Not All Spirits Are Jerks

Greenland Bound: When My Jerk Spirit Guide Told Me I Can't Say No

• Frances Ulman • Season 1 • Episode 3

Share episode

Send us a text

Can you imagine trading a stable career as a clinical psychologist for the life of a shaman? Join Frances on this incredible journey, as she shares her transformation, her experience with shaman sickness, and the powerful lessons she learned along the way about what happens when she tries to disobey her jerk and primary spirit guide.

Listen in as she recounts some of the most unforgettable moments of her travels, from an unexpected reunion with her childhood couch to an even more unexpected reunion in Scotland prompted by her spirit guide. Discover how an upcoming trip turned into an Airbnb revenge story, and how she found herself Greenland bound, with no choice in the matter.  She will also explore the subtle ways our guides and spirits communicate with us, and how we can tap into their wisdom to navigate life's twists and turns.

This episode is filled with tales of resilience, self-discovery, and embracing the unexpected. Whether you're a believer in the spiritual realm or simply curious about the stories of others, she invites you to open your mind and heart to the extraordinary experiences she has had and the guidance she received from other realms. Who knows - you might just find the inspiration to embark on your own remarkable journey.

Join me on Patreon!  
You can find me here: https://www.patreon.com/dropoutpsychologist

Frances is here:
Youtube: www.youtube.com/@dropout.psychologist
Instagram: @dropout.psychologist
More: linktr.ee/dropout.psychologist
Email: dropout.psychologist@gmail.com

Frances Ulman:

Hi, i'm Frances. Welcome to Not All Spirits Are Jerks, a podcast named in recognition of my main spirit guide, who is, in fact, a super duper huge jerk. Today I'd like to share the story about how my main spirit guide told me I had to go to Greenland. I told him thanks but no thanks, and this resulted in a host getting kicked off of Airbnb. So he is a super huge jerk Generally, it's to me but if he doesn't get his way, he gets quite tantrum-y. And well, he does what he needs to do to get his way. Let's back up a little bit. If you knew here welcome, happy to have you here To hear how I got from clinical psychologist to Shaman Living Part-Time in Mongolia, you can skip back to season one, episode. One full story is there.

Frances Ulman:

So for today's story, before we get to the part of my spirit guide having a tantrum and kicking someone off of Airbnb, let's skip back to a time long, long ago when I was living but a simple life. I was living in North Carolina with my guy and I was in private practice, and the thing that I think a lot of people don't understand, of course, because now I have lived in a couple hundred places across a couple continents is I'm actually quite the hobbit, my sense of adventure. Before all this happened to me, and before all this happened to me I was just completely unaware of the spirit, so that any of this was that even real. My idea of adventure was sitting in my front yard after work and watching the siskins and cardinals eat the tomatoes out of my garden. That was quite a thrill for me. I sure I love to travel, but I wasn't really an adventurous soul. So this life of we could say maybe wander, now wandering around the world in the realms, is not by my design, it's by this jerk spirit guide. He kind of gives me marching orders, he tells me where to go and that's where I go and I well, i'm getting ahead of myself.

Frances Ulman:

So at the beginning it was just beginning, meaning when I was living, but my simple hobbit life in my garden and I started having the spirits contact me. It was really really really overwhelming and confusing. I mean, it was just like day after day, things were happening that I just thought were impossible to even happen. So I had been raised as a scientist and I still think of myself as a scientifically minded person And I think so I gave this chaotic stage of trying to hold my life together, not knowing what was going to happen from one day to another. I gave it a go for maybe a year, year and a half. It was just so chaotic And through this chaos there was like one spirit, that the spirit was clearly something special.

Frances Ulman:

He wasn't a ghost. So ghosts are spirits that are just trapped between realms. They didn't make it all the way to the next place, and some of them are good, some of them are forlorn, some of them are just here to cause havoc. But this spirit was different. He wasn't a ghost, it didn't feel like he was human at all. He was quite omniscient and he gave some pretty good advice. I remember it's such a strange example, but you would say like oh, this restaurant that you like, they're having a great special tomorrow, go check it out. And sure enough, it would be true. I mean, it was really small things like that for the most part, but very evidential, and I grew to maybe not entirely trust him, but when you're in such a chaotic space and there's this one steady, constant presence around you, that's giving you more or less good advice. Well, i gravitated towards him.

Frances Ulman:

So, after a year, year and a half of this, i thought this just can't hold. I can't wake up each day like not knowing where I want to put my foot as I put it down getting out of bed. I need some order here. So I tried to be scientifically minded. I couldn't exactly write a controlled study with you know, the experimental and control group, but what I could do was something of, let's say, a single subject design. So I decided I was going to do, from the next day, for one year I was going to do everything the spirit told me to do. It was like single subject design. Let's just go. Let's I this. This cannot possibly be my life for the rest of my life, so let's just jump into it. And then I figured well, after a year I'll have some data and I'll be able to reflect back. Was that a good strategy? So I went to a nearby little store and I bought like a little beaded bracelet and I put it around my wrist. I didn't tell a soul. This is what I was doing And that's what I did.

Frances Ulman:

So for one year I took every single piece of advice that this unknown although spoiler alert, it's the jerk spirit guide. But at the time I didn't know what a huge pain in the ass he was. I took every single piece of advice he gave me. So a couple of weeks went by, still pretty innocuous, benign advice, and then he starts talking about how I should probably go to Nepal. I mean, you guys, going to Spain was an adventure for me. I wasn't a huge adventurous person. Nepal was just like, but it kept so I kind of was brushing it away, brushing it away, but he would, you know, kind of remind me like, well, you said that you would take every piece of advice for one year, and so I left my private practice and I went to Nepal.

Frances Ulman:

The thing is it wasn't just small advice that he had been given before. It was a lot of that, but that just sort of had seemed over the past year and a year and a half not exactly like a training, but it did feel like he was guiding me a little bit, just a little bit Like he. He is the one that pointed me towards a meditation retreat which ended up being very grounding and opening for me and exceptionally helpful, and I met some. I met some friends there, actually that I still know to this day. So it wasn't just a small advice. It wasn't like he said go eat this like dinner special, now go to Nepal. There was a little bit more to it than that. So, yeah, it still is a big leap And I think this is where things really started to jump the shark.

Frances Ulman:

So I got to Nepal. One of the things I left behind was this relationship, along with my career in my home and my, my sweet two dogs. It was an active desperation. Active desperation and perhaps a little bit of not clear thinking. But I got to Nepal and soon after I met this handsome Tibetan man at a coffee shop and we had a conversation not much of a conversation because there wasn't much of a shared language between us And I was. I was walking back to the place. I was saying my friendly guides said Oh, why don't you marry him? Well, i did brush it off a little bit, stick with me. But Yeah, i ended up looking down at that bracelet and said well, i said I was gonna take all this advice for one year. Okay, pause.

Frances Ulman:

So now I know about a little thing called shaman sickness In Mongolia and the neighboring regions. I've heard the stories of many shamans and it's understood that at the beginning of being called by the spirits. You go through a time that can look many years long or you go through shaman illness and it can look different for different people. I know someone who went blind. I know someone who went blind and became paralyzed. It can happen through traumatic childbirth, loss of a partner, all kinds of things. For some people it looks like what I think some other people will call psychosis. For me it looks like leaving my life and moving to Nepal Now safely, on the other side of that horrible time.

Frances Ulman:

I see shaman illness both for myself and having watched others go through it, heard stories and even nowadays I help people go through it as they're going through it themselves. I see shaman sickness. It's not just like a hazing. It's the beginning of the training and there seems to always be some kind of harmony between the the trauma or the difficult situation that you find yourself in and the way that you get out of it is the way that you learn the gifts and the medicine that you eventually will be sharing for others. So it really is to me not just a time of illness and recovery, but it's the beginning of the true training of the shaman or sacred healer. I've seen it in others as well. I think.

Frances Ulman:

Personally, i think this is just a universal thing that sacred healers throughout the world go through, not all, but most. When I say shaman, illness is the beginning of learning what medicine you carry, for me it always seems to come back to something centered around the heart relationships, intimate relationships, also community. There's so many stories like arcs moving through my story, themes of isolation very, in very strange ways, like being personally isolated or being stuck in a country not knowing anyone during a lockdown during COVID. It's not a coincidence and I think, if you reflect on your story, shaman or not, i think this is also a human thing. We have these themes that come up again and again and they feel completely unrelated, like the one teacher in high school who hated us and then suddenly our boss, who has nothing to do with our high school teachers, singling us out in the same way. This is our karma speaking to us and our karma just seems to get pretty accelerated, those of us who are called to be working with the spirit. So for me it almost always comes back to heart-centered and themes of relationships.

Frances Ulman:

So there I was in the midst of my shaman illness. It helps when you know what's happening, and I certainly had no framework like this at the time. I just thought I was taking the guidance of the spirit guide. What he was telling me to do was basically tossing me into the illness that was needed to birth me as a shaman. He was suggesting that I marry my karma. So I did. I looked this beautiful stranger in the eyes and said why not? Let's do, i'm wiser now. They have to buy me dinner first, at least. No, i'm kidding, i'm getting. I'm wiser now. But I think that's like a hallmark of the shaman illness. We just act, perhaps in ways that would look completely irrational, if not completely bananas, to the ones who love us. But there's this bigger chess game at play in multiple dimensions, and as much as I do believe my jerk spirit guide lives up to his name, he could have, you know, part of me, the human part, is like he could have done it differently. I got to admit I learned some really important lessons, not in the, not in the going into it, but once I found myself in that situation, i'd put myself in, ultimately, that I take responsibility, i'm the one that chose to do it, to get myself out of it. I learned more than I ever could have learned in any school, and they became many of the gifts that I used to work with others now.

Frances Ulman:

So back to the story on the ground. There I was, looking this beautiful man in the eye. I did. It wasn't immediate, i mean, it was a couple weeks after we met. I don't want to sound like I was totally rushed, but that's what I did. I suggested to get married, happily tossed myself into it became a very traumatic situation, okay. So just hold this frame as I tell you this next part, because I do see it now is just that season of shaman sickness, shaman illness and I'm okay. Now, folks, i'm gonna be okay. So what happened is I suggested to this lovely stranger that we get married And that's what we set out to do.

Frances Ulman:

So a year later, i looked down at that bracelet exactly to the day, and I found myself living in India with this Tibetan guy. He had now, when we met, he had maybe spoken about I don't know 200 words of English. As his vocabulary grew, it became much, much less interested in anything he had to say. Turns out, i didn't even like this guy Shocker, who could have seen that coming. But just like our medicine can be our poison.

Frances Ulman:

I am stubborn, and when I say I'm going to do something, i do it, which is probably what got me through my graduate program, which I despised. But there it was, having committed to marrying a complete stranger, to a SkyGhost, and probably a good time to not be stubborn. But I said I was going to do it, i had no other plans and, damn it, i did it. We did indeed move to the USA and things went from bad to very, very, very bad. When we first went back to the US, we went back to my parents house. The plan was just to be there for I don't know a couple weeks, a month, gather some thoughts and supplies, and then we were going to hit the road and choose where we wanted to settle in the USA.

Frances Ulman:

But in this time is when I realized I don't even know if I feel safe being alone with this guy in the USA, although at the same time I feel like that's when I was starting to wake up from that sort of fugue state, from that really acute time of shaman illness, and I just it's almost like I just started looking at him. Not almost I did, i just looked at him with some more clear thinking in my eyes and was like whoa, this dude sucks, this dude's got to go. It took a minute. I don't want to say it was as easy as that, but in some ways it was as easy as that because, you know, we are in just a bit of a dream And it's a co-created dream. I don't want to say everything that's happened to you is because of you, but we really need to be careful about the stories that we tell ourselves, because those stories that we tell ourselves become true.

Frances Ulman:

I had been telling myself that I was stuck. I had been telling myself I had nowhere else to go, and so that became my truth. When I woke up from the shaman illness and I looked at this jerk ground jerk, not sky, jerk heaven reflecting earth, i guess, earth reflecting heaven I was like what the hell is this? It's like it just broke the spell that I had put on myself and that's all it took. And then life straightened out and I was able to get him to go.

Frances Ulman:

Well, i had cleared this obstacle, but in its wake was a whole lot of oh boy, i really did a number on my life, didn't I? The bracelet was off and the data was certainly in. Conclusion, don't always listen to that jerk sky boss. Okay, but once you narrow down strategies, i had figured out not to do that. But there was a whole lot of questions left Like what, exactly? what do I do now? I didn't know what to do and I was back on this couch. This was literally my childhood home and as a child I always dreamed of leaving, i just not like super far, but it wasn't even where I was dreaming to go, it was just dreaming of not being there. I never felt comfortable or like at home where I'm from. I left at 17 without looking back and no intention to ever return. But it seems life has a funny way of making other plans for us, doesn't it? And there I was, neither fish nor foul.

Frances Ulman:

I was no longer a clinical psychologist, but I didn't have any conception of myself as a healer at that time. I had been having some pretty strong experiences, like when I was living in India, where I found myself. I was more and more able to read people. So I would practice doing like kind of readings on people And sometimes spontaneously healing energy would be coming, just I don't know, just kind of floating out of me And I would try to do what I could with it, but nothing was coming together And I didn't know what to be doing with myself.

Frances Ulman:

So, hand on heart, i found myself in a yoga class in a strip mall in the southwest of the USA, in Shavasana, and some unknown spirits came to me and they said if you ever want to know who you are in this lifetime, you got to go to Mongolia. Well, that bracelet was off and I was ready to say no. And I said no, just like that was it. And they said the door will open, all you have to do is walk through, and I just I basically I can't say I totally dismissed them. You know, that's pretty intriguing. I had never thought about going to Mongolia before. And there I was with some spirits saying that's the place where you're going to know who you are. It'll be totally different than India and Nepal. I was intrigued, but I was tired and the answer was no, sure enough. strange story for another time. A door actually opened and all I had to do was walk through it And I found myself in Siberia and just a train ride away.

Frances Ulman:

And from Siberia I took the Trans-Siberian Railway down into Mongolia, and that's when, in some ways, my new life began. That's when I in fact did start to know who I was. And as I met these shamans in Mongolia, they were remembering me, my lineage holder. He said he had had a dream about me. I was like four or seven years before and he said he didn't believe it. He never talked to foreigners and he didn't like foreigners. And then there I was. He was as stunned as I was. I was starting to understand. Okay, these last couple of years, as terrible as they were, what actually they did was they shaped my gifts and I had a lot of them. I just didn't know what to do with them.

Frances Ulman:

Once I got to Mongolia, it started coming together. I started understanding what it was that I was being asked to do. Things were good. I would spend part of the year in Mongolia. Because of visa reasons, i couldn't stay there all the time, and when I was not in Mongolia, parts of the time I'd stay in the USA. I found myself going to Iceland a couple of times, working with people there, growing in community there. I found myself down in Chiapas in southern Mexico. Lots of movement still, and I still craved a home, but things were coming together. I thought I had found my stability in this movement of going through Mongolia once a year and growing a life elsewhere.

Frances Ulman:

And then the page turned and COVID came. The season of COVID came for all of us. I left Mongolia maybe it was like December 2019. I left a suitcase there with my niece. I said I'll be back in a couple of months and the world closed.

Frances Ulman:

I didn't know what to do and this spirit guide he had been telling me for a long time to go. I also needed to go to Sopmi, he said, because all this travel is really coming from him, these suggestions And I had put it off, put it off, but I thought, well, this is a nice time to go to Sopmi. So Sopmi are the indigenous lands found way at the top of Europe. They go across part of Norway, sweden, finland and Russia. Now, unlike going to Nepal or Mongolia, the idea of living in the Arctic north that appealed to me. That wasn't so much of a hard sell, and so I thought, well, this is a nice time to go, take care of this task. Do you remember early COVID?

Frances Ulman:

I would say early COVID where we all just so many of us had a sense of like, okay, three more weeks, like just three more weeks, like we're almost through this hard part, we're almost through the worst part. I was in that season and I thought, well, okay, norway had closed its borders. But I thought, well, i'm just gonna kind of set myself up for success, i'm gonna go ahead and fly over to Ireland, because Norway was not accepting people coming from the USA, but they were accepting people coming from Europe. So I thought, well, if I just spend a little bit of time in Ireland, then I can get there. And this was at the suggestion of my jerk spirit guide.

Frances Ulman:

Time came and passed. I spent three months in Ireland. Borders were still closed and I had to leave. So I thought I didn't think my spirit guide So why don't you hop on over to Scotland? And so I did, with the idea that this is going in the right direction. Found myself living in Edinburgh, now, you know, and I had this sneaking feeling as the plane was landing in Scotland. Feels like this spirit guide is getting his way, because what is going on? Scotland was not on my agenda. Norway is still closed. I'm following his advice yet again and I'm finding myself in yet a new place. So there I was in Scotland. Strange adventures happened there. Norway still stay closed. Norway still stay closed. Norway still stayed closed.

Frances Ulman:

The bizarre thing about my experience in Scotland is I arrived December 24th just in time for the stores to have been open for like a couple more hours, and then, starting Christmas and then boxing day, scotland went into lockdown. So I went from Ireland, which had been into lockdown, scooted over to Scotland and now everything was in lockdown again. I didn't know a soul And I was about a 10, 15 minute walk from the castle. The streets were completely, almost completely empty. No one was out, and so every night I would just I had never been to Scotland before. Oh no, that's not true. I'd been there one day on like an overnight, but more or less I had no idea where I was. Every night I would walk up to the castle and it was just me and the ghosts Very, very haunted place. And my sister pointed out probably the last time Edinburgh was so empty was maybe during the war and before that during the plague. I mean it was truly a ghost town. Oh, and it was. boy, was it haunted. So I was there for some months.

Frances Ulman:

Norway still closed, norway still closed. I was walking down the street one day and I see someone familiar walking towards me And it is none other than one of my very, very closest friends from when I was living in Nashville, tennessee, going to graduate school. She had been in the English program and she was now an English professor, and she and I hadn't seen each other for years. I was so scared to tell her what was going on with me. I don't think we really got into it much. I think that she scooted around it as well, but it ended up being that her and I would hang out all the time and I was dating people and not marrying them still, and something felt like I don't want to say life was coming together, because I didn't have any intention of like growing a home in Scotland, but maybe in a new way, to understand what a life is coming together for me. Something felt good, it felt like it was in the right flow.

Frances Ulman:

Everything changed in a moment when I got the phone call from my parents And this is the heavy part of the story, folks, but there's some likeness to it too. I'll tell this story another time. I have one sister and I have one brother, and the phone call that I got from my parents was that my dad woke up and he was unresponsive. My brother. He was being rushed to the hospital and they were gonna see if they could save his life. Could I come back to Arizona as soon as possible? And so I went and my life in Scotland just ended Just like that. My brother did pass. He became an organ donor. I still chat with him. It's a beautiful, beautiful story. I don't have sadness around it now, but, as you can imagine, it was incredibly difficult time.

Frances Ulman:

And there I was again. I found myself yet again on this damn couch in my parents' house. I felt like it was like this Sisyphean adventure. Every time I tried to get away, i was back on this damn couch that I tried to leave when I was 17. So I thought, okay, mongolia is still closed at this time. I gotta get out of here. I do have an update I didn't know that my mental wellness goes down the longer I stay on this couch, no matter how much good television I watch with my parents.

Frances Ulman:

So I made a plan to move to Asheville, north Carolina, a place that I spent some time and I love, and I thought, well, i'm just gonna move to Asheville and figure this out until the borders open again, jerk's spirit guide intervened And sometimes, when he puts his foot down, he really puts his foot down. And he said you're not going to Asheville, you're going to Greenland. What Like do I need to get my spirit ears checked? Did I just hear? Greenland? This is a place I had never, yet again never, considered. All I knew was that Greenland has ice, iceland has green. This is just absolutely a bridge beyond too far. No, i'm not going to Greenland. He said you're going to Greenland, you're not going to Asheville.

Frances Ulman:

Well, by this time, this little hobbit's all grown up and I know what I want And I just want a garden to sit in, and Asheville can provide that for me. And I just want to watch the birds playing amongst the leaves And, yes, now I may also see some spirits playing amongst the leaves. So more realms, but still, just give me my hobbit home, let me be. So there I am just pleased, as planned to my newfound independence and my newfound ability to say no and mean it mean no, no more adventures. I've found what is. There are enough pieces in my life.

Frances Ulman:

Now I'm done exploring, so I go on to Airbnb and I find a great place for me to rent. It's a room In a like, a bigger home with like six or seven rooms. I can rent a room there. I can more or less afford it for one month. I figure one month will give me enough time to. Who knows, maybe the borders will open, or a month is long enough to find something a little bit more affordable. I booked the room and I'm set to go a couple weeks later, as soon as I book it, i hear a voice that says you're not going to Asheville. I didn't know what to make of it, because it sure seemed like I was going to Asheville. I'd booked the room and I wasn't had no plans to go to Greenland.

Frances Ulman:

Less than a week before I was supposed to go to Asheville, i wake up one morning to a message from Airbnb that all my money had been refunded and my reservation had been canceled at this Airbnb. Moments later, i got a text message from the Airbnb host saying I'm so sorry, please give us a call and I'll explain what happened. So she, i give her a call. She's in such a weird state. I mean, as I tell this story I honestly don't know what happened to her. I trust that everything unfolded for her in her highest and best, but she and her husband. They owned this property in Airbnb and they had many good reviews, many, many. They had been hosting people for years. Not one complaint. And she had a guest the day before who showed up and had not followed the check-in procedures and didn't know which room was hers in this house. And so this guest started just opening door by door, well, trying to figure out which room was hers. Well, the guest opens the door to two other guests in the middle of a moment of naked naked intimacy. So the naked naked guests are quite unhappy that this could happen. They call the host making all sorts of complaints and threats About how could this possibly be that our privacy was violated? The host apologized and explained what happened, apologized profusely again and again, but it wasn't enough for the naked naked guest, who now I assume were no longer naked naked, but helps us know who I'm talking about The naked naked woman in particular decides she's going to get her revenge And so she puts an ad out on the local Craigslist saying Free chickens And she leaves the phone number of the Airbnb host.

Frances Ulman:

So the Airbnb host starts getting phone call after phone call after phone call after phone call asking about the free chickens. At first she has no idea what's going on. But she slowly realizes this is naked, naked woman getting vengeance on her for not having properly hosted the Airbnb site. So the Airbnb host, in a moment of not clear thinking, decides she's going to get her revenge. And when people call and ask about the free chickens, she begins answering so kindly and sweetly, saying Yes, i know exactly where these free chickens are. Let me give you the phone number of the woman who has them. And she gives the phone number of the naked, naked, no longer naked guest. Well, now the Airbnb host has breached the contract with Airbnb because you're not allowed to give out any personal information of the guests. So Nakey, nakey, no longer naked woman contacts Airbnb and says this host has given out my private phone number to strangers. Airbnb comes down quickly and fiercely and removes the entire listing from Airbnb and she is no longer allowed to be a host on Airbnb. As she explains this story to me, my jerk spirit guide, he's laughing and he said I told you you're going to Greenland And this, my friends, is the story of how my jerk spirit guide kicked someone off of Airbnb because I had refused to take his travel advice and get my butt to Greenland.

Frances Ulman:

There is an epilogue to this story. I should have taken a screenshot of this, so I open up the flights to Greenland. Like, at this point, i'm just like what on earth is happening? And in the upcoming month there is one plane ticket, one plane ticket to Greenland. Well, this plane ticket is going also through Denmark, because Greenland is still owned by Denmark, and to get to Greenland there's only two ways in by plane. One is going through Copenhagen, denmark, and the other is going through Reykjavik, iceland, and this ticket was going through Copenhagen. So there it was, in the USA, needing to fly all the way to Europe, just to fly back to essentially almost the east coast of the USA.

Frances Ulman:

I had a little nudge to post something on, like just go find a Facebook group about Nuke, x-pats or something Nuke being the capital of Greenland and ask if someone has a room. And, sure enough, by the afternoon I had a really cool scientist at the university offer me a room in her apartment with her and her dog. And, like Asheville, everything fell together like seamlessly When I landed in Greenland, i just all of my frustrations just evaporated. I have never felt so integrated in a land, truly, even more than Mongolia. Mongolia feels like a home, but Greenland was really something different. I've never slept so well. My dreams are profound and prolific. The nature there is so strong and wild and it matched a part of my soul in a way that I can't really describe. Most amazing and surprising to me is I met the most wonderful friends there. Just incredible people doing incredible work.

Frances Ulman:

So Greenland is still occupied by Denmark after several hundred years and there's a huge decolonization, indigenization movement going on in Greenland right now. Greenlanders themselves refer to the land from their traditional indigenous language as Kalatlit Nunat, and in Kalatlit Nunat they're going through a movement that I see all over, which is a reassertion of their culture over the Danish worldview that had been imposed on them generation by generation. Generations of language suppression, movement of people from their traditional lands into the towns because it was just cheaper for the Danish government to take care of them. When I say take care of them, i don't think they were asking to be taken care of. That's that patriarchal, like patronizing worldview from Denmark that was opposed upon the people that were doing just fine on their land. So you're severing, like traditional food ties and, most importantly, like just severing communities.

Frances Ulman:

So, as my friends there are working to indigenize the land, the language and revitalization of culture. A huge part of that is bringing back the traditional spirituality, and the traditional spirituality is shamanism. It's not exactly the shamanism of Mongolia. They don't have shamans because shamans are from a specific land and in Kalasit Nuna they have Angokok And Angokok are the sacred healers. It's different methods but it's all the same jam, if you know what I mean. And I was told there are no more Angokok. I was told that they faded away, let's say, through forced erasure, as Denmark took over the land. But I met an Angokok and she's incredible, and I met her mother too. It's all coming back and it was an incredibly exciting time to be there.

Frances Ulman:

I was talking to a woman one day and she was asking me just kind of who I was and what my story was, and when I told her she said people have to hear this story, francis, and she worked at the university and she invited me to give you a talk at the university. So after some reluctance, i sat with it and thought she's right, this isn't a story to hold, it's a story to share. So I spent almost my last month there, daily working to put this talk together. My talk was to be given the last day before I left, and in a needlessly dramatic way, as does seem to always move through my story. The day before I was to give this talk, there was the first COVID scare since I had been there for several months and everything shut down, including the university. It was greatly disappointed that I wasn't able to give this talk, but a little nudge in me said well, francis, you've already prepared the talk. It's all swimming around in your head right now. I just remembered it and put it on YouTube, and so I did. The talk is called How I Learn to Stop Worrying and Love Talking to Spirits. It's up there right now. My YouTube channel is at dropoutpsychologist.

Frances Ulman:

So There's one thing that I dislike more about my jerk spirit guide than him being a jerk, and that's when he was a jerk and it turns out he was right, and he was right. Going to Greenland changed my life yet again, and instead of it feeling like more chaos, somehow it did feel like a thread for me to pick up, to continue weaving whatever I'm weaving And in fact I should the spirits allow but it feels like I'm being guided this way. I'm going back to Greenland in a couple of months and the story will continue from there. You know, in a sense, this little hobbit. She has found her home.

Frances Ulman:

Although it looks vastly different than that garden I had before, i know where to sit to watch the birds fly across the water and nuke as the icebergs lazily drift past below Up and sought me. My favorite time of year is winter time, the polar nights, when it's dark 24 hours a day and in any moment an unexpected house guest of the northern lights might appear at the cabin door. I know which trees the crows gather in to have first row seats to the Priests during their drag racing after midnight. Down below on Peace Avenue in Ushanbatar, my sense of home is much more vast, wild, it's much more free and it's incredibly much more beautiful than I ever could have imagined in that garden And I have my jerk spirit guide to thank for that, bumping me across land after land, like bumping me across the gravel, knocking out all these old stories and continuing to knock them out so I can go deeper down into myself and the wisdom that lives within all of us to see the vast inner connections and strings of love that bind us all in this vast, wild, beautiful, mysterious realm.

Frances Ulman:

So if you feel like a door you keep knocking on continues to stay closed, or doors suddenly open that you'd never considered before, take a moment to consider. You also have guides around you and spirits around you that care about your journey. There's a different way to read what's going on around us. Rather than good luck, bad luck, the spirits don't always communicate so directly as they do with me. Be curious about what's going on around you. Perhaps you're being guided along somewhere as well. Thanks for coming along this journey with me. I'll see you in the next podcast, if not before in the dream time odesis gosh.