Photo: Torbjørn Hobbel, taken at Acem’s Retreat Centre, Lundsholm, Sweden, 2024

Øyvind Ellingsen, MD, PhD (born in Norway 1952) is an Acem Meditation Initiator and has been involved in Acem Travels in India since 2023.

He learned to meditate as a 17-year-old high school student in 1969 and is still enjoying a daily practice of Acem Meditation and yoga. An active Acem volunteer since 1972, he serves as an instructor on beginners’ courses, a meditation guide and a leader of advanced Acem courses and retreats in Scandinavia and Spain. He was trained as a communication group facilitator in 1974 and has been an Acem Meditation initiator and an Acem International council member since 1980.

His main Acem-related interests have been stress-management, personal development and scientific research on meditation. In collaboration with Are Holen, he developed an instruction CD on Relaxation by Body Meditation that was first published in Norwegian (2002), Danish (2003) and Swedish (2005) and later in English. These instructions have been used in occupational stress reduction workshops and are still used as an introduction to relaxation with a free mental attitude.

Fascinated by the physiological underpinnings, Dr. Ellingsen has contributed to several scientific studies on Acem Meditation, published in peer-reviewed scientific journals. In three book chapters, he describes its effects on the brain, the heart and the autonomic nervous system and explains how the free mental attitude facilitates deep, refreshing bodily relaxation and spontaneous emotional processing (The power of the wandering mind – Nondirective meditation in science and philosophy”).

Dr. Ellingsen is a physician, specialising in internal medicine, and still works as a consultant at the Department of Cardiology, St. Olavs University Hospital, Trondheim.

He is a professor emeritus at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim.

As a professor of cellular cardiology at the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences (1995-2022), he established a laboratory of Cellular Cardiology, which was the starting point for CERG – The Cardiac Exercise Research Group, of which he is currently a collaborating member.

The main purpose of his research has been to determine cellular mechanisms of the beneficial effects of exercise in cardiovascular disease, and to translate them into better programs for prevention and rehabilitation. For this, he was awarded the Ole Storstein’s Award for Excellent Cardiovascular Research in Norway in 2005. Dr. Ellingsen has been a member of The Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters since 2008.

He has been living in Trondheim since 1995, is married and has two children and two grandchildren.