Beauty regime: Singing bowl therapy

We often forget that many beauty basics don’t appear in the make-up bag or on the bathroom shelf: eat well, drink water, don’t smoke, exercise, sleep, wear sunscreen and, probably the most forgettable of the lot, relax.

Stress doesn’t just make us feel like hell, it shows in our skin. It can exacerbate many skin conditions such as psoriasis, rosacea and eczema, and while some stress is good, chronic stress can wreak havoc on our digestive, central nervous and immune systems, leaving us more vulnerable to everything from flu to heart disease. So making time to chill out is just good sense.

Yoga has been a stress-relieving friend of mine for years, but I recently – and quite skeptically – tried something different: Tibetan singing bowls. If you’ve ever licked your finger and run it around the rim of a wine glass, you’ll have some idea of what that means.

Singing bowls have been used for centuries throughout Asia to meditate, relieve pain and restore health. Today, they are commonly used in sound therapy, a practice in which vibrations produced by objects that resonate, or even the human voice, are used to lull a person into a state of deep relaxation and healing. Practitioners argue that these vibrations, which are both heard and felt, decrease stress hormones in the body by steadying heart rate and lowering respiratory rates.

Practitioners or healers include New Age enthusiasts and medical doctors alike. The consensus is that sound therapy, or vibrational medicine as it is also known, isn’t an alternative to orthodox medicine, but rather a complement to it.

People use it to relieve common aches and pains, to mitigate stress and anxiety and to simply get a better night’s sleep.

Zenergy on Fade Street in Dublin has recently started offering a 30- to 45-minute session of sound therapy using Tibetan singing bowls. I popped by one Sunday morning with a pounding headache to meet Edward Lukawski, a healer from Kazakhstan who learned how to play the singing bowls in Nepal.

I was led into a candlelit room and asked to lie down in the middle of a large cushion where I was covered up to my chin with a blanket. Seven metals bowls surrounded me. Lukawski later explained that these handmade bowls from Nepal are different sizes and metals so that they produce different elemental tones when struck with a wooden baton.

He began moving around me, circling each bowl with the baton as he went. The vibrations emanated long after he had moved on to the next bowl, so that by the time he had completed a full circle, I was enveloped in a soothing, hypnotic hum. It felt like something between a monastic temple and a sci-fi film set. Lukawski continued circling and occasionally hit symbols against each other just above my head, producing a high pitch that after wave upon wave of lower frequencies was strangely satisfying to the ear.

“It helps to get into your equilibrium state,” Lukawski explained after the session. “It opened all the blockages – emotional, physical, mental blockages – within your body ... to balance the chakras.”

The 30 minutes flew. I left feeling like I had a just woken up from a long nap. My headache had eased and I felt very relaxed.

I’d do it again, but at €55 a pop, I’ll be sticking to yoga to keep my chakras happy. It was an interesting and satisfying experience, and who knows, singing bowls might just be your downward dog.