Not All Spirits Are Jerks

My Story: From Psychologist To Shaman

• Frances Ulman • Season 1 • Episode 1

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Initiated into a lineage of shamans from Mongolia, Frances  has a primary spirit guide. He teaches her how to accelerate  learning of clairvoyance, clairaudience, and more. He is a master energy healer and teaches Frances these methods for healing with energy. And he is a huge jerk. He has pushed her down stairs, sent her to China in January 2020 to get Covid before it was in the news, and much more. Previously Frances was a clinical psychologist in private practice. Her graduate program did not prepare her for this  life! After living in over 250 places across many lands including Nepal, India, Mongolia, Sápmi (Norway), Ireland, Greenland, Scotland, Iceland, Mexico, South Korea, and more Frances has many tales to tell! Not all spirits are the same, but what is the same is spirits are found everywhere she goes. Ghosts don't need passports. Join Frances as she spills tea about working for the spirits and speaking to ghosts, reflections back on her culture that made all efforts to keep people in the dark about the spirit world known by other cultures now, and as she shares stories about what it is like to work for her spirit guide, the biggest jerk she knows across the realms. 

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Speaker 1:

Hello, and welcome. I am Francis. And this is my podcast, not all spirits are jerks. A podcast named after my primary spirit guide. Who is actually a super huge jerk. Well, more specifically, I should call him my oh god. And oh god is one of the things that's necessary in order to be a shaman in Mongolia. And Mongolia is where I live part time. I have family there, friends there, community, I have all the things like bars I'd rather never go into again. I've got some ex boyfriends. I have my favorite place to get my matcha latte at a really cute coffee shop. My grocery store preferences. For me, less than butter, the capital of Mongolia, has everything that anyone would call a home. And in Mongolia, I also happen to be called a shaman. I'm initiated into a lineage there and there I sit with people as the shaman. But this was not always my life, far from it. Ten years ago, I was still

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a clinical psychologist working in private practice in North Carolina. And as

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you can hear, not only am I speaking English, I am speaking English as someone who was raised in sort of the dominant culture on the West coast of the USA, and you may hear a smattering of a little southern charm in there as well. I am non indigenous, and I am a primarily European ancestry. I was born in the kind of communities where kids generally went to college. We hadn't enough food on the table, and sometimes we took a summer vacation. Where I was raised or how I was raised, we knew about the history of the USA. I think in a somewhat accurate lens, I knew that I was on land that wasn't mine and that lives have been lost and that the land was stolen, but it was told to me in a story of, like, this is the past and here we are now. I wasn't raised in any sort of religious tradition or I guess I could say I was, my religion was science. Perhaps with some good traditional using Sundays for shopping.

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It was basically science and consumerism. Is what I wouldn't say were the religions of my people. I have lived in seven states in the USA and the closest of anything that feels like a home is for me in the Carolinas. So how I got from being a clinical psychologist in private practice, never having any experiences spirits to now really truly working for the spirits as a shaman. Well, that's that's the reason I've made this podcast because along the way, I've picked up some unbelievable stories. Not only am I now a shaman. And let's just take a pause for

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a moment and talk about the word shaman. So shaman is a specific kind of sacred healer found in Mongolia and in the neighboring regions. So when I use this word, if you've heard it used before by someone who's speaking English, ninety eight percent of the time, honestly, it's being completely misused. I'm not using it from a place of ego or cultural appropriation are from it. It's actually quite the opposite. In my case, I'm using that word out of respect for the people with the Mongolian culture, and specifically the shaman teachers that I have that have passed on these sacred teachings and rituals to me. If to me, if

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I did not use the word shaman, that actually would be an active theft. So most of

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the time you hear your Lord Shaman totally, totally incorrect. I use the Lord Shaman out of well, out of accuracy, although I fully acknowledge it's a rather uncommon story. Not only is it uncommon for me to now be seen as a shaman and doing what shamans do in Mongolia, well everywhere. I've also lived in over two hundred and fifty places along the way. There's more specific that I should say I've moved over two hundred fifty times in the last, like, eight or nine years or so. I've lived in places including Nepal, India, Iceland, because actually not, also known as Greenland, China, Taiwan, South Korea, Chiapas in southern Mexico. For me, because I'm truly nomadic, I honestly don't have a home wherever I rest my head, that is home. So some of these places I've just been like, South Korea is a great place to an example of a place that I move through on my way out of Mongolia often. And same for like Turkey. But other places, I'm really have grown and continuing to grow roots roots within these communities. And while some of my best friends, they live in completely different continents, they haven't met each other yet, I have dreams.

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I have dreams. Someday we'll all get together and it will be it will be an event to remember. My sense of what

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it means to have a home both in terms of place and space has been so radically transformed. And so much of what I wanna share is actually the story of me being from not just being raised within colonized spaces, but really being raised to be part of the colonizing machine. I mean, I like to say that I was like in the center node of the project, the ongoing current project of colonization and by center node, oh, I do not mean, like, the most important or any hierarchical sense. I mean, really, I was within the space that was pumping out and continues to pump out these colonized spaces and mines that keep these projects of harm going on. And when I say it was part of it, it was unknowing. I mean, that's how this old game continues to work. Working as a clinical psychologist now looking back, I recognize On a individual level, I would like to think at least once in a while, I was helping.

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You'd have to ask the people I was sitting with,

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but and a larger scale, now that I've completely pulled myself out of that project, well, more or less, I live in spaces and communities that are out side of the projects of the west and outside of Kalana spaces. At least farther from the center node, I don't like It's very rare, I think, to even find places these days that haven't at least been in some part impacted by it. But now being able to look back, I recognize, you know, The myth of clinical psychology is playing a role in these projects of colonization by telling people that you are sick. It's your anxiety rather than Holy crap.

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The system that we're living under is making me anxious. Maybe we need to take care of

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the system. And also seeing with the spirit eyes that I see now, there's so much more play. Like, how are your roots with the land that you're on? What is your relationship with your ancestors? Do you have spirits on you that are, like, literally stuck on you that need to be removed because they're not there for your highest and best good.

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Do you have good spirits around you? Do you have a ghost haunting your apartment? Do you need just a good energy cleaning of the space where you work? Does your coworker have a ghost that's bothering you? There's so much more going on than just like you and your anxiety. That's really that's really keeping our minds in the dark about the much more complicated reality that we live in across so many realms and all the realms, but right here, it's so much more complicated than I had been taught in graduate school and as you may well know already.

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I mean, of course, it's a very complicated reality that we live in. And for me to be able to pull myself out of that and look back at the role that I was in, I recognize that I think in in a global sense, I was honestly doing more harm than good, which is a pretty intense statement to say, it's only because I've been completely kicked out of the previous life that I had, that I've started to be able to have the perspective to look back on my own story. Now I completely full time live and community is very different than the one that raised me. Like, really lived. I don't consider myself a traveler or tourist. When I'm in places that I'm in, I'm really living in community, which includes, like, being married to people within community, sharing tea, sharing illness. I mean, I'm I'm in it. And what's happened is that completely started to undo and transform my relationship with myself and everything around me.

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And I wanna say that having come from the the interior central part of the projects of colonization is I was raised when we're doing something like research, which I did for a long time, we always cite our references. And those references are written down in books, and they have names. Now, so much of

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what I share, you know, there is no book that I can cite because I am finding myself within living traditions. So really early on, I wanna acknowledge nothing that I'm sharing is new.

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I'm not discovering anything. We don't need another person like me saying we're discovering something that's been known for thousands

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of years. It's hard to cite specific people because that's not how these living wisdom traditions continue on and thrive. But I will at least cite the cultures that have taken me in and nurtured me and helped me learn and grow. These are my these are my teachers, and they may not always have a specific name, but fully full acknowledgment much of what I talk about, things like talking about how we are, a set of relations or not objects, and how I was raised to think I was an object. This thinking has come to me through my deep like, intimate place in Tibetan Buddhist communities, both in the east and the west. And also in a lot of the indigenous communities that I find myself moving within. What I'm about to share with you in this podcast, these are things with my PH and my post doc and being published and peer reviewed scientific journals. These are things I genuinely didn't know.

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I didn't know. I almost went my whole life without knowing that ghosts are real. And now, I spent more of my time sometimes talking to ghosts than I do the people in the same cafe. I am constantly profoundly shocked by the ignorance that I have entered that I had as I entered my own story, I truly have no no idea why I am now a shaman. I don't know why any

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of this happened to me. So I wasn't just a clinical psychologist. I was, like, really an atheist, like a material atheist. That's snotting hind, that thought that she knew everything. And when we die, we turn in to warn me, and ghost stories are for people who are less intelligent. I'm really I have no idea why this happened to me. It happened truly spontaneously. There was no traumatic event that happened beforehand. There was no plant medicine ceremony. I had only been doing yoga for just a short while. Well, the yoga started as this all started. Someone said maybe yoga would help. Anyway, it just it happens spontaneously. I truly was in private practice sitting with my what I then called clients and I started hearing, like, I remember I think the very first time I remember having a spirit come into the room I was talking with a woman with anxiety. And her grandmother came into the room and I'm very clear audience now, meaning I hear the spirits around me. And this grandmother came in, so I wasn't seeing her, but I was sensing her. And she said, my granddaughter is lying to you about what she did last night. Ask her what she did again. Sure enough I did and she had been lying to me. From the beginning, these extra sensory experiences that I was having, they were evidential So it was just like a complete I was faced with the decision of accepting what was happening to me or not. And to accept what happened to me meant I within truly a season needed to let go of everything that I had believed in the past. It was shattering.

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And what a beautiful way for me

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to enter the path? Like, this is such a classic story now that I hear the stories of other sacred healers, shamans, and otherwise getting called on their path. It's almost like we're birthed anew. And the best way to birth me anew was not to catch with me like halfway through my story.

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This would have been such a different story if

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it had been like before graduate school or halfway through graduate school. I had gone all the way through, I had become licensed, which took even more time after the private after the post doc, I was finally in private practice. I was writing a book. I thought that I had, you know, really begun and that is poetically exactly the moment I lost it all. Looking at the at the time it felt like trauma and it was But looking back, I understand there was some grand higher level intelligence in when this path cracked open for me. I needed to I needed to be violently ripped out of everything that I thought I had finally achieved to

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to just have all the roots taken up, not all the roots, but to have the soil greatly disturbed. And why did this happen to me? I don't know.

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So I don't know. But I know now that when I spent time with sacred healers throughout the world, we recognize each other. We just seem to have a different kind of soul. I mean, we truly recognize each other. One of the ways a sacred healer identified me as I was just walking through, like, an open air market and she was there. And I walked up to her to look at her what she was offering, and she looked up at me. And she was indigenous and part of communities that I'm generally at that time didn't find myself in, and I was just standing there. You know, she would have just seen like

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a white woman. Just like, hey. I don't do anything to, like, externally do any dog whistles. I just you look at me on the street, I look like a Karen. Maybe not Karen. Okay. Hope not a Karen. But like Karen Karen will be in my family, you know? So this this who I

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now know medicine woman, but at the time I didn't know she looked at me. Her eyes popped open as big

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and bright as you may see full moon suddenly reveal herself as clouds move away. And she said,

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what? Are you? Come here. Come here. Sit down.

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And that's how our friendship began. Sacred healers, we recognize sacred healers because we're not seeing with our physical eyes. We see each other with our spirit eyes. Sacred healers were found all over the world were not of the past. We're still here. And if you happen to

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be living in a culture that still is connected with its wisdom and I would say health, you're gonna have sacred healers as part of the community. Now a sacred healer is different than, like, perhaps you've gone to, like, a drumming where someone's taking the on a journey or someone who's held a full moon ritual or a rinky practitioner. These are all people working maybe we could say within the sacred arts, but we sacred healers are different. We're weird. We're odd. If you know one of us, then you know what I mean. And if you don't, it's just really hard to characterize this. There's just something kind of spooky about us. I'd almost say, And my experience is every well, and every sacred healer I know, we work with we work with other realms and we work with spirits. We become really servants of the spirits. More than just servants of the spirits, we've completely turned our life over. My life is no longer mine. When I say I've moved over two hundred and fifty times, this is not my idea. This is the Olga. He has some kind of grand plan for me and it's only slowly in hindsight that I can start to maybe make some guesses about what his plan is for me. But when he says move, I have to move. When he told me to go to Catalina, Greenland, and I said no, chaos happened. Like, he gets his way.

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He's not just some kind of spirit in

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the sky. He's very, very much able to interact with this physical realm. And once I signed up for this for this ride, let's say, I'm no longer the one driving my spaceship. He makes my travel plans and he decides who I work with. Fundamentally at the end of the day, the only thing I know is who I work for, and that's him. My Sky boss, we don't always get to choose our colleagues, Dewey.

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You know, I laugh about it and like a lot of this podcast is just me being able to, like, share these wild stories with you, but quite honestly, on a day to day level, it's frequently a huge pain in the ass. This life is It's filled with amazing stories and tales and adventures, but a lot of

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the time it is just it's really a painting. And while it's a pain and I can laugh about it and make jokes, the reality is I consider myself to have been saved. Not in any kind

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of Christian way, far far from it. And in fact, perhaps quite oppositional to the meaning of what it means to be saved, I think, in that tradition. So sacred healers in Mongolia were called shamans. In Casa Vit? No not. They're called Onno Coke and Saught me where I spent half of the year, which are the indigenous lands of Northern Europe. They go across Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia. It's actually where I'm recording this podcast now, looking out over the fjord. Here's Secret Tailors are called no eighty. Where I'm from, the sacred healers are called mentally ill. Am we joking? No. I'm absolutely not joking. That's what happened. That's why we don't have them anymore. In the places where I was from. We exist. We just don't get identified. And we well, they used to burn us,

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and now they diagnosis. Both strategies are very effective in keeping sacred healers out of communities. And when you have a community without sacred healers, you have communities that are out of balance and that are sick. And I'm one of the lucky ones who didn't succumb to that fate. I do have some very dear friends who are still living within the projects of the USA, and they are sacred healers, and they're actually I mean, you could say, like, without tradition, I think in some ways, because I don't really think you need a tradition. So long as you are able to connect with the spirits, If

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you have a true connection, if you're a true soul of

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a sacred healer, you can find your way out. Even when you're within the the tightest of cages that have been put around you. That's my belief. So yeah, I am following the path of a shaman. But again, that's just one specific kind. You don't need to be if you feel like you're being called along the path of being a sacred healer or something close one of, like, the allied disciplines. You don't need to move to Mongolia. Everything you need is right there within you right now. I promise. If you can strengthen and maintain a healthy connection with the spirits around you, you will find everything that you need. My path of being a shaman is just I don't know.

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It's just an odd one, but it's not necessary for you.

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Now, shaman being a specific kind of sacred healer Mongolia, what this means is there are certain, like, methods we use. So all sacred healers were all working with the spirits. We all work for the spirits for the good ones. And that is our that is our alignment. We no longer choose our agenda. With the Mongolian shamanism, the very specific way that we do that is gonna look a little bit different than in other cultures. And one of the primary aspects of being a shaman in Mongolia is you have an Olga. An Olga is your, like, your guardian spirit, like, your primary spirit guide. This is someone that you're merged with in your initiation ceremony. And you're merged for life. This is no earthly contract. There is no divorce, there is no backing out. And for whatever reason,

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my own god is just a super huge jerk. So you may ask, like, why do

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I stick with him? Well, I don't really have a choice. He is really really helpful. So when I do things like a healing session with someone, as I experience it, I'm not actually the one healing them. I have my own guy who comes into my body and he's doing the healing work. I can't actually see the future, which may say I'm kind of funny, but this is genuinely how I experience it. My own god can see the future. As long as I keep my connection clean and tight with him, then he can tell me what the future is. It's gonna look the same to the person I'm talking to, but it's a huge difference. Because I have met people who have some who have extra sensory perceptions like clairvoyance, clairaudience, claircentience, clair gustience, and sometimes they work with other people, but when they're not working looking in the ways of a sacred healer. What they're doing is they're looking directly at the person they're sitting with. And that's just a human looking at another human. They're not gonna know what's

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the most beneficial For me,

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I just completely turned myself over to my own god. He he is working in dimensions that I will never be able perceive while I'm still in this body. He sees the

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multidimensional Go game, chess game. He knows what's important for this person in this moment. Is it time for

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a soul retrieval or is it not? A lot of times when I sit with people, I can feel the trauma on them, but it never comes up in session because that's not what is needed. In the session. No. I don't even call session.

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In the sitting when we're sitting together. Whatever my own gut shows me, that's what I show them. And he's also in that's trained me how to do well, how to, like, work with my with my Claire's, the Claire Audience, Claire Audience, Claire Sentient, Clear Cognizant,

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all of those fun things. But I talk all all about that in in this in this podcast series. The thing about having this undercut though, so he's incredibly helpful. He's like my teacher. He's my guide. He's my protector. But he's also the one that oh, he just messes with me. And he's literally messed with me to the point that he's like knocked me down a flight of stairs and brokered my toe. He has Oh my goodness. So many things.

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Well, I don't wanna get his give his spoilers away, but he's a jerk. He's just a jerk. I don't know what else

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to say about him. He never says

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a kind word to me. He's always pushing me more and more

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and more. And imagine having like a boss, but it's like the sky boss.

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There is no time off He's with me twenty four hours a day. Yes. He's with me right now. And he might even be a little bit of a co writer in some of these episodes coming up ahead.

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So mainly he only messes with me, but I'm not the only one he's messed with. He has tripped a flight attendant before he has gotten someone in a car. Accident. He's thrown someone off a horse. I share all these stories in the podcast. He's also the one that's taught me how to well, how to do exercises, which is a pretty handy thing to know how to do. You can you can kinda hear like, okay, he's helpful, but he's also like a real pain in

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the ass. It's just so my reality is, but it makes her a great podcast. I think the strangest thing about this story for me well, I shouldn't say this strangers thing. There's there's so many to pick from. It's a buffet of strangeness. But one of the things that stands out

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to me that's so odd is So when I first opened, I honestly had no idea. I could of any of the sacred traditions, I couldn't have named the chakras. Like, I didn't know anything. And from the very beginning, I was being aware of like the spirits of past loved ones in some ways you could call me a medium now, but there was this one spirit, and I had no idea who the spirit was or where he was from, and he was with me from the very beginning. I talk all about this, but After many, many years and many challenges and going through a time of what people would call shaman sickness, where I where I lost everything and slowly coming back together. And his voice said to me, Francis, you'll never know who you are until you get to Mongolia. And by that time, I was so done with everything. I just wanted my life back I just wanted a dog and a garden again. I told him to f off. And he said, a door will open, and all you have to do is walk through. And it happened unbelievably to me. I I I kinda pushed it out of my mind because, you know, Mongolia, I couldn't have told you where it was on a map. I maybe would have known, like, Central Asia. I didn't know anything about it. Sure I'd heard the word Xiamen, but me mostly in these, like, bastardized ways that had been stolen and moving through the stories throughout the west. In these calm night spaces, but the door did open, and I did only need to walk through. And when I got to Mongolia, When I sit with shamans, not just one, but many shamans now have said, we see that you've lived here in past lives.

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You are a shaman, and you are

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where you're supposed to be. How had I gone from never even having one dream about Mongolia? I don't think I'd ever read a book. I I felt absolutely no affinity or connection to this land, to being recognized there and to honestly now having memories of my own from past lives there? I think some of the mysteries of my story I'll never quite understand in this lifetime. But what I at least do have are

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some great stories share. And hopefully, not just some great stories that are fun to share around

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a campfire, but to get us all thinking about this greater mystery that we're living in. So much of my dreaming have been taken away from me in the spaces I've been raised in, and now I'm learning to dream again, and I'm learning to recognize just what

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have been fantastic mystery we live in. And so that's that's why I'm gonna share a

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lot of these stories with you. Well, I say

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I'm gonna share these stories with you, really even now as I'm sharing these some of these stories, I wonder

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I don't even know if it's me. Who is doing the

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one that's sharing? Is it me? Or is it my dark spirit guide? This life is never dull. It's a wildlife and I believe the wilder, the story, the better it is shared with as many others as possible. It's a pleasure to be able to have you along with me, so thanks for coming along. I'll see you in the next podcast if not before in the dream time. Dream well friends. Dream well.