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First 3HO Summer Solstice Sadhana

Yogi Bhajan Teaching at the 1969 3HO Summer Solstice at Aspen Meadows, New Mexico

The first 3HO Summer Solstice was held at Aspen Meadows, Tesuque Indian reservation in New Mexico, where Yogi Bhajan, as the minister, married several couples. 

Yogi Bhajan at the 1969 Summer Solstice in Aspen Meadows New Mexico

Here Guru Singh describes those times:

It is the brightest fire of the year, June 21; the longest day; the shortest night; a time spiritual communities have celebrated for thousands of years. This is the Summer Solstice, and in June of 1969 3HO began its now decades old tradition of gathering from all over the world for celebrating with Kundalini Yoga, meditation, and White Tantric Yoga at the annual 3HO Summer Solstice Sadhana.

The full story of our tradition actually begins the summer before. It was June of 1968, I had just returned to Espanola, New Mexico, from a year of studying healing music in Michoacan, Mexico. A flyer hanging in the local Safeway store read: “A Gathering of the Tribes, June 21, 1968, in Aspen Meadows near Santa Fe, sponsored by the Juke Savages, the Hog Farm, Ken Kesey, and The Merry Pranksters, featuring the Grateful Dead.” These were all friends of mine from San Francisco, so I made the trip up those mountains.

Ken Kesey, center, with The Merry Pranksters in 1969

Over a thousand people gathered. It was so wonderful that we decided to meet again at Winter Solstice Sadhana in Los Angeles, where an extraordinary event added to the significance of being in L. A. Another poster caught our attention in early January 1969, this time in a health food store. The poster read: “Yogi Bhajan teaching at the East West Cultural Center.”

Yogi Bhajan at the East West Cultural Center in Los Angeles

….When May returned, our lingering memories of the previous Summer Solstice Sadhana returned so strongly, we invited Yogiji and everyone else to come to the mountains in New Mexico, the Land of Enchantment. A ragtag caravan of cars, trucks, and buses left from Los Angeles to cross the southwestern deserts to the Aspen Meadows above Santa Fe. At this time in our community’s evolution, we were few, but this would soon change as our enthusiastic innocence attracted several hundred more young people living around New Mexico to our gathering. Yogi Bhajan fell in love with the children, the land, and the “enchanted” State and from this first Summer Solstice Sadhana gathering, he established a center in Santa Fe. As word spread that such a teacher and technology was in town, students arrived in large numbers.

Yogi Bhajan at early Summer Solstice

In addition to Kundalini Yoga classes, one of most outstanding events at our first 3HO Solstice Sadhana was the now famous school bus race. As Yogiji stood at the starter’s position — a homemade checkered flag rose above his salmon-colored turban and he waved it wildly to indicate the start of the race. Enveloped in the largest cloud of New Mexico dust anyone could imagine, he emerged coughing, sputtering, and laughing from the middle of spurting diesel buses speeding down the meadow of our makeshift racecourse. Later that evening, in the teepee Yogiji was staying in, the inspired conversation twisted and turned through tall tales and cosmic commentary, ending in the initial planning for Woodstock, the colossal music festival to take place later that summer. Two months later, the reality was half a million people doing Kundalini Yoga and listening to the world’s best rock bands on a farm in Woodstock, New York. Many of 3HO’s early members came from this gathering.

Read the full article of Guru Singh’s firsthand account of the early days of 3HO.