Why did I love this book?
This is a breakthrough, must-read, buy-it-now yoga book that will set the broader context for your home yoga practice. If I stumble across a copy in a secondhand bookshop, I always buy it, because I’m constantly giving away the copy I own. That’s how good it is. Paramahansa Yogananda, a university graduate, was one of the first great yoga masters to come over from India to the West.
This book tells the tale of studying with his guru – and it is a fantastical and magical story of expanded notions of what reality is. There’s everything from dematerialising gurus to an old woman who doesn’t eat or drink but just lives on prana, to prophecies of illness and disorder that are fulfilled, and remembered previous incarnations. There is a practicality and roundedness in this book that makes one think that maybe these experiences truly did happen.
7 authors picked Autobiography of a Yogi as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
Autobiography of a Yogi is at once a beautifully written account of an exceptional life and a profound introduction to the ancient science of Yoga and its time-honored tradition of meditation. Profoundly inspiring, it is at the same time vastly entertaining, warmly humorous and filled with extraordinary personages.
Self-Realization Fellowship's editions, and none others, include extensive material added by the author after the first edition was published, including a final chapter on the closing years of his life.
Selected as "One of the 100 Best Spiritual Books of the Twentieth Century", Autobiography of a Yogi has been translated into more…