Sounding Bowls are a wonderful tool for meditation. Their resonant qualities can be used for deepening, and their own sound can give rise to sublime insights. As each person has their own forms and approaches to meditation I will offer here some images from the history of the inner nature of the
Sounding Bowls in the hope that some of these themes may help to inspire your own meditations.
There are three particular themes that weave into the Sounding Bowls.
The clearest to see is sound and music. This goes way back before I first fitted a string to a bowl in 1986. As a youth I enjoyed making music, playing various instruments, most of all the piano. Some time after I took up woodturning my love of playing the piano seemed to get lost.
On moving to Devon some years later I built myself a workshop in order to resume my craft. During this period I went back to piano playing and spent regular time making music. Then the workshop was completed and, once again I could not seem to find the time or energy to play. This saddened me, till a few years later, shortly after I began making Sounding Bowls a thought occurred to me.
The same creative joy that I had at one time put into making music had subsequently been put into creating flowing bowl forms in wood.
I remembered at that point how, in my early years as a turner I used to lie in bed at night with a tune running through my head, tracing out in my minds eye the form such a tune would create.
The enthusiasm for the importance of harmoniously flowing forms had lived in me so strongly that on hearing of a gallery in London called Innate Harmony I had determined to display my work in a place that so completely expressed my ethos. I had also been enthused by a quote from Professor David Pye who taught furniture design at the Royal College of Art. He had written:
“Any form you can make will either sing where it stands or be forever silent.”
This took such deep root within me that when I first decided to fit a string to a bowl it felt as though I was betraying this ideal, giving up my search for the visible hum of the perfectly harmonious form, copping out by making it actually physically audible.
Yet eventually I realised that:
The love of music, song-lines, and harmony that I had put into my pursuit of the perfect curve was now coming out again as audibly wonderful sound.
The moment when I first fitted a string to a bowl-form was always a magic moment, the silent form would seem suddenly to breathe with life as the string sounded into its depths and they responded with reverberations of their own.
The second theme is that of poetry. I had written my inner experience into verse since I was a teenager. At college a lecturer, the poet Paul Mathews, had particular methods of stimulating a play-full imagination. Sculpting the invisible into words became a fascination for me.
Again I noticed that as I began creating bowl forms my interest in writing and musing on words declined. This time I was more conscious of what was happening.
I had begun to see creating pure bowl forms in the same terms as I had seen the forming of good lines and verses in words, as a vessel for the numinous.
The third theme is meditation and inner work.
I have always tried to cut wood in such a way that I uncover its inner nature rather than simply imposing my will upon it. This led to a conversation with the wood, with the nature of the tree and with the role of trees on earth, that supported my reading of esoteric works such as Rudolf Steiner’s “Occult Science.”
In this book I read of the early germinal development of the human form, a kind of spiritual counterpart to Darwin’s evolutionary theories. Rudolf Steiner’s description of the germinal human being gave me an image of something a little like a winged seed where only the leaf-skeleton of the wings is left, carrying the body of the seed high above the forming earth, drawing in the music of the spheres through these diaphanous wings to feed and enable transformative growth and development.
This inspired me immensely. I began to imagine the Sounding Bowls as winged beings drawing in the subtly inaudible music of the universe and forming from it their own sounds to enliven the world and soothe ears that have listened too much to the machine.
The original idea for the Sounding Bowls arose as a gift during a meditation. It happened after I had spent some weeks wracking my brain for a way to bring out the already audible harmony of the bowl forms I was making.
My work was selling in galleries up and down the kingdom. people were seeing in them beautiful forms, beautiful grain patterns, and a subtle finish that glowed with the light. What they were not finding was that each bowl had a rich harmonious acoustic.
During my search for visually harmonious forms I had begun to notice that sound was picked up, enriched and repeated by the inner shape of the bowl. This was particularly noticeable if one held a bowl about six inches from one’s face and simply breathed, spoke or sung softly. The sounds were picked up by the subtly spiralling curve of the inner form and fed back into one’s ears in a most remarkable way, really as though one were whispering into one’s own ears. I had begun to question myself over this:
“How can I help people to become aware of this beautiful sound? How can I add this third dimension to what people find in my bowls?
This question occupied me intensely for some time. Various ideas for drum skins, or wooden tongues came to me but each one was too destructive of the form of the bowls to serve the purpose. Eve
ntually I gave up on the idea, resolving to continue my search for the visual hum of “forms that sing where they stand”.
About six weeks later, while meditating one night a new image appeared before me: It was a bowl with a string stretched across it.
It is from this moment that all the Sounding Bowls have grown, from this moment that the striving towards poetry of form; innate harmony; and the unconscious sublimation of music, have all emerged again from out of the bowls into which they were rolled up.
One day a new insight came. A customers friend, on first seeing her Sounding Bowl, remarked.
“Oh! Apollo’s tortoise!”.
Apollo’s tortoise is sometimes seen as the birth of European stringed instruments. The myth describes how Apollo was walking in the mountains when he came upon the shell of a tortoise. Picking it up he stretched across it pieces of gut and begun to pluck notes from it. From this early beginning he developed the Lyre.
In this myth the tortoise is more than just a shell.
The Greeks saw their world as supported by four tortoises holding on their backs the platform upon which Atlas stands, carrying the world on his shoulders.
The tortoise, like so many of us, is armoured against attack. Once we are armoured we no longer share our pain and it turns inward. In this way we can become hollowed out,
Like the tortoise was when Apollo found him. Into this hollow shell of pain Apollo conjures the sounds of heaven using stretched out guts as strings. The Lyre is born.
We learn from such, myths how Lyre music is able to calm the beasts, (that rage in the human breast) and, in the hands of Apollo’s son Orpheus is able to charm and gain boons from even the denizens of the dark under-world (as in the human shadow).
In many paintings of ancient Lyres the strings radiate out as though each one pointed to a different star. For the Greeks music was a conjuring in of heavenly harmonies. They yearned to hear as their ancients did, the music of the spheres with their own ears. Even today our musical scales are based on the mathematics of Pythagoras who worked out the distances of the planets from earth and scaled his musical intervals accordingly. Some Sounding Bowls use a radiant string pattern today. Others have the easier to play parallel string placement. But:
Each one has the hard outer curve which can be turned upside down to reveal the more vulnerable inside from which harmonies can be conjured.
All these parts of the development of the Sounding Bowls play into each one made. Each Sounding Bowls gives forth the harmonies that brought it to birth. Each one strives towards poetry of form, speaking harmony to the eye and hand. Meditation was the starting point of their development; meditation can release from it the creative powers held within music, wood and form. The reflective powers of their inner curve can resound to one’s own inner work.
One person might listen to the inner nature of the sound, seeking Truth of the circling spheres, another might listen for the inner nature of the wood, seeking through trees to know the Creative forces of the universe, another might seek within the resonant response to know more deeply their own genesis and destiny. Many forms of meditation are possible with a Sounding Bowl, I hint at but a few of them. One thing I am sure of:
