There are two questions my students and clients ask all the time. One is ‘How do I choose a good bowl” and the other is ‘How do I know which bowl is good for a specific chakra’. People also call to obtain a bowl with a certain musical note. My answers to these questions are founded in the Eastern philosophy rather than from a Western mindset, because this better reflects the nature of the instruments as they were intended:
Choosing a good bowl requires a few things.
Quality: Either an eye and an ear for excellent quality- or knowing and trusting someone who knows the bowls and can help you. Many people sell bowls and most are new and machine made to look old. There are several signs of age in a bowl including the shape, the markings inside and out, the thickness of the metal especially on the bottom (thinner is usually older), and the tone. Most lay people will not be able to tell the difference between an antique and a good reproduction. It takes a trained eye. But you should be able to hear the difference. Often even the people who sell bowls in shops and on the internet are not very knowledgeable, so ask a lot of questions. When someone says a bowl is old in this country old can mean 50 years. That is new by my standards. A real old bowl it will be at least 100 years old and more often hundreds of years old. If the vendor doesn’t know the region the bowls were made in, and how the markings help distinguish the type of bowl, they probably don’t know much. Bowls were made in a variety of regions of Tibet and their shape and markings are telling. Some of the bowls have consciousness transformation as their primary intention, and some have physical healing. This can be determined by their shape. There is more about this and photos in my home study course available on my website. A high quality, ancient bowl is an investment. If it is inexpensive and old, then it was probably obtained in a less than honorable manner…A good bowl is an investment and the price can range from $110 for a very small bowl to thousands of $$ for a huge bowl.
On the other side of the coin is the seller who hikes up the price claiming that a bowl is from the 16th or 17th century. If you really want to determine the exact age of a bowl, you have to melt it down- thereby destroying it. Ask where and who authenticates the bowls and how the age was determined and tune into your intuition about the story you are being told.
In Asia, the only way to establish a good and trustworthy relationship with a supplier is over a number of years, and eyeball to eyeball. So the few people who go over themselves to select instruments over a period of years will get the best bowls. If your bowls come from a wholesaler somewhere, w ho purchases large quantities of things you can be sure they are if inferior quality because they probably did not hand select them or have a long term relationship with the supplier. These things DO make a big difference.
Usage: It is useful to determine what you will use the bowl for: ie meditation, grounding, physical healing? Do you want to integrate a few bowls into an existent modality or use them with other instruments in a musical vain, or become a sound healer? The answers to these questions will also impact on your choices.
Tone: The tone of the bowls should linger for quite some time when struck producing several layers of tones you can hear that in turn create overlaying harmonics and overtones. When you sing a bowl (rub the rim with the wooden or leather part of a stick) there are several things to consider. How ‘awake’ the bowl is: some bowls sing right away, and some need to be played for a while and ‘broken back in’. This is neither good or bad but it is important to know so you don’t dismiss a potentially great instrument just because it doesn’t sing right away. When you hear a bowl, listen to your body. If it opens your heart, or moves you deeply in some manner; if you feel tingling all over, or the tone directly impacts one area of your body or grounds you- these are all good signs. Bowls were created for consciousness transformation and healing. You should feel their effect on you.
If you have more than one bowl then it is good to play them together so that their tones harmonize. Eventually, they will anyway, because that is their nature and magic, but why not help the process by starting with bowls that sound great together right away? Note that with several bowls, playing them in one pattern may sound very good and another pattern may not!
Bowls and Chakras. In the west we work with seven chakras. The Tibetans work with five regions of the body. The bowls were created to bring us back to our experience of the interrelationship of all things; thus they are not calibrated to work on any one chakra to the exclusion of the rest. Their very nature encompasses our wholeness. In this way they are very different instruments then the western counterparts- tuning forks and crystal bowls. However there are some bowls whose tone and size lend themselves more naturally to certain areas of the body. Lower tones for grounding, largest bowls by the feet, soothing mid tones around the head, and higher tones over the 3rd eye, etc. There are too many variables to discuss here but you can get some basic principals in my home study course. Having several bowls is wonderful but understand that even if you have only ONE bowl, it will impact all of you, and not just one chakra.