Yoga and meditation in Brazil's public health system: a Fiocruz documentary from Maré to Inca

An açaí seller from the Maré favela complex in Rio de Janeiro was diagnosed with lupus at 20, after a vasculitis that cost her her hair and eyebrows. On some days the disease in her joints kept her from opening a bottle. One Friday she took up a friend's invitation to a yoga class at the neighborhood family clinic. She says her routine has changed since.

The scene opens Yoga e Meditação, a 26-minute episode of the Documentários series from Canal Saúde, the TV channel of the Fiocruz public health foundation, first aired in September 2023. The film follows two of the 29 integrative and complementary practices that Brazil's public health system, the SUS, offers free of charge, and asks what they change in the lives of the people who seek them out.

Yoga outside the studio

In Maré, the classes arrived with a teacher who left Portugal at 24, worked on social projects in Germany and Spain and moved to Rio in 2010, hoping to bring yoga to places where it did not exist. The groups grew through referrals from psychologists and doctors at local health units, who heard from their own patients that they were feeling better. During the pandemic the classes moved online, and some students spent 15 months training to become teachers. One of them sums up the lesson: yoga is not a privilege of Rio's wealthy South Zone, nor of women who are white and thin.

After chemotherapy

The film's other thread is the Zen Câncer Institute. Its founder, already a yoga teacher when she was diagnosed, went through six months of chemotherapy and used restorative yoga, with the body supported by cushions, blankets and blocks, to get through treatment. While still in treatment she put together a relaxation kit for other patients, and later set aside Fridays at her studio for people with cancer. It began with a single participant, Lourdes. According to the founder, there are now more than 400 people enrolled in Brazil, and the institute works with health professionals at a public hospital in Rio and with patients and companions at Inca, the national cancer institute.

What science says

One of the researchers interviewed recalls that academic interest grew from the 1970s on, with Jon Kabat-Zinn, the University of Massachusetts professor who brought mindfulness into medicine without its religious framing. He also cites researcher Shirley Telles, who studies the hearts of people who meditate, and estimates that papers on yoga now number more than 7,000. Volume, however, is not proof. The stories in the film, such as students asking their doctors to cut back their medication, are personal experiences. And the national policy that houses these practices in the SUS, made official in 2006, is criticized for including therapies without a scientific basis alongside better-studied ones such as meditation.

Why watch

The film puts yoga on the mat of a family clinic, with children dozing next to their grandmothers. It is a clear-eyed portrait of how a practice of Indian origin became a public service in Brazil.