Ancient technology & modern science: the power of the shamanic drum (transcript)

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Episode Transcript:

Lian (00:00)

Could an ancient drumbeat really change the way we live, birth and heal today? Hello my beautiful souls, a huge one welcome back. This week's episode is with Sophie Messenger. Sophie bridges worlds that rarely meet. Once a reproductive physiologist with a PhD, she left the lab after experiencing the power of an empowered birth. Over the last decade, she has walked the path of doula, educator and author of why post-natal recovery matters, deepening into the rhythms that shape women's transitions. But first, it's time for your weekly omen from the algorithmic oracles. In Greek mythology, those who forgot to subscribe were doomed to wander the underground of irrelevant content. Best subscribe if you haven't already.

In this episode, Sophie and I explore the ancient immediate power of the drum.

How it once belonged to priestesses and women of the land, how it was silenced by culture and religion, and how it is now returning as medicine for body, mind and birth. Together we trace the threads of history and lived experience, revealing why rhythm has always been a companion in times of transformation. Sophie shares her journey from scientist to drum woman and the moment hearing a single drum beat changed the course of her life.

We explore what happens when women collectively reclaim the drum. The nervous system shifts, the mind quiets and a deeper wisdom becomes audible.

At its heart, this is a conversation about remembering. Rhythm is medicine, voice is courage and community is the ground of healing. And before we jump into all of that good stuff, if you're struggling with the challenges of walking your soul path in this crazy modern world, and with benefit from guidance, kinship and support, then join our Academy of the Soul, UNIO. You can find out more by hopping over to BeMythical.com/unio or click the link in the description. And now back to this week's episode, let's dive in.

Lian (02:13)

Hello, Sophie, warm welcome to the show.

Sophie Messager (02:17)

Hi Lian thank you, I'm delighted to be here.

Lian (02:20)

Well, I am thrilled to get into all of the things that I know your work and your book is about.

I just literally glimpsed at the list of this cornucopia of goodness that your work's about. And I was like, these are things that I am so passionate about, so interested in. And I'd love to just start there.

What is the origin story that took you to this being your work, which as we were talking about before we started recording, it's not very average. We were talking about how, you know, often those of us who find ourselves doing these kind of weird and wonderful jobs are like, it's so interesting that I ended up doing this when I look back in my childhood and I can see there was something way back then that almost foretold this, so I'd love to know what that's for you.

Sophie Messager (03:17)

So I'm going to go towards a particular moment and then I'll go both backwards and forward from there. So 12, 13 years ago, 2014, I'm in my first year as a doula after I spent 20 years being a research scientist. And I go to a retreat and the retreat, I just go to hang out with the doulas. You know, I'm really new to this and wet behind the ears. I'm excited to hang out with doulas. But in this retreat, there's a workshop.

Lian (03:23)

Yeah, best kind of story.

Sophie Messager (03:46)

⁓ called Shamanism for Doula's and somebody brings a drum and they said I'm gonna do a drum journey and I'm thinking what's that bullshit? I'm thinking that's not gonna work you know I'm like full of skeptic like it's like so like no I don't believe in it and then we do the drum journey

and I have such mind-blowing visions that I can still see them today in my head, do you see what I mean And I walk out of there going, I want a drum. And then I go on holiday back to France where my parents live, I'm French. And I tell my mom I want a drum and my mom said, a few years ago when I went to Ireland, I bought this bodhrán would you like it?

Lian (04:20)

Mmm.

You

Sophie Messager (04:42)

I come home with this bodhrán and there's so many layers to that story. I come home with a bodhrán, and my brother is a professional musician, and at that time I don't know it, but I'm still constrained by the beliefs of like there's a right way to do things, which is something I see so much in my work of bringing women to the drum now. And my brother shows me YouTube videos on how to play the bodhrán, and the bodhrán, you're supposed to play it with this little stick that you're supposed to move.

Lian (04:55)

Mmm.

Sophie Messager (05:10)

your hand back and forth at speed and I can't do that. So I come back here with my drum and luckily I have a friend who's a shaman and I go and see him with my drum and I say, I can't play this drum, Peter, you know. And he said, well, Sophie, what do you want to do with this drum? Do you want to play in an Irish band? And I go, no, I want to do some shamanic drumming and he goes, then you don't need to learn to play it that way. I'm going to show you how to make a beater. And the rest is history.

And you know, this is just the defining moment that starts my journey in all the way to, know, having written a book about this very topic. And there's so many themes there for me of like giving people permission to do something, not necessarily how they think it should be done. So the main theme when I talk about women drumming, because

Lian (05:45)

you

Sophie Messager (06:09)

my work is mostly with women, so the book is about women, is that you don't need to do it right. So just a recent example, last week I'm busy signing this. So the book is being published by a publisher in Ireland. last week I went through a garage to have my car fixed and whilst waiting for them to fix the car, I started signing all the stickers that are gonna go inside the book. So I have the book, I have the stickers. that they're coffee table to sign my things and both the garage owner and his wife start saying that looks interesting and we have a conversation and the women said, I've tried drumming once but I wasn't very good. And I said yeah but that's not what I'm talking about here. This is not drumming to a rhythm with a djembe, this is drumming intuitively.

Lian (06:49)

Mmm.

Sophie Messager (06:58)

with your Shamanic drum, which requires very little technical skills and really encouraging women to be basically feeling like they can. And so I'm really grateful I had that experience at the beginning. And then to backtrack a little bit, there's this thing that, you know, what I share in the chapter about my story in my book, which is there's always been a part of me that was feeling that there was something bigger.

Lian (07:13)

Hmm.

Sophie Messager (07:28)

So again to backtrack as how I was constricted by society is I was raised as a Catholic in French with a very, very constricted version of spirituality. One that made me feel like the God is some displeased, bearded guy in the sky that's waving his finger at me because I'm not doing what the priest says I should do. And so I broke from that in my early teens and then...

Lian (07:36)

Mm-hmm.

Mmm.

Sophie Messager (07:57)

the rest of where the drum has played a really, really significant role in my life is recreating a form of spirituality that is mine. And very much like what you're saying, you end up doing weird and wonderful things. I have a very rich spiritual life, but it doesn't fit under our name. doesn't fit under... see what I mean? It doesn't really belong to a set type of spirituality. Probably the closest thing it would be to some element of paganism, but that's not how I define my...

Lian (08:05)

Yeah.

Yes.

Sophie Messager (08:27)

myself.

Lian (08:28)

Yes. ⁓

I, ⁓ I love your story. Thank you so much for sharing. So I would love to start by asking you, what is it that culturally we don't know? And I think really the correct word there is we've forgotten about drumming. What is it there as a culture that we've forgotten about drumming?

Sophie Messager (08:48)

Mm-hmm.

So I would say there's two things. We've forgotten that women used to be drummers. And then we've forgotten that drumming changes your consciousness.

Lian (08:58)

Mm-hmm.

Mmm.

Sophie Messager (09:05)

And those things are linked. ⁓ So I started writing this book because I started drumming during births. I've spent 10 years working as a birth duola I no longer do that, but in that time I ended up drumming during labour and birth, including in a hospital. And what became very clear to me is that

Lian (09:08)

Yes, yes.

Sophie Messager (09:30)

we live in a culture. It's not spoken about, it's not conscious, but that is extremely fearful of trance. And I believe that childbirth is meant to be a really deep trance That was my experience and that's the experience of many of the women who supported. And the drum plays a really big role in helping bring that back in a system that actively prevents it. yeah, of entering that state. And I really believe that's because if people enter a trance-like state, they tend to...

Lian (09:37)

Mm, yes.

Hmm. Yes, puts everything in the way of being able to drop into even the lightest of chances. Yeah.

Sophie Messager (10:02)

question things and not do as they told. So, this doesn't happen. So, if you look at, for instance, the work of Layne Redmond, the late Layne Redmond who wrote a book called When the Women Were Drummers, and she did this big scholarly book about the history of, ancient history of women and drumming, you can see the plainest day because of very ancient carvings and ⁓ sculptures.

Lian (10:04)

Yes, yes. ⁓ They're taking their directives from somewhere else entirely.

Sophie Messager (10:29)

Basically in matriarchal society up to 5000 BC drumming was part of priestesses of the goddess work. They used to use it to achieve a state of transcendence. And that when patriarchy came along and land ownership and male priests and basically all of this power of tool were removed from the hands of women. And then you have more layers of that because you have that and then you have church going through the whole of Europe. spreading through the whole of Europe going, this is the work of the devil. Like literally I found quotes of texts that says

the drum was a sign of the devil's pomposity and they call it heathenism. There's this kind of moving, you know, from like land-based spirituality to this one unified constructed religious construct.

and they remove those things. And then when you've got basically colonialism, they ban the use of drumming, they ban people practicing religions, which are usually animist or Shamanistic And so the drum gets removed even more because you can't really practice drumming discreetly. That's what leads to the rise of the use of psychedelic plants instead.

So I've interviewed people from my book that say that the norm for humanity is to use percussion for altering consciousness.

Lian (11:48)

Yes.

Mm, for sure. Yes. And other means as well, but I think drumming being he and yeah. Mm. Mm.

Sophie Messager (11:57)

and

Yeah, so it's not an either or because I found conflicting opinions on the subject. Some people say that they feel it's only drumming. Some people say that they feel it's only plants. And I believe both. But certainly I've spoken to enough people who corroborated the fact that across many continents drumming was banned as part of like as you know, recently as the 60s and 70s in Mongolia by the Russian government saying that drumming was an attack on like modernity and

Lian (12:09)

Hmm.

Mmm.

Yes.

Hmm.

Sophie Messager (12:29)

and people were actually killed for practicing Shamanism or put in jail. Yeah, you know, it's not that that long ago that that stopped being the case.

Lian (12:29)

Mmm.

Yes.

So what I'm hearing in what you're sharing, and it might be that I haven't got this completely right, so feel free to, you, this isn't ⁓ actual, is there is perhaps differences in our historical use of the drum as women versus men, and versus perhaps using it communally in like mixed sex and mixed age groups.

Is that so? Is there a specific ways that women use the drum that is vital and important to know?

Sophie Messager (13:09)

Yes, yes, you need to look at really ancient history because it's been erased so long ago that unless you look at the work of ancient history you won't find it. But what there was is things like drumming to help induce labour things like drumming to help seeds grow, fertility and land-based stuff that would be.

Lian (13:23)

Mm.

Mmm.

Sophie Messager (13:39)

having been a women practice. know, like I said, priestesses of the goddess in matriarchal societies who'd have those roles of supporting women's cycles and land, fertility and that kind of things.

Lian (13:48)

Mm-hmm.

Hmm. It, um, and you obviously have the experience right at the coalface as it were in, uh, fertility and birth and things of this nature. It feels like that they're the places that perhaps we are most suffering the loss of the drum and the, all the understanding that goes with it. Um, so specifically.

And feel free, know that some of what you've been looking at is the science behind these things. What specifically do you see ⁓ is affected by using drumming in those parts of a woman's life?

Sophie Messager (14:41)

So it works on several levels.

The first level, if you look at the brain, is how drumming, as you know, shamanic style drumming at about four beats per second slows your brain waves down and puts you in a state that is a deeply meditative state where you can access your own knowing, where your brain gets out of the way, so to speak. So that's one aspect. And what I found, one of the things I talked

Lian (15:05)

Mmm.

Sophie Messager (15:11)

Quite a lot about in the book is there is a direct link between being in high brainwave state and stress anxiety. So I believe that in a culture today we spend far too much time in those high brainwaves. We should be spending more time in the middle range. And so the auditory entrainment that goes by the drumming, it helps people enter that state that would actually be people often struggle to do that.

Lian (15:19)

Mm-hmm.

Mm.

Sophie Messager (15:41)

because their mind is too busy. So it's like a fast track to meditation that ⁓ there's a guy called Jeff Strong in America who's both an ADHD drummer and a clinical researcher. And he's been doing things since the 1980s. used to do cassette tapes for autistic kids. And he has live recordings of people with like, know, helmets that measure their brainwaves.

Lian (15:43)

Mmm.

Sophie Messager (16:08)

and he gets them to meditate and then he adds the drumming and they go deeper. ⁓ What I keep hearing is people saying to me, I struggle to meditate with your drumming, it's really easy. Or people will say, I meditate but I go deeper with your drumming. So that's demonstrated by research. That's one aspect. And that means like less anxiety, tension, which is something that is quite common.

Lian (16:12)

Mmm.

Mmm.

Sophie Messager (16:34)

when you're pregnant or you're looking at conceiving or you're in labour, anxiety is quite a common issue. And so the other aspect is it's been demonstrated to increase the release of endorphins, which are your natural painkilling hormones, increase the release of basically a lot of feel-good hormones in the body. It's both affecting the brain and the body. ⁓

Lian (16:50)

Mmmmm

Mm-hmm.

Sophie Messager (17:03)

It basically calms the nervous system down. Because if you're about drumming from a polyvagal nervous system theory point of view, you can either be in a relaxed, open state, you can be in a tense, closed off, stress, running away or fighting, or even worse, collapsing. And the drumming really helps.

Lian (17:05)

Mmm.

Sophie Messager (17:32)

I think beyond what the research shows, I think we also have ancestral memory of knowing that drumming gatherings are something that is associated with feeling safe. But the research shows black and white, that it's affecting ⁓ the nervous system in a very positive way. And then beyond that, there's all those sort of community-based stuff that shows that beyond helping

Lian (17:38)

Hmm.

Yes.

Mmm.

Sophie Messager (18:00)

regulate people's blood pressure and heart rate. it also, you know, when people drum in a group, their brainwaves tend to synchronize. And one of my friends put it beautifully recently. She said she comes to my drum circle. She was going, it closes the tabs in my brain.

But too many tabs open. And I've noticed that people come to drum circles who are often feeling quite activated, like full of their day. And they're like here. And then they do the drumming and by the end they're ⁓ much more in their bodies. So the stories of women have drummed for our birth have told me things like when I picked up my drum, it gave them their power back. It removed the pain. It's sort of, suddenly it's like...

Lian (18:28)

Mmm.

Mmm.

Hmm.

Sophie Messager (18:51)

something to hold on to.

Lian (18:54)

Hmm.

Sophie Messager (18:54)

That made them able to manage the sensations of labour. ⁓ So that's applicable to everything else, you see what mean? Anything that you feel stressed about, you feel dysregulated, you feel you don't know where you're going. At its core, it's a way back in your own wisdom so that your too fast thinking brain can get out of the way and you can get into this space where suddenly you are

Lian (19:05)

Yes, yeah, it's

Sophie Messager (19:24)

clarity and calm.

Lian (19:29)

It's fascinating to me. Everything you're saying, it's, it's...

I'm having this like dual sensation going on where I'm like, there's part of me that's of course, of course this makes sense in terms of all my experience and understanding of drumming ⁓ already and then thinking about it through the lens of what you're talking about in labour. I'm like, yes, of course. And then also simultaneously having this sense of, my goodness, like the...

It feels like there's this vast chasm between how historically women laboured and birthed compared to where we are. it's, the drum feels like a kind of metaphor and a symbol for something so much greater, but it's more than that because I think there is something in that ⁓ reclamation of the drum in those particular moments that it feels so important, so powerful. There's so much.

As you're saying, the drum in itself is powerful, but it feels like it's a doorway into so much else, so much sovereignty, so much detaching from our modern ideas of the way that we should go through this process, in quote marks. And I'm having this moment of like, wow, yes, of course. So.

Interested practically speaking, if you're working with a woman in this way, what does that look like in terms of at what point would you start working with a woman? What would that look like once she goes into labour? I'm fascinated to know this. Again, it's just like, my God.

Sophie Messager (21:16)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I'm really delighted to talk about that because the one question I get asked all the time is what type of rhythm? And I said, there's no such thing. It's completely responsive and intuitive. So in the same way that when I was working as a doula without the drum, I would rock up in a woman's home when she was in early labour or not early labour, know, full blown labour. And the first thing I'd do would be just to fill the space and not say anything, not do anything, but just be and then respond from that place. It's exactly the same with the drum. So in pregnancy, I've used the drumming to give as part of relaxation and healing to women. I've used it to do journeys. I've done the same, in fact, in the context of conception.

because if you do a journey to the womb, it can be a journey to the womb for somebody who's already got a baby in there so she can connect with the baby. Or it can be a journey to the womb to connect with the energy of the womb and see what wisdom the womb has. So last year I ran an intuitive drum-heeling workshop and one of these women said when she went into her womb she was struggling to conceive. She saw the womb instead in the middle of her womb there was a fountain and instead of having beautiful spray of water I was just doing bloop, bloop, bloop.

You know? And it's very powerful stuff because you get that wisdom that nobody else can give you because no amount of... You know, at this heart there's this thing for me that's very much in my past, which is I really don't want to be the one giving people's advice. What I want to do is hold a space so they can get their own advice. But in modern world, a lot of women don't know how to go there. And with the drumming, for instance, some of the stories I've heard from... ⁓

Lian (22:40)

Mmm.

Hmm.

Sophie Messager (23:07)

women have interviewed for the book who they said once had done a drum draw there a few times they no longer needed it to connect with a baby. But again as I was writing this book I was thinking where did we get to a world where women think they need a machine to connect with a baby that's inside their belly? I was like this is crazy but often we don't know because we're not being shown that that's not how we've been raised that's not how society operates.

Lian (23:17)

Mmm.

Mmm.

Yes.

Sophie Messager (23:37)

So it's all like fish can't see water kind of stuff. So the drum is a really powerful way. the word, I love the fact that you use the word sovereignty because that's it. So in pregnancy would be also really love one of my favourite things. So the first book I've wrote was a book about postnatal recovery. It was published five years ago. It's been translated into four languages. I would basically do the

Lian (23:47)

Hmm.

Sophie Messager (24:06)

And he says this of a baby shower by offering mother blessing, which is a ceremony which you usually do in the third trimester, where you gather a group of friends of the pregnant woman. And everything that's in the ceremony is designed to give her support. It's not about the baby, it's about her. And so if people were up for it, I would always bring drumming to this process because...

Lian (24:24)

Hmm.

Sophie Messager (24:33)

it'd be really lovely to welcome the women in a circle where somebody was drumming. And then during the circle, sometimes it'd been just me drumming, but sometimes there's been a big group of us drumming for the woman. And often I find it's very significant, not just for the women, but for all the other women who are there, because there's a sense of we're meant to have that. Do you see what I mean? We're meant to have this practice and...

Lian (24:39)

Mmm.

Mm. Yes,

yes, we are. Mm.

Sophie Messager (25:00)

It's a remembering. number of time women have come to me saying, I've never been to something like that, but that felt so right. building the drumming into the pregnancy is also a way to make the women more familiar with it and possibly wanting to have that during labour. And then during labour itself, it's completely intuitive in both when I might drum and also how I might drum.

Lian (25:08)

Hmm.

Yes.

Mm-hmm.

Sophie Messager (25:27)

The first bus I drummed that, I didn't drum all the way through, it was a friend of mine at home, was a doula, she was a doula herself. And then when she started pushing my gut to me, she's up here, she's struggling. So I picked up my drum and started gently drumming in the corner. And afterwards she said, my God, why didn't you do that before? It was so helpful. And I said, you didn't need it before, know, labour was fast and...

powerful and I was like, I could see she was coping, she was making all the right noises and things, but then when she started to push, I could sense. It's more often the case of sensing that the energy is stuck and then the drumming will help with that. But also like I had a client who hired me to drum at her birth and we drums throughout the whole pregnancy and then we drum through a significant amount of her labour. But then when she started to push, I picked up my drum and she went, no.

Lian (26:03)

Hmm.

Yes.

Sophie Messager (26:21)

That taught me a really big lesson. It's a really useful lesson in like, yeah, you know, somebody can have hired you for that. And at certain point, it doesn't feel right. It's the same way that, you when I was supporting women with comfort measure during birth, sometimes I'd put a cold cloth on their forehead and then sometimes they wouldn't like it at certain point. And then when I'd put it on later, they would shake their head no, because often women can't speak, you know, when they're really...

Lian (26:27)

Mmm.

Yes.

Mmm.

Sophie Messager (26:50)

in established labour, they can't use their voice. then, and then I, and there's a story that really, you know, exemplify the sovereignty aspect is that I had a client who fought very hard to get a home birth. I had drummed for her during her pregnancy. So I drummed for her at home during labour at various points. But then during her labour, even though she fought to stay at home, she said, I need to go to the hospital.

Lian (26:53)

Yeah.

Sophie Messager (27:19)

and that was the right thing for her. So I took my drum and then when we got into the delivery unit of my local hospital, the obstetric unit, I started drumming. And afterwards she said, once we got into the hospital, I feel I had handed over my power to the system and when you started drumming, it gave it back.

So she said it was much more important. She said the drumming at her home, it's like it didn't really do much. It wasn't really needed because she was getting on with her labour. Until we went to the hospital and she was like, that was really, really powerful. And I've had women sharing that they left their body when they heard the drum to go and collect the consciousness of their baby. And in some women's case, who'd had traumatic labour before, they said that's...

Lian (27:41)

Yeah.

Sophie Messager (28:09)

prevented trauma because they were in a process so they could understand why this was happening beyond the physical space. The ex-Australian midwife, founder of the School of Shamanic Womancraft, Jane Hardwick Collins, who has written the foreword of the book, she shared that during one of her labour when somebody started to drum, it removed all the pain. She went into such an altered state, suddenly there was no pain when she was really struggling before.

Lian (28:13)

Mmm.

There's something really hit me when you shared the way that that woman just, it was kind of, there was something about you drumming in the hospital that was so profound. I felt that there was something visceral that moved in me when you shared that and I don't really have the words for it, but I can feel that this is something so vital for us to reclaim. And I had a question I was going to ask you that you've answered by sharing that story, which was like, is it possible to do that in a hospital setting? Is that welcome? Is that allowed? Are you getting told not to? What does that look like?

Sophie Messager (29:19)

So I teach an online course called Drumming for Birth, which is a, I taught it live a couple of years ago, now it's available as a course you can buy as a pre-recorded course. And the one thing I do warn people about is that it's likely to be received with not very well. I'm trying to say that.

So it's a paradoxical thing because on one hand I personally really feel that drumming stops the innate chatter. people are less likely to be interrupting the birth trance if somebody's drumming because they still got some kind of sacredness thing that's in people's consciousness even though they don't get it. But they are very likely to you know, to think you're completely nuts. What's this? A bit like when I was 13 years ago, you what's that bullshit?

Lian (29:54)

Mmm.

Hmm.

Yes.

Sophie Messager (30:13)

The first time I drummed in a hospital, I purposefully did not make eye contact with a midwife, but my friend who was sharing the care with another doula, she said, when you picked up your drum, you should have seen the midwife's face. What fascinates me is last year, so a couple of years ago, I was invited by a scientific journal called the International Journal of Birth and Parent Education to write an article about drumming for births. And then last year, they invited me to talk about it at their conference and I said, I'm not going to talk.

Lian (30:25)

Mmm.

Sophie Messager (30:42)

because if I talk, that's not going to teach them anything. I'm going to give a slide with the evidence and I'm just going to drum for 15 minutes. I'm going to take them through a drum journey. But it felt so uncomfortable because I... So I had to address the elephant in the room and I'm really grateful for another womancraft author called Bridget Supple who said to me, you need to name the elephant in the room.

Lian (30:51)

Okay.

Sophie Messager (31:05)

And so I did what she had suggested, which is started to talk by holding, purposefully took one of my weirdest looking drum, which is shaped like an egg. And I held this drum aloft and I pointed at it and I said, if I tell you this heart was a pain of childbirth, do you roll your eyes? And I said, people used to feel exactly the same about water birth 20 years ago. And now there's one in every UK hospital. But one of the conversation I've had with people I interview in my book is that,

Lian (31:28)

Mmm.

Sophie Messager (31:34)

even though the science has been there since the 1960s and some of the science I quote in the book is using real cutting-edge research, you know, stuff that uses MRI scans and 3D recording of brain waves, you know, it's not like some small old-fashioned science. But people still feel very skeptical because the way it looks. So if it, I often say that if it came out of a machine or

Lian (31:53)

Mmm.

Sophie Messager (32:03)

or a App people go, ooh, that's really interesting. But because it looks so esoteric, people are very much not wanting to believe, which is why I put so much science in the book, because I was like, because of my background as scientist and what I do now, I feel very much that I have a job to act as a bridge to help people have the experience. Because once people have had the experience, there's no going back. Yeah.

Lian (32:06)

Mm.

Yes.

Mmm.

Yes, sometimes people need the science in order to even open to the possibility of something. You know, that's kind of what we've been trained to do in this culture, actually. So your ability to work with that, I think, is a real asset. So as much as I find what we're talking about around birth absolutely fascinating, I want to now broaden out slightly. And I wonder...

What your sense is, if we were as women to reclaim our relationship with the drum more generally, which of course would include during pregnancy and birth, what do you see would change? What would that create? we collectively as women took up the drum again, what would that mean?

Sophie Messager (33:24)

It would mean that we'd been less overwhelmed, more in tune with our own wisdom, and less... We would break out of the constraint of our culture, which has taught us, subtly and not sometimes, not so subtly that we don't know what's right for us. So that's why the system has suppressed that so much. Do see what I mean?

Lian (33:44)

Hmm.

Sophie Messager (33:51)

And to some level that's why the system ridicules things. Jane Hardwick-Collings always say that when something in a woman's life is systematically ridiculed, it means it's always a sure sign that it's always great power. And just to share a story earlier this year, one of the things I discovered, there's a chapter about this in the book. When I was writing the book, I discovered that I could...

Lian (33:51)

Yes.

It has power.

Sophie Messager (34:19)

could use the drum in the same way as I use microdosing of plant medicine. So two years ago I was really struggling with my mental health and I started microdosing psilocybin. So microdosing is taking subperceptual doses of a psychedelic plant so that it doesn't cause you to have any vivid visions or change in your consciousness. ⁓ Well, not immediate, you see what I mean, but that.

Lian (34:23)

Mmm.

Mm-hmm.

Sophie Messager (34:46)

over time it allows you to become aware of unhelpful brain patterns and then you have an ability to rewire those and again it's not a figure of speech like this published research showing that psilocybin rewires your brains, creates new networks in your brain. And so I did that for a couple of years and then ⁓ in the process of writing this book about 18 months ago.

I started to decide that I was going to do drumming for five minutes a day and use the same process I use for the microdosing, which is a journaling and setting an intention for a cycle of four to six weeks. And then I started this and within two weeks, just like I had with the psilocybin, I had this very similar experience of becoming aware and helpful, full pattern that I'd never been aware of before. And it's so striking that I started writing about it and then

Lian (35:22)

Mmm.

Mmm.

Sophie Messager (35:44)

doing some research and going, okay, so in the book there's a chapter called, Beating the Shroom that compares psychedelics to drumming. And I went, talked about it at the convention of women drummer last year in November and I lost count of how many women came to me and say, I'm gonna do that thing that you talked about. And then this year I held us in about six months ago, over a course of a month, I held a group of women.

online and what we did is work together having an intention for the period we were working together and basically drumming for five minutes a day with intention, with journaling and it blew my mind. It was a small group of women, it was six women but I expected that if they went up a point or two in their scoring themselves out of 10 from the beginning to the start I would be quite impressed but they didn't score from one point or two point, went through a 50 to 80 % improvement in the course of four weeks. Of scoring themselves, they put intentions like, want to feel more present, I want to feel more in my heart, I want to feel less stressed, you know, like it was all about, like, that basically being in the present. And that's another thing I've also noticed with drumming, is that when you're drumming, because of the combination of the sound and the fact that you're actively beating something, so there's motor element as well, which is why it's more powerful to do drumming than to just listen to drumming, even though listening is really powerful of its own accord. You can't really think about something else.

Lian (37:19)

Mmm.

Yes.

Sophie Messager (37:30)

So what I say and that happens to me and what other people have told me over and over again happens to them too is this feeling that suddenly your brain gets a lot more quieter. Like if I compared it to if it's your brain before brimming it's like you know a bit like when you can't find a word and the more you search for it the more the word eludes you and you get very annoyed. see what I mean?

When you're trying to seek answers to something where you don't know where you're going, the more you seek from a sort of cortex, brain, high brainwave point of view, the more it eludes you. And then if you slow down into that space, you basically, drumming makes you being in a moment. From that space, you can feel a lot calmer, a lot more relaxed, a lot more grounded and able to access your own

Lian (38:09)

Mm-hmm.

Mmm.

Sophie Messager (38:27)

wisdom. So for me it has the power to change the very fabric of society.

Lian (38:28)

Hmm.

Yes, yes. I mean, ultimately, if something can change the mind, it ripples out to change the collective. That doesn't seem at all a far-fetched notion to me. It seems complete common sense.

Sophie Messager (38:46)

Yeah, and I also don't think it's a coincidence that so many women seem to be interested in making drums. Like it's going up and up up and up and up. And when my friend Melanie Syrett, who runs a business called drumwoman.com, decided two years ago to put up this women drumming convention, something that had never happened in the UK, she decided in April, ran out in November and was sold out with 150 women. And she sold out every year.

Lian (38:53)

Yes.

Wow, good thing there.

Sophie Messager (39:16)

is sold out again this year. So there's clearly

Lian (39:16)

It says a lot.

Sophie Messager (39:20)

an appetite for it. And that's what I'm seeing in the women who come to my drum circle is mixed gender, but there's a big, big majority of women, which again, I see when Melanie runs an event as open to both men and women, there's 80 % women in there. My drum circles, I seem to attract a lot of

Lian (39:22)

Mmm.

Sophie Messager (39:45)

people who've never done this before and they often say, I don't know why I'm here, but I just feel drawn to this.

Lian (39:51)

Yeah, my experience is the drum calls us when we're ready. It's, you know, the when the students ready, the teacher will appear when the beater is ready. Drum will appear is what I've noticed. I appreciate obviously your work and your passion has all been about the drum. But I'm curious whether you've seen anything about other ancient forms of

Sophie Messager (40:01)

Yeah.

Lian (40:20)

instruments, it doesn't seem quite the right word, but I'll use the word instruments, ⁓ that we've used in these ways. Like my own practice and experience has included the rattle. Currently I'm studying with a Mongolian shaman and they use the jaw harp. I wondered whether you've seen much about other, these ancient instruments that we've used in these ways.

Sophie Messager (40:45)

So yes, totally, from my point of view, percussion is percussion. And it's not just percussion because, you know, and yes, I totally get that you can do it with a rattle. And I'm very aware of the Mongolian shaman practices because one of the people I talk about in my book is a French woman who went to train with Mongolian shaman for nine years, and then she was the first person to publish research on that

in 2017. And I understand that people in Australia use the didgeridoo in similar ways. So I think there must be a whole host of instruments across the planet, some of which we don't even know about. And then you can make percussion noise with your mouth, you know, it's like, or even slapping your body. know, rhythm and movement is the key to regulation of the nervous system.

Lian (41:35)

Hmm.

Hmm.

Sophie Messager (41:44)

And percussion has this... My theory is that singing, drumming and dancing is part of how humanity, the world, since the world exists, I don't know if it's... But we know that drums are million years old, that it's one of the first instruments that was created, but this normal part of human behaviour, the same way that bees make honey, and not having it is not normal.

Lian (42:00)

Hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Sophie Messager (42:12)

And yet, with that is also comes the fact that there used to be a recognition that this healing and releasing of trauma in the context of making sound and rhythm and movement was always done in community. It wasn't done alone. ⁓ So I'm entirely sure that there must be other instruments.

Lian (42:26)

Mmm.

Sophie Messager (42:34)

found very few cultures that have not got drums apparently, but I suspect there might have been people who didn't have animals big enough to do that, but it's very unusual. According to Jeff Strong, it's less than 10 % of humanity that doesn't have a form of percussion. But I'm sure I haven't found all the instruments that exist because when I started looking at thinking, I wanted to list all the drums that existed, it proved an impossible task because there's so many different versions. And then cross-cultural.

Lian (42:39)

Mmm.

Hmm.

Sophie Messager (43:04)

exchange of new instruments being created all the time. For instance, fairly modern invention is a hand-panned drum. It's like two half-moon shapes that are stuck together and there's little grooves, little hollows for your finger and you tap it. It looks like a UFO. Does that ring a bell? Do you know what I'm talking about? Yeah, yeah. So that's fairly recent, has been invented in the last 20 years.

Lian (43:13)

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. Yes, I think so, yeah.

Sophie Messager (43:32)

So I think people are very creative and they always find ways of making sounds with various things and percussion will change your consciousness.

Lian (43:32)

Mm-hmm.

Mmm.

Wow. There's a quote I think the team will be choosing. ⁓ That brings us really beautifully ⁓ to a close. Before we do, is there anything else that you feel we haven't touched on that you feel is really important to include in this conversation?

Sophie Messager (43:49)

Yeah.

So I think I've touched upon it, but I'd like to mention that again, that if you feel drawn to drumming, do not get constricted by the idea that there's only a right way to do it. I encourage people who want to start drumming to do it intuitively. Of course, there's lots of different types of drumming. I use shamanic-style drumming, which is basically that's got lessing at the back to hold it and then you use a soft beater, like this. But this is like a very unusually shaped drum, usually it's a round thing. Yeah, it's a moon and it's got a matching beater.

Lian (44:42)

it certainly is. Beautiful.

Sophie Messager (44:47)

So usually, you know, they are frame drums that I use just with the hands and shamanic drumming traditionally was done just beating the drum at a certain speed, which is usually around three to four beats per minute.

but again intuitively. then frame drum, which is historically what women used to use in martial arts society, which is played with a finger with sort of different rhythms. And then obviously there's all those sort of djembe type, you know, drum that you hit with the hand that are bigger and that drumming is drumming. They all do the same similar things. You know, there's different ways to do it, but rhythm will entrain your brain.

Lian (45:18)

Mm-hmm.

Sophie Messager (45:30)

And so I encourage people to basically play. Get a shamanic drum because that's... Get a frame drum or a shamanic drum and a beater because that's technically the thing that's easiest to do. Because you don't need to learn to hit the drum with your hand the right way to produce a beautiful sound. It's just... Some of the stories I share in my book is that there's a lot of really beautiful projects around the world where they provide drumming.

Lian (45:43)

Mmm.

Sophie Messager (45:58)

or vulnerable population and that includes people for instance with dementia. And they find that it's easier to use frame drums and a beater because then people don't need to like have good motor control skills to be able to do it. But yeah, would really, if you've, my message would be if you feel drawn to the drum, just trust that and don't get put off by the idea that.

Lian (46:02)

Mm-hmm.

Hmm.

Sophie Messager (46:26)

you don't know how to do it right, like I was 13 years ago. ⁓ A few years ago, got a... There's a drum in Portugal called the adufé, which is still mostly played by women. So there's a few drums around the world today that are mostly played by women. I went hunting for that. And it's a square drum that's double skinned and it sings inside. And it's played both by hitting it with the hand.

Lian (46:41)

⁓ Mm-hmm.

Sophie Messager (46:52)

and also kind of jiggling it in the air and there's songs that goes with it. And when I got this drum, ⁓ my brother said, no, you're going to have to learn to play this thing properly. And I'm like, I'm going to do. Yeah, I could do that. I can just hit it with my hand. And by then it was really interesting to see how far it come. Because again, I've had people say to me, what you're doing is not music. And I'm like, define music.

Lian (47:13)

Hmm.

Mmm.

Sophie Messager (47:20)

What we have is this weird constriction in our culture that you can only do art or creative pursuits if you're good enough. If you're doing it because it makes you feel good, if you're doing it for your own pleasure. You know, it's beautiful that we have an analogy to cooking, people who cook in their kitchen and Michelin starts chef, but this is like saying you can only cook if you're a Michelin star chef. That's bollocks.

Lian (47:29)

Yeah.

Yes, that's such a great analogy. I was thinking back to my original shamanic training and drumming together, singing together, dancing together was so much of the training really was doing those things and not doing those things because that's kind of what professional shamans do.

But just because that is what we do as humans and it's a kind of.

It just like cooking is. It's just almost like a hygiene fact. It's just a normal thing to do. And you're quite right. We've, we've separated these things, drumming, dancing, singing into this category of it's only worth doing. It's only something we should do if we are experts. Hmm. Yes.

Sophie Messager (48:37)

And there's shame there. know, there's people don't dare because they think they can't possibly do it publicly. It took me quite some time to shake that. I spent many years having this restriction that I didn't quite understand where it was coming from. ⁓ in the book, there's a story I tell about this Benton story.

Lian (48:45)

Yeah.

Mm.

Mmm.

Sophie Messager (49:06)

painted stone from an artist, a UK artist called Jane Rose and it says she drums on it. And I started, I bought

Lian (49:14)

think I have something by that artist. I don't know what it is, I'm sure I have. I'll just check that out afterwards.

Sophie Messager (49:17)

Yeah. So I bought this stone almost like an object to bring what I wanted to have in my life. But at the time I bought the stone, I remember feeling like an imposter. I work a lot with, I love working with women around that imposter syndrome thing. And I ⁓ bought the stone to like symbolise where I wanted to go. But I remember having the stone and feeling like I shouldn't be having this stone because I'm not a drum woman. And then...

Lian (49:34)

Mm.

Sophie Messager (49:47)

When I turned 15 in 2020, because of the restriction of travel, I could not actually have the party I wanted to have. So I asked the community of women I'd started drumming with before the lockdown. I want to start my 50th birthday drumming in the woods and two women came with me and we've been drumming once a week for five years together.

Lian (50:07)

⁓ I love that.

Sophie Messager (50:09)

And when I was writing the book, looked at that stone and I was like, my God. So I wrote a part in the book about the stone saying, look at what's happened to me since I bought this stone.

Lian (50:18)

Mmm.

Sophie Messager (50:21)

So everybody who starts their journey, they're going to start there, or they're going to start somewhere where they don't feel competent and they're not sure they can. And I just say to women, just bang your drum. If it feels safer to do it private somewhere, quiet, and where nobody can hear you at the beginning, then do that. But a theme that I've certainly noticed massively, which is full of stories in the book, is that when women come to drumming, they often don't really do it. And then the more they

Lian (50:48)

Mmm.

Sophie Messager (50:50)

build up confidence with the drum, the more they also build up confidence with their voice.

Lian (50:55)

I just had this, like just the moment before you said that, was envisioning the power of that somatic expansion, both in terms of the body growing, but also the volume, of course, of the drum growing and how powerful that is. Yeah.

Sophie Messager (51:14)

Yeah. So when my book is launching in a couple of weeks, I'm also launching a series of conversations I've recorded over the last few weeks called Women Making Noise. And it's basically a group of nine women, includes Jane Hardwick-Collins, which includes Lucy Pearce from Women Craft, which includes a whole host of powerful women. And it's talking about the relationship we have with making noise and how did you experience that friction between

Lian (51:24)

Hmm.

Sophie Messager (51:44)

what we still carry in our consciousness, is when we women and we being loud and outspoken, was our ancestry, we were killed for that because of the burning of witches thing. And so we carry this and still in modern time, know, women are still described as hysterical and it's still there. You see what mean? That controlling women's voices, that you can't be a woman and basically be noisy because it's not seen as.

Lian (51:46)

Hmmmm

Yes.

Mmm.

Sophie Messager (52:14)

being a good girl, it's still there. So when we feel scared about picking up our drums, we carry the weight of our culture and the weight of our ancestry. That's why it's such an important reclaiming to undo.

Lian (52:15)

Yes, for sure.

Hmm.

Gosh, yes.

That's where we needed to finish this conversation. Perfect. Where can listeners find out more about you and of course your book and your wonderful work?

Sophie Messager (52:32)

Hehehehehe ⁓

Yeah.

So the easiest way to find out more about me is my website sophiemessager.com. I'm sure you'll put that in the show notes because people misspell my name because I'm French. So my Messager is not spelled like in English. It means messenger in French. I just spell it completely different. And then I'm on social media, I'm on Instagram.

Lian (52:50)

Of course, yes.

⁓ I wondered. And of course you are.

Sophie Messager (53:10)

Facebook, on LinkedIn, I'm on YouTube. I have a podcast called Wisdom Messenger, which is available on Spotify and Apple podcasts and YouTube. And then the book, and I have a whole host of like, I write prolifically, so I've got something like 250 blog posts on my website. And that's where I invite people to start with if they want to find out more about what I do and whether they resonate with what I do. Mostly now, my focus is to help women.

Lian (53:30)

Hmm.

Sophie Messager (53:39)

who are feeling too intellectual and like an imposter to harmonise their intellectual and their spiritual selves and basically go into their power. And then the is available to purchase from Women Craft Publishing. And thank you. It's a picture of drum I've made taken by a really beautiful, talented photographer friend of mine, Colette Tovog.

Lian (53:57)

The Beautiful cover.

Hmm.

Mmm.

Sophie Messager (54:07)

It's available to purchase where you buy your books. mean, it literally is coming out on the 19th of September, but it's available to purchase from the publisher. It was available to purchase ⁓ two and a bit months ago already. Yeah.

Lian (54:22)

Wonderful. Well, this has been such a pleasure. really have loved finding out so much more ⁓ about the drum and there's been so many moments where I've like just felt the truth of what you've been talking about. So thank you so much.

Sophie Messager (54:41)

Thank you so much for inviting me to talk about this.

Lian (54:44)

What a rich and wisdom-filled show. Here are my favourite parts. Women once held the drum as a sacred tool for fertility, labour and trance, and reclaiming it today restores what was lost. A steady beat has the power to shift our brainwaves, soften anxiety and transform how we meet pain and threshold moments. When we take up the drum together, we awaken sovereignty, courage, and a remembering of the wisdom that belongs to us all. If you'd like to hop on over to the show notes for the links, they're at bemythical.com slash podcast slash five one eight. And of course you'll find all the details about Sophie's very soon to be released book. And if you're struggling with the challenges of walking your soul path in this crazy modern world and with benefit from guidance, kinship and support, come join our Academy of the Soul, UNIO you can discover more by you're hoping to go over to be mythical.com slash unio or click the link in the description.

And if you don't want to miss out on next week's episode, head on over to your podcasting app or platform of choice, including YouTube and hit that subscribe or follow button. That way you'll get each episode delivered straight to your device, auto magically as soon as it's released. Thank you so much for listening. You've been wonderful. I'm sending you all my love. I'll catch you again next week and until then, go be mythical.

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