural feats to demonstrate their enlightenment, arguing that these only demonstrated the ability to perform a feat. Writings Swami Rama authored dozens of books, published in India and America, which describe the path he took to become a yogi. He discusses the philosophy, practice and benefits of yoga and meditation. In an early co-authored book, Yoga and Psychotherapy (1976), he presented Hatha Yoga with reference to western psychology. His best known work is Living With Himalayan Masters; the cultural historian Alistair Shearer calls it "an influential autobiography". Sexual abuse Swami Rama has been accused and convicted of sexual abuse. Abuses alleged to have taken place against former students of Swami Rama in Chicago, in Minneapolis, in New York, and in India in the 1970s were documented by Patricia Ann Darling in a chapter of her 1987 University of Minnesota PhD thesis. The journalist Katharine Webster stated in Yoga Journal in 1990 that women had since the early 1970s made claims of sexual abuse against him, and that since the matter had never been investigated, she