The West’s First Yoga Master Of India
Paramahansa Yogananda was the first yoga master of India to take up permanent residence in the West. Born and raised in 1893 in Gorakhpur, he arrived in America in 1920, and proceeded to travel throughout the United States, filling large halls, on what he coined his “spiritual campaigns.”
He founded Self-Realization Fellowship (the first center was located in Boston, MA) to disseminate worldwide his teachings on India’s ancient science and philosophy of Yoga and its time-honored tradition of meditation.
Yogananda’s spiritual legacy has had a lasting impact on Western culture. His Autobiography of a Yogi, first published in 1946, helped launch a spiritual revolution in the West. It has since been translated into multiple languages, and remains one of the best-selling spiritual classics to date.
Yogananda continued to lecture and write until to his passing in 1952. To read more about Paramahansa Yogananda’s biography, visit the site here.
