7 Easy Ways to Use Your Singing Bowl At Home

Discover the Power of this Hypnotic Sound Therapy Tool

So, you fell in love with a crystal singing bowl, and you took one home. But now, you wonder what more you can do than tap it every once in a while and admire its beautiful sound. Maybe you purchased one after you experienced their soothing vibrations during a sound bath or sound journey. But now, your singing bowl just sits at home and adds to your vibrational decor. Or maybe you’re like me, when I first got one, and want to meditate with it but aren’t sure where to start. 

A crystal singing bowl can affect the body, mind, spirit, and space in so many amazing and beautiful ways. (To find out more about these high vibrational instruments, click here.) And the more we use them, the more powerful their effect on us. If you aren’t sure how to welcome your resonant crystal quartz singing bowl into your daily routine, here are a few ideas to inspire you! 

1. Quickly Decompress

relaxing with headphones on hammockDid you know that sound is one of the most powerful and effective ways to help you decompress? The power of sound to transform emotion is displayed all around us on a daily basis. Take, for instance, waking up to the sound of your alarm versus waking up to the sound of your loved one…or your favorite song…or perhaps, to the gentle sounds of your zen progressive alarm clock app. A simple sound can affect your initial perspective for your day!

Do you ever notice your body physically tensing up after prolonged exposure to construction or the whirring of machine noise? And how do you feel when your favorite song starts playing through your car stereo? Ever notice how even your less enjoyable chores seem to go by much faster when you’re listening to upbeat music that makes you happy? Your sonic landscape really does have an incredible impact on your mood, which, in turn, affects your productivity, reactions, and emotional stability.

Paying close attention to the sounds you are listening to throughout your day, and including more beautiful tones that please you ears can have a dramatic effect on your entire mindset!

The Relaxation Response 

Your day can be so full of stress, from impatient drivers on the road to work pressures and navigating relationships with the various people you encounter throughout your day. By the time you get home, your senses are over-stimulated and exhausted! That’s when you want to reach out for a quick fix to effectively switch off your body’s stress mode. Fortunately, there’s a healthy solution to help you quickly release all that stress: your beautiful crystal singing bowl! Sound that is soothing to you can ease you into quick relaxation by activating the parasympathetic nervous system, which triggers the body’s relaxation response

Harvard physician, Herbert Benson, first termed this idea of a relaxation response  to counter the body’s fight-or-flight response that is activated every time we experience stress. The more stress we hold throughout the day, the more our body pumps troublesome amounts of cortisol and other stress-induced neurotransmitters into our bloodstream, which, when emitted for prolonged periods of time, can instigate or worsen various conditions, including headaches, insomnia, ulcers, hypertension, and even lead to more life-threatening illnesses, such as heart disease and cancer. 

How Singing Bowls Relax You

While meditation has been shown to elicit the relaxation response and mitigate the harmful effects of stress, it requires a steep learning curve of time, patience, and discipline. However, the pleasing tones of your singing bowl can help you reach that state of calm and peace much sooner. 

Preliminary research findings discovered that participants who meditated on the tones of crystal singing bowls (as well as Tibetan singing bowls, bells, and gongs) showed significant changes in mood, drop in stress levels, decrease in blood pressure and heart rate, decreased anxiety and depressed mood scores, and all experienced a sense of deep relaxation and peace.1  

Furthermore, singing bowls entrain the brain to move into the theta brainwave state, which opens us to deep meditative and peaceful states, intuition, and dreaming (subconscious activation). 

How to Use Your Bowl to Decompress

When you come home from a long day, take a moment to sit down somewhere comfortable. Then, just focus on slowing your breath as you turn your attention toward the sounds of your hand gently and slowly working its way around your crystal singing bowl. Notice the small fluctuations and vibrations. Listen to the waves of the tone responding to your speed and pressure. Stay with it. It will only take a few minutes before you find your stress melting away, your inner chatter quieting, and a significantly more positive mood change settling in. 

If we accept that sound is vibration and we know that vibration touches every part of our physical being, then we understand that sound is heard not only through our ears but through every cell in our bodies. One reason sound heals on a physical level is because it so deeply touches and transforms us on the emotional and spiritual planes. Sound can redress imbalances on every level of physiologic functioning and can play a positive role in the treatment of virtually any medical disorder.

-Dr. Mitchell Gaynor, director of Medical Oncology and Integrative Medicine, the Cornell Cancer Prevention Center in New York

2. Meditate More Easily

If you wish to deepen or even begin a more steady meditation practice, your singing bowl can be an incredible help to anchor (focus) your meditations. One way to do this, as mentioned above, is through simplyboysenberry zafu zabuton meditation pillow set focusing on the crystal tone(s), as you sustain your singing bowl(s) or tap it like a bell repeatedly.

Additionally, you could play your singing bowl while chanting a mantra or affirmation. This will reinforce the relationship of the sound to the memory and emotional centers in your brain, and the more you do it, the more effective this can be. This is an active form of meditation, using the task of stroking your singing bowl and/or the rhythmic pulse of your tapping or mantra chanting to allow your mind to fall into a meditative trance. 

3. Chakra Clearing/Energizing

You can also use the different seed syllables for each chakra to clear your chakras with your singing bowl meditation. Read our previous article on Clearing Chakras to find out what seed syllables go with what chakras and how to go about clearing and energizing your chakra centers.

Whatever your chosen form of meditating with your singing bowl, keep in mind that the most important thing is to allow both mind and body relax and let go without trying to control anything.

4. Tone to Your Bowl

Another beautiful way to use your bowl is for vocal toning. Vocal toning is a great way to strengthen your vocal cords and release communication blocks  (opening the throat chakra). Of course, vocal toning can also be a tool for achieving meditative states. But beyond this, toning to your singing bowl can help to exercise and loosen your vocal cords, on a physical level.

When you are feeling “out of tune”, a little toning can bring you into harmony with your singing bowl’s vibrations. In the practice of nada yoga, it is believed to balance and harmonize your cells and energy pathways. And if you’ve ever tried it, you can attest to the way this truly does seem to transform your subconscious mind’s blocks to owning your voice.  

5. Cleanse Your Crystals (and other vibrational medicine tools) 

Apart from helping you to get more out of your meditations, singing bowls have other important uses as vibrational medicine tools. If your singing bowl came from The OM Shoppe & Spa, then, it is made of 99.9% crystal quartz. And as you already know, crystal quartz is a powerful tool to amplify and transform energy! Because of this, it is an excellent choice, not only for cleaning your crystals, but also for recharging them. 

If it is a small and smooth (tumbled) crystal or crystal jewelry piece, you can place it directly inside your crystal singing bowl. If it is a rough or large crystal, just place it nearby. Then, stroke your singing bowl and let it gain intensity so that there is a high amplitude of vibrations submerging your crystal and taking it back to its highest vibrational state.

Use your intention to gauge how long you should play your singing bowl. Typically, 30 seconds should do the trick.  

6. Clear the Energy in Your Space

Pure crystal quartz tones have such an immense effect of harmonizing and entraining vibrations around them, making them pretty amazing tools for clearing energy in spaces. Your home is your precious sanctuary, so it is essential for your home to feel good.

The vibrations of stress, emotion, and all the different energies our friends and loved ones carry can collect and linger in a room. To your advantage, singing bowls can disperse chaotic energy and transform and re-energize the feel of the room. Striking your singing bowl like a bell can help break up stagnant energy. When you sustain the tone of your crystal singing bowl(s), it can lift the energy in your home into a serene and celestial place.

Light some sage or turn on your essential oil diffuser for an even more dramatic lift.

7. Make Beautiful Music

And finally, if you are musically inclined, you can absolutely use your singing bowl to create beautiful music. You can use your singing bowl in combination with other bowls (in harmonically-pleasing or purposeful intervals). Or, you can use your bowl together with other musical instruments to create melodies, rhythms, and play songs or improvise your own meditative pieces. If you only have one singing bowl, this can provide a beautiful drone  for your exploratory or meditative music.

A drone is a sound therapy term for a tone that plays continuously in the background of a musical performance/ composition. A drone helps to establish a key center and can have strong grounding, entrancing, and meditative effects. 

Need Help With Your Singing Bowl?

If you’re not sure what bowls you need to create beautiful harmonies or use with your other instruments, or if you need help deciding which bowl to get, we’ve got you covered. Feel free to call us or come by our shop for a free consultation. Speak with our musical director or trained staff, and we will get you the specifics you need to help you raise the vibrations in your space!

Also, we have wonderful news to celebrate!

Alongside its exciting new expansion, the OM Shoppe & Spa is getting ready to launch a whole new series of in-store and online workshops, clinics, and classes, including workshops on how to play crystal singing bowls.

And in the meantime, we wish you the highest of vibrations as you use your singing bowl to tune up your happy at home! 

1 “The Effects of Singing Bowl Meditation on Sound, Mood, Tension, and Wellbeing: An Observational Study https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5871151/

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