Swami Satchidananda
Swami Satchidananda was born as Ramaswamy in 1914 in India. After losing his wife, he immersed himself in spiritual practices with Sri Ramana Maharishi, among other luminaries. In Rishikesh, he met his guru, Sri Swami Sivananda, who later sent him to serve in Sri Lanka, where filmmaker Conrad Rooks met him and invited him to the West. Pop artist Peter Max hosted Swami Satchidananda in New York in 1966, and helped convince him to stay in the United States. In 1969, after founding the first Integral Yoga center in New York, and as Integral Yoga centers were being established globally, Swami Satchidinanda opened the Woodstock music festival with a talk followed by meditative chanting. In 1979, he founded Integral Yoga’s headquarters at Satchidananda Ashram–Yogaville in Virginia; he built the Light Of Truth Universal Shrine (LOTUS) to world peace there in 1986. As a humanitarian and pioneer of interfaith dialogue, Swami Satchidananda received many honors and awards, including the Juliet Hollister Award, the U Thant Peace Award and, posthumously, the James Parks Morton Interfaith Award. He died in 2002.
