Sleep And Mysticism

Introduction and Guest Background 0:00

Hello and welcome. I am so delighted to be sharing with you today. Is this material inspiring? And we have such a wealth of resources and insights that we can not just understand and be inspired by, but apply to make our lives dramatically better. So I'm so glad you are here sharing these wonderful resources with me today, and I am delighted to introduce Philip Carr-Gomm Philip Carr-Gomm is the author of some 20 books and card decks, including The Druid Way and The Gift of the night. The subtitle of that book is A six step Program for Better Sleep.

He began studying jewelry in his teenage years and eventually became head of the Order of Bards of Eights and Druids. He has also trained as a teacher of yoga nidra and mindfulness meditation. His fascinated by the intersection of the worlds of psychology and spirituality. He finds that psychology reveals the many facets of our human consciousness. And when you add the insights of the perennial philosophy, the ancient traditions passed down through the ages, you enter an awe inspiring, transformational territory.

He livestreams a program called tea with a Druid. each week. So I'm so delighted to have you here. Thank you. Thank you. Dawson. I'm delighted to be with you. Yeah. So I've got to find out about your teenage interest in drudgery. And I'm interested because there is a little bit of research. There's more coming that shows that the teenage years are formative in terms of our spiritual growth. And many teenagers actually are having profound spiritual experiences, but have no way to relate them to the culture in which they find themselves.

So I'm really curious about that catalytic period in your life. Isn't it? Isn't that interesting? Yes, yes. Well, I mean, it started for me actually kind of around puberty, funnily enough, around when I was 11. I, I read a book called The Life of the Buddha, that was in the family home. And, and that it was like a light being switched on. It was like my life before then. I can't remember much. But from that moment, I remember reading The Life of the Buddha, and it was this very lyrical rendition of the Buddha's life.

And and it made the concept of the spiritual quest the most important thing. You read it and he thought, well, this is the most important quest that one could ever take. And from then on, that's been my passion. But my father also had a lot of friends who were psychoanalysts, who used to come to the house and so on, and he was very interested in Freud and so on. And so I became interested in psychology two around the same time. And at in the same year, when I was 11, I first met a friend of my dad's, Ross Nichols, who was a poet and a historian, and he was running a college in London.

And he happened to be, you know, a chief druid as well. And, and then from the age of about 16, I, I became intrigued by, by this idea of a kind of magical landscape in Britain.

Teenage Spiritual Awakening 3:34

You know, here we have loads of stone circles and, you know, fascinating spiritual sites and, and the idea that, my grandfather was friends with a chap called Alfred Watkins who came up with the concept of ley lines, you know, that connect up lines of power across the land. And, so that was sort of in the family, too. And so all these influences were there, and, and, and and they triggered this really strong interest. And so I, I became intrigued by the idea of drew a tree and I asked my, this friend Ross Nichols, if I could study with him.

And so I began studying with him from the age of 16. And, and I think you insight about, a about teenage years is, is interesting because we, we, you know, every so often were approached by people who young people who are having spiritual experiences in a very young and, we, we ask for permission from their parents to engage with them and, and, yeah. And some of them take our courses, our training courses that we do. Yeah. And it's just so powerful when you're coming to spirituality at that early age.

And many people, of course, circle back around. But after they've had children, had a career and then, of course, in Hinduism, there's the concept that between 55 and 17, somewhere around there, you finished your your external work. Now you're moving into a focus on internal life, and that's where you go next. But, I think that the, the, the ability to find a place for, the spiritual path early on in your life is such, such, a remarkable blessing. So I'm so glad you you started out that way. And then where did that take you from there?

Well, I you know, it was the time I was born, in 52. So, you know, in, in the late 60s, early 70s London and there was a haze of marijuana smoke everywhere, and, you know, so, so part of me was involved in that whole kind of flower power movement. That was the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, all the rest of it. So tremendous sort of energy there. And the psychedelic world as well with, with LSD and, you know, wonderful mystical experiences studying the work of, you know, Timothy Leary and, and Ram Dass, Richard Alpert at the time, but also the Druidry as well, you know, and my compatriots thought I was crazy hanging out with these elderly people who are interested in drudgery.

but but but I managed to sort of follow both tracks and, after a few years, by the time I was 18, 19, the, the a leader of the kind of, you know, smoking pot and taking psychedelics, it was it was time to finish that, you know, it was it was the some friends started to get caught up in the undertow of that kind of movement. And I moved on and decided to kind of really dedicate my life to spiritual practice and exploring states of consciousness and essentially how one could, you know, develop spiritually and attain these altered states without using any artificial substances.

And, and so, so then and then and then he was saying, oh, well, then what happened is then I followed the guru for a while, the Bulgarian guru, who was very charismatic and, you know, Ron Michael Ivanov. Oh, yeah. I read his books. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's right. So got very close with him, got completely caught up in that. And at a certain moment, I think, I think I was with him for seven years and. It kind of went wrong. My experience was it was no longer helpful. It was actually a hindrance. It was problematic. And, you know, I could talk for a long time, I suppose, about the whole, the whole business of, of gurus and, and movements like that.

for, for a number of years, I was very after this experience, I was very against gurus and the movements to build up around. Now I've come to a slightly more considered view, I think, where I say, you know, in certain interesting it certain instances, gurus can be very helpful to trigger stages in one's spiritual development, but one has to be terribly cautious. And there are all sorts of downsides. And it's as if I started for me, I needed to move on and move away from, from from being in that situation.

And I decided and that was the point. I decided to stay. I'd always wanted to study psychology, but I'd thrown myself so deeply into spirituality. I was kind of by that time and probably, 25, 27, something like that. I sort of didn't have time for the psychology, but when I started to see the shadow side, I suppose one would say of the, of this particular movement, I knew it was time to get serious and study psychology. So I took a degree at UCL, and then I was interested in union analysis. So I studied a training analysis.

I wanted to be a union psychoanalyst. and then at a certain stage, I sort of switched horses to psycho synthesis, which felt more in tune with the spirit of the times. A particular a kind of transpersonal psychology and psychotherapy. So I trained in psycho synthesis, and then, started practicing, it, you know, in my 30s, you know, it all took years, all this stuff, years of analysis, the years of the degree, years of training in psych senses. And then I started working privately with clients through my 30s and 40s onwards.

Yeah. And one of the things that you say in your book, The Gift of the night, in fact, you bolded this paragraph.

Psychology, Gurus, and Training 9:19

You talked about psychedelics as a way of opening our awareness to the fact that there are those elevated states. And, you mentioned how your in your personal quest, you realized it was time to set those aside and move to finding them endogenously, finding them within, finding them from your own experience, not looking for a stimulant to produce those experiences, but you're saying how incredibly useful that psychedelics can be to let people know who don't know, who've never had a quiet enough mind to experience those states of being that there is a there there, You know.

Yeah. That's great. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, they, they catapult you kind of into these, dimensions. And, you know, if you're not prepared, if you, if you, if you're not sufficiently prepared, can of course, be very dangerous. It can precipitate psychosis. And, and people, you know, see so hence the need for extreme caution and getting the set and the setting right, which was a concept that Leary and Alpert, really, you know, developed and, and, and which is still in use today. And I think for me, when I was working with, with the issue of sleep, a moment of sort of insight came to me when I realized that the, the model that we use in.

So in the last three years, I've been working, with psychedelic therapy in that field, which, there's this whole renaissance in the use of psychedelics to address various psychiatric issues like depression and so on. So I've been working in that field for a few years now, and, and a great stress is placed on certain settings. And for me, a kind of breakthrough in terms of working with clients who have sleep difficulties was in was was in realizing the very obvious in a way, in simple fact that, actually the sessions setting concept, applies beautifully to sleep too, because with psychedelic therapy, what you're doing is you're taking people who, in a normal state of consciousness and then, creating the right set and setting for them, looking after them so that they can go into an altered state and have a very unusual experience and then come back down safely and, and then integrate that into their daily lives and, and their consciousness.

And of course, that's happening every day with sleep. I mean, you know, we're in a very everyday state of consciousness. Let me go to a very weird place where we have strange dreams and, you know, so on. And then we come back down and then when we wake up in the morning, so, so, so that's, you know, at the heart of the sort of method I've developed for dealing with insomnia or sleep difficulties is taking that same model set and setting and medicine. You know, what? What are you going to take to get you to sleep, those three, ideas and applied them to sleep therapy?

Essentially. Yeah. The three steps. You have, the first three steps of your six steps in the book. And, also go ahead and just share with us what those, stages of sleep are. And, the brainwaves we have that are characteristic of each one and how these periods of intense dreaming can echo the altered states we find in psychedelic experiences and even mystical experiences. Yeah. Well, I guess most people will probably be familiar with the concept of sleep stages. You know, where we go through light sleep first of all, and then we drop down into deep sleep, which is really with the restorative sleep.

and then we have REM sleep. there are various other ways of dividing it where you have the stages one and two of light sleep, stages three and four, deeply, but essentially light sleep, deep sleep, and then REM sleep. Rapid eye movement sleep where you have most of the dreaming, most of the dreaming occurs. And then and then really, what's happening very simply is that in deep sleep, that's necessary for, laying down of memory and, and of, and for sort of physical restoration, cell regeneration.

And so it's very important to get that deep sleep. And then, and then you come up into REM sleep. And that's the kind of time of emotional processing. And, you know, a simple analogy really is, is, is, you know, if you take the amygdala, the sort of the, you know, the most primitive sort of brainstem system, that's what's functioning in, in, in deep sleep. And that's and and while that's happening, the office is being tied into and that nice sort of image, I think, is that during the day, masses of people have pieces of paper, are coming into our office, masses of bits of decisions that were making, people that were meeting experiences, were having data that's coming in that were absorbing and or rested.

The office closes in the evening and you know the person, you know, the boss goes home. and then in the back office, the secretary does the filing through the night book or secretary. and, and that's when the filing occurs. And you can even sometimes catch yourself, I don't know if you've ever had that experience where you, you sort of wake up and you find yourself filing. It's almost like you can feel as a memory that you're sort of, you know, a bit of something that happened during the day and it's kind of been put in a certain place.

I've, I've had those kind of experiences. but then in addition to all the pieces of information that have come into it. So in the morning, if it's work, if you had enough. Steve, Steve, there's a sense of refreshment and the office is clean and tidy to start another day. If you don't, have a few, if you have a few bad night's sleep, you get that kind of chaotic feeling. The office is in a mess and the papers haven't been cleared off the desk. And more papers are arriving, and you have that very uncomfortable feeling that can come from having poor sleep.

but then what happens when. When in a good night's sleep, the the paper has been cleared, and then you've got the next phase, which is all the emotional things that happened to you when you were cut up on the motorway, when your boss shouted at you, and so on. And you haven't processed that. And so what you do is that's why. And then it moves up into the limbic system. That's what's most activated during, during REM sleep. and you have these strange dreams where you punch the boss in the nose and, you know, you you experience all sorts of emotions that are often more intense than the kind of emotions you feel in waking life, you know, so, so this, this, this goes by the lovely name of sleep architecture, which I quite like.

So you have this sleep architecture in it, and it varies as you age, you know, so you get less deep sleep as you get older and so on. And then various things mess around with it, like sleeping pills. Mess with your architecture. Alcohol messes with the architecture. Cannabis does too, probably. And so on. is that what you were looking for? Is an. Answer? Yes. And the other, point you make in the book that say part of the book is that, there's this remarkable process in which our neurons literally separate and allow the cleaners to come in.

So once the secretaries and than the filing once the office is closed and is cluttered with all this paper, how do we take out the trash?

Psychedelics, Sleep, and Set and Setting 16:48

Just just walk through that process with us. It's so fascinating, isn't it? I remember when I learned about that, it was like, oh my God, how fabulous, how, how wonderful the body is now it's almost it's almost too much to believe. It's so amazing. But what happens in deep sleep is that the space between the neurons does. There's more space because that allows the cerebral spinal fluid to flush a block from the brain. And it's, let me see if I can remember that. The word for it, no, it's just slipped from my mind.

There's a particular which has been talked about quite recently in the news because they found that this is associated with Alzheimer's. Oh, but on a lot of people. That's right. Yeah. That's right. It's, you know, which is a kind of plaque that, you know, sticks kind of sticky stuff that kind of gets in the way. And this flushing system flushes it out incredibly. And then and then gradually the, you know, the brain changes and, you know, and the space is back to just just as you say, the office cleaners come in and they wash the floor, you know, and they clean the desk.

It's fabulous. And, you know, the exciting breakthrough drug now is the one that that seems to be able to help the brain to do that. And it's being held out as potentially a way of helping people suffering from Alzheimer's. So, yeah, all this stuff is going on. I think, you know, when we don't know about sleep, we think, well, you know, basically my life is divided into I've got this time when I'm awake. And then there's this time where I'm kind of out of action, you know, and some people carry this logic to its extreme and they say, well, I'm out of action.

I may as well have more time awake. I could be more productive. Why waste a third of my life being out of, you know, unconscious, effectively, like dead to the world. And so you get people who get into sleep hacking, really stupid and dangerous thing to do. You know, you might have to do it. If you're rowing across the Atlantic on your own, you might have to mess around with your your sleep. But sleep hacking, which is basically where you try to reduce the amount of sleep you have. And so you do, you know, you sleep for an hour and then you wake up and then two hours later you have a 20 minute nap, and then you're two hours later, you have a one hour sleep, all sorts of different schedules.

You can do it completely mess up your, your your your, yeah. But some people that comes out of this mistaken belief that nothing's happening, that you're kind of dead for a third of your life. It's not true. Amazing things are happening. It's just that your everyday conscious mind isn't aware of it. Philip, how does sleep change. As we get deeper into mysticism? Further on our spiritual journey? That's a very interesting subject. Because because this is this is quite a common phenomenon that as you start to meditate and work spiritually, you experience with sleep can change.

And scientists have come at it from a sort of another angle, and it goes like this. Some people, when they're wired up, and their sleep is being monitored, there will be this peculiar phenomenon where they will be woken up when the only indicators say that they're asleep, and when they're woken up, the person insists that they were awake. And so it's called in sleep science. It's called sleep state misperception. And from a scientific point of view, you say, no, no, no, you're you're you're you misunderstand.

You are asleep. I can assure you all the graphs. But the person themselves will have experience, complete consciousness. Now, the downside of that is that all the problem that can occur is that people and this happens with insomnia. People think they are not sleeping when they actually are. So once you get this, it's actually it's it's it's a tremendous piece of information to have. Because what it means is that even if you think you're not getting enough sleep, you may actually be sleeping. You just you just add a level of development.

In a spiritual development, I would say where where your consciousness is able to be, you have a sense of being awake, but your body is actually asleep. those people who work with lucid dreaming have have, you know that that's another direction you can take, where you start to discover you can be essentially become aware, have a sense of self-awareness whilst your body continues to sleep, and then you can enter into dreams and explore the dream world and explore other worlds. So so so. Yes, so so and and a common experience for people who meditate, for instance, can be that it makes them sleepy.

They will say, oh gosh, you know, every time I try to meditate, I go to sleep. And my suggestion would be, don't really, don't worry about that. If your body needs to sleep, it will sleep. So if you're sleeping, that's okay. And there will come a time where you discover that the distinction between sleep, sleeping, and wakefulness starts to blur and that you can actually allow yourself to sleep but maintain a level of awareness at the same time. So you kind of have your cake and eat it. You can have some kind of awareness development, and and your body can get a rest to.

Which is why I'm so interested in yoga nidra as a, as a spiritual practice and, and bring it into the book because it can help people rest hugely, hugely beneficial for people. Yeah. For those who aren't familiar with it, perhaps just describe what yoga nidra is and what the practice looks like. Yeah. Okay. Well, yoga nidra is where you essentially it's it's one of the easiest meditations to do because you make absolutely no effort at all. You lie down, you get yourself really comfortable

Sleep Stages and Brain Cleansing 22:48

and and then you follow a voice or a recording. You can do it yourself. But, but, but the whole idea is to completely let go. So it's actually easier to follow a voice or a recording, and that leads you on a journey around your body and your awareness. Many, many, many people who are meditative, familiar with body scans, where they move, their awareness down their body or up their body. This is this is like a body scan. But if you're moving around and you move around on, various pilgrimage routes around the body and there are various established routes, or you can, you know, take other ones, but basically you travel in your awareness around your body, just becoming aware of different parts of your body.

And, and then that can often send people to sleep. If it doesn't send you to sleep, you're in a very deeply relaxed place. And then you evoke a sense of opposites. You you sense being very hot and very cold at the same time, very high up, very low down. And it's as if the brain at that point says, I can't handle thinking about two completely opposite things at the same time. And then you're you're likely to drop into sleep. If you don't drop into sleep, you go even deeper into into an altered state of consciousness.

And there are more techniques you could the breathing techniques, visualization techniques and so on. but the main thing is you, you know, on my, on my website, you can kind of follow the links to, to a program I have called The Garden of Flowing and Perpetual Happiness, where I offer 12 of these, 12 of these yoga nidra to follow. And, and it's a free program that people can use if they want to go. And so it can be you're going to be a preparation for sleep. Yeah, absolutely. It's a it's a great way to enter into steps.

In my book I, I identify 13 ways to to enter into sleep. You get the so the you know the the early steps in the program. You know steps 1 to 4 are getting set in the setting, right, which is, in other words, how you think and feel about sleep in the set. And then the setting is all the stuff around sleep hygiene, about the, you know, the the vitamins you take in the kind of bedroom you have and the words, practical things. And then so you've got the set in setting. Right? So then you're in bed, you've sorted all that out, you're in bed.

Well how do you drop off? Well, you know, if you need help, I've identified 13 ways. And one of those 13 is is yoga nidra. Let's now go to the other end of the spectrum. We looked at how sleep changes in mysticism, how psychedelics can get you to those elevated states of consciousness. And there are people who can't get there. There are people who are traumatized. And one of the problems that people with PTSD experience is sleep interruptions. They're they're they're level of distress on the insomnia scale is extremely high.

They usually come into treatment for PTSD with clinical levels of insomnia. And so, Philip, when you're working with somebody like that, how do you approach it? Let's just also describe what goes on in the brain there because, this is a case in which often all of that paperwork, a lot of which is traumatic memories, isn't getting swept out and is interrupting sleep. So let's just cover all of the aspects of trauma and how it can affect sleep store. Absolutely. Because of course, what's happening is, is as the, the traumatic memories are relived during nightmares, the intense city of the emotions, are so strong.

You get into this cycle of where the nightmares are so, distressing. You avoid going to sleep and you don't want to go to sleep because you have you have these very negative and unpleasant experiences. And because you, you, you avoid going to sleep or, you will therefore, you know, your health starts to degrade your mental health and your physical health degrades, insomnia gets worse, the nightmares continue. And it's an awful, vicious cycle. One of the some of the treatment approaches include eMDR, you know, eye movement, EMG desensitization reprocessing.

Grab a mouthful of a of a term, but it's where in in in therapy, you get people moving their eyes from one side to another or touching themselves or hearing processing sounds and so on. And and we don't fully understand why it works. But one of the it seems to be that it's mimicking the process that occurs during REM sleep. You know, REM dream sleep is called it happens in REM sleep and it's rapid eye movement sleep. And you have this interesting phenomenon of the brain where the eyes are moving backwards and forwards.

So the suggestion is that with eMDR, therapy people, you're, we're sort of mimicking this process and helping to process memories. So you're invited to, remember these and to context the traumatic memories in a conscious state, engage in eMDR and, and and gradually diminish that the emotional kind of ferocity intensity starts to diminish. there's some interesting a little bit of work that's been done on lucid dreaming of teaching people to lucid dream in combination with image rehearsal therapy, where you, you essentially, describe to the therapist the script of the sort of nightmares you're getting, the storyline, and then you develop a different outcome from the storyline.

So you, you change the script, and then in deep relaxation, you run through the storyline change,

Mysticism, Yoga Nidra, and Trauma Treatment 28:38

but with a different ending to the movie, as it were. So, and eventually by doing that, during the day, as it were, in consciousness, that starts to influence how you're experiencing it during the night. And, some people have started to study the ways in which if you teach people how to lucid dream, where they they become, develop a sense of agency within their dreams, they can, in a similar way, alter the course of of the script that's been, played out in the in the dream. So. I can't hear you now.

By altering the script, by, doing that processing during the day, consciously you're able to influence the dreaming brain to take a similar approach to those problems at the night. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Powerful. So, yeah, what you're doing during your day and it sets you up for a good night's sleep. And again, that's part of the set and setting emphasis you have in the book to actually setting yourself up for that great night's sleep. Yeah, exactly. And then let's go to the final steps that you talk about in the book.

Those final stages of where you're now really actively that you've set the stage, moving into those techniques that can give you, wonderful sense, waking up refreshed and whole. well, well, well, really to, to get to sleep, you, you basically need three things, which is, you know, a safe, comfortable bedroom, place to sleep, a safe place. It sounds simple, but, you know, we all know not not everybody, you know, that can be an obstacle to some people. A safe, comfortable bedroom with all the right conditions, you know, a calm mind and a relaxed body.

And that's often, you know, that that's the those are the hurdles to get over the situations to set up. And once once you've attended to certain setting as much as you can, your your body is going to be likely to be in a more relaxed state, but it may not be sufficiently relaxed. Your mind may not be sufficiently calm for you to follow the natural path of dropping into sleep. The various ways in which you can really assist, following that natural path, but that are covered in the book. But nevertheless, we often need a little extra help.

The classic bit of extra help we take is sleeping pills. But we know now from the research that it's not good for you to in an emergency. In the extreme cases. But I'm so intrigued by, Where your spiritual journey. Where your mystical journey. Where your personal journey of unfoldment is taking you next. You've been through this long series of evolutions, from your teenage years to the psycho analysis to psychotherapy to star quality. And you're interested in yoga nidra and mindfulness? that's quite a spiritual journey, and I'm really curious as to what the next steps look like.

Okay, well that's interesting. I mean, on the one on the one hand, you know, there's there's a constant through this whole journey and then, you know, there have been lots of explorations as you pointed out and so on. And, but one one thing has remained constant, which was, you know, which remarkably really, I suppose, you know, for me was right back from the age of 11, you know, which was psychology and spirituality, these two somehow bringing them together and, and, and and that's been my passion and my interest, for all these years.

so, so and that hasn't changed. It's not like I, you know, as I get older, I think, well, I'm kind of a bit bored by that now. I've been doing that for 50, whatever it was, 60, 60 is, you know, that's kind of dull. I it's still my passion. I still find it fascinating. I still love the topic, you know, and so on. so that hasn't changed. One thing that has changed in the last few years is for many years I would plan really quite rigorously. I would I would kind of tune in every so often and set goals, ask myself what I wanted to achieve, where I wanted to be this time next year, and so on. And, you know, the whole goal setting process, which is really rather interesting.

And, you know, I've studied quite a bit of that. The goal, goal setting, and achievement a from the psychological angle be from the sort of the magical angle, you know, if you take concepts from, you know, magic and, and apply them to goal setting, it's very it's dynamite, you know, and, and I do a course called Lessons in Magic, which is all about how, how how how that works. combining the two approaches, and then about 3 or 4 years ago, I said to my wife, we would always do this. At the end of the year, we would review the the year behind and then plan the year ahead and set goals.

And I said, should we try not planning? Should we do essentially what I think is it Michael Singer, the surrender experiment, right. Yes. Yeah, yeah I just it just started reading it. But but but I think it's essentially that, that idea of not planning and I have to say the last three years have been absolutely extraordinary. I mean, the amount of things that have happened and meetings that have occurred and, you know, that I could never have predicted,

Surrender, Community, and Collective Growth 35:48

so, so, so part of me is kind of engaged in the surrender experiment, is trusting and and just allowing life to unfold and rest of it, and, yeah, I would, I would say that, I, I think, I think, I think that's that's it really. Oh, and the third, there's another element going on, I think, which is, is, I'm working on a concept within, within, within the druid, movement that I'm involved in the other boards of it's and Druids of the half of I sense more and more collectively, not just in the Druid world, but in, in our world in general.

The image that keeps coming to me is a fireside, you know, a circle of people sitting around the fire, sharing their stories, sharing their experiences. No hierarchy. No. We're all brothers and sisters along with the brothers and sisters are the trees, you know, and the earth and the sky and the stars. You know that this great evolutionary experiment, I think my sense of the of the, you know, the we're really waking up to the fact that in the past, the spiritual quest was seen as this kind of heroic journey, you know, from from when I was young and I read about the Buddha's quest for enlightenment.

It was kind of one man making this heroic quest, you know, resisting temptation, sitting under the tree, becoming illumined, you know, and then, you know, Jung's individuation process, Joseph Campbell's hero's journey. It's a very much an individual process of sort of, of of a heroic quest to develop what's more and more a sense that it's that it's we're all part of this evolutionary wave, and it's not about us as individuals kind of making it to the top of the mountain, but of us all gathering around the fire together and being together.

And that's the that's the predominant feeling I get to the kind of emotional soul level. I just want to sit around the fire talking in this, which is why I love doing podcasts. I mean, you know, I've loved, you know, we've only just met an hour ago and I've, I've loved having a conversation with you. And we're sitting around the fire talking and asking in the questions and so on. Yeah. Yeah. That's also where I think that maybe that guru disciple model is really useful in years gone by, and now it's far more peer to peer.

And that's why coaching has has arisen. Coaching has none of the, power differentials inherent in psychotherapy. It's sharing great ideas with each other. And so these models of leadership, these models of, personal change, these models, spirituality, that a collective where I'm not looking to, you know, become the Buddha and elevate myself and become a spiritual teacher. We are sharing together. I am listening to whatever your story might be, and we're finding our collective common ground there.

It's a it is, I think, a very different approach to the one that you described earlier with, with the Hero's Journey. So thank you so much for having that that beautiful vision. And I encourage you to, keep on inviting us all around your fireside as often as possible to, to gather and share and connect and, and be in this collective unfoldment. And it's obvious, too, that we human beings can no longer be seeking that path as a species ourselves, independent of our environment, because either we evolve collectively as an entire world, planet or or our species certainly is going to be imperiled, and many species might, might, might be imperiled as well.

So that's definitely where evolution in nature are taking us to. Yes, absolutely. Absolutely awesome. Thank you. Yes. That's very well. Yeah. Well, thanks so much again for, this wonderful time around the fireside. I'm feeling we'll have had some more. And for inviting all of our listeners, all of those who are with us today, for being part of that conversation and part of this huge, great, exciting, collective upward movement. Thank you all. And thanks for being here. Thanks for taking care of yourself this way.

Look forward to connecting with you in the future.