My own experience with Tibetan Singing Bowls began many years ago while I was a lot into yoga and mantra meditations of all sorts, staying up all night on Shiva-Ratri and meditating. So when I first saw a singing bowl I was very skeptical. A friend of mine had just received it and was very excited about it. He had been in to yoga for much longer then I so he looked on the bowl as a cute gadget to show to his friends rather than a powerful meditation tool. So my first reaction was to regard it in much the same way but when we actually got to the Tibetan singing bowls part of the evening everything changed.
It was for first time in my meditation career when with the help of the Tibetan singing bowls I actually reached a level in my meditation that seemed almost magical. I found an extremely powerful and incredibly real sense of absolute joy. One of my favorite authors, Osho, compares many times the experience of meditation to that of LSD and I was very disappointed by the fact that my meditations had always been a very serious, very rigid thing where a sense of content was the best I could achieve. So I almost taken aback by the sheer joy I found in the meditation created through one of these Tibetan singing bowls.
It was only much later, in a Tibetan singing bowls and other artifacts shop, during a visit in Bangalore, India, that I found out that they are mostly used for healing. And it is to this day that I still reject the notion. Although it is true that I “accidentally” – in the sense that I wasn’t expecting to get that effect – healed a couple of friends headaches, toothaches and even insomnia. I still believe that the intended purpose of the Tibetan singing bowls is in fact a deeper sense of meditation.
If you are thinking about trying meditation with one of the Tibetan singing bowls that are currently available try to have someone else playing it though. That is not to say that you should force some unsuspecting victim in to what might seem to them a rhythmic, boring job. However if you have a friend who is passionate about spirituality you should try at least once to enjoy the pure AUM sound of the bowl while he is playing it. I have found that the experience is colored by the personality and the spiritual strength. I actually have a friend who can create an experience where the sound seems to be like a cloud above our heads and it is raining down on us. And of course when I say sound I mean something closer related to a perceived energy rather the actual noise. However this experience is related to this one single person and although I have meditated to many other people singing on a lot of Tibetan singing bowls, none has created that experience to me.
Still, I think that one’s experience when listening to the Tibetan singing bowls is a very personal one that inevitably takes you from the rim of existence and almost throws you in the debts of your own self where the one is part of the many. To me that means that I have meditated alone and in the company of others and I have never felt bothered by either situations and what has always enriched my experience has been the sound of the Tibetan singing bowls.