In these guided instructions, I'm going to walk you through the steps that I would utilize for a standard crystal singing bowl meditation that you are leading.  

So first and foremost, you're going to want to ensure that your space is comfortable knowing you know how quickly your legs may fall asleep or your back may get tired. 

And you're going to want to ensure that your bowls are all within comfortable reach. 

There's no right or wrong way to sit here. And quite often I will make minor adjustments to my own posture during a meditation session. 

So you might give yourself a little bit of space between the bowls where you could maybe stretch your left or your right light out if you need to, without disturbing the bowls. And without disturbing the meditation session itself with the bowls orientated in a way that you're comfortable with how they're being played. 

And you know if this is new to you, if you’ve not worked with bowls before or if you want to deepen your understanding of them,  in my science of sound course here at rootsoflife.org. I give a lot of tips as to how to orientate your bowls, and how to orientate them in a way that will make sense to your own meditation that you're bringing forward and tons of other very useful guidance and instruction to get your sound practice up and running. 

So I'm going to leave all of that out of these instructions for this meditation practice here but if you are interested in all that is covered in that training do have a look at the course here:

https://rootsoflife.org/courses/the-science-of-sound/

So once you have the bowls orientated in a way that is conducive to your meditation or to what you want to get across in this experience, you would invite everybody into your room or into your studio space. 
And one thing that I would really encourage here is to make sure that the studio space is uniform in its appearance every time and by appearance I don't just mean the lighting and the way that you orientate your bowls but I also mean perhaps in any type of scents that you choose to use and keep in mind here that if you use any scented oils or incense or whatever, it may be that the majority of people will enjoy it. But the problem is one or two people might really not like it. So anything that you do use make sure that it's very subtle. 

But the key here is if there is a scent, that it's consistent, because when people smell it, they're going to immediately turn into the practice of the meditation, namely to YOUR meditation, or to the experience because it's familiar to them and it becomes something they associate to YOU, not to someone else, but to YOU and YOUR space. The same with the lighting and the temperature and perhaps even in the way that you present yourself. So similar clothing like for me, for instance, I usually always am wearing a black shirt and some comfortable linen pants or shorts depending on the temperature and the time of the year.  I’m always trying to have a uniform presentation because then people will find it familiar and they will be able to sit and lay into the meditation right away as opposed to having to get comfortable with a new environment or to even notice subtle changes.  

Now, once all are in and getting situated, you would be encouraged to have them as close to the bowls as possible. So when they come and lie down, then you can bring their heads to within five inches or 10 centimeters or so of the bowls. And I would encourage you to put the people who are the most stressed or have the most difficult time meditating closer to the bowls. 

And then what I do is ensure that I have my cell phone out with obviously it being on silent.

Make sure to check that every single time please because when you don’t someone will call you I promise! 

 On your phone then just open up a stopwatch app and just have this in a place that is going to be convenient for you to see. But it's not going to be disturbing for anybody in meditation so perhaps behind the bowl, or between your legs or whatever it might be. 

Go ahead and hit start on that and keep a mental note as to how long this meditation is going to run 
30 minutes 45 minutes that's usually what I go for. 

My sound meditations are usually 45 minutes from start to finish. And by start I mean when people are lying down on the mat

 So here is a script you can use to welcome everyone and start the meditation practice (you could even read this directly if you wish)

 A very warm welcome, everybody to this crystal singing bowl meditation here today. 

I invite you to take 30 seconds or so to just get into a very comfortable position here on the mats. 
Moving the body around just making micro adjustments to the shoulders, the legs the hips, the neck, allowing everything to relax. closing the eyes and just turning into the breath and knowing that we're here now for this meditation experience. We're in this room together holding space together.

Let everything else just wait outside 
turn into the breath. 

Breathing in and out through the nose and allowing the awareness to be on the breath here. 

And with the awareness on the breath, we begin to relax the body, the mind and the spirit.
(I would give about one minute here to turn into the breathing for the clients. So allow them to breathe for just about a minute and add about 30 seconds into this I might just say if your mind ever wanders, just return back to the breath.)

-- So this is how I would guide people into the beginning of this meditation practice that probably takes about three to four minutes. And from there what I do next is I simply strike one of the bowls 

now that could be the deepest or the biggest bowl that you have. 
It doesn't really matter which one you want to start with. But just striking it two or three times, not making it sing, just gently hitting it so that it rings and allow that ring to fade out fully. And then repeat it again. Two or three strikes, allow it to fade out fully. And then two or three strikes again and allow it to fade out fully. 

And the reason we do this is to set the tone of the practice and by doing this we allow the ears and the sense of hearing to stretch. And so when I make these strikes, and I've made the third strike on the bowl, I would say this to the clients 

with the sound of the bowl I invite your sense of hearing to really stretch as the sound of the bowl fades, see if you can stay with it. Turning into your sense of hearing and really be present with the bowls. 

And then from there I would begin to very gently make one bowl sing. And then I might move to the next, making another bowl sing so on but one bowl at a time at the early stages of this meditation. 

And then at about the 10 minute mark or so I will begin to play multiple bowls at the same time. 

So juggling the sounds of two different bowls. And it's important to note here as you do this that every time that you move to a new bowl, you want to use the second bowl as a bridge and what I mean is you never want to stop playing both bowls to start two new ones. 

So keep one bowl singing while you then transition to a second.  Strike it a couple times. Make it begin to sing and then the first bowl you can transition to another one and make that sing so there's always fluidity in the sound. 

Now depending on what a potential focus was, maybe it was the heart or maybe the sacral then you might want to spend more time on those bowls in this meditation. But if it's just a general crystal singing bowl then I invite you to just play them as you wish. Indeed the truest sense of holding space with the singing bowls is to allow your own mind to become quiet and still and relaxed. And so you can just be with the sensation of the bowls yourself and play them as you intuitively see fit. carrying people through for as long as you need. So if you have a 45 minute session in total then you might start to bring them out at about 37 minutes on the timer and bringing them out you might say something like this. (By the way, this is after you have stopped playing the bowls and let them all just wring out and become quiet. And once that silence is is achieved. Then simply saying:)

And coming on back into the mind and the body. Very, very, very, very slowly bringing awareness back by wiggling the fingers and the toes. Very slowly coming back into awareness of the room, my voice and whenever you're ready you gently open your eyes. 

And as you're doing so and you come back into full awareness of the room and consciousness. I invite you to take this moment to remember what you felt and experienced in this crystal singing bowl meditation here today. 

Knowing that the truth of that meditation is no less true now. 

In your fully awake state. Your subconscious experience in the meditation can become your conscious understanding as you've arrived on the other side of your meditation, so just bridge that gap

and then hear I'd give them maybe a minute or two to do this. And then I would finalize the meditation by saying a very warm thank you to all for coming. 

I've hope you've enjoyed and namaste to everybody. 

If you have any questions or if you would like to talk with me after the meditation, you're very welcome to otherwise be well everybody and hope to see you next time. 

So that's a rough guide to my crystal singing bowl meditation experiences. Obviously there's variations there and there's wiggle room but that is a general overarching guideline to how I hold my sessions and I think that's probably going to be a beneficial read for you as you're starting off on your own crystal or Tibetan singing bowl experiences. 
