In today’s episode of Healing from Within, your host Sheryl Glick, author of The Living Spirit: Answers for Healing and Infinite Love welcomes David Eby (http://www.expandinglight.org/)the musical director of Ananda village the subject of the film “Finding Happiness” (http://findinghappinessmovie.com/)and is located in the Sierra Nevada foothills of Northern California. This village is one of the world’s first and foremost conscious communities, others are located in Italy and India. This film, “Finding Happiness” shows us the path towards developing our physical and spiritual gifts. “Finding Happiness” shows an alternative life community with people who seek the resources, connections and a suitable place where they and their families can develop their highest level of human potential. The goal of Ananda is to seek the means to help people live in harmony and balance.
The storyline for this film which is part fictional and part documentary offers a real inside look at a spiritual community. Skeptical reporter Juliet (actress Elizabeth Rohm of American Hustle and Miss Congeniality) sets out to explore Ananda, sent by her editor at Profiles Magazine to investigate people having a real life experience in genuine unscripted interviews. During the course of the film, we find out about the founder of Ananda village, Swami Kriyananda, who is one of the foremost spiritual teachers of yoga principles in the world today. In 1948 at age 22, J. Donald Walters became a disciple of the Indian master of yoga Paramhansa Yogananda. For the next 63 years he was the most widely known of Yogananda’s disciples throughout the world. Kriyananda authored many books, composed many songs, and was a skillful poet, playwright, lecturer, photographer, linguist, television and radio broadcaster. In 1968 he published his most famous book, making him known as the “father of the spiritual community movement,” Cooperative Communities: How to Start Them and Why. That same year, he founded the first community, Ananda Village, which would be followed by seven others, including communities in the U.S., Italy, and India.
Kriyananda studied with Paramhansa Yogananda, author of the best-selling spiritual classic Autobiography of a Yogi, India’s “spiritual ambassador to the West” who was the first great master of yoga to live and teach in the United States for most of his life and was even invited to the White House by President Calvin Coolidge. In 1925 he established an international headquarters atop Mt. Washington in Los Angeles, called Self- Realization Fellowship. It was there that he would inspire the young monk Donald Walters, known as Swami Kriyananda, to found the first “world brotherhood colony” at Ananda Village in 1968. Yogananda continued to lecture and write until his passing in 1952.
Some of the major teachings of these eastern gurus include the notion that the true basis of religion is not belief, but intuitive experience. Intuition is the soul’s power of knowing God. To know what religion is really all about, one must know God. The last contribution brought by Yogananda to the West is the non-sectarian, universal spiritual path of Self-Realization. Yogananda gave this definition to the term Self-Realization: “Self-Realization is the knowing in all parts of body, mind, and soul that you are now in possession of the kingdom of God; that you do not have to pray that it come to you; that God’s omnipresence is your omnipresence; and that all that you need to do is improve your knowing.”As the means of attaining this exalted spiritual state, Yogananda initiated his followers into the ancient technique of Kriya Yoga, which he called the “jet-airplane route to God.” The path of Kriya Yoga, which combines the practice of advanced yogic techniques with spirituality in daily life, can be learned through the Ananda Kriya Sangha.
The title of the film is Finding Happiness and in searching for what constitutes happiness,
