Author: Swami Satchidananda Saraswati

Satchidananda opened the Woodstock festival in 1969 with a talk on sound and vibration, which put a Hindu monk in front of half a million Americans and made him briefly famous. He taught Integral Yoga, combining hatha practice with a doctrine that all faiths arrive at the same place, and built the Yogaville community in Virginia around it. His commentary on the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali is still widely used. In 1991 former students publicly accused him of abusing his position with women in the community, protesting outside a conference he was addressing; he denied it and no case was brought. He died in 2002.