By: Anne Powerll
There is a moment within spiritual practice when effort becomes its own obstacle. You can concentrate harder, breathe more deliberately, demand that the mind become quiet, and discover that all this striving only creates another form of noise. The alternative is unsettlingly simple: stop fighting.
Ananda Xenia Shakti & Love Power the Band’s “Devotion” lives inside that moment.
The song emerged not from serenity but physical distress. During a silent meditation retreat in the mountains of Andhra Pradesh, India, Ananda became ill. Unable to comfortably continue her meditation, she began softly singing the names of Radha and Krishna.
A melody appeared around the Hare Krishna Maha Mantra.
She followed it.
That origin story matters because “Devotion” doesn’t present transcendence as something achieved after suffering has been conquered. Ananda’s discomfort remained while another sensation arose alongside it, peace, sweetness, expansion, the feeling of being held by something larger than the struggling body.
The resulting song preserves that coexistence.
“Devotion” doesn’t move toward revelation in the conventional manner of popular music. There is no enormous chorus arriving to resolve everything that preceded it. Instead, repetition becomes the mechanism of transformation. Ananda circles the mantra while Love Power the Band builds an atmosphere spacious enough for the listener to notice small changes in emotional temperature.
The voice is crucial.
Ananda doesn’t approach these words as a vocalist attempting to conquer them. Her singing possesses a vulnerability that feels closer to invocation than performance. Instead of standing outside the song and presenting it to an audience, she sounds immersed within it.
The distinction becomes particularly meaningful when placed against her history.
Before Ananda Xenia Shakti, there was Xenia Holliday, a musician with the pioneering all-female punk band The B-Girls. She inhabited the combustible world of late-1970s punk, toured with The Clash during the London Calling era and contributed backing vocals to Blondie’s AutoAmerican.
It is difficult to imagine two images further apart: a young woman participating in punk’s disruption and the spiritual artist of “Devotion,” singing a sacred mantra born during meditation in India.
But perhaps they’re not opposites.
Punk, at its most meaningful, wasn’t merely a sound. It was an argument about permission, who was allowed to make music, who decided what a musician should look like, and whether identities inherited from the surrounding culture had to be accepted at all.
Ananda has carried that question forward.
The rebellion simply changed direction.
Yoga, meditation and spiritual exploration eventually replaced punk clubs as places where she tested ideas about liberation. Becoming a yoga instructor and spending extensive time in India didn’t erase the young musician searching for freedom. They expanded her vocabulary for describing what freedom might mean.
“Devotion” makes that continuity audible.
Where punk often sought liberation through confrontation, this song seeks it through surrender. Where rock mythology prizes the autonomous individual, the singular personality announcing itself against the world, Ananda’s devotional practice moves toward dissolution of that separation.
Even Love Power the Band’s philosophy reflects this impulse. Its performances have been conceived as participatory experiences, with singing and movement breaking down the familiar distinction between performer and audience.
The body matters here.
“Devotion” originated because Ananda’s body refused to cooperate with her plans. That could have been treated as an interruption to the “real” spiritual experience. Instead, the interruption became the doorway.
That idea feels unusually humane.
Wellness culture frequently sells control disguised as transcendence: optimize the body, discipline the mind, perfect the routine, eliminate discomfort. “Devotion” proposes almost the reverse. The body can hurt. The mind can resist. The night can refuse to become what you planned.
Beauty may still arrive.
When Ananda later entered a studio in India, she recreated the song in a single take. She has described the composition as something received rather than consciously written, a transmission whose meaning rests as much in experience as authorship.
Listeners don’t need to share that spiritual interpretation for the recording to work.
“Devotion” communicates through one of music’s oldest technologies: repetition. Gospel understands it. Dance music understands it. Punk understood it, too. Repeat something long enough and the meaning begins to change. The intellect loosens its grip; rhythm enters the body; listening becomes participation.
That makes “Devotion” particularly countercultural in 2026.
We live inside systems built to prevent sustained attention. Songs compete with notifications, feeds and infinite alternatives. Silence is treated like dead air.
Ananda Xenia Shakti offers repetition instead of novelty and presence instead of urgency.
The remarkable thing is that this doesn’t represent an abandonment of her rebellious past. It may be its logical continuation.
The young punk once sought freedom by questioning the world around her. The woman singing “Devotion” asks whether the next barrier might exist within.
And after decades spent traveling between those two questions, Ananda has arrived at a beautifully paradoxical answer:
Sometimes freedom begins when you stop trying to escape.
