What are Crystal Singing Bowls?

Last winter, Barlow was in Kauai with his family. While visiting local shops he saw some beautiful crystal singing bowls in a window display. He found out that not only were they attractive but they made amazing sounds. He was interested to find out that they were tuned to various frequencies and at that moment he realized he wanted to use them in his next concert. He asked who made the bowls and was told that they were created in a small town in Utah —  Holladay.  The coincidence made the prospect of using them even more appealing.

Yogis have used singing bowls for decades, but in recent years crystal alchemy bowls seem to be displacing the traditional Tibetan variety. One of the two founders of Crystal Tones—the Utah-based company that was the first to make crystal alchemy singing bowls—has heard of them being used in hospitals, schools, meditation studios, and therapy settings.

One practitioner believes that while Tibetan metal bowls are wonderful, their sound doesn’t penetrate our bodies in the same way because we have very little metal in our bodies but we are primed to receive the sound that crystal bowls make in our bodies because “we are water and our bones have a crystalline structure that creates an entrainment between sound and body.”

 

Barlow carefully selected the bowls you’ll hear at our concerts on September 18 & 19. The bowls used in Christopher’s piece are from Crystal Tones in Holladay Utah.

Thanks to Brandon J Heugly (Clinical Social Work/Therapist, LCSW, MSW) for letting us borrow the rest of the bowls used throughout the concert.