The Secrets to Better Sleep with Philip Carr-Gomm
February 3, 2024
About Philip Carr-Gomm
Philip Carr-Gomm is an author and psychotherapist, trained in psychology, sophrology, and psychosynthesis psychotherapy. The founder of the Sophrology Institute, he works in the emerging field of psychedelic psychotherapy with the ACER Integration Community founded by Dr. Rosalind Watts. Philip runs a sleep clinic that offers online sleep therapy and is the author of more than 20 books, including Empower Your Life with Sophrology, Seek Teachings Everywhere, and The Prophecies. He lives in Sussex, England.
Links & Resources
Website for Philip Carr-Gomm: www.PhilipCarr-Gomm.com
Follow Philip on Social Media: Instagram, Facebook, & YouTube.
Books Mentioned in this Episode: The Gift of the Night, Seek Teachings Everywhere, The Prophecies.
Follow Along With The Episode Transcript
Dr. Lotte | Intro [00:00:00] Welcome to Dr. Lotte: Science with Soul, the podcast that transcends the boundaries between science and spirituality. I'm Dr. Lotte, your host, a Physician, Medical and Psychic Medium, Ancestral Healer, Keynote speaker and Award-Winning Author of Med School After Menopause The Journey of My Soul. This podcast finds its roots in my own extraordinary life experiences through my personal odyssey. I have discovered our profound connection within a divine tapestry of existence. I have traversed the realms of illness, healing and transformation, propelled by two Near-Death Out-of-Body Experiences that bestowed upon me the extraordinary gifts of clairvoyance, clairaudience, and clairsentience. Guided by this sacred calling I embraced the pursuit of medical school at the age of 54. Prepare to be uplifted, transformed, and awakened to create a path to healing your own life physically, emotionally and spiritually by bridging the gap between science and soul.
Dr. Lotte [00:01:20] Welcome back to Dr. Lotte Science with Soul. Today's guest is Philip Carr-Gomm and he is an author, a psychotherapist trained in psychology, sophrology, and psychosynthesis psychotherapy and lives in Sussex, England. The founder of the Sophrology Institute, he works in the emerging field of psychedelic psychotherapy with the ACER Integration Community founded by Dr. Rosalind Watts. Philip runs a sleep clinic that offers online sleep therapy and is the author of more than 20 books, including Empower Your Life With Sophrology, Seek Teachings Everywhere, and The Prophecies. For more information about Philip, please visit his website. PhilipCarr-Gomm.com. So welcome, Philip. It's such an honor to have you as a guest today.
Philip Carr-Gomm [00:02:18] Hi! It's a pleasure to be here, Lotte
Dr. Lotte [00:02:21] I can't wait, you have done so many things! And you're an author of more than 20 books, you've studied so many different subjects in psychotherapy and psychology, and you know about magic, you know about so many, many things. But let's start by talking about your latest book, The Gift of the Night. Can you tell us what that is all about?
Philip Carr-Gomm [00:02:44] Yes! Well, okay. So, you know, my big interest has been how we can combine psychology and science with the spiritual, a spiritual understanding, a magical understanding of life. And um, I of the many things study one of the main features of that is, of course, an exploration of consciousness, this extraordinary phenomenon that we all experience. And my wife, when she was going through the menopause experience, really bad insomnia, really affected her sleep. And she told me later that I apparently wasn't very sympathetic, which which I was devastated. I thought it was being very sympathetic, but apparently I wasn't sympathetic enough. And and I then experienced insomnia myself. It was as if the gods said, "okay, let's let you try to see how you feel about it". So I had a period of insomnia and I discovered how horrible it is and how it makes you feel really bad. So I decided to really fix this problem and I started to explore what science said and what alternative approaches said, and so I trained in CBT, which is the main Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, which is the main, you know, medical approach and psychiatric approach to insomnia. And but I also had already studied Yoga Nidra, Mindfulness Meditation and so on. And so what I really decided to do was to combine an understanding of of sleep science, the techniques that they use with alternative approaches as well. So taking integrative approach. The thing about the science is that it's really well-established. There isn't a lot of dispute around it, as in many topics, you know, that people agree about, about the science of sleep. And cognitive behavioral therapy has a 70% success rate, which is really high for dealing with a particular problem, and yet, it has certain features in it which a lot of people don't like, which we might come to later. Now, alternative approaches also have many enthusiasts if you if you speak to somebody who's into Yoga Nidra or Hypnotherapy or Sophrology, which is another system that I've studied, they're really enthusiastic about it. It just doesn't have the science behind it because the science is very expensive, takes a lot of time. So they haven't been done. So I thought, why don't we take the best from both approaches and put them together as one? So that's what I've done. And I began an online sleep clinic, lots of people have been through the program it's available as an online program today as well, and it was really successful out of that the book grew, you know, and then the final kind of piece of the jigsaw in this particular approach that I take arose out of the last three years where I had been invited to work in psychedelic psychotherapy. Initially with a group of clients who had been on a clinical trial taking psilocybin for treatment resistant depression with tremendously positive effects, and I was in the team that helped them with the integration process and the therapy process afterwards. And there's a particular way of working in psychedelic therapy, which is very simple, which is is you apply this simple formula of Set, Setting and Medicine. The set is how you think and feel about things, very important in any endeavor really, setting is how you set the bedroom up you know, the body with the vitamins and then add the setting, and then you've got, well, what do you actually take? Now you can take medicine literally with sleeping pills, but, you know, it's really not good to use them long term problems with habituation and, you know, all sorts thing. So so you want to apply another approach, and so I identified 13 ways to get to sleep, and that's the step five in my six step program that I introduce in the book. 13 Different Ways to Get to Sleep, and the idea is you try them out and you'll find your favorite and work with that.
Dr. Lotte [00:06:57] Wow, that's wonderful. So can you tell us about any of those steps? Um, how to get to sleep?
Philip Carr-Gomm [00:07:06] How to get to sleep.
Dr. Lotte [00:07:07] People should probably read your book, but is there anything that you can share that that's an easy trick?
Philip Carr-Gomm [00:07:11] Yeah, absolutely! Well, you jump right in, because it in fact, I say in that chapter, step five, which is choose your medicine. I say, you know, here's the juicy bit, like, how do I actually get to sleep? You know, if you if you jumped here, please go back and read the other the other four steps, because that'll prepare better prepare the ground. But assuming that you've prepared the ground and you know, you're getting the right amount of vitamins and supplements and you're you know, you've got the right kind of bedroom and you've calculated the best bedtime and the routine, you've got to establish all those kind of things and how you actually going to nod off. So you've got a relaxed mind, you know, and a and a calm mind and a relaxed body. You're ready to go. Well, I'll give you a few, but will you ask me for one? I'll give you one! Laughter. Okay. Which is Sophrology, which is a system developed by a Colombian neuropsychiatrist 60 years ago, he died a few years ago now. Hugely successful in the French speaking world. It's never really spread, you know, there are books I've written a book about it in English, and I'm lucky because I speak and read French so I could study it. You can study it in English, and but it's never really crossed the language barrier. But if you go if you go to France, any little town in France will have the Sophrologist and you'll be sitting around the kitchen table and you'll say, you know, "My my daughter's taking her driving tests and she's really anxious about that. Oh, why don't you see Dominique? She's the Sophrologist in the town. Oh, yes. I'll go there!" You know, "My husband's having nightmares regularly. Oh, why don't you go and see Dominique?" you know, and so on. So Sophrology is is highly successful, and it's basically a method of kind of embodied mindfulness with breath, movement, affirmations, visualizations and so on, in a kind of sequenced format, that helps with this thing and it can help with going to sleep. And so I present that's one of the techniques I present in the book.
Dr. Lotte [00:09:12] So, but there is many different things with that Sophrology. So the visualization or, you know, doing different things that bring your physiological response to a more calming state. So do they do several different things or do they just pick one of them like a vision of a garden or floating on a cloud?
Philip Carr-Gomm [00:09:33] No, it's very it's very specific. It what what some this professor, Alfonso Caycedo, who developed Sophrology created was a very elegant system which which essentially uses tension and relaxation of the muscles and the all the exercises just last 10 minutes. So in our kind of fast paced society, that's great. Oh, thank heavens it's just 10 minutes is great. And it involves standing up and sitting down and you think, well, this is really strange. But but basically, put very simply, you stand up, you breathe in deeply. This is the kind of induction technique and you hold your breath and you tense, try to tense every muscle in the body as long as you can, and then you let it out to be release, relax and let go. Breath out there. You do that three times with your eyes closed and then you sit down. And what's happened is you've dropped from a sort of beta every day, normal waking consciousness, beta brainwave state, you drop into an alpha brainwave state, relaxed, much more relaxed. So you've done this little routine that's taken like 3 minutes, something like that of tension, release breathing, standing up. You sit down and you're calm, and then with this particular technique, you go into a visualization where you imagine it's the evening. And your brushing your teeth and getting into bed and you just see yourself going to sleep and having a and then you do a kind of speeded up film of yourself sleeping deeply and beautifully. You just take a few minutes of this and then senses of waking up in the morning all fresh like that. You're going to have an affirmation at the end of that, you come out of the exercise 10 minutes later. And you do this during the day, not in the evening, just do this a few times and I suggest people do it for a week, just 10 minutes, you know, and I mean, there's more to it than that. I'm giving you the whistle stop tour of it, you know. So you do this you do this 10 minutes a day, and what you're doing is you're programing your nervous system, this wonderful quality called neuroplasticity, you know, where our nervous systems actually grow. I mean, physically, literally, that's the amazing thing with neuroplasticity. So your nervous system gets kind of programed and there's this other pathway that you're laying down and you're laying it down in the alpha state, very relaxed state. So if you've been used to tossing and turning at night, not getting to sleep and worrying, and also what you're doing is you're laying a different pathway. So in the end, when you actually start to act out this fantasy or this visualization, that evening, you're going to act it out and so on. I mean, I managed to cure myself of a kind of swimming phobia that I had from falling in a pond when I was a little child, you know, with just doing this a few times, but visualizing swimming and loving it and enjoying it. And now I now I love swimming, I wish I had done it earlier when I was younger.
Dr. Lotte [00:12:29] I mean, it is pretty amazing because just by thinking or imagining a different state or being in a different state or doing something different, we create these new pathways. I mean, it's amazing.
Philip Carr-Gomm [00:12:42] It's amazing, isn't it? It's lovely. Yeah, it's lovely. Yeah.
Dr. Lotte [00:12:45] So what about if people wake up in the middle of the night? What if they. You know, sometimes your patients, they say "I sleep for hours. Then I wake up and I'm awake and I fall asleep, and it's getting light outside!" Right?
Philip Carr-Gomm [00:12:56] Yeah.
Dr. Lotte [00:12:57] And you tell them, try all these different supplements, blah, blah, blah. Right? But this is a much better solution because they don't have to, they can just retrain themselves.
Philip Carr-Gomm [00:13:06] They can retrain themselves and the thing about, you know, people with with that problem, which is called in sort of medical terms, they'd call it sleep maintenance, you know, disturbance or insomnia that you can't maintain a full life. The first thing for poor people to get is that this is there's nothing wrong with them. This isn't abnormal. But there's a lot of evidence now that we slept in two chunks of about 4 hours with a couple of hours in between. And the reason we think that is because if you put people down in caves with no cues as to daylight, they will tend to sleep in two chunks, about 2 hours apart for about 4 hours. And then people have gone through old medical records and, you know, historical records and so on. So there's a suggestion that this is actually from an evolutionary point of view, the way our ancestors used to sleep. So so if you accept the fact that, okay, then maybe I'm just kind of more in tune with my ancestral kind of, you know, wisdom than than you are, because you sleep for a whole night. You know, you get rid of all this kind of stigma and and worry around the fact there's something wrong with you. So this is just completely natural, normal. Then it becomes a life, a lifestyle. Questions like, can you arrange your life around this phenomenon? You know, and, and, and the various things that prevent people doing doing that. You know, one of them is, you know, because they have to get up really early to go to work. And, you know, that's an issue to look at. The other thing is we like to go to sleep with our partners, you know, and it's very possible there's been some interesting research that shows that people who are larks tend to hook up with people who are owls, you know, So the people who, you know, it's good for them to go to bed early, hook up with people who's good to go to bed late. And again, there may be an evolutionary reason for that, you know, because in childcare that makes a lot of sense, you're kind of covering more hours for childcare. But it means that often what will happen in a couple, is one of you will compromise, you know, because it's nice to go to bed together. You know, when you when you hook up with somebody. So it's a lifestyle adjustment to make if you suffer from, you know, maintenance, insomnia, as it's called. But then the question is, "Okay, I get it. That's that's great. But what do I do when I wake up at two in the morning? Four in the morning? What do I do?" Well, you've got the reason I've called the book The Gift of the Night is that people who have difficulty sleeping, it's very easy for them to see the night as a kind of enemy. It's like, "Oh, my God, I've got another night where I'm going to toss and turn and worry." And then when I worry, I start worrying about worry because I know the worry is good for me. So I worry about the fact that I'm worrying and single kind of double worrying and not sleeping, so so the night isn't your friend. So this the suggestion here right from the beginning of the book is turn this around and see the night as your friend and see this as a gift of of "me time". You know the way we're always going around saying I didn't have enough time for "me", I'm looking after the kids during the day, and there's my husband who so demanding and work and all that stuff. But actually 8 hours a day, every 24 hours were given this kind of retreat, retreat time, it's all yours, just you know, relax! Laughter. So so you treat it as a gift! So you say, "Okay, what am I going to do for these 2 hours?" And there's like a whole load of things you could do, you could you could make up a playlist of composers that you don't know, I did this when I suffered from my bout of insomnia. I never have time to listen to music when during the day. And I wanted to know of these composers that people told me about, you know, beautiful music and I'd never had a chance to listen to it. So I made up playlists of all this wonderful sacred music and Bach and John Tavener and all the rest of it and listen to it. And then meditation techniques it's like, "Oh, why don't I for the whole month, I'll kind of listen, to some kind of mantra meditation. Let me try that." And you know, Yoga Nidra or whatever. Or maybe you want to learn a language, or maybe you actually want to get up and write a bit of your book ,or do some housework, or whatever it is. You just accept that this is your body's natural flow, and and so that's that's, that's the idea behind it. You know, and that -
Dr. Lotte [00:17:18] Yeah, and people can take a class and learn more about this online?
Philip Carr-Gomm [00:17:22] Yeah, they can they can do two things, they can they can either um, they can, they can go online. I have a I have a online class called the "Sleep Clinic". And, and, and that's a series of and it's prerecorded, so so you just take it at your own pace and it's got 14 different recording audios on it and so on. It just takes you through and and people say they find it extremely helpful. Uh, and then there's also the book, The The Gift of the Night, which has just come out and of course on the audio record, on the audio or audio book version of The Gift to the Night, there's, there's a bunch of scripts. I give five scripts out of these 13 methods that I that I've identified. Five of them I read out in a very soporific voice, laughter, so that the audiobook acts as a kind of sleep aid as well, hopefully.
Dr. Lotte [00:18:17] Right! Laugher. That's great.
Philip Carr-Gomm [00:18:19] Yeah.
Dr. Lotte [00:18:19] You also talked about the, the importance of, you know, how your bedroom looks, can you just mention why that would be important?
Philip Carr-Gomm [00:18:27] Okay. Imagine, imagine you come round to, to visit me and I take you into our house and I say, "You know, Lotte, I've got a room dedicated to changing consciousness in this house. And you might say, Oh wow, that's like a whole room for changing consciousness. I said, Yeah, it's dedicated to that." And you wonder what it is, I'm going to show you some kind of temple or some sort of meditation room, and I open the door and it's the bedroom, because what do you do in a bedroom? You change consciousness, you lie there, and then you go into a very altered state of consciousness, and then you come back again, ideally. So so so that's so if you see the bedroom as your as your ashram, as your temple, as your retreat space, or however you want to term it, and you basically do what you know, what sleep science and doctors call sleep hygiene, which I think is a very unfortunate term. I mean, if you go to uni, if you go to a doctor and talk about your sleep, he'll teach you sleep hygiene, which immediately suggests that somehow you're being unhygienic in how you sleep, which I think is insulting, you know, and so I much prefer set and setting, talking about the setting, you know, what setting, what's your bedroom like? And you'd be amazed that the the settings I've had people in my my sleep clinic who will will say, "Well yeah you know I have um, you know my husband moved out so and I've got a double bed and so I've got some of the furniture from, you know, the move I've got, I've, you know, I've got a coffee table on the bed, but that's okay. I can fit on the other side of the bed. And I do have six, six cats who sleep with me, you know, but I don't sleep very well." I think this could encourage people to, you know, to treat make their bedroom a beautiful place where they change consciousness.
Dr. Lotte [00:20:13] Mmhmm. Yeah, I remember my dad when I was little, you know, especially when I had teenage years and you're trying to rebel as much as you can, and he was a physician. And so to encourage me to make my bed because I was in my rebellious state, he would always say, "Well, you know, when that bed is made, it's a lot more inviting to go to bed."
Philip Carr-Gomm [00:20:32] Absolutely.
Dr. Lotte [00:20:33] It's still you know, it's still with me today is like, no, you wake up, you make your bed, you make your bedroom look nice because you want it to be inviting at the end of the day.
Philip Carr-Gomm [00:20:42] Yeah, absolutely.
Dr. Lotte [00:20:43] I completely hear you, it's so important and I think people don't realize how important it is, you know, to you want to walk into the bedroom and feel like this is my sanctuary.
Philip Carr-Gomm [00:20:52] This is this is my sanctuary. This is where I'm going to go to sleep. And, you know, and then there are all sorts of like details around temperature and and, you know, ventilation. And it's amazing, for instance, men and women have different basal metabolic rates, you know, so they you know, men to men tend to feel hotter in bed than women. But then, you know, the menopause that might reverse and so on. And so, you know, there's a very simple solution to that around around just having two single duvets of different thicknesses that you put in the same duvet cover, you know? So that with each person, you know, whereas often in a couple's situation, it's amazing how many couples one person puts up with being too hot or too cold because of their partner, you know? Fix these things, you know, so it's just tells like that, you know.
Dr. Lotte [00:21:38] What about couples that have a partner that snores or that keep it so it keeps waking them up?
Philip Carr-Gomm [00:21:45] That's a huge yeah, that's a huge issue! They've they've done a survey and I've forgotten what it is, but it's something like it's I may have got the statistic wrong because I always forget stats, you know, but it's something like 20% of couples in America sleep apart because of snoring. And in fact one of the things, you know, if I if I do a workshop on on on sleep ah and and I go around the circle asking people for their story, you know, just talk to me about your sleep and what it's like and all that stuff. An you know, you'll do one round and the people who don't have a you know, some people say, "I don't have a problem", second round, when they've loosened up and heard everybody's stories, they'll say, "Well, actually, you know, my partner snores terribly. And I, you know, I wake up and I think about wandering into the spare room and I never know what to do". So it's huge. Luckily, there's a whole bunch of things you can do and, you know, I go into it in the in the book and I go into it in sleep clinic. There are lots of different resources that you can turn to, but very simply, you need to identify whether it's coming from a problem with the nose, the mouth, or the, you know, the throat, basically the tongue and throat, and then you kind of hone in on those and you apply, you know, what's been found and, you know, the devices that you can buy and the techniques you can use and so on. But they can be, you shouldn't you shouldn't have to put up with it. You know, you can you can fix it. And if you can't fix it, then you have you know, then I suggest, you know there's this interesting thing about, you know, you have this you have this discussion about, you know, whether you should sleep apart, maybe you should sleep apart, you know? But then what do you do about the intimacy? Because part of being in a couple is is that the intimacy and and, you know, do you make dates with each other for intimacy? Which some people find a wonderful turn on, you know, and other people find a complete turnoff because they can't switch themselves on on a monday night or whatever, you know, just like that, you know, so so it's a very interesting area. And one of the great things I love about sleep is is a friend of mine who's a doctor in Glasgow said that he had developed this acronym, which is Safe S.A.F.E., and he said he'd found with patients that a great way to begin a dialog with them or relate and start off with talking about sleep. Then you can get on to alcohol, then food, then exercise. If you go straight in with, you know, how much do you eat, you know, are you eating too much or you how much you drinking? People immediately throw up defenses, but starting off by talking about sleep because you know, how does your sleep and people's for some reason they find it easier to talk about the fact that they have problems around sleep and difficulties and that's a way in, a safe way in to start a discussion around health and in general. So so that's another reason I like this topic you know.
Dr. Lotte [00:24:34] Yeah, I mean, everybody sleeps. So it's a really important topic and so many people don't get good sleep. Right?
Philip Carr-Gomm [00:24:41] Yeah, about about a third and a third of the adult population, if not more, have to report sleep difficulties. Yeah.
Dr. Lotte [00:24:48] Now, I know you work a lot with magic, Druidry, how does all of that fit in to sleep and everything else that you do?
Philip Carr-Gomm [00:24:58] Ah! Exactly. Okay, well, I was I was incredibly lucky when I was 11 years old, my dad, we lived in London, my dad introduced me to the old chief Druid. He was a lovely guy who was like a kind of uncle figure, family friend in the household, and he ran a Druid Order, Druid group in London. They did ceremonies on Parliament Hill in London and so on, and I became absolutely fascinated by that and it was, you know, I grew up at a time, you know, the swinging sixties and into the seventies in London so it was, you know, London suddenly became technicolor. It was black and white until about 1960 and then they switched on the color and it was all wonderful. And then lots of gurus came over from India and there was a fascinating and I was fascinated by that as well. I was fascinated by Buddhism and the Maharishi and so on. But the idea that in Britain we had all these stone circles and magical sites and that there was this ancient pre-Christian spiritual tradition of the Druids just fascinated me, and I happened to know somebody. So from the age of 16, I started to train with him and I was initiated on Glastonbury tour when I was 18, and then in my thirties I was asked to lead a Druid group and I found myself traveling all over the world in the end, I mean, to the States a lot and Australia and New Zealand and so on. Teaching Druidry and you know, and we use guided meditations and I would notice a phenomenon which is sometimes people would say, "Wow, I fell asleep during your meditation, but I feel great now", you know or whatever. And, and, and I started to become interested in how the voice can be used to guide people into sleep and out of sleep by that. So because I was trained in psychology and psychotherapy as well that kind of my interest, you know, fed into that as well. And so and so I started to see how how can one use the voice and the techniques of meditation to actually help people to go to sleep? And so I recorded a CD do you remember those days in the past when people had CD's? Laughter And it's now available on Amazon and iTunes and it's called Sacred Nature. And, and, and in that I made a couple of tracks on Sleep, I did one called Healing Sleep, and another one called Drawing from the Well, which was a catnap recording. And after a few months, I looked on Amazon. You know, the way you do, you talk and you have to look at the reviews. And there was a lady on there saying, "I have used this recording 800 times and I've never got to the end of it. You know, I used to think I was an insomniac and I'm not anymore", you know. So I thought, wow, this is, you know, So this was another reason why I got into sleep therapy, because I thought, here, this is interesting. You know, I want to I want to do more of this. I want to help more people and and explore this in more detail.
Dr. Lotte [00:27:56] Right. So when you're when you're working as a Druid, what can you explain what a Druid is or what what I entails? What is that? Is that like a Shamanism or what is it?
Philip Carr-Gomm [00:28:08] Yeah! Okay, well, Druidry is is the way you describe it would be as an earth spirituality or nature spirituality. It's where you, you, it has three schools in it, three kind of streams of teaching to one, and they all kind of weave together. But there's a way in which that is three streams and one is, is the bardic school, that's where you start if you train in Druidry and we've we've developed a you know, we have an online trainer. Everything is taught online that wasn't including Druidry, you can you can go on to our website Druidry.org and it's in seven languages, you know, and we have trainings in it. Yes. So so so so but in, in this training you, you start off with the bardic school and it's all about storytelling. So it's it's this idea that psychologists and psychotherapists understand very much about the power of narrative in understanding your story and then the collective stories of your of your of where you live, the folklore and all the rest of it, you know, ancestral stories, stories of your family. All of these help you hugely to find your place in the world, you know, and and so you learn the art of Bardism, but it's also the kind of artistic expression, creativity, how does creativity flow through me and all that stuff. And then you move on to the more shamanic school, if you like, which is called the Ovates, which work with the power of trees and of plants, the healing energies of nature and the kind of elastic quality that time has, when you start to learn how to explore the other world and past and present and future all start to be a little less defined than you thought they were. And and you dive in and discover all sorts of wonders and so on. So that's the that see the Ovate work. And then, and then you come to the Druid work itself, which is philosophy and ritual, you know, conducting ceremonies and weddings and funerals and baby blessings and seasonal ceremonies and so on. So it's that kind of stuff.
Dr. Lotte [00:30:23] Fascinating! So you're talking about the nature Ovates work and how that works with nature. When you look at trees and and flowers or go to the woods, would you say that, you know, you resonate with the plants and the trees or that they're alive, that we have a connection with them, that they're not really separate from us? Or how do you look at that?
Philip Carr-Gomm [00:30:48] Absolutely. That's exactly it. I mean, you know, from a sort of psychological angle, more and more people nowadays are talking about connection and connectedness as a way of healing. Because what we've done is we've created a kind of world for many of us that's so disconnected from nature, you know? I have a friend who was renting a high rise apartment in London the other day, and I went to this kind of the listening glass and concrete tower in London. And, you know, we went out to a restaurant, we had a great time and all that stuff, but it was so unnatural. It was like living in the future in some way. But some people live like that all the time. And I kind of tend to forget that because I live in a lovely garden surrounded by trees, you know, in the country. And so I forget this, but but a lot of us live in this disconnected world. And part of the healing I think, that we need to go through individually and collectively is is weaving ourselves back into the fabric of nature and realizing there isn't a separation. And so what Druidry does is it helps us to feel connected to the earth and the trees and the plants, the sky that we're all there. We're all in this together, you know. And yeah, that's one of the main aims of Druidry, you know, which is why it's seeing such a huge revival. It's amazing the amount of people involved in it now.
Dr. Lotte [00:32:11] Yeah. So for people who are listening and would like to go and learn more about that and how do I connect to nature? Do you have any recommendations for those people what to do and how to how to begin that journey?
Philip Carr-Gomm [00:32:25] Well, of course I'm biased. I believe that the what we offer is this is the best way to do it! And I would suggest that people go to Druidry.org, which is Druid and then r y .org, and you'll see there's lots of information on that website. And you know, if you sort of browse around a little bit, if you like the feel of it, if you click on the join thing, you come to a page which has a little message, a little video message and, and, and, and, you know, and there's this training that we've developed over the last 35 years, which is kind of immersive and experiential and yeah, and it works with some films and some music and meditation and teachings and so on. It takes you by the hand, you know, and suggests ways of working so that you gradually develop your creativity and your, you know, deepening sense of connection with nature and so on.
Dr. Lotte [00:33:19] Yeah. And you talk there about the importance of the storytelling and and sharing and the ancestral stories. So the way in our modern world, we have this illusion that we're separate from everybody else or our ancestors until you start working with it and then you realize how much the ancestors have an influence on who we are and what we do. So how do you what do you see in Druidry? How can that help people? Or is it more sharing what the ancestors did or their stories, what what they did wrong, what they did right? And how does that then influence the people today? Why is it important for them to know about the ancestors?
Philip Carr-Gomm [00:34:04] Yeah, absolutely and of course we're coming up to this time of Samhain, you know, Halloween, the time of the ancestors towards the end of October. And in Druidry we have we have these eight festivals, you know, the solstices, the equinoxes and the festivals in between. And we're coming up to this time where we think of the ancestors and we connect with them and so on, people we love who've passed on to the other world and so on. So, so the, the, the, the we when, when, when we go into the Ovate school we work specifically with the ancestors, and we do that every personal way by by encouraging people to explore their family tree in the classic thing that we do with ancestry dot com and so on, exploring your ancestry but but but but always bearing in mind that there's a beautiful concept in Druidry which is the milk-line as well as the bloodline. So rather than just thinking about your family, I mean there are some people who don't know who they're who they're that their ancestors are, you know, they're adopted or whatever. There are some people who don't like who their ancestors were. They had very difficult relationships with their parents and so on. And the reality is that there are people in our past and the past of our family who were very influential, who weren't genetically related to us. Often these can be spiritual teachers, they can be, you know, people who really nurtured us when we were young, you know. So this is of the milk-line, in in the Celtic world in the past, there were a lot of wet nurses, a lot of women who would, you know, feed babies and and so on. And so the milk, this is where the idea of the milk-line come. And so so we encourage-
Dr. Lotte [00:35:47] Milk-line, like milk, like baby milk, like nursing.
Philip Carr-Gomm [00:35:50] Like baby milk. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. The milk. Yeah.
Dr. Lotte [00:35:52] Interesting.
Philip Carr-Gomm [00:35:54] So so we encourage people to think of their milk-line. Like who the people who are really formative in your life and who nurtured you and kind of made you who you are today, you know? So you have not only genetic ancestors of bloodline and blood connection, but the milk-line as well. And and then you and then you this helps you in a number of ways, one to kind of fill out your story so you kind of understand more of who you are, where you've come from. Your your part in the bigger story of humanity and and at the same time, and it brings a kind of depth and color to your sense of identity. And it brings compassion, too, because you often discover that not all of your ancestors were that great. And and and and so we realized, you know, that you know, that we need to have compassion towards them, towards us, towards others. And and it's part of kind of becoming human, becoming more human, I think, you know, and and we developed a sense of community because you know, one of the great findings that, you know, psychology is coming round to now is that we've we've disconnected ourselves from nature. So we need to kind of rebuild that sense of connection, which was never broken, it was broken in our consciousness. It's all about nature. So it can't be broken, you know, so we just have to remember that. But then there's community as well. The other thing that's happened is we've got isolated from each other, and and how do you build community and part of building communities? Getting to know who you are and your ancestors and what your what your connections are, literally, you know. And then the third level of healing and connectedness comes to a connection to a sense of meaning or spirituality. Lots of studies show that that having a spiritual understanding is good for mental well-being. Having a spiritual perspective, I should say, is good for mental well-being because it gives your life some sense of purpose and meaning.
Dr. Lotte [00:38:00] Yeah, absolutely. It's the modern world, I think a lot of diseases also come from being disconnected, being disconnected from nature, being disconnected from any kind of support, whether it's family or friends, because people get so isolated. And then I feel like the body also falls apart with that, right. So important.
Philip Carr-Gomm [00:38:22] Yeah, absolutely.
Dr. Lotte [00:38:25] So of all the books that you've written, do you have a favorite or you have a couple of favorites?
Philip Carr-Gomm [00:38:32] Uh, um, I tried, I'm sorry. If you can hear my grandson teething, teething at the moment and I can hear him! Maybe you can't.
Dr. Lotte [00:38:39] It's not picking up on my end
Philip Carr-Gomm [00:38:43] Great. Okay. Okay. So, uh, favorite. Oh, that's that's really hard. I'm not sure, at the moment The Gift of the Night is my favorite because it's so kind of practical, and people who've read it, uh, say it has this immediate effect. So there's a great sort of heartwarming feeling that, you know, this little book can really help people and make a big shift in their lives. I'm I'm kind of fond of the novel. I've written one novel. All of my books are nonfiction, but I've written one work of fiction called The Prophecies, which, you know, took about five years to write. So, so I'm kind of very fond of that and the story in it. Yeah.
Dr. Lotte [00:39:24] And can you tell us a little bit what the book is about?
Philip Carr-Gomm [00:39:28] Uh, it's I was, I was I had written a book called A Book of English Magic with a coauthor and the launch of it in London the publisher said to me, "You know, we really like it, you should, we'd like you to work on some fiction. We think you could write fiction." And my initial kind of knee jerk reaction was, No, I can't write, I only write nonfiction. And then during the summer, you know, on holiday, I was thinking, Why did I say that? I mean, like, why not? And wouldn't that be fun? That would be kind of interesting to play with that. And then, of course, the question came, well, what are you going to write? If you're going to write fiction, what is it? And I was staying at the time in this extraordinary house that was in it almost felt like it was haunted, it was ancient, and it was very atmospheric. And a woman it was in the forest in Brittany, in France, and the woman who lived there was called the Druidess of Brocéliande, and she was a famous prophet and seer. And so I decided and I'm sleeping in her bedroom! You know, she had died in 1960 or something and it was you know, it was a bed and breakfast place in this I'm sleeping in in this four poster bed that was her bed. And I started to research her life and I asked the owner, you know, "Do you know anything about her life? Because it sounds so extraordinary." And he said, "I don't. But I know a man who does!" And he arranged for me to go and see a Count, Count, I forgot the name Cognac or something like that. And he drove me to his chateau. And and it was 11:00 in the morning and I remember the Count and Countess as handing me a glass of whiskey, and I tried to politely refuse, and they said, "No, no, no, drink it." So I drank it and he showed me around the chateau. And then I popped the question to him. I said, "Can you tell me about the Druidess as a Brazilian?" He then told me a story from her life that was so extraordinary I couldn't get it out of my head. I mean, I just had to write the book. I just it was, you know, it was just crying out to be told if I told you the story. Now, you know, if I told you this, you know, you would spoil it because it's like that's how the book-
Dr. Lotte [00:41:42] Well, I'm going to have to read it!
Philip Carr-Gomm [00:41:43] Yeah! Laughter. So that was the story. So it's actually based on the truth.
Dr. Lotte [00:41:48] Mm hmm.
Philip Carr-Gomm [00:41:49] And so it's a work of fiction, but it's a fictionalized story that has lots of true elements in it.
Dr. Lotte [00:41:58] Oh, that sounds very exciting. I can't wait to read that one. And then the other book Seek Teachings Everywhere. Can you tell us a little bit about that one?
Philip Carr-Gomm [00:42:08] Okay. Well, that's the thing about Druidry it sounds very when you first hear about it, you know, the Druid tradition. It sounds very specific, doesn't it? Sounds very particular. Oh, you know, that's the pre-Christian kind of magical tradition. You know, in the British Isles and in Brittany and Ireland, you know. But actually Druidry, as it's developed in the contemporary world, is is highly combinable. You know, there's that word I never know how to pronounce, miscible, m-i-s-c- miscible. It's like if you're making cocktails, vodka is a great base because it can you can fix anything with vodka, for instance. Mm hmm. So Druidry is a bit like the vodka, you can mix it with you can mix it with Wicca, you can mix it with Buddhism, Jainism, Christianity, you know, and it goes really well together. So so I over the last 30 years, I've written various essays and studies on Druidry and Christianity because a number of Christians are Druids as well. And, you know, and so I've written about that, and then I've studied the Jain tradition, which is kind of earlier than Buddhism and some people say earlier than Hinduism in India. Very interesting, dharmic religion. I've studied that for about 12 years and I've that combines very well with drudgery and I've studied Wicca as well. And so so the collections of essays that introduce this idea of combinations and, and then, and then there's a section on Druidry and Wicca, Druidry and Christianity, Druidry in Jainism and, you know, suggestions of how you might like to look at it works very well with Daoism as well, for instance. So that's that's the book.
Dr. Lotte [00:43:58] Another great one! Laughter. Going to have to read that one too! So I'm just going to work my way backwards. Laughter.
Philip Carr-Gomm [00:44:05] Laughter.
Dr. Lotte [00:44:05] I got to do the sleep one too! The Gift of the Night. It is just fascinating, especially as, you know, so many people have sleep issues.
Philip Carr-Gomm [00:44:13] Yeah! Exactly.
Dr. Lotte [00:44:14] It's such a common issue, the insomnia, can't go to sleep and they worry. So-
Philip Carr-Gomm [00:44:20] Well, I think, you know, the point is that, you know, we you know, there's basically sleep, nutrition and exercise of these kind of cornerstones that we need for a healthy physical body and mental, you know, life, mental well-being. And, you know, we've all had those stories about how doctors up until recently, you know, in their sort of years of medical training, would just get with like one hour on nutrition or one afternoon on training or something like that. You know, that's being fixed. people are people are really you can find a lot on nutrition now in relation to how exercise and a lot of exercise, you know, how it affects health, that third pillar, you know is less less developed and we need to develop that. So I like working with psychology, with psychotherapists, because if you're a psychotherapist, you know, one of the first questions you should ask your client in your initial exploratory discussions is, how's your sleep? Because there's this incredible relationship between mental well-being and sleep. And if there are some psychotherapists who will admit that they have never talked about their client sleep.
Dr. Lotte [00:45:26] Yeah.
Philip Carr-Gomm [00:45:27] Even if they've been working with them for years and you think, come on, you know, you need to look at that, because sometimes you can help somebody's mental health massively in two or three sessions if you get their sleep fixed.
Dr. Lotte [00:45:42] Yeah, absolutely. I'm right there every time. I mean, I'm a Naturopathic Physician are trained differently and we do get a lot of nutrition, but that there are some standard questions, right? And it's always what is your sleep like? What is your stress level like? And do you have a bowel movement every day? I mean, why make them go to the bathroom and sleep and reduce the stress, then we're, now we're on course to create healing.
Philip Carr-Gomm [00:46:08] Your on course to better health, yes.
Dr. Lotte [00:46:10] There such important they're cornerstones of your health. That's you know if you're not sleeping well, everything else is going to go out the window.
Philip Carr-Gomm [00:46:16] It's out of whack. Yeah absolutely.
Dr. Lotte [00:46:18] Yeah. So important. So do you have a, it's been such an honor to have you as a guest today, but I know we're going to have to wrap this up. Is there any last messages of advice that you would want to give the world? The world is such a messy place right now. Is there any advice that you can give to people that will help them create calm and peace in their own life?
Philip Carr-Gomm [00:46:43] Yeah, I would say I'm amazed that the amount of people who will experience sleep difficulties and of course we've talked about insomnia, but we haven't talked about the other kind of related ones, like the relationship between sleep and depressed sleep and obesity, you know, sleepwalking, sleep talking, you know, sleep phobia. There are lots of other things as well which which I deal with in the book, and it's amazing how many people are resigned and to their sleep difficulty, they will say, "Oh, I've you know, I've had insomnia for years now. There's nothing and I've tried everything. My husband snores. We've tried everything keeps me awake every night, but we've tried everything." You know? Well, I'd suggest would be you really can fix this, you or I should say you probably can fix this. The very high likelihood. You just have to take a little bit of effort to do it, but it would change your life. You'll feel so much better that it's really worth, you know, taking making the effort and and trying to fix it. Because you feel calmer and more peaceful for a start.
Dr. Lotte [00:47:45] Yeah. And again, can you let everybody know what your website is and how they can learn more about you and also how to find your books?
Philip Carr-Gomm [00:47:52] Okay, Sure. Yeah! So it's just my name and the advantage of my name is it's weird! And there's only one of me, which so that's really helpful. So. So my name is Phillip with one L and then Carr-Gomm, which is c-a double r, hyphen, g-o double m. So, so if you, if you, if you just Google me, you'll find me a Philip Carr-Gomm, you at my website is PhilipCarr-Gomm.com. It's Philip Carr-Gomm with that with a little dash dot com and you'll see all my books there, under courses you going to courses and you'll see the sleep clinic online and other courses in magic lessons in magic and so on and the Druidry stuff, you'll see it all there on PhilipCarr-Gomm.com. Yeah.
Dr. Lotte [00:48:33] Oh that's, that's great! And we'll make sure to put your website in the podcast notes as well so you can just go to the notes and click on the link and it will take you right to Philip's website. So it's been such an honor to have you as a guest today. So thank you so much for taking the time and sharing all your knowledge with the listeners.
Philip Carr-Gomm [00:48:50] It's it's a pleasure, Lotte. Thank you, well, thank you for inviting me. Yeah.
Dr. Lotte [00:48:56] As we conclude this episode, I want to express my heartfelt gratitude for your presence within our community. If you haven't yet, make sure to subscribe, leave a review and share this podcast with friends and family. Subscribe to my newsletter in the show notes and receive new podcast episodes delivered right to your inbox. If you resonate with the interconnectedness of mind, body and soul and are motivated to embark on a journey of personal healing, I invite you to connect with me at DrLotte.com. Together, we can pave a path towards transformative healing in your own life.