In yoga circles today, the term Yoga Master can mean many things. Maybe it’s a hatha yoga postures instructor or someone who has been teaching for a long time. At Yoga World when we say Ramakrishna Ananda is a Yoga Master, we mean someone recognized by spiritual leaders as having experienced higher consciousness and who is living in that state of awareness.
Ramakrishna Ananda (Graham Ledgerwood) began practicing meditation, yoga and mysticism as a youth in Canada in 1958. The following decade he studied and practiced numerous spiritual paths — The Eight Main Yogas, Sufism, Jewish, Christian and Egyptian Mysticism, Zen, Theosophy, The Tao and other related disciplines.
In 1966 Ramakrishna Ananda also experienced a spiritual awakening, an expansion of consciousness, which changed his life. This breakthrough, called cosmic consciousness or samadhi, was a transformational event. It stayed with him for three ecstatic months and then slowly receded. Hopeful of a spiritual reawakening, he intensified his study of yoga.
Then, in May 1969 he entered a five-month period of solitude and silence in the Sierra Nevada foothills in Northern California. There, during that summer, spiritual awareness returned and filled him. As a consequence of this development, Ramakrishna Ananda became a teacher, minister, and director of the Yoga Fellowship ashram in Sacramento, California.
A year later Ramakrishna Ananda was called to serve in Southern California. He founded the Yoga Center of California and Spiritual World Society in Costa Mesa where he taught yoga, mysticism, metaphysics, meditation and world religions from 1970 through 1995.
In 1995 Ramakrishna Ananda transitioned from fulltime teaching and preaching at the Yoga Center to focus on meditating, writing, conducting retreats and spending quiet time with the Lord. Recently, he has shifted his focus to a broader worldwide outreach with these videos and teachings on Yoga World.
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