Crystal Bowls: Where My Sound Healing Journey Began
The first time I heard a crystal singing bowl, I felt something shift — not just in my body, but in my entire field of awareness. The tone was unlike anything I had ever experienced. It wasn’t just a sound; it was a sensation — a wave moving through me, clearing space I didn’t know was cluttered, softening edges I didn’t know I carried.
That moment was the beginning of my love story with sound healing.
How It All Began
In 2017, I was living in Los Angeles, just blocks away from Unplug Meditation in Santa Monica. I had recently returned from the Route 91 Harvest Festival in Las Vegas — an experience marked by tragedy when the event turned into a mass shooting. In the aftermath, I came home searching for calm and healing, open to anything that could bring relief.
I signed up for a one-week trial at Unplug and began exploring everything from breathwork to reiki, curious about how different modalities could support the nervous system. But it wasn’t until I attended a sound bath that something inside me truly shifted.
As the first notes of the crystal singing bowls filled the room, I felt the vibrations roll through my body like waves — gentle, luminous, cleansing. For the first time, I dropped fully into meditation without effort. The sound seemed to bypass my mind entirely and speak directly to my soul.
That experience changed me. I left knowing I had found something profound — a way to restore peace through vibration.
The Teacher Who Inspired Me
The sound healer leading that session was Michelle Berc, founder of Sonic Being. Her sessions were immersive, intentional, and deeply resonant. I became a regular, attending nearly every class I could during the rest of my time in LA.
Years later, during COVID, I reached out to Michelle over Zoom. She became the first person to teach me how to play the bowls myself — a full-circle moment that felt both sacred and fated. The same sounds that had once healed me were now flowing through my own hands.
The Seven Bowls That Started It All
When I decided to begin my own sound healing journey, the first instruments I ever purchased were a set of seven quartz crystal singing bowls, each aligned with one of the seven main chakras — from the grounding Root to the Crown of divine connection.
These bowls became my teachers. Each carries its own voice, color, and vibration — yet together, they form a symphony of balance and wholeness.
Each bowl corresponds to a specific energy center in the body:
Root (C note) — grounding, stability, safety
Sacral (D) — creativity, pleasure, flow
Solar Plexus (E) — confidence, empowerment, will
Heart (F) — compassion, love, healing
Throat (G) — communication, truth, expression
Third Eye (A) — intuition, insight, clarity
Crown (B) — unity, consciousness, divine connection
Playing them in sequence feels like painting with frequency — guiding energy through the body’s inner landscape, clearing, aligning, and harmonizing as each tone blooms into the next.
How Crystal Bowls Work Their Magic
Crystal bowls are made of pure quartz, a highly resonant material that amplifies and transmits energy. When a bowl is played, it emits a fundamental tone (its primary note) along with subtle overtones — higher frequencies that shimmer above and around the main sound.
These layers of vibration interact with the body, mind, and energetic field, creating a multidimensional experience that supports balance, release, and integration.
While gongs produce a vast, swirling sea of complex overtones, crystal bowls have a clear, luminous harmonic structure — their tones feel like beams of light, pure and precise. They gently tune the body into coherence, bringing calm to both the physical and subtle layers of being.
The Heart of Every Sound Bath
To this day, I play my crystal bowls in every sound bath I offer. They are the foundation of my practice — the heart of my sessions and the reason I fell in love with sound healing in the first place.
With just these seven bowls, I can create a full sound bath experience — one that grounds, clears, and restores. Their resonance holds space for deep relaxation, emotional release, and energetic renewal.
Over the years, I’ve added gongs, chimes, tuning forks, and drums — each with its own unique medicine — but the crystal bowls remain my favorite. Their tones don’t demand; they invite. They remind me that healing doesn’t have to be complicated. It can be as simple as one note — one vibration — that brings you home to yourself.
Closing Reflection
Sound healing is, at its essence, a return to resonance.
For me, it began with the crystalline tones of seven quartz bowls — vibrations that reminded me what peace feels like and set me on a lifelong path of sharing that feeling with others.
Every time I play them, I feel that same spark of remembrance:
that healing isn’t something we find — it’s something we remember through sound.
