The surprising—and continuing—influence of Swami Vivekananda, the pied piper of the global yoga movement.

By the late 1960s, the most famous writer in America had become a recluse, having forsaken his dazzling career. Nevertheless, J.D. Salinger often came to Manhattan, staying at his parents’ sprawling apartment on Park Avenue and 91st Street. While he no longer visited with his editors at “The New Yorker,” he was keen to spend time with his spiritual teacher, Swami Nikhilananda, the founder of the Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center, located, then as now, in a townhouse just three blocks away, at 17 East 94th Street.

Though the iconic author of “The …

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Writer Megan Bishop-Scott has had this one idea percolating in her mind for some time now.

What she calls a “flash mob meditation” in Calgary where people get together for the spiritual practice.

The challenge, she says, is helping people understand what meditation is all about.

One of her main contracts is writing life histories for foster children.

“Because of that, I’ve actually been asked to go to group homes where some of these really hard foster kids are,” she says. “I’ve taught them how to meditate. And they get it in a second. Basically what I explain to them is that life …

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Jeff Eckhoff: A nonprofit Iowa-based educational foundation tied to the calming meditation teachings of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi has injected new stress into the life of a competitor.

Maharishi Foundation USA Inc. of Fairfield this week sued the Meditation House LLC, accusing it of infringing on the foundation’s trademark covering the teaching of “Transcendental Meditation.”

Paperwork filed Monday in U.S. District Court in Des Moines accuses the Meditation House of lying in its advertising about the benefits of “Vedic Meditation.” Claims about the studied health value of those techniques are “false on their face,” according to the lawsuit, and designed to confuse the public with …

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Tom Heneghan: Rasanath Das, an ex-investment banker turned Hindu monk, was spending recent Sunday afternoons leading Occupy Wall Street protesters in meditation until police cleared their camp at New York’s Zuccotti Park this week.

The 32-year-old monk isn’t sure now where his next session will be. He’ll keep following the protesters to lead meditation, though, convinced they will only roll back the inequality around them if they find equanimity deep inside.

“Anger won’t solve anything,” he told Reuters. “We have to work from the heart … there is so much distrust now.”

Das has been a discreet presence at the protests, leading short sessions …

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Every day, the Hare Krishnas chant a melodic meditation and serve food to students in UF’s Plaza of the Americas. A decent number of students usually line up — especially on Spaghetti Wednesdays — but no one seems to know much about the people who serve the vegetarian-friendly fare.

An hour and a half before the sun rises, the Hare Krishnas gather for meditation, called japa, in the temple of the Krishna House, just off campus on Northwest 14th Street.

They recite their mantra with the help of Japa Mala beads, a strand of beads — not unlike the rosary — that helps devotees keep track of their chanting. Each strand has …

Mataji Nirmala Devi, founder of Sahaja Yoga movement and sister of former union minister NKP Salve, passed away in Genoa, Italy, on Wednesday, her family sources here said. The spiritual leader was 88. Her body will be brought to Delhi on Sunday and funeral will be held there on Monday.

Nirmala Devi, who was born in Chhindwara in 1923, started Sahaja Yoga propagating it as a method of meditation and claiming it to be a breakthrough in evolution of human awareness. It was started in 1970 and attracted followers in thousands across the world. The movement now has centres in about 120 countries.

In her younger …

A month after I started meditating, I went home to visit my mother. This was back in the day—only a few years after the Beatles visited Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in India, and caused a storm of mostly satirical press commentary. Meditation was still considered an activity for eccentrics and hippies, and my secular humanist mother found my insistence on sitting every morning hilarious at best. In the mornings, while I was sitting in meditation, she would walk past my closed door every few minutes and call out, “Aren’t you done yet?”

I rolled with it on Saturday. But on Sunday, when she knocked on the door for the third time …

No one denies that Hinduism’s most sacred and ancient texts, including the Bhagvad Gita, describe different kinds of yogic practices. But what does this ancient and sacred tradition of yoga have to do with what people all around the world do in yoga classes in gyms and fitness centres today?

To most Indians, such questions are nothing less than sacrilegious. Yoga is for them what apple pie and motherhood are for Americans: a living symbol of their way of life.

Indians tend to affirm their claims on yoga by trotting out the familiar icons of the ‘5,000-year-old Vedic tradition,’ which supposedly stretches from the Pashupati seal of the (actually very unVedic) Indus Valley …

The organization, which follows Hindu and Christian teachings, selects Sri Mrinalini Mata, 79, to succeed longtime leader Sri Daya Mata, who died in 2010. Mrinalini Mata has been vice president of the group since 1966.

The Self-Realization Fellowship, a Los Angeles-based organization that follows a spiritual path rooted in both Hinduism and Christianity, has elected a new leader, the fourth since it was established in 1920.

The fellowship announced Tuesday that Sri Mrinalini Mata, who became a Self-Realization nun at the age of 15, was elected president last week by its eight-member board of directors. She succeeds Sri Daya Mata, the group’s longtime leader, who died in November.

The selection of Mrinalini …

There has always been a pervasive but undocumented feeling that Indian philosophy, as manifest in Vedanta on the intellectual plain and yoga on the physical plain, has very significantly influenced the West in general and America in particular. That feeling now finds a meticulously constructed scholastic endorsement in the form of an important new book.

Author Philip Goldberg’s ‘American Veda – From Emerson to the Beatles to Yoga and Meditation, How Indian Spirituality Changed the West’ (Harmony Books, 398 pages, $26) [available on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk] offers a comprehensive account of the inroads made by Indian philosophy since the early 19th century.

‘The combination of Vedanta and Yoga was …