Protocols written by a doctor, repeatable by anyone

What the method actually is

Sound resonance therapy — the acoustic work, in which the bowls stand around the body — and vibro-acoustic therapy — the contact work, in which the bowl is placed on the body — have been developed since 2009 by Dr. Viktor Surikov, an anaesthesiologist and intensive care physician. Authorship of the method was registered in 2016. The parameters of the protocol, the note sequences and the structure of a session are protected by patent RU 2862944, granted in May 2026; an international application to extend that protection to other jurisdictions is currently in registration.

Myths and misconceptions

Questions that sooner or later occur to anyone interested in singing bowls. We have gathered the main ones below.

• Can bowls cure?Sound and vibration affect how a person feels, and the protocols are built on that. The method does not treat disease, does not replace the help of a licensed professional and is not offered instead of one.
• The bowls are forged by Tibetan monksThe name goes back to the 1970s and to the record shops of the West: the album Tibetan Bells by Henry Wolff and Nancy Hennings, 1972, put the word Tibetan next to the sound, and traders in Kathmandu picked the label up because it sold. The craft itself is Nepalese. The bowls were beaten in the Kathmandu Valley, largely by Newar metalworkers, and served for centuries as everyday and ritual vessels — in Nepali they are simply called bata, a bowl. Nepalese craftsmen did travel north: when the Nepalese princess Bhrikuti married the Tibetan king Songtsen Gampo in the seventh century, she took Buddhist images and Newar artisans with her, and Tibetan ritual metalwork was made in Nepal for centuries afterwards. What is not documented anywhere is a Tibetan tradition of playing these bowls, or of using them to treat anyone. That use is modern, and largely Western.
• The bowls are made of seven metalsSpectrometry on one of our acoustic bowls shows bell bronze: copper and tin, with everything else under 0.15%. The alloy is chosen for decay time. Symbolism has nothing to do with it.
• The illusion of “listening” water: how a beautiful fairy tale broke against the factsIn his day the Japanese researcher Masaru Emoto enchanted the world with an elegant hypothesis: he froze water after “saturating” it with blessings or curses. The results were startling — kind words gave rise to flawless symmetrical crystals, coarse ones to shapeless blots of ice. Emoto’s books became instant international bestsellers. What stayed off camera was a thoroughly subjective method: the author selected the samples personally, knowing the history of each one in advance, and published only those photographs that fitted his theory. When the celebrated illusionist and sceptic James Randi offered Emoto a million dollars to run the experiment in the presence of independent experts, he preferred to ignore the challenge. And the companion experiment with rice, supposedly rotting from insults, failed outright when it was repeated independently — the grain proved utterly indifferent to human speech.
• Seven notes correspond to seven chakrasIt is often written that each bowl corresponds to a particular chakra. It is the phrase you hear most often from bowl sellers. The workings of our nervous system, and of the body as a whole, are extremely complex. Reducing them to seven notes is like reducing the whole spectrum of colour to the seven of the rainbow. Science and medicine keep making new discoveries about how our body works, what is written in the code of our DNA, how the pineal gland functions, and much else. It is all far more complex — and far more interesting.