Satyananda Saraswati

Early life

Satyananda Saraswati was born 1923 at Almora, Uttaranchal, into a family of farmers and zamindars.

As a youth he was classically educated and studied Sanskrit, the Vedas and the Upanishads. He says that he began to have spiritual experiences at the age of six, when his awareness spontaneously left the body and he saw himself lying motionless on the floor. Many saints and sadhus blessed him and reassured his parents that he had a very developed awareness. This experience of disembodied awareness continued, which led him to many saints of that time such as Anandamayi Ma. He also met a tantric bhairavi, Sukhman Giri, who gave him shaktipat and directed him to find a guru to stabilise his spiritual experiences. However, in one of his early publications, Yoga from Shore to Shore, he says he would become unconscious during meditation and that "One day I met a mahatma, a great saint, who was passing by my birthplace...So he told me I should find a guru."

At age eighteen, he left his home to seek a spiritual master. In 1943 at the age of twenty, he met his guru Sivananda Saraswati and went to live at Sivananda's ashram in Rishikesh. Sivananda initiated him into the Dashnam Order of Sannyasa on 12 September 1947 on the banks of the Ganges and gave him the name of Swami Satyananda Saraswati. He stayed with Sivananda for a further nine years but received little formal instruction from him.

Bihar School of Yoga

In 1956, Sivananda sent Satyanda away to spread his teachings. Basing himself in Munger, Bihar, he wandered as a mendicant travelling through India, Afghanistan, Nepal, Burma and Ceylon for the next seven years (although on several occasions he said he travelled only through India), extending his knowledge of spiritual practices and spending some time in seclusion.

In 1962 Satyananda established the International Yoga Fellowship Movement (IYFM) in Rajnandgaon. IYFM inspired the establishment of ashrams and yoga centers spiritually guided by Swami Satyananda in India and all over the world. In 1964, he founded the Bihar School of Yoga (BSY) at Munger, with the intention that it would act as a centre of training for future teachers of yoga as well as offer courses on yoga.

Among those who attended courses at BSY were students from abroad and students who subsequently emigrated from India. Some of these people in turn invited Satyananda to teach in their own countries. He lectured and taught for the next twenty years, including a tour of Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Singapore, North America between April and October 1968. The foreign and expatriate students also established new centres of teaching in their respective countries.

Seclusion

In 1988 Satyananda handed over the active work of his ashram and organisation to his spiritual successor, Niranjanananda Saraswati, and left Munger.

From September 1989 he was in Rikhia, Deoghar, Jharkhand. There he lived as a paramahamsa sannyasin and performed vedic sadhanas including panchagni, an austerity performed before five blazing fires outdoors during the hottest months of the year. At Rikhia, Satyananda conducted a 12-year Rajasooya Yajna which began in 1995 with the first Sat Chandi Maha Yajna, invoking the Cosmic Mother through a tantric ceremony. During this event, Satyananda passed on his spiritual and sannyasa sankalpa to Niranjanananda.

He died on 5 December 2009.

Teachings

Satyananda's teachings emphasise an "Integral Yoga" with a strong emphasis on Tantra, known as the "Bihar Yoga" system or "Satyananda Yoga". This system addresses the qualities of head, heart and hands – intellect, emotion and action - and attempts to integrate the physical, psychological and spiritual dimensions of yoga into each practice. His system of tantric yoga involves the practice of:

components of Kriya yoga, in combination with other practices such as asana, pranayama, mudras and badhas. Kriya Yoga aims to awaken the dimensions of consciousness where our dormant potential and creativity lies.

Satyananda classified and expounded the techniques given in the tantras as a series of different stages and levels of pratyahara, such as antar mouna, and different stages of meditation. He invented a technique of yoga-nidra, now known worldwide as Satyananda Yoga Nidra, and defined and codified the different stages of the technique.

Publications

Satyananda wrote over 80 books, including Asana Pranayama Mudra Bandha. Satyananda's writings have been published by the Bihar School of Yoga and, since 2000, by the Yoga Publications Trust established by his disciple Niranjanananda to promote his teachings.