My husband, Vidura, and I came to Ananda Village in 1974. We had looked far and wide for a place to live amid like-minded people: a place with high ideals, yogic principles, schools for our two children. We were looking for a place where we could learn and grow.
Finally, at a Meeting of the Ways conference in San Francisco, we met Swami Kriyananda and people from the Ananda community near Nevada City. After we visited their Village with its eighty some members, we felt at home and moved a few months later.
There we became disciples of Paramhansa Yogananda ("Master"), author of Autobiography of a Yogi, and students of his direct disciple, Swami Kriyananda ("Swamiji"). Swami Kriyananda founded the Ananda community in 1969 on the spiritual principles of Yogananda and his vision of "world brotherhood colonies." In time, our discipleship and dedication to spiritual communities became the driving forces in our lives.
In 1986, when the idea of creating pilgrimage tours to India came up, Swamiji asked Vidura and me to help organize and lead them. (It is interesting how karma works: The couple he first chose were Shivani and Arjuna Lucki. But Swamiji had also had the idea of starting a work in Europe, which was just beginning. Shivani and Arjuna were asked instead to go to Italy to support the fledgling Ananda work there. As a result, we were asked then to go to India to lead the tours with Asha and David Praver as pilgrimage guides.)
During the twenty years the four of us led these pilgrimage tours, we became very good friends of Master's family, especially with Hare Krishna and Anjali Ghosh, who lived at 4 Garpar Road in Kolkata, the house where Master had lived during his formative years and where his extended family still lives to this day.
In addition, we met and became friends with Meera Ghosh and her son, Durlov, and his family, members of Master's family living in Serampore. Sri Yukteswar (Master's guru) had an ashram there, at which Master spent as much time as possible during the ten years before he moved to America. Meera was the saintly girl Yogananda had chosen as the wife for his nephew, Ramakrishna Ghosh, his brother Ananta's eldest son.
Being in the presence of these high souls was to be one of the highlights of our lives.
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