Ananda Xenia Shakti & Love Power The Band creates “Music for Body and Soul,Vibrational Healing and Celebrating the Festival of Life.”
After a successful career in the punk scene as the lead singer in an all girl band, touring with the Clash numerous times, and singing background vocals with Blondie, both in the studio and during live performances, Ananda discovered the teachings of yoga and never looked back. She took her high-spirited energy and love and directed it towards creating transformational music.
A Love Power The Band concert is a unique happening. When performed live, their songs become pieces of interactive music, where the hive that gathers for the show is given a part in the song and holds that down, dissolving the barrier between performer and audience, and handing the show over to the music and oneness. Interactive Music symbolically holds Ananda’s vision of love, life and oneness. She believes we are born of the “Song of the Divine.”
Ananda took time from her schedule to answer some questions…enjoy!
- Hi Ananda! Thank you for taking the time to answer some questions about your illustrious career. You began as a punk rocker, as a founding member of the B-Girls. Tell us what that whole time was like! It must have been very exciting and scary at the same time. How did you deal with all of that?
Hi thanks for your question.
It was full on exciting and inspiring and of course once in a while full on nerve racking when we were getting on the big stages with the The Clash. And sometimes in the smaller places like CBGB’s when you knew famous people were in the audience …like when David Bowie came to see us !
The thing about the big shows is that because of the lights you really can’t see the audience very well, if at all…. But in the small clubs you can sometimes see them too well, every expression on their face !!! We were shifting from Clubs to thousands of people, but in the end the fun outweighed the fear.
We had youth on our side so in many ways we didn’t have anything to compare it to. It was our stepping out into the world. I didn’t have another job I didn’t have aspirations for another career, this was it and it was all happening in a way that was so organic and natural.
We worked really really hard on honing our skills and finding ways that satisfied us in expressing what it was that I wanted to express. We practice some days for 10 hours a day. We formed a band without knowing how to play our instruments. So it was a quick catch needed ! LOL but the practice was always so inspiring and so delightful. It had the magic of creating a dream for all of us individually and together. Yet none of us really believed that that dream could manifest and here it was, happening.
We were young and fun loving, and we were dear dear friends and so it was like hanging out with your best girlfriends and getting to do the thing that you wanted to the most in the world.
It was definitely an exploration. We discovered worlds and people that were brand new ideas to us !!!, but we had the most amazing capacity for humour and we would laugh so hard and so long and we were always up for doing really silly things, which kept it light, when it seemed a bit odd to us.
Our pranks were not at all ‘cool’ in the context of being NYC Lower East Side Artists, they were silly, like teenage girl play… which we were !! but it was refreshing and it was natural to us, so it delighted people, mostly ourselves !
It was very much like a dream come true, all of our dream for that time of life , and because so much of it landed on our laps, it ended up being far beyond what we ever thought would happen. Cynthia was our band leader she worked hard on connecting us with people and places, and the rest truly was karma.
We didn’t even a sense of competition with anybody else who might be doing better with their career. We thought we were so lucky to be where we were and we never gave that gratitude up. That was really what kept us going through any challenge. We had a kind of innocent belief that life was meant to be fun and that magic could happen and it did.
As far as navigating some of the destructive aspects of the punk scene, we had independent ways of doing that. Each of us explored things in different ways and had different outcomes. I ended up finding a sense of deeper meaning by seeing things happen in people that I knew I didn’t want.
When we were living in NYC I started the practises of yoga. By having been able to go so deeply into what was my dream ( the punk scene) at that time it allowed me to in someways exhaust it, and when I found something that struck me in a more meaningful way I was able to leave the old dream scene without a huge struggle. It definitely took some courage, but because I knew that what I was looking for now, it really was never an option to not make the choice to move on.
I personally did not get involved in the drug scene that was so relevant at the time, I was not even drinking. I would jog in the morning from around 14th st to the UN and then back down again. I was in a different trajectory at that time and the juxtaposition between myself and the punk world was the thing that really catapulted me forward into the next and more deeply meaningful part of my life
- Any stand-out moments from your touring days back then?
Yes when we toured with The Clash for the London calling album it was pure magic. The show they performed and the music was amazing. Every night you felt like you were watching history take place. It was mesmerizing and it was a moment in time that is so special to have been part of. We had a great relationship with The Clash. They were so supportive of us. They let us use their equipment on tour because we didn’t have any amps LOL and we couldn’t afford transportation so they took us on their tour bus ! The tour was wonderful, the whole thing was really exciting.
- What was it like recording with Blondie? Can you tell us which tracks you performed on?
We sang background vocals on their album Auto America and it was a blast. We happen to be in LA for a gig at the Whiskey A Go Go and Blondie were there recording. Debbie came to our gig and did our sound, because she was getting ready to produce us and wanted some experience mixing our sound. She invited us to come into the studio with them, we were super excited and a little nervous but they welcomed us so sweetly and it all flowed.
- What eventually led you to leave the B-Girls?
I had an Awakening and found new meaning, direction, and desires to live life in a different way. By that point after 5 yrs in NYC there were some issues with drugs and alcohol in the band. We were being drawn into different karmic live stories and explorations. Then I met my first spiritual mentor and he was living back in Canada. What I was experiencing and developing spiritually and healing emotionally became the most important thing in my life, so I made a hard decision. It was hard because we were really just about to be signed and step forward in our career, but I couldn’t genie that life is calling me in another way and I felt radiant and alive and full of love, so I made the difficult phone call from Canada where I was visiting to the rest of girls NYC about my news.
- Tell us about your yoga practice, and your spiritual gifts please.
I call myself and inter-dimensional healing artist . I’m always felt that the arts are here to heal and to inspire consciousness to rise. This was true even in the punk world . We were trying to break through something, but the problem for people was that they didn’t have enough inner resolution, so they started to break themselves apart, rather than to truly be able to address the issues.
My higher intuition opened spontaneously and I started to receive messages from lofty realms, full of love and wisdom, to assist people in healing and moving forward in their lives in a way that is whole and connected.
Then I started to be given understandings about the nature of the spiritual psychology of the human being, and the fact that we have what’s called a core soul story, that is like a script and it compels us to act out a sense of limitation over and over again, create illness, misfortune, lack of joy etc. until we finally say enough !!! and we change it. This is what it means to come off the wheel of karma.
My life has been dedicated to that process and to helping others end their limiting cycles. Through readings and healing sessions.
The yoga that I teach is unique and complements the Healing Sessions. It’s designed in a way to consciously assist people in unwinding themselves from their limiting and painful life patterns. Most people don’t understand that Basically anything in your life that’s not going a harmonious way, that’s not completely wonderful, is caused by your core soul story imprint.
The music that I create with Love Power the Band is designed as well to lift people’s spirits up to know the love they really are, so they can drop the old stories
Life is really all about that….dropping the old stories and coming to and understanding that we really are a love story. We are the great story of creations love and all of our life stories are love stories, often stories of broken love, disappointments etc. yet still love underneath. And once we know the heart has always been involved in all stories, then we can leave them behind and celebrate the festival of life
- How has your success as a New Age/New Earth musician and songwriter compared to that of your early career days?
Wow good question ! I put more of a vulnerable heart and soul into it now than I was capable of doing when I was a teenager . I feel more like an artist now than I did then because I feel like I’m really trying to communicate things that are transformative rather than reflective, maybe not always understood but the communication means so much more to me these days.
Also I make videos for most of my songs, so I also get to create visual imagery to assist the songs in awakening the beauty, inner wonder and strength in people. So in a nutshell I get a lot more out of it, in personal expansion than I did in the past. So I love it !!!
But I don’t the industry now. The public doesn’t understand how artist are expected to pay for everything, do everything and get almost nothing back monetarily . Most artist are actually paying to be offer their art to the public rather than being paid for it and the Industry in taking the revenue. Hopefully this shift with this great change we are in collectively.
- What’s next on the horizon for you?
Touring touring touring that’s the focus. I also have more recordings coming out and I’m shooting a few more videos.
Music comes through me in such different ways and I just let it be, so the next recording but I’m going to make us actually singer song writing style
Love Power the Band style of music seems to shift a lot, yet the feeling of the band stays consistent. It’s really fascinating to be part of.
I’m really looking forward to the next videos, to the new recordings, and to meeting with people and inviting them into the music. When Love Power plays live it plays interactive music, the audience gets a part of the song, they become part of the band. What we create, we create together. This has always been my vision since I was a little girl, creating oneness. I’m so happy to have this platform to be able to share it with.
I am also launching an exciting initiative called the The Oneness Communion. It’s a weekly free 10 minute live guided Unity meditation held on Thursday night 9pm EST. There is a wonderful community of artist and spiritual aspirants and healers that have stepped up to offer the sessions. We are doing this to support our Collective harmony inside and out ! Hope to see you all there. Just a few minutes of your time each week can have a huge effect on the collective energies and directions. INSTA @oneness_communion
Thank you so much for your questions I really enjoyed them and I hope my story inspires others to follow their dreams !
Take care !!!
Be Love
Be Free
- Thanks again! We can’t wait to see what’s next!
