Not All Spirits Are Jerks
Previously a clinical psychologist, Frances is now integrated in the world of shamanism in Mongolia. Along the way she has been in over 250 places across lands including Nepal, India, Sápmi (Norway side), Greenland, Bhutan, Iceland, Denmark, Mexico, South Korea, Scotland, Ireland, and Taiwan. The most unbelievable stories are the true ones. Join Frances as she spills tea about working for the Spirits, seeing the unseen, decolonization, haunted hotel rooms, and more!
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Not All Spirits Are Jerks
A Shaman's Journey: From The Clinic To The Cosmos
Have you ever wondered about the profound interconnectedness that exists between healing, the land, ancestors, and our relationships? How about the intriguing path that may lead a clinical psychologist into the ancient realm of shamanism? Join your host Frances, as she takes you through her personal journey of transformation - from treating mental ailments within the confines of a clinic to sparking spiritual awakenings in the vast landscapes of Mongolia and Nepal.
These are not just stories about her transformation, but also a deeper dive into consciousness, cultures, and how sacred healers are set apart from the rest. She will share how a mere curiosity about varying perceptions of the same shared experiences led her down a path of self-discovery and profound inquiries about existence. We'll explore the impacts of colonization on spirituality and the unique nuances of spiritual awakening from a western perspective.
Fasten your seatbelts as we traverse the serendipitous journey that led her to find herself recognized as a shaman in Mongolia, and the life-altering experiences that found her on this path. We'll discuss the power of the present moment, the wisdom of emotions, and the often-misinterpreted teachings of ancient spirituality. Her transformative journey has not only reshaped her life, but also revealed how the wisdom of our ancestors can guide us towards liberation, rather than repression. So, brace yourselves for an extraordinary ride, as we navigate the mystical realms of spirituality and consciousness.
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Frances is here:
Youtube: www.youtube.com/@dropout.psychologist
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Email: dropout.psychologist@gmail.com
Hello and welcome. I'm Francis. Welcome to not all spirits are jerks, a podcast named after my main spirit guide, who is quite the jerk. Today, i'm gonna tell you the story of how I found myself way out in Western Mongolia, near the borders of Kazakhstan and Russia. It was in a Jeep with a man I'd known for only about a week, and we were driving for a full day Across an almost completely empty landscape. There weren't even any roads, certainly no other cars. The only way we could notice the passing of time was the sun slowly drifting overhead, occasionally needing to stop for a few yak or camels or sheep crossing in front of us. I had absolutely no idea where I was and I had to put all of my trust in this man who I had barely known. We were doing all of this to follow the guidance of a dream I had had two days before, and I'm gonna share with you how it took actually years of discipline and intense training to reach the point where I could get myself so fantastically, unfathomably, completely lost.
Speaker 1:If you're new here, let me catch you up on a very long story in about one sentence. So previously I was a clinical psychologist. Now I'm initiated into a lineage of shamans in Mongolia, and I do spend part of my time living in Mongolia among community. There and there they call me a shaman. I spend the rest of my time living in many countries across the world and I share my stories with you today. If you'd like to know more about my story, you can check out season one, episode one, where I talk about this journey from psychologist to shaman. So if you're like I was before all of this happened to me, you probably have never met a shaman or real sacred healer before now. You may have met someone who calls themselves a shaman, but if they were speaking a language other than one of central Asia or nearby regions as their mother tongue, i Recognize I don't. I am an unusual case They probably almost certainly were not a shaman.
Speaker 1:Shamans are a subset of sacred healers, and sacred healers are found in cultures all throughout the world, not just in the past, but we exist even now. Now There's something just very different about us sacred healers. You may have heard of them as Medicine men no 80 up and sought me on a coke in Greenland. Every culture has a different name for us and the methods that we use are different, but what's similar with all of us is. We all Have a similar kind of soul and it's just different.
Speaker 1:It's odd a lot of why I share my stories here, because a lot of The people who are being called to be the sacred, healers and cultures, well, they're getting lost, because those of us like myself who were raised in like highly colonized spaces, we never knew about this as like a possibility. We didn't know that this could happen. The only story, the only myth that we were given was to call us mentally ill. So I share these stories That a few others share To kind of maybe be a beacon, among other reasons, for those of you who might be being called on a path yourself. Even if you're not a shaman. I think it's wonderful to learn about us because We exist and we have a function and we have a role in functioning cultures. And yes, when I say function and cultures, i'm tossing a little side-eye to the culture that I'm from.
Speaker 1:I am born in what is currently called the USA. I am of non indigenous, primarily European ancestry, and I'm about as square as you can get in terms of the path that I was shaped upon. I mean, i became a clinical psychologist. To me becoming a clinical psychologist. Now, from the lens I have now looking back, i recognize It was a healer's soul. I was being called to help and I do believe I was helping many people along the way, but in some other ways I was part of the machine that was perpetuating harm. Let me explain more about what I mean Now.
Speaker 1:I had really kind of swallowed the Kool-Aid and taken this, the myth and the myths that I was raised in to become a clinical psychologist, and one of the primary myths that I was given is that we're individuals and that Meeting that we're independent. What's happening to us is independent of other things. So we talk about, like your depression and what happened to you. Now, as a sacred healer, i have many more senses that I ever knew could happen to a person. I'm able to see things like what I like to say with my spirit eyes and I recognize I don't think it really ever resides in an individual because we aren't an object. We are a set of relations where, relations with the land, with others, with our ancestors.
Speaker 1:It's such a complicated web that we may experience something like depression, but to be going towards how to help someone with depression, i think it it magnifies a problem to be suggesting that it resides in the individual alone. I mean, look no farther than being raised in a sick culture that Trains us to go against the rhythms of nature. When we can't be, i think, within a healthy rhythm within ourself, we begin to wear down and it can slowly become something that eventually can be labeled a Mental health concern. Now, this, of course, is nothing that was taught to me in graduate school. One of the things that I find interesting, when I compare the differences between how I am now and how I was trained to be before, is there's an assumption that if everyone goes through the same graduate program, they're gonna come out kind of the same, as if psychologists or psychiatrists, like, were fungible.
Speaker 1:Nothing could be farther from the truth when I think about all of the shamans that I've met and other sacred healers along the way. Well, i mean, to begin with, there is no school, there is no training, there is no certificate. It's just a type of soul that you have and you may not have known it. That's a pretty common story. I found my story is less common in Western spaces, but when I go to Mongolia I have met other shamans that have a similar story of mine, that they were just living their best life, their cosmic egg cracked and they became something new, whether they were looking for it or not. So that's one way that sacred healers are different. You can't sign up to be this and I'm not sure that you can unsign up once your cosmic egg has cracked. Another thing that I've noticed is different is all the shamans that I've met and sacred healers in general. Like The only and the only thing that I can Use as a comparison is sort of like X-Men. I just remember where they were all in school and they all had their different gifts, right, so they were maybe in the same training program, but they were complete, being called to be Filling a completely different role, and I think that's what I see, that, like I said, we're a set of relations and I think sometimes what happens is, as a community gets out of balance, there's a need for a certain kind of being to come in to help bring that balance or that health or that Vitality back to the community or the land or the system.
Speaker 1:As I start to have some years behind me, even looking back at myself, i start to kind of put some pieces together. Moving as I was moving forward in the story. It felt like absolute chaos. It felt like, wait a minute. I was a clinical psychologist. Now, now, what am I? in the first couple years I didn't I. It's like I knew I was in trauma because I didn't know how to tell my story to myself. I truly didn't know how to tell my own story to me. Now I see the harmony in it. You know, i'm never gonna be a specialist in teaching rituals or calendars.
Speaker 1:Astrology This is nothing that my soul is, i'd almost say, aligned with. It doesn't resonate with me. But what is always happening for me since this beginning is there just cosmic winds that just have me like constantly journeying. As soon as I lost my home, i've been on the move and I've now lived in over 250 places across so many different cultures and, of course, i'm constantly journeying between realms as well. And what's happening is I'm just constantly getting experiences after experiences after experiences to reflect upon My sick culture that raised me and healthier ways to be, and I feel like I'm a storyteller. So all these pieces are coming together and I don't understand what my role is. I don't know what I'm being called to do, but when I sit with myself and I follow that next step, that next step, that next step. I can even start to see patterns in my own story of perhaps the reason why I was sort of called to duty We could almost say who I don't want to say called to duty The reason why I was activated, and So I think that there's something kind of cosmically odd about us sacred healers that I don't I'm not ready to say that we signed up for a specific mission, but it does feel like we're given a unique set of skills And we find ourselves exactly in the place where we're supposed to be to use the skills that were given.
Speaker 1:So like. I know a sacred healer who comes from a community that's had a lot of Difficult things happen for many generations in the past, and there's something about the way she works that I feel like. She's fantastic at soul retrievals, but not just soul retrievals on the individual. It's almost like she's calling back the energy of the ancestors. It's like soul retrieval on a group level. It's remarkable. And then a Shaman mentor of mine she's fantastic at medical stuff, so she can look at someone and she'll see perhaps like cancer in the body now or that it's gonna happen in the future, and she's not against medicine by any means. There are people in her family that are in Western medicine programs. These things work in conjunction as far as I'm concerned, but she's fantastic at just the medical piece of things.
Speaker 1:And then I think about me and my story. Now I tell people that I never had one strange thing happen to me before I opened. I never heard a ghost in the night, i never had a visitation from an ancestor, i never saw a land spirit, nothing. But you know, i was thinking about it as I was putting this, actually this episode, together. I don't know. Well, i have a lot of realizations as I do these episodes, but something came to me and I realized you know what that is? a golden thread that goes through almost my entire story.
Speaker 1:I think I've always been incredibly fascinated by consciousness. Everything about my story, always, for me, comes back to consciousness and exploring deeper and deeper what that means. When I say I'm going between cultures, i'm not an anthropologist, i'm not a scientist I'm not looking at it and saying, oh, these people eat this food and these people grow these things. It's not a comparison, it's really immersing myself, living within different cultures and starting to have undoing of really fundamental ways of thinking and being within myself and noticing that shift within my own consciousness. These cultures are changing me And, of course, as I'm journeying between realms and I'm aware of ghosts, that's a shift in consciousness as well. And then, moving back to thinking about how different cultures talk about these different experiences of different realms, there's something also in my story that's always circling around deeper and deeper introspection and knowings about, i don't know, consciousness. Even that isn't quite the right word, but that's what I have for now, for today.
Speaker 1:So I'm the oldest of a sister and a brother. The three of us and I was about 10 or 11 when my brother was born, and he was born with some medical difficulties that led him to have a lot of cognitive differences, and that was the beginning of sparking my curiosity about how different people have different experiences of what is like a shared experience with our eyes. But we're coming at it with a very different kind of reality, and I remember when I was young, everyone else wanted to be like you know, little girl. Everyone wanted to be the marine biologist And I was busy saying I'm gonna be a brain surgeon. I was never gonna be a brain surgeon, i'm not that dedicated to working that hard, but I spent many, many years thinking I wanna be a brain surgeon. I was so fascinated by the brain Okay, like full truth, i also wanted to be a marine biologist like who didn't. But that love of the brain and being interested in what that meant brought me to once I got to university. I ended up getting a degree in cognitive science.
Speaker 1:Now, at that time it was at the University of California, san Diego. It was one of the only cognitive science departments in the country, and what it was was really an attempt to understand the mind, and it had three components to it, so it was focusing on biology, behavioral ecology and computer modeling. All of this was supposed to kind of bring a synergistic effect to help us move forward in our understanding of what consciousness was. I was captivated by it. I actually, i think, in one of the few people who, like, found my university classes just really fascinating, and thank goodness, cause I think I might be a little lazy by nature, but that called me into class because I was just so interested in the conversations that we were having.
Speaker 1:After university, i spent a couple of years working at a university, in the linguistics department over in Boston, cambridge actually And from there I just wanted to continue on. I was just such a curious soul I didn't really think about what the ramifications were, but I went ahead and found myself in a doctoral program. Now this doctoral program was for clinical psychology But all I heard was I get to continue to think about consciousness and study consciousness. I didn't really think about the clinical part too much. The graduate program that I ended up in it was in Tennessee and it was very scientifically minded. It was sort of like a reactionary program to the days of training and a psychologist in the model of like Freud. And by reactionary I mean I don't think we were trained very well to be clinicians, to be honest, which is why, at least right now, i'm not naming it. I'm not totally calling it out. I'm not the graduate school in the middle of Tennessee for clinical psychology, but what it did do was it trained us to continue to think about individuals and mental health through the lens of a scientist.
Speaker 1:I had done a lot of advanced mathematics in my university years And then once in graduate school, i still had four more years of training in statistics. It was actually said in one of my classes if it can't be measured, it doesn't exist. Can you imagine how far I've come. I have to say I found graduate school miserable. It was terrible. It was such a bad match for my soul. I spent more years there than I care to admit. It was four years of classroom training, along with the research and your writing or dissertation, and we were seeing quote unquote patients along the way. But for me it was just. It wasn't like my university experience where I just got to study the brain and consciousness. I found graduate school more experience of grooming Like the professors around us.
Speaker 1:They were like demigods We would talk to each other about. When we were able to actually see one of them in the hall and maybe have a two minute conversation with them and passing, or maybe catch someone's ear in an elevator, we found our ability to contact them for mentorship was extremely limited. A lot of the times we were just flailing about on our own. I'm mostly speaking from my experience, but I think this was a shared experience for many of us in my program And what happened was they would praise us Basically when we found ourselves acting like little mini-thames. They were shaping us to become like them and to see the world through their eyes And we were shamed when we were trying to go in our own way.
Speaker 1:Now, looking back, i understand that this was not a good match for my soul. Oh, you know, i was just thinking right now because of a lot of the research I was doing. I was doing a lot of research with kids and families with intellectual differences, including autism, down syndrome, william's syndrome, prada, willy, if you know of any of these And so I spent a lot of time in the special ed department graduate program as well. They always seemed like they were having more fun. They were like way more down to earth and quirky and probably embracing of differences. So I just want to kind of throw a shout out to that department. I really think clinical psychology, it's its own special kind of pathology. My I shouldn't even say my program, i shouldn't say that at all. I retract that from the record.
Speaker 1:Well, there I was in this graduate program that I think could be characterized more by pathologizing of self than pathologizing others, just like a study of gaslighting, this little girl who had wanted to be a brain surgeon and who found herself so driven in university and driven in some ways. I was just driven by my curiosity. I think I've always just been so curious and I've always been very, completely like not caring about what other people think of me. Again, that might be part of that little cosmic egg peeking out, because I've been much more, much less interested in what other people think of me my whole life than other people have. So once I found myself in this graduate program, my entire like desire for following that curious drive within me was squashed. I had a mentor who had her own difficulties which we never knew about, but her difficulties were played out on us And I no longer was honoring sort of my incarnation Yeah, that's the way to put it. I didn't have those words back then. I was a complete material atheist, like science was my religion. I fully put all my eggs in that basket and believed that that was all we needed to understand the world around us.
Speaker 1:So the irony of me being in a clinical psychology program not honoring the path that I was being called upon, watching myself slowly, slowly get sicker and sicker physically and I was falling towards a deep depression, the irony of no one in that program recognizing what was happening to me and helping pick me up, i think is a metaphor for much more than just my story. There were good, good professors totally throughout that program who really did deeply care about us, but we were all trapped in a certain kind of worldview that we were being raised as the expert on others And there was no room within that story for us to show weakness within ourselves, and I think it was making us all sick. Does that make sense? I feel like I'm being a little bit too strong and I do wanna just kind of pause and say, other than my this one mentor, there are phenomenal people in this program students and professors. It's the myth that we were being raised in that I'm trying to put the lens on. We couldn't see what we didn't know, and what we didn't know I now understand was taking the whole ship down. Gosh, that's so like heavy. That's a really heavy analogy. It was like weighing us down Somewhere in between.
Speaker 1:There is what was happening, and what I find like kind of really fascinating about that time is how completely effective my culture had been in putting me like precisely in the box that it wanted me to be in, even though my soul was getting sick and my energy was becoming depleted which I knew when I was aware of, and I was going to doctors and I was trying to figure out what was medically wrong with me. I mean, gosh, if shamanism did have a school, this would be like shamanism intro for a stay. The body is our teacher, our emotions are our wisdom And my body was communicating with me and I didn't even know this, that's. And I hadn't even gone to a yoga class right, these are things that they say in like yoga studios. I didn't know that there was a connection between my body getting sick and the stress, the soul squashing that was happening in the program. That's how brainwashed I was, that I no longer even knew that. I could just listen to myself. I didn't have any other worldview, not one other experience to fall back on. There was nothing. There was no little knock inside of me to say Francis, this isn't you that's sick, it's the system that's sick. And that, for me, is one of the most beautiful, perfect examples of how colonization works. Yeah, it works through the power structures, but it also works in the most intimate ways. It cannot be sustained without training us to keep our minds in a certain place.
Speaker 1:I'm reminded of this place near my parents' house. So they live in the desert Southwest And that's where I was raised, and there's just this one street nearby. We used to call it the magic circle when I was growing up, but my dad would take us on bike rides there And for some reason, it's the only place where people are allowed to have like animals, like horses and maybe some sheep. Oh, it was magical to go on those bike rides when I was like five, six years old, and every once in a while, when I'm back now, it's nice to go for a walk, especially like it's so, so, so hot there during the daytime, and so I like my favorite thing to experience is when it's dark and hot, so it'll be like 11 at night, but it'll still be maybe like 90 degrees, about like 31, 32 degrees Celsius, and I like to go for this walk on this magic circle, feeling the desert heat. And there's this one plot, this one land, and they have a couple horses, but along with the horses they also have maybe a pony or two. They have some alpaca. I think they're alpaca because they look like the nicer ones And I don't think they're gonna headbutt me. The best way I try to tell the difference between llamas and alpacas is llamas are the ones that look like they're gonna headbutt you, and these ones look sweet. And then they have.
Speaker 1:Suddenly, a couple years ago, a deer, a deer showed up and a deer, like lives with this, like motley pack, and I would like to go visit it. And it was only after a couple years of like, checking in it on some time, slipping some blueberries to the animals in the darkness of night, i realized what the heck is going on with this deer. There's nothing keeping this deer in this enclosure. There was barely any enclosure. It was just like a little metal bar, a couple metal bars, the way that you would keep horses in their place. This deer could have been out in a second Like, had it never once decided that it wanted to explore. It seemed perfectly happy and mobile. It just was where it was And it had lost, i would say, its sense of curiosity about the world around him. It's very bizarre And I think of that deer when I think of myself in graduate school.
Speaker 1:Like Francis just jump out, but I didn't, and I got sicker and sicker. What I also did was I finished the hazing and I got out of graduate school. I got my doctorate. I went on to do a postdoc at another university, this time in North Carolina. I am published in peer reviewed scientific journals. Not a lot of publications. It was not a model graduate student, but enough to prove that my story is true. And in this graduate program, just sort of the non alignment between me and what I was being called to do continued to deepen and grow. And yet still I never once had any experience of anything outside of the ways that I had been raised to see and view and sense the world around me.
Speaker 1:That cosmic egg that was the real truth of my soul was well, well hidden from many, well, until it was in private practice. And then it didn't just begin to chip away a little, it basically cracked open in an instant, and in this way my story is a little bit different, even from the other shamans that I have spoken to and other sacred healers. Once I started to open, it was rapid and intense. To the point of it I would almost describe it as a violent opening. I'm okay now but, like I talk about in some other podcasts, it was a really tough and chaotic couple of years And of course, i think one of the things that so like oh, it's such lost time is like when this started to happen to me, i hadn't a clue. I hadn't a clue what was happening to me. So let me give you a sense of like what I mean.
Speaker 1:So I had been in private practice just I don't know, maybe very, very briefly, just a couple of years, and in this way I do think that the timing was complete. The decision was I needed to, like, get my license just so I could have to walk away from it. It's good training to push you into thinking you know who you are, works for something for over a decade and just walk away. But that's what happened And here's why. So I, in this spontaneous, unexpected opening. Nothing traumatic had happened to me, no signs until I had the symptoms.
Speaker 1:I was sitting in my office one day. Well, so from the time I opened, started having by opening I mean started having awareness of, like extra sensory perception and being aware of other realms. In a very short time I started hearing. Well, clear audience is still one of the strongest things that I have in my profile, i would say. So I started hearing and just slightly perceiving spirits around me, ghosts and otherwise.
Speaker 1:I was in private practice one day and I was sitting with my quote unquote patient or client. I like to call them clients to make it more respectful than patient. I mean, i don't use any of those words now. Now it's just I sit with people and we see what happens. I may be the shaman when I'm sitting with people, but we're both being healed and we're both relating in a way that is going to transform us both. So I try not to have these roles so set, even though I'm the one now doing the sacred healing work with people.
Speaker 1:But back then I was sitting with my client and he was telling me about some friend that he was close to who had passed really recently. And as he starts talking about this, you guys, at this point I had just been hearing voices of spirits and ghosts around me, maybe a month or so, maybe just a little bit more. So he starts talking about his friend who had passed And us talking about him, us putting our consciousness on this friend. It had been less than 49 days. The friend was still transitioning to the next place. We conjured him into the room. Now the client had no idea that this was happening. He's just talking about how he misses his friend. And as he starts talking about his friend, the friend starts saying tell him I'm here, i'm here. Tell him I'm right here, tell him I'm fine.
Speaker 1:Okay, this was not in my graduate program What to do with intrusive spirits of passing loved ones. I had absolutely no training to fall back on. Not only did I not have any training, i didn't have any stories around me. I didn't have stories of elders talking about what happens to a soul as it's transitioning on. I had nothing, except it didn't feel like instinct at that point, but just nothing, but nothing to go on. And so at that point, desperate to get this man out of my way so I could talk to my client, i said into my heart look, you can stay in this room, but you gotta sit down in that chair. The spirit listened and he sat down in the chair. And he sat there for the rest of the session listening to his friend talking about how much he missed him. Of course this was absolutely shocking for me, but also thinking back about just kind of my critiques of the way that we approach things like mental health and these colonized spaces. For him, visiting his psychologist talking about his grief was another reinforcement for him that there is nothing to be done except talk about what you miss. There is nothing to do to help that connection and the relating going even after someone has dropped their body. What a shame, right. And his friend was so happy. His friend was very cheerful and at peace with the fact that he was moving along.
Speaker 1:I could have said something, and in that moment I didn't. Not only did I not like imagine going to see your psychologist and your psychologist is like, hey, no problem, i see him, he's right here, he's fine. Do you have any messages that you want to pass on? I'd have lost my license in a second. Well, i gave it my best try. I think that time was, looking back feels brief, but being in that experience, you know it just there, was, there, was. It just couldn't hold.
Speaker 1:And so I'm, from the outside, looked like I had an ideal life, especially when you think about it through the training program that my culture had given me. I was married, i had a house with a mortgage, i had some dogs, i had health insurance. I was like a you know, quote, unquote productive member of society. And from the outside, this must have been one of many decisions that people watched me make that would have looked completely irrational. And think about that If you happen to know someone that is starting to seem irrational, or yourself. From the outside, it would have looked like I was no longer doing good decision making, but from the inside, this was an act of self preservation. I could no longer hold these two worlds together the world that I had been raised in and the world that I was now aware of, and so I made the decision to move to Nepal.
Speaker 1:I left everything with a backpack, and the reason why I went to Nepal is because one of the few things that gave me any sort of hope or glimmer of light is I had started going to a couple of meditation retreats. This is not like a cautionary tale. Most people that go to meditation retreats do not come out like me, don't worry, although people do have some odd experiences there, but usually you're fine. So don't think that this is the cause of it. But those were the few times where I thought okay, the people that are speaking around here are giving me something to hold on to. It's not that they were giving me answers, it's not that anyone around me had my story, but they were giving me instructions, like little clues, you know. And these, these instructions that ended up being so profound and completely revolutionary for me were sit, follow your breath, transformative. Being a scientifically minded, curious, rational person that I was, i thought well, where can I get more of this? How about Kathmandu? And so I left my life. When I went, it was more an act of desperation than anything else. I just needed some answers and I I had nowhere else to turn.
Speaker 1:Now it's not entirely true that I decided to go to Nepal. I talk about this in one of the episodes before. But what was also going on? as I'm hearing spirits of past loved ones and whomever was, i had one spirit guide around me and he, from the beginning, seemed to always be there And I didn't know who this voice was, but I felt it and it felt more or less safe to me, and this is the voice that one day in my ear, i think I was like taking a shower. The voice said you got to go to Nepal, and I kind of dismissed it. There's a lot going through my mind. At that time I had been communicating with a horse. Earlier that day, you know, i was still trying to like keep up patient notes, client notes, um. But but that little suggestion of going to Nepal stuck with me, so that these two reasons combined are why I ended up going to Nepal.
Speaker 1:Now, when I went to Nepal again I talk about this a lot more in a previous episode, but what I did was I still took that rational mind with me I made the decision I don't know what the freaking heck is going on in my life. I do not know how to navigate this. I sometimes don't even want to open my eyes and get out of bed. I got to have a plan. I got to have a system around me. So I made the decision that for one year I took note of the date. I put a bracelet on a little beta bracelet. I told no one, but I told myself for one year I'm going to follow the guidance of this guide because I don't know what else to do. I'm going to say yes to everything that he suggests and I'll reassess at the end of one year. It's like a single subject design. So that is how I got myself to Nepal Kathmandu and the adventure quickly took off from there.
Speaker 1:I ended up spending almost two years living in Nepal and then for much more of the time in India. It was terrible. I know people that go to India and they find themselves and they have these beautiful experiences. That was absolutely not my experience at all. It was miserable, but I had told myself the story that I had nowhere to go back to, and so that became the truth for me. I believe the story I told myself, so this is part of why I stayed there so long. There's more to it, but it was the milieu I found myself in and this is where I look back and recognize. This is where the training began. It was a new kind of discipline. It was a discipline of chaos.
Speaker 1:The year came and went. The decision was made that I had made a terrible decision and I should not take all the advice from this spirit guide. This ended up being the spirit guide that this very podcast is named after, because he's just kind of a jerk, and again and again he was giving me decisions like trapping me or setting the trap and I was taking it, falling into an abusive relationship, eating food that made me sick, just things, big and small. So at the end of the year I realized, well, that was a terrible decision. My life was absolute chaos.
Speaker 1:My awareness were expanding and growing in ways that even to this day, i don't quite know how to explain how mind-blowing it was, and everything was happening so quickly and there was no training around me. I wasn't reading any books. I had come to the decision that reading was just making it more complicated. I just need to stay with the experience. It's the only thing that I can hang on to. And more and more, the present was becoming my absolute refuge And that the present moment was becoming my teacher, as I was learning how to stabilize my awareness in the present, which is something that had never been shown to me. This is not the reserved for the shamans and healers, this is for all of us.
Speaker 1:The more I learned how to stabilize my awareness in the present, the more I started to gain what I would say is a new way of understanding. I started to grow my second wing. You know your mind, my mind, all our minds, the human mind. It's a banana show in there, and if we're only stuck in our thinking minds, we're just going to think ourselves right into delusion. There is no truth in there, there's only interpretation, extrapolation. I had to learn how to drop down into my heart to find that present moment And then, resting in my heart, i realized emotions are our wisdom.
Speaker 1:Emotions are communicating with us. I started to be able to understand and make the connections between my physical health and my emotional landscape, and I never could have had this other than through direct experience and practice. It was like opening a door to a whole new world. That was just right there within me And it's right there within you too, If you have been coming from a culture that's trained you to worship your mind and your thinking. It's like we've been misled. Now, as I was raised, reason is king. If you can think it, then you can be it. Emotions are something to be controlled. They aren't teachers, they are something to be managed And big emotions bad. This is, i think, one of the hallmarks of colonized space is the dismissal of emotions as a rich source of wisdom and information. Definitely, that was true in the culture that I was raised in. That was true in the graduate program that I was in.
Speaker 1:It's so strange to me when I think back about how we would talk about emotions. I mean, first of all we would talk about them, we would try to understand them. We wouldn't ask the emotion like what do you hear for? Are you trying to communicate something? And the goal was basically I mean, sometimes I almost feel like the goal of traditional therapy, as it's done now, is to like mitigate emotions, to not have too many of them or something.
Speaker 1:And I now find myself spending more than half of the year in Nordic-controlled cultures And these Nordic-dominated spaces. Emotions are, i don't know, like weakness. I think that there's probably a very clear connection between that and the history of how religion came to dominate these spaces, and so sometimes when I'm in these spaces, i just feel like such an odd bird, because to me, people around me haven't quite yet explored the depths of who they are and come to understand how to be with and truly work with emotions. And they're looking at me thinking I'm like not rational, because I'm having emotions, definitely, definitely, definitely. I don't mean everyone by any means, but I mean, you know, i think I'm not going to out on a limb, i think I'm not being too like outrageous by saying there are differences between cultures, and I don't think that salsa dancing was ever going to be coming out of Norway If they only understood, like, what sacred healers are experiencing.
Speaker 1:I'm not even just experiencing my emotions. I think, sacred healers, we have to be really, really skilled at emotions, because we need to be able to use ours and mind them for the wealth of wisdom and information that they're bringing us, and also someone like me. I feel your emotions, and a lot of times the emotions that I feel are premonitions of someone that I'm about to work with in the next week or two. So if I'm not really settled into the present moment, really settled into my emotional richness, then it's going to feel really chaotic in there, and then in so many of the spaces that I moved through and perhaps you're in some of these spaces as well emotions are like the opposite of reason And they're to be shunned. It's such a mad way to be, and I also do have ancestry from that part of the world as well, and so I can see it going down into my own family line, following me into the project of the USA that my family is part of, and there's kind of this, of course, dialectic that comes out that there was a lot of repression of emotions on some parts of my family line. And then there's the flip of that right, it's got to come out somewhere and some of the others became sort of the Canary in the coal mine and they are completely overwhelmed and burdened by emotions that they can't manage. So this is what I mean by growing the other wing. If we're living in our mind alone and we're trying to reason through everything, well, a very famous kind of pit statement that goes around the circles that I find myself in is the mind is a wonderful servant but a lousy master Everything is going to be more confusing. Ultimately, if you try to stick with that rigidity and understanding everything through that lens. On the flip side, you can't dismiss. Of course I'm not saying to dismiss that None of this is. I really don't want it to sound like I'm trying to say like just go with your dreams. I think we need both wings to fly.
Speaker 1:When I was living in San Diego, i was dating a surfer for a while. He was from Brazil and there were a lot of Brazilians there. He was in the master's program for business or something. That's how I met him at the university, but his passion was surfing. I was only with him just a short bit. I remember one time me, coming from this repressed type ancestry, was not prepared, as I was told. I hope that this isn't like too Well, i'm just going to stick with my experience.
Speaker 1:What happened is one day we were driving his pickup truck in Ocean Beach and we had a small, to me, a small moment of tension. He got so angry at me and he kicked me out of his pickup truck and he just left me on the side of the road. He was a really, really sweet gentle dude. I was just standing on the side of the road and, like what just happened? Never in my life has anyone gotten so irrationally angry at me and responded in such a passionately angry way. He was like just get out of my sight, get out of my car. I didn't know what to do. So I was standing there completely perplexed, and 20 minutes later he came back and he just opened the door and I got back in.
Speaker 1:I was later talking to a friend of mine about this, like what is going on? Is there something wrong with this guy? And she laughed and she was like you're dating a Brazilian, welcome to the family. It was a little bit too far from my ways of knowing, being, relating and perceiving and I think that's part of why he was lovely, but he and I just couldn't find a common ground. So all this to say, i have seen many experiences in people pushing into their emotions and letting the emotions drive something. I've seen many examples, many, probably more examples of people using believing that they have to live in the reason mind to be like living correctly or the right way. I don't think either of these ways are going to be working. These are the two wings, and the way to get to flight is to be sitting in the present. Now, i don't want to say that I discovered this. This is ancient technology from thousands of years ago and, basically talking about the tenets of Buddhism, the last thing we need is another white person saying they discovered something.
Speaker 1:My personal experience is just that the chaos around me sort of shoved me into this discipline of when I have nothing else to rely on. I mean, india was like such a crucible for me of pushing myself into this new way of being, because I just never knew what the next day was going to bring. I was with a Tibetan refugee, so he was born and raised in India. His parents were from Tibet. This means that he wasn't going to have Indian citizenship. His status was refugee, so I was living primarily in Tibetan refugee communities with him. We had no plans and India is a place of extremes of weather, so in the summertime we would stay primarily up at the foothills of the Himalayas and then, as winter came and it got cold up there, we would move down south And you just kind of I don't know how to I don't even know how to begin to explain it You just meet the present day and see what comes, and sometimes we would make plans. So we need to go to Calcutta one time for visa purposes, to go to the embassy there, and so there we are, taking the train to Calcutta and we get off and Calcutta is, to this day, one of the most difficult places of any realm I've ever been in.
Speaker 1:Leaving the human aspect of it aside, i remember just walking down the street and just being bombarded by ghosts, just ghosts who just walking through me like a swarm of mosquitoes Too many to count, too many to like, even process And it was like they're going through me. I didn't have any skills around that at that time. I didn't know what to do it, what to do. I didn't know how to put protection around me. This is now what I teach other people, but I had to go through that time of not knowing it myself. That's the way of the shaman, that's how you learn, i think, is you first go through it yourself, and at that time, i had absolutely no idea what to do, and so, instead of getting scared, i would anchor into the present moment. I would feel what was moving through me and I would begin to be able to separate out Oh, there's a lot of terror in these, in these ghosts, that a lot of what's inside that I'm experiencing right now isn't mine, and I could begin to set that aside. And that probably was the beginning of like being able to gather my energy as well, being able to pull myself back into myself rather than lose myself along the way.
Speaker 1:And then we decided to go to Bodh Gaya, which is the place where Buddha said to become enlightened, sitting under the Bodhi tree, and you can still go see the Bodhi tree It's said to be not exactly the same tree, but grown from the seed of the original tree And it's like the Mecca for Buddhism Just all people from all over the world, all different cultures, gather there. It's incredible place to be in. I do think, in some ways, my energy was transformed from having been there. I would, so we spent, we went there twice. I think the total was probably about six, seven weeks that I've spent there, maybe a little bit more, i'm not sure. So when we would go, i would just sit during the daytime and meditate at this incredible place And I would just feel this energy erupting through me, like erupting up my spine and out my crown, to the point that it's like, am I safe? And again, just anchor into the present moment, anchoring into my breath. This is my number one practice now. Nothing elaborate, and people want me to teach them some like, really like secret, profound rituals, and it's like no, just sit with your breath. That's, that's going to be the window into the entire universe. It's truly within you.
Speaker 1:And then I remember leaving Bodhgaya. We took the train out and it was a very, very crowded train. It was a day train And there were like luggage racks on top of us and the luggage racks, which didn't even look necessarily strong enough for luggage. Instead, people were sitting on these luggage racks. So you're just thinking like, oh, please, goodness, may this luggage rack stay intact. And so, as we're leaving Bodhgaya, there are men sitting on this luggage rack just above my head and he had had some spicy food And he was just farting on my head for hours. Connect with your breath, do not panic. In this over crowded train, it was a training that you aren't going to get in any university. It's a training that you're not going to get in any colonized space And it's a discipline that I think few truly understand, because I don't spend much time at all in like these more new, agey kinds of spiritual spaces in the West.
Speaker 1:But where I do spend a lot of time is in Buddhist, like the Buddhist worlds in the East and the West, and particularly those. I don't want to generalize, but there are kind of certain flavors that you get as you move across cultures, and one of the flavors I get in these Western students being exposed to Buddhism is we're really uptight, we're taking these ancient teachings of liberation and we're just constructing another cage, and that cage is one of what I see is often repression, mastery, overcoming emotions. I don't think that's how it's actually supposed to be. These are the spaces that I find myself in the teachers that I am around, the students that I'm around. I don't think that's through any fault of the students. I think you have a clashing of two things You have the students and we're coming in.
Speaker 1:Most of us, having been raised in these Kalanai spaces, we have these Kalanai's minds, and Kalanai's minds means that we're looking for certainty. We're looking for lesson plans that we can learn, take up and then notice progress, and progress doesn't mean getting sick. Progress means moving forward and quote unquote getting better. I don't think this is how any of it actually works. And then so you have these minds and but we are there's. I think something in our soul is calling us out. We're trying, we're like that deer who's starting to get curious and we're like wait a minute, maybe there's somewhere to jump to. But when we jump, we leave the enclosure we had been before, but we accidentally jump into the monastic world.
Speaker 1:You know a lot of these teachers that are coming to us from the West. They are very different than the people who brought us Buddhism. If you read stories of Padna Sambhava, that man was a wild man. I'm pretty sure he was queer. He would have sex in graveyards, drinking wine out of skulls. This is the man who brought Buddhism to Tibet. Something, something funny, happened along the way, and we now are getting these teachings through men. There are women, but they haven't yet saturated the teacher, the role of teachers in the West. So we're primarily now getting these teachings through men that have been raised in monastic settings, very rule bound, very rigid, they have their own cages and I think you get the clashing of these Western students then meeting these teachers from the monastic world.
Speaker 1:I do have a story that happened just recently that I think is just puts like a quick lens on what I'm trying to say. So I was just at a retreat, about two months ago or so, from a teacher who I adore. His name is Tenzin Wangya Rinpoche and he has a lot of offerings online. That's how I'm able to stay in connection with him with all this traveling that I do Very generous of him, i follow him actively and I think that the students that he pulls around him are really, really good, beautiful souls. But there's a rigidity in that community and a very like not just an adherence to the rules, but I like taking refuge, let's say, in the rules.
Speaker 1:So I was chatting with someone, as you do, and mentioned, yeah, i spend time in places like Greenland, and he said how do you maintain your vegetarian diet while you're in Greenland? I just erupted into spontaneous and genuine laughter and was like yeah, i never said I'm a vegetarian. For me, i have a very strong internal compass of how I like to eat and that is, i like to eat sustainably and from the land, and when I'm in Indigenous communities that have the privilege of still connecting with traditional methods, which can include hunting, then I consider it a privilege to be able to eat in that way. I'd much rather eat something that was hunted and pulled out of the sea and served to me in Greenland than an avocado that was shipped in using oil grown maybe from not ethical practices. So that's for me.
Speaker 1:Behind this is the worldview that I try to never take more than I need and then believe that there's enough for all. I am always thinking the gifts of the food that are ever shared with me from the land and the belief I think fundamentally, that everything is alive, everything has a consciousness, including avocados. But I didn't share with him, nor did he ask me my reasoning for the ways that I eat in that moment. So I just laughed and said yeah, i'm not a vegetarian. I never said I was. And he. He looked at me with like a mix of shock and horror and a bit of confusion on his face too, because he thought he was safe in his enclosure with the other students, and he said well, you might want to ask our teacher about that. This poor guy must have just thought I was a completely cracked pot. I just laughed. I didn't know what else to do, not laughing at him, but it was just so precious the way he suggested I should seek guidance on these choices that I've already made. I just said to him yeah, i'm not, i'm not seeking teacher's guidance on this one. This is what I mean.
Speaker 1:There's just a rigidity in these communities that I think is not the ultimate path And it just, i think it creates a culture of the opposite of what I think Buddhists of the past were really explaining. These are teachings of they're not safe, they're wild and nothing is certain. So what you're getting, i think, is you're having these colonized minds, but something in the heart is stirring and they're looking for where to jump, and then they're jumping into these communities of teachers that are no longer like the original carriers of Buddhism. They've been raised in the monastic spaces and they have their own cage. That they're offering And it doesn't make for, i would say, the growth of the second wing. It keeps people in a way, trapped. No, traps are sometimes like, as Ram Dassis does say or does say, we need those traps because they become our path. Sometimes you need to get trapped. You need to use the structure that's given to you to find your way out of the structure. So I don't want to sound too critical of it, but I do want to note that I don't think that's the be all, end all And it creates, i think, communities that are just kind of uptight and rigid and killjoys My experience.
Speaker 1:to be honest, this meditation retreat that I was recently at is actually the first one I've been to almost since the beginning of this wild journey. I don't really actually go to formalized retreats all that often. It felt more like I was being more or less blocked from them for the most part of this journey. Well, my jerk spirit guide, he gave me a few experiences of going on meditation retreats at the beginning, but then by the time I got to India, nepal, i was sort of there to fend for myself. I did take some teachings from his Holiness the Dalai Lama in these huge, open teachings, and they were. They were, of course, incredible, but generally speaking, my jerk spirit guide, let the chaos be my teacher, and this is where the discipline came in, the discipline of stripping everything away and just being with.
Speaker 1:I lose the word because there's something below. The breath is what I have found, and the deeper I sit, the more it's like. At first, when I started sitting with the breath, it became a little place to pinpoint, it became a place to anchor my attention. But now it's like the breath isn't even the focus anymore, it's what's behind it, and what's behind it becomes more and more infinite. That might be the space of the shaman I talk about, like going to my office, and going to my office sometimes just means taking a nap, but also can just mean sort of spacing out. It's a trance. It looks like spacing out to other people, but what it is is these years of intense discipline, of following the breath in until I literally fell behind it, and what's behind there is indescribable and infinite. And also what's behind there is the connections to everything, the connections to the ancestors, the connections to the land, the recognition that the self is an illusion, that we are just relations.
Speaker 1:I don't think I'm saying anything that would sound profound or new to people that are still lucky enough to be raised in cultures that haven't been completely scrambled, and I don't want to come across as someone who's like telling elders something that is just the ways that I think humans have been Right. This is just one story of like a dumb, dumb Weston or me, francis, finding my way out and finding my way out literally having to have my entire world taken apart and just decimated so that I could literally have nothing left to hold on to except for my breath, and then, with the breath, falling into, i think, a more natural state of being. And this natural state of being I don't think is profound or revolutionary, i don't want to talk about like removing into a new age. I feel like I'm moving backwards in the most beautiful way, a reconnection with what I think it used to be for all of us. So this is the space where I go to when I want to hold space for someone that I'm sitting with. It's also the space that I go to when I want to connect with information or teachings that I may be gifted for my own path. It's also the space that I go to, sometimes in dream time.
Speaker 1:The me that I've become now through these years of, let's say, unconventional training is someone that the former me could have looked in the eye and not even recognized. I truly wouldn't have been able to see me, the who I am now, because I was still in that enclosure A lot of people. They want the teachings, they want the teacher, and it doesn't come and it doesn't come. I got to this place by knocking on so many doors and the doors not opening. And now I think I more and more understand why that is because the teacher can come, the teaching can come, but the soul isn't always ready. You could have dropped me in that space in western Mongolia, out near Kazakhstan, with that man. You could have given me the jeep and everything I needed, pointed me in the right direction, but my soul wasn't ready yet.
Speaker 1:It took these years of discipline, of the chaos, resting only in the present moment, to get myself to the point where I was ready to follow the, to follow the doors that opened that led me to Mongolia in the first place, following the rabbit hole even farther down, taking that small prop plane out to western Mongolia, meeting this wild man and he was wild, padma Sambaba would have definitely approved And finally getting to the place of having that dream that night that said you need to go that direction And what it said in the dream is you're going to find your teacher a teacher. So I told this wild man about it and he said I know exactly where that is. My uncle lives along the way there. I don't know anyone there, but he might be able to help us find a shaman. And so we headed out across this land with no roads, with no map, only following a dream.
Speaker 1:We picked up this uncle and the three of us headed towards the dream. And when I got there, i did find my teacher and she welcomed me in and she tested for me for hours. She consulted her astrology, she consulted her own God And then she said you are indeed a shaman. We'll hold the ceremony for you tomorrow. And this is how it took years of discipline to get me to the point to be able to get so completely lost and off the map that I was found. Wow, thank you so much for coming along this very winding journey with me. I'll see you on the next podcast, if not before, in the dream time. Dream well, friends, dream well.