tibetan singing bowls are bronze bowls that are struck with a mallet to produce a sound, in a method not unlike running your finger around a wine glass to produce a sound. they are traditionally used in tibetan buddhism and related religions and as meditation tools. i am not a buddhist or anything, i just happen to think these singing bowls are really neat. some tibetan guy i met in boston introduced me to them. he gave me a back massage with it and showed me how to play one and use it to clear your head.
there are lots of sizes of singing bowls, but the 2 i have are about 10 inches in diameter. the first thing you want to do is hold it in the palm of your hand. be careful not to let anything touch the sides of the bowl or else it won't reverberate properly. use your dominant hand to hold the mallet. for a beginner, i would suggest first hitting the bowl on the side with the mallet and then running the mallet around the edge. or, once you are good enough, just run the mallet along the edge with first striking it and it will start to play. go clockwise or counterclockwise. it doesn't matter, just circle all the way around the bowl. you can go faster or slower depending on how loud you want it to play. keep your wrist loose.
to meditate with it, just close your eyes and bring it close to your head. take it from one side of your head to the other. get somebody else, if you want, to do this for you so you don't know what is coming next. the sound is crazy and it just pierces your skull (in a pleasant way) and you can focus only on the sound.
the tibetan man who introduced me to this said that he thought of the vibrations from the bowl into your body's cells as ripples in a pond. he said that it ripples through and puts everything into a state of clarity and harmony. i don't know if this is scientifically accurate, but i really like the idea.
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