Accidentally New Age*

Accidentally New Age is going back to school.

The plan for now is to become an occupational therapist, but ANA is open to being led down a different path — say, cosmology.

For the time being, though, ANA is taking all the prerequisites that she didn’t manage to fulfill while obtaining her liberal arts degree.

Learnings from the first week of classes:

• Before Newton and his Law of Inertia, there was the idea that an object remained in motion because air created a vacuum behind it and squeezed it along.
• If a teacher tells the class they will need to get into groups of three and will likely be called on to present what was learned in class, everyone will sit up and start taking notes.

Accidentally New Age just spent her lunch break listening to this delightful podcast about dark energy. It contains a lovely interview with the cosmologist who came up with the name “dark energy” as a way to explain that the concept it describes isn’t a “cosmological constant.”

It’s pretty much a 25-minute discussion about scientists’ discovery of (and lack of true comprehension about) the mystery of spanda. And so I loved it. And so should you.

Enjoy.

P.S. The interview features several mentions of the Large Hadron Collider. Which leads to the obvious question:  Has the Large Hadron Collider destroyed the world yet?

The new culture seemed to whirl backward and forward—a loop of history, history as loop—calling and responding, leaping, spinning, renewing.

In the loop, there is the alpha, the omega and the turning points in between. The seam disappears, slips into endless motion and reveals a new logic—the circumference of a worldview.

—Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation by Jeff Chang

Accidentally New Age is always on the lookout for ways that her everyday reading relates, metaphorically or otherwise, to her Yoga. Those of you who know ANA know she really can’t make it a day without talking about spanda—the divine vibration. Fascinated with this idea of perpetual creation and dissolution, ANA looks for it everywhere. Which makes for a pretty satisfying activity since, by definition, it really is everywhere.

It’s in her yoga practice: in the setting of intentions and the transitions within and between poses.

It’s in her work day: in a particularly creative application of editorial style to a sentence that needs a certain bit of polish.

It’s in the news: in the seemingly perpetual expansion of dark matter (shakti?) in the universe.

And it’s in hip hop…or at least in Jeff Chang’s telling of its history. The alpha, the omega, and the turning points in between. What’s not to love about that?

At a recent Anusara intensive, ANA heard John Friend talk about the goddesses Saraswati, Lakshmi, and Kali, and how they relate to creation and dissolution. Saraswati creates order; Lakshmi represents fullness, purna; and Kali is destruction. In an asana practice these three phases would be: setting up the foundation for a pose (Saraswati), finding the full expression of the beauty of that pose (Lakshmi), and then the necessary end of that pose (Kali) before transitioning into the next one.

The alpha, the omega, and the turning points.

Accidentally New Age is loving the poetry these days. This week she is especially enamored of this verse, from the Mahamudra:

The primordial purity of the mind

Is the nature of space.

There is nothing that anyone

Can receive or reject!

Namaste, kids.

Sianna was reciting poetry to us in class this weekend. Accidentally New Age fell in love with this poem, by Hafiz.

How did the rose

How did the rose

Ever open its heart

And give to this world

All its beauty?

It felt the encouragement of light

Against its being,

Otherwise, We all remain

Too frightened.

Accidentally New Age needed to look up some synonyms. So she went to her reference shelf to consult the thesaurus. She also took a step back to find some humor in the books on that shelf; a very accurate reflection of the information she looks up or verifies most often.

Chicago Manual of Style

Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate

Roget’s Thesaurus

Berkeley High School’s Slang Dictionary

What’s What: A Visual Glossary of the Physical World

Light on Yoga, B.K.S. Iyengar

ASPCA Complete Guide to Dogs

Sankalpa: Resolve, Will, Intention
Mudra: Seal, Sealing Posture, Impression

Accidentally New Age sets a sankalpa each morning; another one before each yoga practice. It gives her a neutral point to come back to if her day starts to overwhelm, or if she finds that she has stopped breathing in a pose. Checking back in with the intention after savasana (corpse posture) and before bed provides bookends, a way to measure and reaffirm.

Sankalpa mudra is a way to seal in your intention. From your seated meditation posture, raise your left hand, palm facing up. Clasp your right hand over your left, as if shaking hands with yourself, then rest the back of your left hand on the top of your right thigh.

The left arm crosses in front of the heart, an external manifestation of turning inward; listening to, and making an impression upon, the heart. The right hand pushes the left hand gently into the thigh, a grounding agent.

It is interesting that Accidentally New Age was nasal-pot obsessed on Thursday because on Friday she went to the Yoga Journal San Francisco Conference to take an all-day asana workshop with Ana Forrest. Conference attendees received a gray tote bag filled with goodies including weird supplements, weird energy bars, weird fruit juice, and an issue of Vegetarian Times magazine. But wait, what’s this big box? Oh, is it a NeilMed neti pot and some packets of Sinus Rinse saline solution? Why yes it is.

At the conference marketplace there were tons of vendors selling tons of things. ANA made her way to the NeilMed booth to see what sorts of things they might have to offer a connoisseur of the neti.

Turns out that all the cool kids are using a new type of nasal irrigation technique called a Squeeze Bottle System. It is basically exactly what it sounds like: a plastic squeeze bottle with a little tip that you fit up your nostril. Apparently this provides “positive pressure” as opposed to the “gravity flow” offered by the old-fashioned neti pots.

ANA decided not to buy one of these squeeze bottles because they aren’t as pretty as her neti pot. But last night, when finally going through and deciding what to keep/toss from her goodie bag, she opened up the neti pot box so she could take out the packets of saline solution, and what was in the box? A coupon for a FREE squeeze bottle.

Expect a full report of the pros and cons of each design soon.

Accidentally New Age has been learning some basic Sanskrit, which has gotten her curious about Latin. In her father’s bookshelf, ANA found the 1949 edition of Word Power Made Easy (Over One Million Sold!), and has been methodically going through it to, well, increase her word power.

This is ANA’s favorite passage thus far:

Gyne, woman, is found in gynecologist, the doctor who treats those ailments peculiar to women, such as pregnancy, tumor of the uterus, tipped womb, menstrual disorders, and other feminine mysteries.