Accidentally New Age*

The illustrious KK found her way to my blog yesterday and emailed me some awesomeness, which I have excerpted for your reading pleasure:

i actually mistakenly made an error in description though; the pose on my card is valakhilyasana, or pose of the valakhilyas (or balakhilyas) who were tiny forest-dwelling hermits the size of a thumb and resplendent and bright as the blazing sun; tiny blazing heavenly spirits! now, i have no doubt that they ate moonbeams and dew…

but the more noted partaker of moonbeams is the legendary partridge-type bird called the chakora, who feasts on moonbeams, and is the inspiration for the pose chakorasana (one leg behind head, other leg out straight up, balance on hands).

may i do that pose for your phone camera so that you can have a record of it?

sometimes too much pixie dust in my coffee in the early morning makes my mind merge the mythological creatures into one fabulous pose of sri!

Clearly this camera image is to follow. Next week.

Accidentally New Age goes to 7 a.m. yoga classes on Mondays through Thursdays. After the initial period of moping and exhaustion, she has grown to basically love it. But she’s also noticed that even though she feels wide awake, she doesn’t always trust herself to be completely…with it.

Every morning after she’s gotten warmed up she takes off her long-sleeve shirt. And every morning as she’s taking off this shirt, she fears that she’s forgotten to put her tank top on underneath.

So far it’s been on 100% of the time.

KK was really on a roll when teaching class this morning. She must have sprinkled some extra pixie dust in her coffee. Here are some of my favorite gems:

While we transitioned from Chaturanga back to Downward Dog:

Don’t let your big and heavy heads droop way down below your shoulders.

While we held a pose for a little bit:

Connect back to your divine throbbing. You have to have a little bit of a throb because you made it here this morning.

When transitioning out of Urdhva Dhanurasana:

Be sure to come out of the pose with integrity. If you pop your shoulder out as you come down, then you diminish your shri and your pose is not as pretty.

After we attempted KK’s favorite pose:

That pose is the little critters that live in the forest and eat the moonbeams and drink the dew. Obviously. That’s why I like it.

Accidentally New Age finally managed to attend to her first-ever Kundalini Yoga class. She’s been toying with the idea of going ever since someone told her that the goal of Kundalini is to “awaken the coiled serpent of energy sleeping at the base of her spine and help it to travel up and down her chakras.” That…is clearly awesome.

But then she saw some weird compilation video of a Kundalini class and it kinda, well, made her laugh out loud.

But ultimately, her curiosity won out and she took herself to a local class to see what all this Kundalini fuss is about.

ANA really would love to sit each and every one of you down and provide you with a blow-by-blow of the class, because it really was that special. She’d love to reenact for you the pose that involved running in place while kicking her knees way up and punching the air. She really wishes you could have seen the…beautiful…blanket the guy sitting in front of her was practicing on. She wishes you were there to find it as hilariously amazing as she did. And she also wishes that you could experience just exactly how great she felt for the next two days.

Watching the eclipse got Accidentally New Age thinking about the concept of spanda — a Sanskrit word describing the divine cosmic pulsation, the constant contraction and expansion. It’s the idea that everything is in this perpetual state of vibration. ANA hears about this a lot in Anusara classes, and she kinda (but mostly doesn’t) understands it.

But sitting on her bed, staring out the window at the eclipse, ANA started to understand spanda a little bit more. As the moon began to peek out from behind the earth’s shadow ANA watched as a little sliver of bright white would reveal itself, but then immediately be obscured. And it was through this process of revelation and concealment that the moon was gradually uncloaked.

It reminded ANA of the constant movement in a yoga pose, even as the outer body is still.

Accidentally New Age has been busy!

• She’s been attending weekend-long spiritual workshops.
• She’s been buying items she swore she’d never buy.
• She’s been picking out the perfect teapot within which to brew her favorite Pu-erh.
• She’s been signing up for lots more yoga-type workshops.
• She’s been working some ridiculous hours at her day job.
• She’s been dreaming about poop and about water and friends falling off the edge of the earth.
• She’s been eating raw food and lots of juice and vegan delicacies.
• She’s been getting ready for her Reiki Attunement.
• She’s been seeing deliciously bad dance movies.
• She has been finding an Ayurvedic clinician.
• She’s been waking up early every morning to meditate.

She has been missing all of you.

Accidentally New Age gets pretty excited when she receives emails from people that begin “Happy Mercury Retrograde!” or with subject lines like “the black dakini and music” and the like.

She also gets pretty excited when her friends forward her the emails they receive that make them wish they had a blog such as this to post their newage findings to.

The best one of late was forwarded from Karen. It opened with an awesome flickering candle. ANA thinks you’ll all agree with Karen that the only thing better than the candle itself:

…is the name of the file:

awsomecandle.gif

xoxo.

Accidentally New Age just discovered she can look up every class she’s ever taken at Yoga Tree. And so she counted up all of the classes she took at those studios in 2007.

114.

Some friends are making lists. Here’s Accidentally New Age’s latest.

Types of Bodywork (or Energy Work) ANA has received.

In descending order of frequency.

• Deep Tissue Massage
• Polarity Therapy
• Acupuncture
• Reiki
• Cranial Sacral
• Chiropractic
• Shiatsu
• Rosen Method
• Swedish Massage
• Somatic Psychotherapy
• Aromatherapy Massage
• Thai Yoga Massage
• Rolfing
• Lomi-Lomi
• Hot Stone Massage

We practiced our Urdva Dhanurasana in class this morning.

KK suggested that once we were in the pose, with our arms and legs straight, that we walk one heel in toward our head and grab it with a hand.

“Really curl up and make yourself round,” she said. “I want to see a roomful of cinnamon rolls.”