Paramahansa Yogananda
Indian yoga guru who brought meditation to America and wrote the memoir Autobiography of a Yogi Show bio
Bio
Paramahansa Yogananda lost his mother at eleven and spent his youth seeking a spiritual teacher. He found his guru at 17 and trained under him for the next ten years.
Yogananda wrote of a 1920 vision of American faces, and an invitation to Boston soon followed. He founded the Self-Realization Fellowship that year to spread India’s yoga and meditation worldwide. Yogananda later told his life story in Autobiography of a Yogi, published in 1946.
He landed on a government watch list, under FBI and British surveillance. Yogananda went from seeking a teacher to initiating thousands into Kriya Yoga, his lineage’s meditation practice.