Yogananda Fest in Palo Alto was a great success, with an estimated 650 attendees over the course of the day. Dozens of volunteers completely transformed a local community center, setting up stages, pavilions and vendor booths, creating multiple gorgeous altars, and setting up a pictorial timeline of Master’s life along the length of the main hall. (All the more impressive given that we couldn’t start doing this until 8am that day!)
In addition to the main hall for the keynote talks, we had two smaller classrooms, a healing arts room with many busy practitioners, an outdoor yoga pavilion, and a music stage. We had a constant flow of meditation and yoga classes, spiritual talks, children’s activities, book signings, chanting, and a seemingly never-ending array of complimentary snacks with fresh squeezed lemonade from home-grown lemons!
In the evening we ended with an interfaith panel and a final arati, or offering of light, done by the entire audience. Many attendees expressed amazement and appreciation for all the joy that both went into and came out of the whole event. Several new people who had never encountered Ananda before showed up at Sunday service the next day while many more expressed interest and gave us their email addresses to stay in touch. The entire Ananda Palo Alto community was floating on the energy generated by serving at this event for days afterwards!
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