While becoming a psychologist demands six years of rigorous education, one can qualify as a singing bowl therapist in just three days.
The therapy involves striking metal bowls of different sizes to produce sustained overtones that are meant to help listeners relieve stress, heal ailments, or to induce sleep.
Despite its simplicity, the cost of healing is not low. In Hong Kong, a one-hour group singing bowl sound bath costs about HK$300 per person, and one-on-one sessions can cost thousands of dollars.
Newcomers who want to be a therapist can enroll in a 20-hour foundational course for around HK$5,000 (US$641). After learning the basics of singing bowl knowledge and performance skills, they are able to use this training to treat clients.
Economic Prospects and the Healing Market
Training centers’ blogs claim that becoming a singing bowl therapist requires a low investment of time and monetary cost, but can be a significant income as the health economy grows in a big way.
They provide evidence such as the data from the Global Health Institute that the healthcare market worldwide was worth $5.6 trillion in 2022, and was expected to grow at a rate of 8.6% to reach $8.47 trillion by 2027.
However, for everyone who pays the HK$5,000 entry fee, singing bowl healing remains a game of ongoing investment with uncertain returns, akin to playing the board game Monopoly.
PART 1. The Game Begins with a 'Lie'
Selina Lai, who studied singing bowls in Nepal over a decade ago, states that singing bowl healing is a “lie.” While it is effective, it is akin to “a blind cat running into a dead mouse.”
Lai refuses to be called a “therapist”. In her view, singing bowls do not have a long history or mystical religious background; they are simply “containers” in everyday Nepalese life.
Geli Chen, one of the founders of Exit Heal Singing Bowl Academy, agrees. “Before we popularized singing bowls in China, Nepalese people didn’t take them seriously. There weren’t many singing bowls sold in the streets. But now, if you visit Nepal, you’ll see that every shop, whether it sells brassware or not, has several bowls displayed at the front.”
Dr. Adrian Wan, deputy program director of the MSocSc in Behavioral Health at the University of Hong Kong, uses singing bowls at the end of mindfulness sessions to wake participants. Curious about singing bowl healing, he sought personal healing sessions from two therapists with similar psychology backgrounds and professional experiences. For the same insomnia issue, the two therapists explained it differently—one cited a blockage in the head chakra, the other in the chest chakra. Remarkably, both sessions alleviated his insomnia for one to two weeks, he said.
planetary energies
The combination of astrology and sound therapy provides a profound healing experience. As the sound frequencies of the crystal singing bowls merge with the energies of the planets and stars, a symphony of celestial healing unfolds within you.
Traditional chinese medicine Theory
Using Chinese medicine’s human meridians as the basis for positioning, they use professional sound forks with different tone frequencies to apply the healing sound of the audio therapy to the surface of specific acupoints in the human body in order to liaise with the relevant cells and tissues to produce a co-mingled resonance, so as to enable the body tissues to regain their proper functioning and their harmonics.
Scientific Theory
The human body consists of many cells, tissues and organs, and each part has its own specific frequency and vibration pattern. When singing bowl emit specific tones and frequencies, they can resonate with different parts of the body.
The singing bowl healing market features a variety of theoretical systems, similar to a martial arts world with numerous sects, each with its own interpretation of the history and principles of singing bowls.
Used by Dr. Wan’s therapists, the mainstream system integrates the chakra system from Indian yoga, where each bowl’s sound corresponds to a chakra – or energy center in one’s body – and can adjust its energy. Additionally, some instructors use planetary energies or Traditional Chinese Medicine theories to explain the effects of singing bowls, while others rely strictly on physical science.
Chen, the founder of Exit Heal, used to be very confused by the theory of the singing bowl. “When I was learning in Nepal, I was taught the chakra system step-by-step—place a bowl for one chakra near the left ear, another near the right ear, and seven chakra bowls around the body, striking each a set number of times. But I didn’t understand why. I asked my teacher, and he said it was tradition.”
This has also been a long-standing question for Xanche Ho, a singing bowl therapist with three years of experience who has studied at training centers in both Hong Kong and Nepal. The instructors at both centers explain the operation of singing bowls simply as “tradition,” which does not satisfy Ho, who seeks a more scientific explanation.
Dr. Wan says that the theories behind singing bowls are currently just hypotheses and are very difficult to prove. “Some singing bowl therapists also use brain waves to explain why singing bowls work, but testing brain waves requires very expensive procedures and equipment. This makes it difficult to accumulate a large sample size for research, and now the evidence accumulates very slowly.” Additionally, the theory of using “vibration” to explain the effects is hard to test in a clean experimental environment because “everything is vibration.” The color of the singing bowl and the mental state of the therapists are all vibrations, he said.
It is clear that there is no universally accepted theory in the industry, whether in mysticism, medicine, or physics.
According to Lai, striking a singing bowl can induce relaxation partly due to the sound frequency, which can be relaxing even when listened to directly without a singing bowl, and partly due to the power of suggestion, which plays a significant role in the effectiveness of these “lies.”
“Singing bowls are recognized by Western medicine as a complementary therapy that can offer a placebo effect,” Lai explained, using a medical trial’s control group as an example. Participants unknowingly use a placebo without real medication, and the belief in the therapy can itself be therapeutic. “In fact, our consciousness can influence how our bodies function,” he said.
Lai added: “Actually, we are playing a game with our own brains, which need very physical or tangible explanations.” The rituals associated with singing bowls convince the brain, drawing it into the game set by these practices.
Part 2.
The Commercialization Path for TherapistFirst Round: Acquiring 'Assets'
More than the skills of playing the singing bowls, the real investments for newcomers in this Monopoly-like game are the courses, equipment, and venues.
Lai notes: “If you don’t delve too deep, the techniques can be taught in a day.”
“The operation of singing bowls is easier than using chopsticks,” says Mona Choi, who runs a yoga, massage, and singing bowl studio in Central.
Bridget Ng
Founder, Yoga Instructor & Singing Bowl Therapist
Bridget Ng, who switched to being a yoga and singing bowl instructor two years ago while also taking care of her children, teaches at various yoga studios. Beyond the basic Level 1 course, she invested an additional HK$5,000 in a Level 2 course and spent over HK$10,000 on a set of singing bowls at Flo Yoga Academy, a training center, with total expenses amounting to HK$60,000 including yoga training.
“I actually haven’t invested that much,” Ng says. “It took me a year to break even on that HK$60,000, and then I’m looking at what else to learn, unlike others who really go overboard.”
Xanthe Ho
Founder of Mindfulness Sound HK, Singing Bowl Therapist
Ho has been a part-time singing bowl therapist for three years but still needs a full-time job to sustain her livelihood. She studied Levels 1-3 at the renowned Sound Therapy Hong Kong and spent over HK$40,000 on singing bowls. Her studio, Mindfulness Sound HK, costs about HK$28,000 a month and earns just enough to barely cover expenses.
Ho admits: “Being able to sustain my hobby is satisfying enough for me.”
Tiki, who prefers to remain anonymous because of the sensitivity of the topic, entered the healing industry less than three years ago. She calculated her total costs at 100,000 yuan (US$13,500), including courses in Thailand and all equipment purchases. She has yet to recoup her investments and her income as a therapist doesn’t match what she earned previously as a corporate trainer.
Discussing the investment for being a therapist, Tiki said: “The entry barrier is indeed low, but the threshold to truly become a therapist and earn a living from it is quite high, as there’s much more to learn and improve.”
%
You are at half way of commercialization!
SECOND ROUND: MONETIZING 'ASSETS'
Training is the primary source of income in the singing bowl healing market. Lai, Ng, and Ho admit they are not particularly skilled in business management. In the singing bowl Monopoly, if one wants to earn a high income, one should fully utilize the ‘assets’ they’ve acquired, selling courses and singing bowls.
“Rich therapists sell singing bowls and certification courses,” Ho says. Her decision to further her studies in Nepal was also motivated by a desire to become more professional and potentially offer her own courses in the future.
Ernest Tang
Founder of Meeting Point Yoga Studio, Yoga Instructor & Singing Bowl Therapist, Mindfulness Practitioner
Ernest Tang, who has run the Meeting Point yoga studio for six years, says about 10,000 people have experienced singing bowls and 2,000 have attended singing bowl training courses there.
Roughly calculating the income ratio based on the most common prices at Meeting Point, which are HK$280 for a group session and HK$5,200 for a Level 1 singing bowl course, the revenues are HK$2.8 million and HK$10.4 million respectively, with training accounting for nearly 80% of the singing bowl business revenue.
Chen, the founder of Exit Heal, says that achieving a monthly income of 50,000 yuan generally requires the therapist to have relevant client resources, such as being involved in the wellness industry, running a yoga studio, or focusing more on training work, or having very high personal healing session rates. Exit Heal can offer approximately 13-15 round foundational courses a month, with nearly 12 participants per course.
Geli Chen | Founder of Exit Heal, Singing Bowl Therapist
Selling singing bowls is also a lucrative path.
The markup from the wholesale price in Nepal to the retail price in China can exceed tenfold. Singing bowl distributor Xuanheng Liu exemplifies this by stating that the same singing bowl costing 400 yuan in Nepal is sold for 5,000 yuan in China.
Liu believes that singing bowl healing is a Ponzi scheme, essentially relying on continuously recruiting newcomers to profit.
“Whether it’s Tibetan Buddhist artifacts, singing bowls, or other Tibetan jewelry like Thangka or Dzi beads, many are actually Ponzi schemes operating on a pass-the-buck model,” says Liu. “This is an unspoken rule in the industry, and it’s also a survival strategy within the field.”
Lai has a different opinion.
“It’s not exactly a Ponzi scheme, nor is it multi-level marketing, but it definitely is a business structure,” Lai said, describing the current singing bowl healing market as a “vortex.” “Once you jump into this vortex, you must keep it spinning; otherwise, how do you sustain your own beliefs?”
PART 3. Intention: Healing or Business?
The speed at which the vortex spins is decided by the therapists themselves. Singing bowl therapists sell courses and equipment without any systemic training time requirements or qualification thresholds.
Hong Kong singer and actor Chui Tien You is one of the beneficiaries of this “Monopoly” game. In 2022, he transitioned to becoming a mind-body-spirit therapist, teaching over 100 students within a year and launching his own singing bowl brand in 2023. His singing bowl courses are priced at HK$5,500, while his Reiki courses, an energy healing technique, range from HK$3,500 to HK$5,500.
Chui’s transition did not take much time. On July 18, 2022, Chui mentioned on Instagram that he had completed the Reiki Master & Teacher course with his mentor Maya. By Sept. 21, 2022, he posted a video of himself practicing with crystal singing bowls for the first time. By October, he began teaching, and three months later, he shared a graduation photo with 12 students.
June 29, 2021 Chui leared Reiki at Hong Kong
July 18, 2022 Chui qualified as Reiki master with help of Maya Ris
Sept. 21, 2022 Chui published post about singing bowl fot the first time
Dec. 31, 2022 Chui shared the photo with 12 graduate Reiki student
July 12, 2023 Chui started his own singing bowl brand
Oct. 17, 2023 Chui shared the photo with more than 100 graduate student
Based on the photos Chui posted and the name Maya, Maya Ris and her London-based holistic institution, Soul Centering, can be identified. She offers Reiki Master Teacher Training in just two days, with 5-hour sessions each on Zoom. Maya also teaches crystal singing bowl courses.
According to public posts on social media, therapist Micgo Chiu appears to have completed his training course in early 2022 and started teaching by October. And for therapist Marbert Lee, the period from being a newcomer to teaching was likely two and a half years.
How long does it take to train a qualified therapist? How long is enough for a therapist to become a teacher?
Comparing the pathway to other professions that help people with emotional and physiological issues is quite revealing.
“Unlike social work counselors and clinical psychologists, basically anyone can claim to be a teacher in mindfulness because there is no mandatory registration for being a mindfulness teacher. But you can’t claim yourself a social worker because it requires a license, and if you claim to be a social worker without being one, you run into trouble,” said Dr. Wan, who is Hong Kong’s first certified teacher of Mindful Self-Compassion (MSC). The mandatory registration applies to counselors and clinical psychologists as well, but the practitioner of mindfulness is more loosely defined.
The training for singing bowl teachers is similar to mindfulness, even though there is no authoritative training path. Yet, the process of becoming a qualified mindfulness teacher takes much longer, and involves two to three years of training and practice, according to Dr. Wan.
Treehole HK, a very active mindfulness teaching organization in Hong Kong, promotes psychological principles and offers mindfulness training. However, their teachers never claim to be certified mindfulness teachers, preferring to call themselves mindfulness facilitators.
The difference between a facilitator and someone formally trained as a teacher is significant.
“You can read any books about psychology, but that won’t make you a good psychologist,” Dr. Wan says. “The public would not understand the training pathway. They don’t actually have any information on what constitutes a good, eligible mindfulness teacher.”
Geli Chen
Founder of Exit Heal
Chen, the founder of Exit Heal, mentions that even in Nepal, there are no authoritative institutions for singing bowls, let alone in China, where many popular masters were once merely middlemen selling singing bowls. When it comes to training certificates, Chen recalls a private organization called the “China Academy of Management Science” aggressively promoting certificates via WeChat, selling them for 200 yuan each.
Geli Chen, Singing Bowl Therapist
<Transcript of audio: Previously, we have also seen people claiming to be Nepalese royalty. For example, there was a so-called “Royal Nepalese Therapist” in Shanghai who was said to have provided medical services to Nepalese royal family and was later invited to China.
This person, who was originally from Nepal and had the appearance of a Nepalese, became famous in China for a while after doing some business of selling singing bowl in Nepal. But in the last two years, it seems that this person has not appeared again.We often see some self-proclaimed “gurus” from Nepal who were once very famous in China but disappeared in a short time and another “guru” appeared to replace him. This phenomenon has persisted in recent years. Generally speaking, these people claiming to be from Nepal and disappear after a short period of time and which can not last for long time. This may be a reflection of the tendency of some people towards hype and self-packaging.>
Dr. Adrian H.Y. WAN
Deputy Program Director, MSocSc in Behavioral Health in University of Hong Kong
“I think it’s perfectly fine if you just go for a short training on the singing bowl and then develop an interest in it. But when you use it as an intervention or a means to help people improve psychological well-being or heal trauma, that is another issue,” Dr. Wan said.
Qualified therapists need to know a lot about trauma, mental illness, theoretical foundations, and the principles of what they are teaching before they can use it effectively, according to Dr. Wan and others.
Certified Teacher of Mindful Self-Compassion(MSC)
“The mind-body-spirit field is not a modern science because it doesn’t have ‘standards.’ Without standards, there can’t be authoritative institutions; it’s all created to suit business models and people’s psychological needs,” says diviner Zhao. “If you truly want to discern the genuine from the fake, it’s about goodness versus malice. People can sense whether someone is genuine or malicious, similar to elections—you rely on your intuition.”
Intention is a word nearly every therapist mentioned during the interviews. It is universally recognized as the most crucial quality of a therapist.
“Even though you’re not a scientist, if you have good intentions to help, you’re not just focusing on making money, you do have the compassion or you do have the intention to help other people, I think you’re doing a good thing,” says Dr. Wan.
PART 4.
Who can Benefit from Singing Bowl Healing?
Women and novelty seekers make up the main customer group for singing bowl healing.
Therapist Ho says that nearly all participants in singing bowl sessions are newcomers, with 95% being women, and about 30% to 50% are new mothers who face tremendous stress balancing childcare and work. Founder of Exit Heal Chen notes a similar gender ratio at her singing bowl academy.
Among the customers interviewed, only one was willing to pay the market-level price of HK$300 per hour, while are only willing to pay between HK$100 and HK$200. Additionally, none were inclined to pay continuously for singing bowl sessions, despite finding them comfortable, as they did not perceive a “pressing need.”
“The ultimate clients are those with emotional troubles, such as depression,”says Ho. She has about 10 regular clients who suffer from depression or other emotional issues.
Tiki estimates that regulars make up about 20-30% of her clients.
Searching on Google Maps with the keywords singing bowl in Chinese and English, most singing bowl studios are concentrated in the two districts with the highest income per household in Hong Kong, Central and Western and Wan Chai, with incomes of HK$42,600 and HK$40,500 per month respectively.
Beyond helping customers deal with emotional issues, practitioners and believers singing bowl healing claim that it also helps to alleviate insomnia, menstrual pain, constipation, and other ailments. Therapists said they are often surprised by the feedback from their clients.
“People really come with headaches, stomach pains—wherever it hurts, that’s where we strike,” says Tang, the founder of Meeting Point. “When someone tells me it worked, I wonder if it’s really effective, but they have no reason to deceive me since this is their own experience.”
Therapist Ng’s clients have reported that singing bowl sessions temporarily relieve nasal congestion for those suffering from rhinitis.
However, as Lai and Dr. Wan said, the effectiveness of singing bowls seems to be coincidental, and current scientific experimental conditions cannot verify it.
“When you go for a singing bowl session, you will find that people are just arbitrary. They have no idea why they have to ring certain notes for certain durations for a specific issue. They just take a more spontaneous approach. They ring a singing bowl, talk to you, get feedback, and then try other things. The whole process is not standardized,” Dr. Wan says.
Chen’s Singing Bowl Academy seeks to establish standard operating procedures and repeatable results. In the academy’s three-day courses, they teach solutions for 50 different physical ailments. For example, they claim that by using the vibrations from the singing bowl to exert a downward force on the anus, they can effectively assist people with constipation. And non-pathological menstrual pain can be alleviated by applying the bowl’s vibrations near the uterus, with the specific requirement that the operation must be silent, only allowing the vibration from the bottom of the bowl, according to their claims.
Exit Heal’s post at Red on the difference between their three-day and ten-day classes
“I don’t want to be too harsh on those brave souls who are pursuing their career in that area, but I would say there are still a lot of mountains to climb before they can come up with the same standard,” Dr. Wan says.
Dr. Wan believes that the current lack of research evidence and chaotic standards in the singing bowl industry is reminiscent of the early days of mindfulness development. Mindfulness and cognitive behavioral therapy have developed over 50 years, providing substantial evidence, and their discussed heartbeats of practitioners are much easier to measure than the vibrations of singing bowls.
Assuming the therapist mentioned above actually participated in the Monopoly game, who was the biggest winner based on the information provided by STORY?
“Some people find the sounds very annoying. Some people get headaches when they are immersed in a singing bowl session,” Dr. Wan says. “Maybe they are very helpful, but I need evidence to inform me that what I am doing is safe and helpful, not actually making things worse.”
The singing bowl industry needs more consensus to facilitate research and must wait for experimental techniques to develop. Just as brain waves couldn’t be studied before the advent of Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging machines, it doesn’t mean brain waves didn’t exist.
At the current stage, it is hoped by those who want to use singing bowl therapy to relieve specific ailments that they will take the time to gain a better understanding of the effects of singing bowls, the therapist’s background, and the training path they followed, instead of blindly believing the therapy sessions will help them.
Thank You For Watching
Webstie Content Editor: Chuanyun Zhai
Webstie Builder/ Designer: Victoria Cai, Chuanyun Zhai
Special thanks to the people who kindly allow us to have interview with, and allow us to take photos and videos.
Special thanks to Foon Lee, and Sui Cindy Kwan for the website and content advise.