If you practice yoga, thank this man
Ancient Indian practice’s popularity grew under first swami to make US his home
Long before he arrived in the U.S. to bring the ancient Indian practice of yoga to the West, Paramahansa Yogananda visited a temple in Kashmir and fell into an ecstatic trance: in his vision, he saw the temple transform into a gleaming white mansion. It sat on a hilltop in a distant land.
Years later, he visited Mount Washington, a hilltop neighborhood less than six miles from downtown Los Angeles. And there he saw it, the gleaming white mansion.
“I recognized it at once from my long past visions in Kashmir and elsewhere,” he wrote.
The mansion was actually the long abandoned Mount Washington Hotel, and it would soon become the headquarters for the Self Realization Fellowship, the global organization Yogananda founded over a century ago.
Yogananda, who died in 1952, purchased the hotel in 1925 and transformed its grounds into a lush and expansive oasis that includes a wishing well, an outdoor “temple of leaves,” a koi pond, trickling waterfalls and plenty of benches for meditation.
Yogananda spent 32 years in the U.S., addressing tens of thousands in concert halls across the country, writing a bestselling autobiography, and instructing disciples that included George Eastman, founder of Kodak, and the pioneering botanist Luther Burbank. He counted Mahatma Gandhi among his friends, and President Calvin Coolidge invited him to the White House.
Yogananda’s influence can still be felt on popular culture — his face and the faces of his three gurus appear on the cover of the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” album — and on contemporary thought; Apple founder Steve Jobs requested that everyone who attended his memorial service be given a copy of “Autobiography of a Yogi.”
If you stream yoga classes online, meditate to alleviate stress, or consider yourself more spiritual than religious, you have Paramahansa Yogananda, in part, to thank, said Diana Eck, professor of comparative religion at Harvard Divinity School.
“You can’t say it all began with him, but I think it began most popularly with him,” she said. “He was way, way ahead of his time.”
Indian spiritual teachings were not entirely unfamiliar to Americans when Yogananda arrived in 1920. The Bhagavad Gita was translated into English in 1785, and John Adams and Thomas Jefferson exchanged letters about reading Hindu philosophy.
Indian sacred texts informed the Transcendentalist movement of the mid-1800s, and in 1893 Swami Vivekananda, a Hindu monk from Calcutta, became a media sensation after delivering a talk to the Parliament of the World’s Religions in Chicago. The following year, he founded the Vedanta Society, the first teaching institution for Indian philosophy in the United States.
The society still exists, but Vivekananda spent only a few years in the
West. Yogananda was the first Indian swami to make America his home.
“Here we had a teacher who came and basically dug his feet into the mud,” Eck said.
Central to Yogananda’s
teaching is the idea that one doesn’t have to renounce worldly life or live in a cave to have a direct encounter with God. He taught that blissful, divine communion is available to all, and that methods developed in India thousands of years ago represent the fastest path to establishing that connection.
The physical practice of yoga — known as the asanas — is just one branch of yoga, and it wasn’t what Yogananda particularly focused on. He was more interested in teaching techniques of intense concentration.
“What Yogananda brought is a fairly advanced and much more comprehensive meditation practice for people who feel they don’t want to be a dabbler anymore,” said Brother Chidananda, president and spiritual head of the Self Realization
Fellowship.
Yogananda called his teachings “the science of religion” because he believed his methods were testable. Faith wasn’t part of the equation.
This emphasis on the scientific method, and his belief that people of all races, genders and religious backgrounds could encounter the divine, helped the swami connect with Americans.
“What he was speaking about was not otherworldly,” Eck said. “He said yoga was something that was demonstrable, if you practiced it you got certain results — and people did.”
Yogananda traveled across America, and to stay in touch with his growing number of students, he created the Self Realization Fellowship Lessons, a kind of mail-order yoga and meditation school. Hard
copies of the lessons are still sent through the mail from the Mount Washington headquarters.
Yogananda arrived in the U.S. as the Spanish flu pandemic was finally receding. Now, in another time of fear and anxiety, interest in his teachings is at an all-time high.
With its temples and meditation centers shuttered, Self Realization Fellowship officials say visits to the organization’s website have more than tripled during the pandemic compared with the previous year, while interest in online prayer requests has increased by a factor of six. Inquiries about guided meditation are up 77%.
In a YouTube video recorded at the beginning of the pandemic, Brother Chidananda reminded Yogananda’s modern-day followers of what their guru had taught them — to arrive on the battlefield of life as a fully equipped warrior.
“I often think how followers of this path are so very much blessed, to have the spiritual tools, to have the wisdom, to have the understanding that they can draw upon during times of uncertainty, during times of crisis,” he said.
The ability to silence the static noise of fear that threatens divine consciousness.
The unshakable knowledge that within every person lies a wise, loving, joyful, eternal soul.
That direct connection with God is always possible, for those who seek it.
It’s the message Yogananda brought from India a century ago, since relayed innumerable times from Mount Washington.