Swami Satyananda Saraswati

Satyananda Saraswati was born in 1923 at Almora, Uttaranchal,^[2] into a family of farmers and kshatriyas, the warrior caste.^{[S 1]}It is claimed that he was classically educated and studied Sanskrit, the Vedas and the Upanishads. He stated 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. This experience of disembodied awareness continued, leading him to saints of that time such as Anandamayi Ma. He claimed to have met a tantric bhairavi, Sukhman Giri, who gave him shaktipat and directed him to find a guru to stabilise his spiritual experiences.^{[S 1]} In another version of his life in Yoga from Shore to Shore, he stated that 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.”^{[S 2]}