Yogananda Fest 2025: What happened?

WHAT HAPPENED?

YoganandaFest.com featured activities

It rained in Los Angeles on Saturday morning, as it has 5 out of the 6 years this fest has existed. So most diehard yogis were undeterred. While it remained cold, cloudy, and drizzly with showers in some parts of the megalopolis that is LA County, which stretches for over 50 miles across as a basin, the sun came out over Torrance, the city (one of 88) hosting the festival.

Lovin schismatic disciple Kriyananda

Yogananda was a great Indian guru who is bigger than the organization that claims to be his exclusive promoter, the Self-Realization Fellowship (SRF). There is a better albeit smaller organization that promotes the real guru, baby and all.

(Could the great Hindu-Christian syncretic-saint have had a baby with one of his American female disciples?) The Ananda Church of Self-Realization (Donate | Yogananda Fest) is a kind of schism that arose among Paramhansa Yogananda's followers.

Autobiography of a Yogi: The
Original 1946 Edition plus

One original disciple, Kriyananda, was a purist. He decided to publish the founder's autobiography in its ORIGINAL (unredacted, unabridged) form. It's better that way to read it, but SRF doesn't like it.

The larger, less orthodox SRF organization made changes to the classic book and will not settle a lawsuit that says the rightful owner of the religious organization is Yogananda's unacknowledged son. There's DNA evidence to back up Ananda's claim, but SRF will not acknowledge, as to do so would mean the loss of their ability to legally claim ownership of the book, its proceeds, the properties spread across LA and elsewhere, and the legacy of the great master. What to do? What to do? More lawyers are needed to settle the issue. Or the son should become a guru, claim his lineage, and speak out publicly rather than behind the Ananda organization. Until then, there are TWO versions of the book. Which have most people read?

After about 9:00 am, with clear skies and lots of enthusiastic participants from the Holy City of Lost Angels, events went on as planned: meditation, Kriya Yoga, Hatha Yoga, inspiring featured speakers and more.

• Also participating: Glendale's Ashwin Clinic-College of Ayurveda Yoga & Vedic Sciences – Ashwin Ayurveda – Love in all we do – since 1901
• Kriya Meditation Ayurveda Yoga Vedic Sciences Clinic/College | Meetup
• 4:30 pm Soundbath and Prana Lifeforce Healing, Sat, May 3, 2025, 4:30 PM | Meetup
• Dharma Buddhist Meditation (Disclosure Project, Los Angeles) Events

Event details

I paved the way for PY in 1893.

Yogananda Fest (YoganandaFest.com – 2025 | Paramhansa Yogananda's Keys for Peace and Happiness) is an annual Kriya and Hatha Yoga, meditation, and spiritual-living festival. Join in an all-day program celebrating and sharing the teachings of the great American missionary and Indian yogi Paramhansa Yogananda.

Indian gurus in the USA?

Swami Paramananda, 1923

[After the arrival of Swami Vivekananda in the United States for the Chicago Parliament of the World's Religions in 1893, visiting Pasadena and declaring it the "Varanasi (Buddhist Kashi and Benares) of America," both set up ashrams here, Swami in South Pasadena and Yogananda in neighboring Mt. Washington, a prominent hill above the next town over, Highland Park, with a magnificent view of the Downtown Los Angeles skyline.

Paramahansa Yogananda, 1920

That mansion became Yogananda's Self Realization Fellowship's Mother Center (older than the magnificent Lake Shrine in Malibu, currently closed due to the Palisades Fire), after the organization's founding in 1920, along with a big temple in Hollywood on Sunset Blvd. (next to an old hospital purchased by Scientology and made into big cult offices), whereas Vivekananda's Victorian style house is a small and easily missed blip on Figueroa Street. Not far from there, a devotee of Sri Anandamayi Ma named Swami Paramananda founded the beautiful and rustic monastery in Glendale/La Crescenta called Ananda Ashram (Ananda Ashrama, spiritual center for Vedanta) in 1923.

Hinduism in America: Converge

So Yogananda is a sort of latecomer but by far the most successful of Indian gurus in America, outshining even the Beatles' cultish Indian guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the founder and promoter of Transcendental Meditation (TM), which was a fad from the 1960s though still some people swear by it, like a young Jeff Goldblum in his cameo in Annie Hall.

Why does any of this matter? Not only did Hinduism come to America, Buddhism came along as well (many centuries earlier, even before Columbus and Christianity, according to Rick Fields, Edward P. Vining, and other American historians), making an incredible splash that still reverberates and sends out rings of influence. Books have been written about it.]

• Buddhism in America: Global Religion, Local Contexts
• Hannah: The Untold Story of Buddhism
• Meditating at the Glendale Temple, Los Angeles
• Sri Aurobindo, founder of Integral Yoga
• Bikram Yoga's Choudhury, Dick Nixon's trainer
• Hare Krishna Movement (ISKCON)
• Sri Anandamayi Ma: The Divine Mother
• Top 10 Spiritual Gurus of India

West Coast used to have some parties that made LA the antithesis of NYC

• Yogananda Fest – 2025, YouTube.com; Siri, Ananda (Dharma Buddhist Meditation), Dhr. Seven (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly