About Swami Vishnudevananda
Swami Vishnudevananda was born in Kerala, on Southern India’s Malabar coast, in 1927. He would go on to become one of the 20th century’s best-known and most widely beloved teachers of yoga as both a spiritual discipline and a means of attaining optimum physical well-being. As a student of the revered mid-20th century sage Swami Sivananda, Swami Vishnudevananda absorbed the large body of traditional yogic teachings based on the ancient Vedas, and in the late 1950s, began to convey this wisdom to Western students.
To generations of these students, he is perhaps best known for authoring The Complete Illustrated Book of Yoga (1959), a thorough overview of hatha and raja yoga techniques designed for practitioners at all levels of accomplishment. He is also renowned as the founder of Sivananda Yoga Vedanta Centres, a now-global network of retreats, ashrams, and learning centers, as well as for the associated series of yoga teacher training classes he began in 1969.
Vishnudevananda died in 1993. Shortly after his death, a biography titled The Yogi: Portraits of Swami Vishnudevananda was published. His students have continued his work by maintaining and expanding the network of Sivananda Yoga Vedanta Centres in major locations all over the world, including Montreal, New York, San Francisco, the Bahamas, the United Kingdom, and India. They have also assembled compilations of his writings and published them in various books, such as Teachings on Yoga Life (2015).
To generations of these students, he is perhaps best known for authoring The Complete Illustrated Book of Yoga (1959), a thorough overview of hatha and raja yoga techniques designed for practitioners at all levels of accomplishment. He is also renowned as the founder of Sivananda Yoga Vedanta Centres, a now-global network of retreats, ashrams, and learning centers, as well as for the associated series of yoga teacher training classes he began in 1969.
Vishnudevananda died in 1993. Shortly after his death, a biography titled The Yogi: Portraits of Swami Vishnudevananda was published. His students have continued his work by maintaining and expanding the network of Sivananda Yoga Vedanta Centres in major locations all over the world, including Montreal, New York, San Francisco, the Bahamas, the United Kingdom, and India. They have also assembled compilations of his writings and published them in various books, such as Teachings on Yoga Life (2015).