Self-Realization Fellowship Encinitas Temple in Encinitas's Old Encinitas district carries the Kriya Yoga lineage that Paramahansa Yogananda established when he founded the international organization in 1920. The temple's weekly meditation instruction, kirtan devotional chanting, and scriptural study position the Second Street campus alongside Soul of Yoga as one of Encinitas's core contemplative institutions on the coastal corridor. Yogananda established the Encinitas Ashram Center in 1937 after receiving the clifftop hermitage at Swami's Point, and he composed much of his landmark Autobiography of a Yogi on the property overlooking the Pacific. A Books & Gifts shop on South Coast Highway 101 stocks the full SRF publishing catalog, adding a spiritual-literature resource to the corridor also served by Encinitas Library. The original 1938 Golden Lotus Temple was designed with floor-to-ceiling ocean-view windows but had to be removed in 1942 due to coastal bluff erosion; services relocated to the current campus in 1977 and expanded into the auxiliary J Street Chapel in 2012. The property complex encompasses the main sanctuary, a dedicated meditation hall, the preserved 1937 hermitage shrine, and the clifftop Encinitas Meditation Gardens spanning ocean-facing terraces with koi ponds, succulent plantings, and 180-degree Pacific panoramas above Swami's surf break.