"He practised medicine for 10 years. When he was 35, his wife and one child died. At that point he dropped everything and set off, sleeping in the road, begging from door to door, from Singapore to Himalaya. He suffered of rheumatism and malaria for two years, but he cured himself through yoga techniques. Now he is happy because there is no pain, no separation, no death for him, because dualism is not real anymore and because the only reality is Brahman-Atman, the soul, which is the same in the human being and in the Universe.” (Mircea Eliade)

He was always the first.

On Thursday, the 8th of September, during the first hours of the morning, when the Bharani star was at the ascendant, a boy was born, in the Pattamadani village, on the bank of the Tamraparani river, in the South of India. Sri Vendu Iyer, financial administrator and a great Shiva Bhakta (worshipper of Shiva) and Srimati Parvati Ammal, a very religious woman were the happy parents of this child (the third and the last ) who was named Kuppuswamy.

The boy, intelligent and naughty, proved from his first years that his path was called tyaga (giving up). He loved people and he manifested compassion towards the poors. He often took cakes and candies from the house and gave them to his friends, but also to his dogs, cats, sparrows, without touching them at all. Also, he used to bring flowers for Shiva’s adoration ritual, Shiva Puja, performed by his father.

“A living light, shining powerfully in the middle of darkness, such was Yogananda in this world. Such a great soul hardly appears on Earth, when people really need it only.”
Yogananda’s childhood

On the 5th of January 1893, in the North-east of India, close to the Himalaya Mountains, at Gorakhpur, Mukunda Lal Ghosh was born, the one who will be known as Paramahansa Yogananda. Yoganagda remembers his father Bhagabati Charan Ghosh, as a good man, serious and sometimes severe, a valuable mathematician and logician who let himself be guided especially by the intellect. His mother, Gyana Prahba Ghosh, is described as a queen of hearts who raised her children in an atmosphere filled with love.

In his book that went round the world “Autobiography of a yogi”, Yogananda tells the miraculous moments that sprinkled his childhood, marked by images from another life in which he was a solitary yogi on the snowed up peaks of Himalaya mountains. One of the first miracles is his healing with a picture of Lahiri Mahasaya.

Approaching the teachings and life of the great yogi Shankara is every time, for every human being, a calling to meditation and at the same time a revelation of the depths of his soul. The entire life of Shankara was a continuous self-sacrifice towards God.

At the age of 10, he was a great scholar

Often considered the greatest philosopher of all times and a perfect yogi, Shankara, also called Shankaracharya, was born in Kaladi, in Kerala, the West coast of India, around 686. Historically talking, we know few things about him, but numerous fascinating legends reveal nevertheless some things from his austere life.