Yogananda, and How Yoga Crossed the World

If you have ever seen a quiet room where people sit with closed eyes and steady breath, or move slowly through careful poses, then you have already met one of India's gifts to the world. It is called yoga. In this section we follow how it crossed the oceans.

Our guide here is a gentle monk named Paramahansa Yogananda. In 1920 he sailed to the United States, and a few years later he made his home in Los Angeles. He had come to teach, and he founded a fellowship so that his path could be shared and carried on.

His teaching held a quiet, hopeful idea. In the old days, the deepest seekers often left the world behind. They became hermits in the forest. Yogananda taught that this was not the only way. A person with a job, a home, and a family could also walk the inner path. You could seek the divine without giving up your ordinary life.

He taught a method of meditation and breath that he called Kriya Yoga, a way of turning the mind inward toward stillness and light. But the thing that carried his name around the world was a book.

In 1946 he published the story of his own life. He called it the Autobiography of a Yogi. It tells of his teachers, his search, and the wonders he said he met along the way. Since then it has been read by millions of people, in dozens of languages. For very many readers around the world, it was the first door through which they ever walked into Hindu thought.

Yogananda was one of many teachers, but he stands for something larger. In the decades after him, yoga spread across the whole earth. Today you can find it in nearly every city, in quiet studios and living rooms, practised by people of every background. Few ideas from India have travelled so far or touched so many lives.

Now, what is this yoga that travelled so well? Here a careful teacher must slow down, because there is a gentle question worth getting right. So let us step to the Threshold and look honestly.

The word yoga means "to yoke," to join. In its deep sense it is an ancient discipline for joining the small self to the divine, through stilling the mind, steadying the breath, and disciplining the body. That deep practice is very old, taught by the sage Patanjali and in later texts you will meet on this journey. The physical poses, the asanas, are one limb of it. asana

Yet the popular practice the world now shares, the one built mostly around flowing poses for health and calm, took much of its present shape more recently. We will set the views side by side at the Threshold. The honest heart of it is simple: the deep philosophy is ancient, and the popular global form of poses is, in good part, modern. Both are true, and there is no shame in either.

There is one more gentle caution. As yoga travelled, it was sometimes sold and packaged in ways far from its roots, treated as mere exercise or fashion. To notice this is not to scold anyone. It is only to remember that beneath the poses lies an old and serious path of the spirit, and that this depth is always there for anyone who wishes to seek it.