Category: podcast

Leonie is an Australian author, entrepreneur, and business coach. an internationally best-selling author of the My Brilliant Year workbooks. I personally prefer to refer to her as a neurodivergent sweary rainbow unicorn business goddess. 

Join us as we explore themes such as mental health, self-care, embracing authenticity, and the power of vulnerability in personal and professional growth. Listening to Leonie’s story is a masterclass in prioritising your well-being, embracing your multi-passions, and overcoming societal conditioning to live your most authentic life.

Highlights of the episode include:

• Navigating Mental Health Challenges: Leonie shares her personal journey with mental health, offering practical strategies for self-care, managing neurodivergence, and seeking professional support when needed.
• Balancing Work and Life Priorities: Leonie shares the art of finding harmony between professional ambitions and personal values, addressing the importance of setting boundaries, avoiding burnout, and aligning your work with your core priorities.
• Embracing Authenticity and Vulnerability: The discussion centres on the power of authenticity in business, marketing, and personal growth, emphasising the healing and transformative nature of vulnerability and sharing one’s true voice with the world.
• Completing Creative Projects: Leonie shares her insights on the process of completing creative projects, discussing the personal growth that comes from finishing and sharing one’s work, and overcoming the barriers of self-doubt and imposter syndrome.
• Empowering Underrepresented Voices: Leonie shines a light on the unique challenges faced by underrepresented communities, such as women, people of colour, and the LGBTQIA+ community, and encourages listeners to challenge societal conditioning and embrace their authentic selves.

Can you listen to the episode on Spotify, Youtube, or Apple Podcast

You can find Leonie at at

• leoniedawson.com
• @leonie_dawson

In this episode, I interview Rachael Crow, a multifaceted guide exploring diverse healing modalities. She facilitates circles, workshops (including drum making) and healing sessions. From menarche to menopause, she creates sacred spaces honouring life’s transitions. Based in West Wales surrounded by nature, her multifaceted work helps others awaken to their authentic power.

We cover a wide range of topics centred around empowering women, embracing self-care, exploring spiritual practices, and finding healing through various modalities. We discussed the importance of cultural rituals, women’s circles, and reclaiming practices like drumming that have historically been taken away from women. We emphasise the need for continuous self-reflection when engaging in these practices. Rachael shares personal experiences with struggles like addiction, recovering from stage 4 cancer, and finding purpose through helping others. This conversation also focuses on the significance of energy management, self-care practices, and celebrating women’s achievements.

Highlight Points:

1. Embracing diversity and multifacetedness: Rachael encourages others to embrace and showcase their diverse skills and interests, reflecting her own journey of self-discovery and exploration of various healing modalities.
2. Prioritising energy management and self-care for women: Both Rachael and Sophie stress the importance of women prioritising their energy levels and engaging in self-care practices to align their work with their passions and well-being.
3. The power of women’s circles and cultural rituals: we discuss the transformative impact of women’s circles and the need to reclaim cultural rituals surrounding significant life events like motherhood, menopause, and childbirth, which can create a sense of belonging and empowerment for women.
4. Drumming as a healing and empowering practice: Rachael shares her experiences of how drumming has helped women rediscover their power and confidence, while Sophie explains how drumming as a safer alternative to psychedelics for achieving heightened states of consciousness and interrupting negative thought patterns.
5. Exploring alternative healing modalities: we touch on various techniques for achieving heightened states of mind, and reflect on exploring different paths to healing and personal growth.

Can you listen to the episode on Spotify, Youtube, or Apple Podcast

You can find Rachael at

• rachaelcrow.co.uk
• @rachael__crow

In this Episode I interview Melonie Syrett. Melonie, known as The Drum Woman, creates commissioned and channelled drums, leads drum circles and conventions, holds drum birthing workshops and retreats, teaches facilitator training, and guides drum-based sacred site expeditions. 

In this episode, we explore the transformative power of drumming for empowerment and self-expression, particularly for women. Melonie shares her inspirational journey from teaching to professional drum-making and facilitating. We delve into Melonie’s perspectives on drum circles as judgment-free spaces for presence, community, and personal growth. 

Melonie, known as The drum woman, was called to drumming in 2012. Though she didn’t realise it then, the drums came into her life to create positive change for herself and others. She left her career as a primary school teacher in 2017 to fully embrace the path of drumming she felt drawn to. Now Melonie creates commissioned and channelled drums, leads drum circles and conventions, holds drum birthing workshops and retreats, teaches facilitator training, and guides drum-based sacred site expeditions. 

We have a wide-ranging conversation about the significance of drumming, especially for female empowerment and self-expression. We discuss Melonie’s journey from teaching to becoming a full-time drum maker, facilitator and organiser of drumming events. The challenges of career transitions were explored, as well as the importance of balancing work with menstrual cycles. They talked about Melonie’s experiences organising a major women’s drumming convention and her plans for more events. The transformative power of drum circles was emphasised as a space for judgement-free self-expression and personal growth.

Highlights Include

• Melonie share her journey from teaching to professional drumming, making her own drums, and organising drumming events.
• We discuss the challenges faced when transitioning from teaching careers to new opportunities.
• Melonie finds scheduling work around her menstrual cycle improves productivity and wellbeing.
• How organising a 150-person women’s drumming convention was daunting financially but created an incredible community spirit.
• How drum circles offer a powerful space for self-expression, presence, and personal transformation.

Can you listen to the episode on Spotify, Youtube, or Apple Podcast

You can find Melonie at

• • Thedrumwoman.com
  • @thedrumwoman

In this episode, I interview Hollie Hope. Hollie is a mother, grandmother and an integrative healing arts practitioner, intuitive oracle and master of sacred sound. She has been supporting the community for the last 17 years through releasing traumas and distortions we hold with ourselves and teaching others how to open and activate their spiritual gifts and embracing their own feminine sensual embodiment.

Through techniques cultivated through healing her own lifetime of trauma and abuse she offers wisdom how to incorporate sacred sound when healing the mind, the physical body and the emotional body to assist in activating the most potent parts of our own uniqueness and our own master healer within ourselves. 

In this episode, we explore Hollie’s journey into drumming as a sacred healing practice and its scientifically-backed benefits for stress relief, empowerment, emotional release, and trauma recovery, especially among women.

Highlights include:

• Hollie’s journey into drumming after being invited to join a Native American drum circle. Despite initial hesitation, she experienced an emotional and physical connection to drumming.
• How drumming became a self-healing tool for Hollie during a difficult time, helping her manage emotions and find stability. She evolved from personal use to teaching and making drums for others.
• How drumming ceremonies facilitate healing, self-connection and emotional release for women by reopening dormant or stagnant parts.
• Stories of using drum ceremonies to help two women release negative emotions/experiences and regain control and empowerment.
• Research on drumming’s benefits for trauma therapy by allowing expression of emotions and trauma release.
• How drumming can release trauma stored in the body’s cells. 
• How drumming can induce relaxing alpha brain waves to counter excessive stress-induced beta waves in modern life.
• How drumming aids meditation, stress relief, emotional regulation, and self-expression by connecting the body and mind.
• Hollie’s new book, The Sacred Healing Drum

Can you listen to the episode on Spotify, Youtube, or Apple Podcast

You can find Hollie at

• • Holliehope.com
  • @hollie.hope

In this show, I interview pioneers in women’s health and personal development about ground-breaking concepts that help women reclaim lost knowledge and inner wisdom.

By bridging insights from ancient traditions and modern research, we’ll question stale cultural narratives and midwife a new paradigm around birth, life transitions, and women’s autonomy. Join me as we delve into stories and studies that empower women to reconnect with their inner voice.

In this episode, I interview Laura Leongomez, a priestess-witch, mother, and doula. Laura is a workshop facilitator and trainer; a writer, artist, massage and song therapist from Colombia living and working in Pembrokeshire. We discuss Trance as our birthright, exploring altered states of consciousness during birth and other rites of passage.

Highlights of this episode include:

• What is Trance. Trance in daily life and as a bridge between our individual self and the universe or spirit world.
• The fear of trance in the modern world, including the historical punishment for being “crazy,” “weird,” or “powerful,” which has led to a widely-held fear of these states in modern society.
• The fear our society has of the potential power of uninterrupted birth and the trance that is meant to occur during birth, and how this often leads to unnecessary interference. 
• Community-Led Trance Work and Holistic Healing, including singing, dancing and drumming
• Laura’s experience of holistic practises in Colombia versus the UK, in particular her learning from indigenous midwives in Colombia

Can you listen to the episode on Spotify, Youtube, or Apple Podcast

You can find Laura on Instagram at

• @whiteowltherapies 
• @dark.madre

In this show, I interview pioneers in women’s health and personal development about ground-breaking concepts that help women reclaim lost knowledge and inner wisdom.

By bridging insights from ancient traditions and modern research, we’ll question stale cultural narratives and midwife a new paradigm around birth, life transitions, and women’s autonomy. Join me as we delve into stories and studies that empower women to reconnect with their inner voice.

In the third episode of the Wisdom Messenger Podcast, I am interviewed by Bridget Supple from the International Journal of Birth and Parent education about the article I published in the journal about drumming and birth. 

Highlights of this episode include:

• Complementary therapies for birth and the myth of evidenced based maternity care

• What brought me to postpartum care and to drumming

• The benefits of drumming during pregnancy and birth

• How maternity care interrupts the birth trance

• My most memorable experience using drumming during birth

• How drumming can help in the current state of maternity care

Here’s a summary of the article published in the International Journal of Birth and Parent Education:

Drumming has historically been used by women in feminine-centered religions and rituals surrounding major life events like birth. However, these practices were suppressed and disconnected from women with the rise of patriarchal societies. Reintegrating drumming traditions into pregnancy, birth, and the postpartum can help restore a sense of the sacred and empowerment for women.

Research shows that drumming induces measurable changes in brain waves, hormones, and physiology. Benefits include relaxation, pain relief, reduced anxiety/stress, and altered states of consciousness. For birth specifically, drumming can provide a sense of focus, community, intuition, and trust in the process.

During pregnancy, drumming can reduce anxiety, promote calm and focus, foster community and intuition, and support late-term coping. For labour and birth, key benefits are relaxation, pain relief through endorphins and trance states, separation from normal consciousness, and empowerment during challenges. Postpartum drumming can support emotional, physical, spiritual wellbeing and healing through rituals.

The type of drumming that is most helpful follows an intuitive rhythm rather than a set tempo. Drumming can be incorporated throughout pregnancy, birth, and postpartum or just in specific stages based on the mother’s needs. This can include sound baths, drum journeys for guidance, and focused drum healing.

In conclusion, while understudied, cross-cultural accounts and women’s experiences highlight drumming’s value in bringing calm, empowerment, and intuition to pregnancy and birth. Reintegrating this ancestral practice can support restoring the sacredness and women’s inner wisdom and autonomy in the transition to motherhood.

You can find the article Drumming for birth: Why drumming is a powerful support tool for pregnancy and birth at https://ijbpe.com/

Or message me for a PDF copy of the article.

If you enjoy the article you can subscribe to the journal for only £10 a year this October 2023 (£25 a year normally), and access the entire 10 years database of past articles too.

You can listen/watch to this episode of the podcast on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcast.

You can find me on this website, and on Instagram

• staging.sophiemessager.com/
• Instagram : @sophie_messager