Swami Satyananda Saraswati

Swami Satyananda Saraswati (1923-2009) was an Indian yoga master, disciple of Swami Sivananda, who founded the Bihar School of Yoga and became one of the 20th century’s most systematic transmitters of tantric and pranic yoga to a global audience.

He is especially renowned for codifying and popularizing Yoga Nidra (“yogic sleep”)—a guided practice of deep relaxation and rotating awareness through the body that brings the practitioner to the threshold of sleep while remaining conscious, often paired with a sankalpa (resolve/intention) planted in this receptive state.

He also produced authoritative texts on pranayama, the chakras, kundalini, and the subtle energetic anatomy of tantra. For the mind-power lineage, Satyananda is doubly significant. His systematic teaching of prana, the chakras, and kundalini transmits the Indian subtle-energy system—an ancestor, alongside Daoist qi, of modern “energy/vibration” spirituality.

More pointedly, his Yoga Nidra is a direct bridge to mind-power technique: the practice of entering a deeply relaxed, hypnagogic, suggestible state and planting a sankalpa (intention) closely parallels the affirmation, visualization, and “impress the subconscious in a relaxed state” methods central to manifestation teaching.

Yoga Nidra’s hypnagogic threshold also overlaps with the states used in lucid-dream and reality-shifting practice, making Satyananda a key link between classical yogic energy-and-consciousness work and contemporary mind-power method.