Yoga in Sweden is the practice of yoga, whether for exercise or other reasons, in Sweden. The form of yoga practised in the Western world was influenced by Pehr Henrik Ling's system of gymnastics. Sweden is home, too, to Europe's first yoga school, the Goswami Yoga Institute in Stockholm.
The Swedish gymnastics pioneer Pehr Henrik Ling (1776–1839) devised a system of gymnastics which, according to yoga scholar Mark Singleton, shaped the development of modern yoga as exercise in the Western world. [1]
In 1946, the Austrian Walther Eidlitz (1892–1976), known as Vāmana Dāsa, moved to Sweden and taught Bhakti Yoga there for the rest of his life. [2] Yoga became more widely available in 1949 when the Indian yogi Shyam Sundar Goswami (1891–1978) visited the country for the Lingiaden gymnastic competition named for Ling. Goswami founded Stockholm's Goswami Yoga Institute the same year: it was the first yoga school in Europe, and Goswami taught there for the rest of his life. His followers continue to run the institute. [2] [3]
In the early 1960s Bert Yoga Jonson (also called Bert Yogson) opened his yoga studio in Malmö, also teaching in Gothenburg and writing 15 books on yoga. [2] [4]
In 1972, Swami Janakananda founded the Kriya Yoga centre Håå Kursgård in the southern province of Småland. [2] In 1976, Stockholm's Skandinavisk Yoga och Meditationsskola ("Scandinavian Yoga and Meditation School") was founded. [2] It claims to be Stockholm's oldest school of yoga as exercise, and uses Håå Kursgård as its retreat centre. [5]
Rachel Bråthén (1988- ), known as "Yoga Girl", lives and teaches on the island of Aruba in the Caribbean Sea. [6] [7] Her 2015 book, also called Yoga Girl, became a New York Times best-seller [8] [9] and popularised the line "Yoga every damn day". [10] [11] She helped to pioneer Paddleboard Yoga, having taught it from 2009 onwards. [12]
While yoga had a big following in the 20th century, interest in yoga has increased rapidly in the 21st century. Many Swedes state that they practice yoga, though few have read the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali . [13] In 2017, yoga was Sweden's 8th most popular fitness method, and was the primary fitness activity for 12% of its women and 2% of its men. [14]
From 2012 there has been an ongoing debate in Sweden about whether yoga may be taught in schools, as religious instruction is forbidden in the state schooling system. Sweden's School Inspectorate decided in 2012 that Östermalm School in Stockholm could teach yoga as exercise. The scholar Erik af Edholm noted that since Ling's gymnastics had influenced modern yoga, the yoga now practised in Sweden was a secularised and reimported form of gymnastics. [15]
Sweden is, according to The Wall Street Journal , an "excellent place" for yoga retreats. [16]
Eriksdalsbadet is the biggest swimming centre in Stockholm, Sweden The outdoor pool was built for the 1962 European Aquatics Championships. The new Eriksdalsbadet was built 1999 and was designed by architect Björn Thynberger.
"Ack Värmeland, du sköna" or "Värmlandsvisan" is a Swedish popular song, best known in the English-speaking world as "Dear Old Stockholm".
Pehr Henrik Ling pioneered the teaching of physical education in Sweden. Ling is credited as the father of Swedish massage.
Social welfare in Sweden is made up of several organizations and systems dealing with welfare. It is mostly funded by taxes, and executed by the public sector on all levels of government as well as private organizations. It can be separated into three parts falling under three different ministries. Social welfare is the responsibility of the Ministry of Health and Social Affairs. Education is the responsibility of the Ministry of Education and Research. The labour market is the responsibility of the Ministry of Employment.
Swami Janakananda Saraswati is a tantric yoga and meditation teacher and a writer, who has had a noted influence in the dissemination of yoga and meditation in Scandinavia and Northern Europe. He is the oldest active sannyasin disciple of Satyananda Saraswati in Europe.
Sanna Viktoria Nielsen is a Swedish singer, television presenter and musical theatre performer. On her seventh attempt, she won Melodifestivalen in 2014 with the song "Undo" and so represented Sweden in the Eurovision Song Contest 2014 in Copenhagen, Denmark, finishing in 3rd place overall. Sanna was one of the Eurovision Song Contest 2015 commentators for Sweden and hosted Melodifestivalen 2015 along with comedian Robin Paulsson. She was announced as the new presenter for the sing-along show Allsång på Skansen for the summer of 2016. She hosted Eurovision The Party at the Tele2 Arena for the Eurovision Song Contest 2016.
Catharina Ahlgren was a Swedish proto-feminist poet and publisher, and one of the first identifiable female journalists in Sweden.
Jonas Hassen Khemiri is a Swedish writer. He is the author of six novels, seven plays, and a collection of essays, short stories and plays. His work has been translated into more than 25 languages. He has received the August Prize for fiction and a Village Voice Obie Award for best script. In 2017 he became the first Swedish writer to have a short story published in the New Yorker. Khemiri's novel The Family Clause (FSG) was awarded the French Prix Médicis and was a finalist for the National Book Award. Khemiri moved to New York in 2021 for a Cullman Fellowship at The New York Public Library and currently teaches in the Creative Writing program at NYU. In 2023 he was a Ben Belitt Distinguished Visiting Writer at Bennington College.
Martina Sofia Helena Bergman-Österberg was a Swedish-born physical education instructor and women's suffrage advocate who spent most of her working life in Britain. After studying gymnastics in Stockholm she moved to London, where she founded the first physical education instructors' college in England, to which she admitted women only. Bergman-Österberg pioneered teaching physical education as a full subject within the English school curriculum, with Swedish-style gymnastics at its core. She also advocated the wearing of gymslips by women playing sports, and played a pivotal role in the early development of netball. Bergman-Österberg was an advocate of women's emancipation, directly encouraging women to be active in sport and education, and also donating money to women's emancipation organisations in her native Sweden. Several of her students founded the Ling Association, which later became the Physical Education Association of the United Kingdom.
Dissenter Acts were laws, enacted by the King of Sweden with the consent of the Swedish Parliament, which gave nonconformists who wanted to leave the then established Church of Sweden the right to do so, provided that the dissenters then joined one of the state-approved denominations. The first such edict was decreed in 1860 by Karl XV and the Ståndsriksdag; the second one in 1873 by Oscar II and the reorganized bicameral Riksdag. Neither the Ståndsriksdag, divided into four Estates, nor the newer Riksdag could be said to be truly democratic, though, as the suffrage was restricted to males who owned property. The 1873 edict remained in force until the 1951 Religious Freedom Act (religionsfrihetslag); the Church of Sweden remained the established state church until 2000.
Virabhadrasana or Warrior Pose is a group of related lunging standing asanas in modern yoga as exercise commemorating the exploits of a mythical warrior, Virabhadra. The name of the pose derives from the Hindu myth, but the pose is not recorded in the hatha yoga tradition until the 20th century. Virabhadrasana has some similarity with poses in the gymnastics of Niels Bukh the early 20th century; it has been suggested that it was adopted into yoga from the tradition of physical culture in India at that time, which was influenced by European gymnastics.
Niels Ebbesen Mortensen Bukh was a Danish gymnast and educator who founded the first athletic folk high school in Ollerup in Funen, Denmark. He achieved international fame as a gymnastics trainer for the Danish team at the Olympic Games in Stockholm in 1912. He was inspired by the rhythmic female gymnastics of the Finnish gymnastics educator Elli Björkstén(1870–1947) and the medical gymnastics of Kaare Theilmann.
Tino Sanandaji is a Kurdish–Swedish economist and author born in Tehran, Iran, who resides in Stockholm, Sweden.
Rachel Brathen is a Swedish yoga teacher, a pioneer of paddleboard yoga, and the founder of Island Yoga Aruba in the Caribbean. She is the author of the 2015 book Yoga Girl.
John Knut Chrispinsson was a Swedish journalist, author and television presenter. He worked mostly in TV and radio with news programmes and historical programmes. Chrispinsson also wrote several books on Swedish history.
Vulnerable area is a term applied by the Swedish Police Authority to areas with high crime rates and social exclusion. They are colloquially known as no-go zones. In the December 2015 report, there were 53 vulnerable areas, which increased to 61 in June 2017. The increase is reported to be due to better reporting, not a changing situation. The overall trend is that these areas are improving.
Inga-Britt Margareta Fredholm was a Swedish secretary, archivist and author. She spent more than ten years serving as Evert Taube’s literary secretary, both in Sweden and abroad. She collected and edited Taube's stories for Bonniers' and contributed a total of twenty pieces of work on the national poet.
Carl L. Thunberg, FSAScot is a Swedish popular historian.
Frans Viktor Heikel was a Finland-Swedish gymnastics teacher, known as "the father of Finnish school gymnastics".
Yoga is by origin an ancient spiritual practice from India. In the form of yoga as exercise, using postures (asanas) derived from medieval Haṭha yoga, it has become a widespread fitness practice across the western world. Yoga as exercise, along with the use that some make of symbols such as Om ॐ, has been described as cultural appropriation.
