What are Singing Bowls?

Singing bowls are a tool for meditation and relaxation. Singing Bowl are also widely known as Tibetan Singing Bowls or Himalayan Bowls.  Back in the day in Asia in Tibet, India, and most of Nepal, it was used for its holistic powers and healing, deep relaxation, stress reduction, reiki, etc. They help to provide essential aid to meditation and can be found on Buddhist altars, monasteries, and meditation houses throughout the world.

The natural and harmonious sound emitted by singing bowls is used to invoke a state of deep relaxation, which assists meditation. The sound healing practice of Tibetan Singing bowls with time is widely adopted by various music therapists and sound healers, yoga, and meditation practitioners all around the world.

Sound healing phenomenon

Sound healing represents a ritual of acoustic sound in the form of meditation meant to encourage self-healing. One of the most common forms of sound therapy is the one that includes the singing bowls. Singing Bowls as a sound healing process has been in practice for centuries now.

In today’s time, so many of us live a busy and stressful life. We are pretty much all the time wired up, our brain’s working subconsciously all the time. We dwell in our day-to-day physical activities and there’s a lot of stress and anxiety around us. We need to find ways to distress ourselves and sound healing is a really useful way to create and maintain the balance of our inner-self with the physical being.

Singing Bowls benefits

For Physical and Mental well-being:

The Singing Bowls has two main benefits, one with our physical body and another with our mental body. The vibrations generated by the singing bowls can affect the smallest unit of our lives, the cellular movements. So, it helps to detoxify the toxins accumulated in every single cell of the body. It helps in detoxification. The second benefit with the mental body, the mental body is related with the vibrations that are created in our brain and the singing bowl has such an effect that it can tune our brainwaves to a state where we feel peace and calmness from within. The stress is completely eradicated. The problems that come due to the stress and anxiety are completely removed by the practice of singing bowl.

The benefits are not just limited with the physical and mental body; it also works with your higher self, the psychic body.

For emotional balance:

Singing Bowls as sound healing can help you in releasing emotional pressures as well. A lot of us have some kind of traumatic experience in our lives and the emotions associated with that get stored in our bodies. It may be at a cellular level or maybe subconsciously and we aren’t aware of it too much but there’s a sense of some emotional pressure that somehow guides our behaviours. And if we can release that in a gentle way, then it helps to enable us to have a kind of a more sense of freedom and be more at ease and have a greater sense of wellness.

Meditational point of view

Meditation is a practice for synchronising our body and mind in the present moment. It is a journey through which we connect our internal peace with mind and soul. The vibration of the singing bowl is the same as the brain wave, and it is said that it helps to get into deep concentration. They produce sounds which evoke a deep state of relaxation that naturally assists our brain and body, entering into a meditative state.

Singing bowls have such powerful sound waves that can convert our alert and reactive beta state to a creative and relaxed alpha state. It can make our mind be free from any restrictions and webbed thoughts and undergo a restorative and healing process.

Health benefits

It has been proven that the vibrations from singing bowls have created great impacts on the way our body functions like blood pressure. Other benefits of this therapy include stress reduction. No human body can heal itself when objected to constant stress and work or under any pressure circumstances. Usage of these bowls to create sound waves through vibrations helps activate the parasympathetic nervous system which conserves energy at one time to regulate body functions for later.

There’s proven proof of the fact that patients who listened to frequency music produced from singing bowls helped them recover and become less anxious after their surgery. The reason behind such relief is the soothing of nerves by these beneficial sound waves which resulted improve in heart rate and blood pressure.

How it works?

Many techniques for healing the body, mind, and spirits were traditionally introduced with the use of sound waves. The singing bowl was invented to use the vibration of the sound of singing bowls so that we can de-stress ourselves, become joyful and enjoy the peacefulness inside us.

The sound that these singing bowls create is highly dependent on the size of the bowl and where the mallet is placed. Singing bowls are a great way to indulge yourself in a relaxing, meditative state that will help you calm down, heal and discover your inner self. The human body represents the accumulation of numerous vibrations; each organ of our body vibrates when exposed to a certain frequency. Since each singing bowl is unique and can create a particular frequency, our body vibrates and reacts differently to each of them. It helps our body to reach a meditative and regenerating state. We can easily change our normal beta state by using certain combinations of rhythm and frequencies.

If you are new to Singing Bowls you can click here to buy one of our Hand Made singing Bowls and try cleansing with that. With time, your connection and practice to use Singing Bowls will improve and you can try connecting with our other Singing Bowls to help deep and improved cleaning, concentration, and try creating balance in different chakras of your body.  

Attributes to the Chakras of our body

There’s a strong link between the healing and power of these sound frequency tones. These tones help balance and align the chakras.

The sounds these bowls make are apparently great for cleaning your spirits and balancing your chakras. It has an overall benefit for our health, concentration, body, and energy otherwise. It is one of the basic but efficient ways to maintain balance in our body and create a positive impact on our inner self. You can easily help your body heal and regenerate energy with the help of Singing Bowls at home by yourself. We have a variety in sizes and types of Singing Bowls, each of them has its own significance and impacts on different Chakras of your body.

We have major seven chakras in our body; they can be attuned by using the frequency of the concerned chakras from seven singing bowls. It will help you balance the energy in every single chakra and to have better psychic health at the same time. Spiritual well-being too can be achieved by practicing, listening, and playing the singing bowls.

The singing bowls are a major tool to come back to a meditative state, to cool down the mind, and come back to a state of thoughtlessness. The sounds of the singing bowl will help you to be quiet in your mind and learn out of listening. It will take you on a journey of higher self-realization. The only purpose of making the sound is to work with the space element inside your body. Once the space element is balanced, all other lower elements automatically come to balance.

What is a singing bowl made up of?

Generally these bowls are made of a metal alloy of seven elements but other materials can be used as well. The seven elements mostly used are Brass, Copper, Iron, Silver, Gold, and Tin. They are made traditionally by hammering heated alloy of seven elements till it gets a round bowl shape. In modern times, singing bowls are made using both traditional techniques as well as the use of machine-lathing to give the metal round bowl shape. It is made in various parts of Nepal.

Playing of Tibetan singing bowl is quite easy and you only require few minutes to learn to get hold of the technique.

How to play a singing bowl?

Holding the Singing Bowl correctly

The first thing we should know is how to hold the bowl. The bowl should not be held in your dominant hand i.e. it’s better to hold it on your left hand if you are right-handed and on your right hand if you are left-handed. Now, keep your hand fairly flat, palm facing the sky. The fingers should not be touching the outer round surface of the bowl. The walls of the bowl vibrate to create the sound, if we use fingers touching the wall of the bowl, simply the sound won’t play.

Use of Mallet, Stick or Striker

Make an appropriate choice of stick/striker you use to create the sound effect, the size shouldn’t be too small or too big for the bowl you use. Try using sticks of a certain mass, only then the bowl can play sound. So, the choice of sticks should be smaller for the small bowl and slightly bigger with the big bowl you want to play. Mallet/striker often comes with the singing bowl set so in such a case you don’t have to worry to choose the pair.

Running around the rim technique

With the right choices of stick with the bowl, keep your elbow and forearm fairly steady. Place the bowl on your palm and then make your stick run around the rim of the bowl at an angle of 45 degrees in a circular motion. You have to run the stick on the outside rim of the bowl. You have to move the stick with full arm motion rather than only wrist movement.

Tapping Technique

The other way to make a singing bowl sing is by tapping or striking the mallet on its edge. You can simply give a tap on the edge and feel the vibrations flow through your body.

The other ways to play singing bowls are by placing them on a mat or cushion. You can even place it on your body parts to let the vibrations get soaked in through that part. You can play singing bowls in different parts of your house to create positivity and purification. Singing bowls give different vibrations throughout the day because of the difference in your energy level at different times of the day.

The more you use a singing bowl, the more it gives clear sound waves. The singing bowl then vibrates the air around the bowl and the sound travels to our ears. We can change the note that the bowl makes by changing the frequency of these vibrations. Empty singing bowls make faster vibration sounds and give higher notes.

If we add some water, then the bowl has to vibrate the water and the note will automatically change. The vibrations get slower and give lower notes.

In the context of Nepal, these bowls are part of almost every Nepali household. They have been used as utensils in the kitchen and for various religious purposes in monasteries for centuries.

The Nepali music industry is slowly adapting and using these bowls to experiment with different levels of notes of its frequencies. The use of singing bowls in music form makes the song soothing to hear. It is one of the most valuable yet underestimated pieces of art that exists in our Nepali culture for a very long time. 

It’s more popular these days for its undeniable benefits to health and mental peace that people seek for an escape from daily chaos, stressful lives. Millions of people all around the world are keen to know the optimal use of singing bowls in their day-to-day life and their impacts on their careers. Singing bowls have been flexible in their use throughout the years. It has been used in different parts of the world for various purposes and yet discoveries of its uses are adding up.