Melting The Heart

Reviewed by Debi Winston-Buzil: Yoga Chicago.com

Sitting around drinking tea the other day with friends, I noticed our teabags each held a special fortune. Mine read, "Noble language and behaviors are so powerful that hearts can be melted." This I know. I see and hear things that move me profoundly, bringing tears to my eyes. It's my heart opening. Now check this out. When you hear music, what part of the body does it hit first? Why it hits the skin, it touches the heart!

Before music makes its way into my eardrum and registers as sound, it's already made an impact upon my heart. In its most notable forms, the power that sound transmits is heart-opening, ground-shaking, and heartbreaking. Mantra--divine energy encapsulated in sound--may be the surest quickest way to "melt the heart."

Buddhism teaches us that with the union of female and male energies--compassion and wisdom--we create consciousness. Mantra becomes the sound of this experience.

Once we relax the body and the mind, we can focus on the mantra. The state of going inward presents itself effortlessly. We can attain the Buddhist Nature. The mantra becomes a vehicle for upliftment and enlightenment.

Tibetan Mantras for Turbulent Times, by Deva Premal and The Gyuto Monks of Tibet , is a collection of Tibetan Buddhist mantras. Blending Western female "flow" with the voices of the Gyuto monks, who dedicate their lives to practice, this CD is intense, musical, and intriguing. Deva Premal is best known for her yoga music. Her first record, The Essence, released in 1998, was one of the first spacious Western yoga chant CDs I had ever heard. My teachers at Moksha Yoga Center played it over and over again. I felt as if every yoga studio across the country was playing it. The Gyuto Monks of Tibet were also my first introduction into the mysterious overtone "chordal" singing of this tradition. My experience of Tibetan chanting is that it is deep and holy. The monks came to the U.S. for the first time in 1995, opening for the Grateful Dead. What an interesting concert that must have been!

The eight chants (ten including an invocation and closing dedication) were chosen as the most facile for Westerners to learn. The opening "Invocation," led by the Gyuto monks, is a gateway to enter the practice. Temple bells ring, bringing Deva Premal into "Om Manah Padme Hum," a chant for compassion. This features Deva's signature layered vocal harmonies. The collaborators create an architectural soundscape that is repetitive and deeply soothing. Each track begins with the monks' traditional Tibetan invocation. Deva Premal, with her rich and honeyed voice, then offers 108 repetitions of the mantra--an auspicious number for attaining results or at least sustaining a peaceful vibration. Deva Premal and The Gyuto Monks, with their unmistakable voices, is a beautiful polyglot of communion of East and West, masculine and feminine.

The Mantra of Perfection, "Teyate Gate Gate Paragate Parasamgate Bodhi Soham," is my favorite. Also known as "The Heart Sutra," this mantra cultivates generosity, focus, patience, and wisdom. The translation of this sutra by Sharon Gannon of Jivamukti Yoga seems drawn from the poetry of the Beat generation: " Gone gone real gone beyond even the most gone only in going that gone is there awakening." The mantra moves quickly. If you are chanting along, you may need to skip a mantra or two just to breathe!

Tibetan Mantras for Turbulent Times is a valuable meditative tool as well as a pleasurable listening experience. The Buddhist belief that the mantra is a technology to hold the mind together is powerful medicine. Directing us toward "right thinking," you can't go wrong with Deva Premal and The Gyuto Monks of Tibet.