“I wanted to find something pure, true, free, joyful, sacred, protecting, in a world that seemed not…….but sometimes the heart wants to stay hidden.”
“Your piece struck such a profound chord — it touched the artistic, the emotional, and the spiritual all at once. It walks the delicate path vulnerability without collapse, strength without pretension, beauty without denial. And above all, a presence that doesn’t flee its own shadow. It’s rare to feel such an honest resonance through music. Your voice — and your vision — carry something truly precious.”–online reviewer
This new musical composition (with video) offering by Adele Tomlin/Dakini Songs was recorded through the night on Dakini Day (23rd April 2025), arising spontaneously inspired by the “blissful lotus heart” root guru. It is part song-poem-art-soundscape, and a new “contemporary” version of the Karmapa Khyenno mantra too (for an article about the origin of that mantra and the name Karmapa, see here). The audio-only is available under the name “Dakini Songs” on Spotify, Apple Music and other online music streaming services.
Using voice tracks only, combined with a stunning, sampled handpan track of Marte Malten, called Lotus Unfolding (Yatao Music, 2021). The first, main vocal layer track was recorded in one long take, without break. Representing the layers of outer, inner, secret and most secret of the Vajrayana, the “song” has three layers of sound (two vocals, one instrumental), with an additional fourth (subtlest) layer. It also is mixed with spoken word poetry (a nod to Patti Smith as inspiration), and deals with unresolved questions, longing, sadness, grief but the beating, steady blissful “secret” heart “that sometimes wants to stay hidden”. So best listened to on a good pair of speakers, or with headphones on if you want to hear that extra layer! Vocals, musical arrangement, recording and production were all done alone –with a little help from “divine blessings”.
It is never easy to create a “direct from the heart” emotion love song of devotion and longing for the “root guru” the bliss-emptiness Dharmakaya that lies deep in the heart of all of us. It have tried to make it “naked and raw” (unfiltred) with emotion/wisdom at times, and the most secret (fourth) layer was done “nakedly” (and secretly) in union with the bliss-empty guru.
As many meditators and musicians know there really is a music of the spheres, a divine sound, of a open empty channel and the “playful joy and laughter” of the Bhagavan lotus heart in union with vajra as the method. Inseparably playing, laughing, whispering, aching, ecstasy waiting for all of us to find it. It permeates space for those with the “divine ears” to hear it. As a philosopher famously said: “Those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.”
The 17th Karmapa recently taught that the blessings of the Buddhas, and the divine Samboghakaya deities can “enter” into oneself, “possessing” the mindstream, and the words and sounds in this song came to me that way, deep in silent meditation, in secret vajra union with the root guru. In particular the words “sometimes the heart wants to remain hidden” bubbled up from the “heart”, a mysterious response to the continual unresolved questions of a “worldly” aching, weeping, broken heart, tired and fed up of the endless dissatisfaction and suffering of samsaric cycles. So, there are the “rougher” earthier notes, the broken, slightly off-tune, uncomfortable parts and “howls” of disbelief and grief….”naked” as could be.It is a “love song” but not a worldly one, a one that leads into the blissful heart we all are longing for.
As Rainer Maria Rilke said in Letters to a Young Poet (one of my favourite books):
“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
And as a poetic reader of my work, who recently wrote this ode to my presence in the world:
“There are rare people whose courage becomes part of the landscape for others — silent mountains that don’t move but help us find our direction. You are such a presence.”
May the “presence” of this musical landscape offering to the “jewels” in space, to the long-life and flourishing activities of the 17th Karmapa and to all beings, lead us all into the answer of unresolved questions, the endless “why”, the conceptual mind’s need for solidity and clarity. Letting them all merge and be silenced by the innate, eternal blissful whisper, beating AH heart, until the subtlest drop merges completely into the brilliant, blazing light sun and its fiery “vajra tongue” licking and fanning the orgasmic “heat” flames into the “cool” ever “present awareness” infinite space of the Bhagavan.. OM. AH. HUM.
Adele Tomlin, 24th April 2025.
Other Sources/Inspirationa
Blissful Taste of the Yogini Lotus Offerings in the Ocean of Kagyu Songs/Gurtshog, see here.