Satyananda Saraswati (25 December 1923 – 5 December 2009), was a Sanyasi, yoga teacher and guru in both his native India and the West. He was a student of Sivananda Saraswati, the founder of the Divine Life Society, and founded the Bihar School of Yoga in 1964. He wrote over 80 books, including the popular 1969 manual Asana Pranayama Mudra Bandha. Biography Early life Satyananda Saraswati was born in 1923 at Almora, Uttaranchal, into a family of farmers and kshatriyas, the warrior caste. 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. 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." At age eighteen, he left his home to seek a spiritual master. In 1943, at the age of twenty, he met his guru Sivananda Saraswati and went to live at Sivananda's ashram in Rishikesh. Sivananda initiated him into the Dashnam Order of Sannyasa on 12 September 1947 on the banks of the Ganges, and gave him the name of Swami Satyananda Saraswati. He stayed with Sivananda for a further nine years but received little further formal instruction from him. Bihar School of Yoga In 1956, Sivananda sent Satyananda away to spread his teachings. Basing himself in Munger, Bihar, Satyananda wandered as a mendicant through India, extending his knowledge of spiritual practices and spending some time in seclusion. In 1962, Satyananda established the International Yoga Fellowship Movement in Rajnandgaon. This inspired the establishment of ashrams and yoga centres spiritually guided by Swami Satyananda in India and around the world. In 1964, he founded the Bihar School of Yoga at Munger, with the intention that it would act as a centre of training for future teachers of yoga as well as offer courses on