Autobiography of a Yogi

In May 1936, Yogananda, his secretary, and three friends drive to visit Giri Bala, a female saint who practices a yoga technique as a result of which she never needs to eat. She has not eaten in five decades. In her late sixties, she lives surrounded by friends and family. Yogananda and his friends travel to the village of Biur, in a remote part of Bengal. Giri Bala greets them at the doorway of her house. Yogananda is struck by her spiritual appearance. She says that she has neither eaten nor drunk anything since she was 12 years old. As a child, she had a huge appetite. She married when she was still a child, and her mother-in-law criticized her for eating too much. Stung by the criticism, she vowed never to eat again. She prayed for God to send her a guru to show her how to live without food. At the Ganges, she met a guru who initiated her into a technique that would allow her to accomplish her goal.

As Yogananda questions her more, Giri Bala says that she has never been sick. She meditates at night, sleeps little, and attends to her family duties, including cooking for the family, during the daytime. Evening comes, and Yogananda and his friends depart. At Yogananda’s request, Giri Bala gives him a strip of her sari as a souvenir.

In late 1936, Yogananda visits England again and then returns to America. He celebrates Christmas at the Self-Realization Fellowship’s Mount Washington Center. Yogananda presents many gifts to his friends and followers, including a silver drinking cup to a longtime devotee, Mr. Dickinson. Dickinson is amazed and says he has waited 43 years for the cup. In 1893, he met Swami Vivekananda at the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago. He believed that the swami had appeared to him as a boy when he was drowning. He wanted Swami Vivekananda to be his teacher, but the guru told him that his teacher would come later and would give him a silver cup. Dickinson attended one of Yogananda’s meeting in Los Angeles in 1925 and knew he had found his teacher.

While Yogananda was abroad, his disciples built a hermitage/ashram for him in Encinitas, California. They wanted it to be a surprise, and now he sees it for the first time. A large estate, it was financed by one of Yogananda’s followers, James J. Lynn, an American businessman. A few months later, Yogananda conducts an Easter service at sunrise on the lawn of the ashram.

Yogananda spends what he describes as happy years in California. In 1937, he founds a Self-Realization Fellowship Colony in Encinitas.

In 1942, a Church of All Religions was built by Self-Realization Fellowship workers in Hollywood, California. Two more temples, in San Diego and Long Beach, followed in 1943 and 1947, respectively. In 1949, a 10-acre site in Los Angeles was donated to the Fellowship. Yogananda believed that in founding these centers he was fulfilling a duty that Babaji and Sri Yukteswar had given him.

Yogananda spends time dictating his interpretation of parts of the New Testament. One night while he is praying, he receives a vision of Jesus and feels “the power that upholds the myriad worlds” (537). During 1950 and 1951, Yogananda spends time at a retreat in California’s Mojave Desert, where he translates the Bhagavad Gita. He once again extols the power of Kriya Yoga to lead a person to spiritual truth through an understanding of breath. He also teaches classes in Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras. He points out that humans may never understand every secret of creation about why life unfolds the way it does. The task for men and women is to seek wisdom and learn to understand their true nature.