Hello and welcome to Wisewalkers. I'm your host Ronald Fell Jones. This episode is the

fifth in what I'm calling my legacy editions, which I'm producing to launch the podcast.

All five of these episodes feature recordings of live radio interviews I conducted decades ago,

most of them around 1980 on KVMR radio in Nevada City, California.

You can find the other four legacy editions and much more information about the podcast on

the Wisetalkers website, website wise talkers dot com.

This fifth episode features an interview I conducted in 1981 with Swami Kriyananda whose birth name

is James Donald Walters. Walters became a direct disciple of Brahmanza Yoga Nanda in 1948 at the age of 22.

20 years later in 1968, he founded Ananda Village, an intentional spiritual community north of Nevada City that has since grown to have a global presence.

I give a brief biographical background on Creananda in the introduction to the upcoming 1981 interview and I will provide

some additional relevant information about him here. But first a few words about the revered

Yogi that Donald Walters became a disciple of Paramahansa Yogananda.

Yogananda was born in India in 1893 and came to the United States at the age of 27

where he lived the final 32 years of his life.

Yogananda founded the Self-realization Fellowship in 1920, headquartered in Los Angeles.

SRF, as it is often called, is still very active today as the primary disseminator of

Yogananda's work and teachings in the West.

Yogananda is widely regarded as the Father of Yoga in the West for as many years of dedicated

efforts to introduce and popularize yoga and Indian spirituality in the Western world.

Quite a legacy given the enormous popularity of yoga in its many forms today.

Some listeners may know of yoga nanda through his famous book, Autobiography of a Yogi.

I read it myself sometime around the age of 30, and I absolutely loved it, as have countless others.

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