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
SEASON ONE LAST EPISODE: Decolonizing Minds
Decolonize your mind, one podcast episode at a time.
Join Frances as she leads us on a journey from colonized minds to full moon rituals with her shaman mentor under the Mongolian starry skies, where the stars shine brighter than anywhere you've ever seen. In the same episode, she will share reflections from her childhood, growing up in a colonized culture and eventually becoming a clinical psychologist. It is this personal history led her to scrutinize the myths that underpin colonization and the devastating effects they can have on our lives. As a clinical psychologist, she shares how the myths of clinical psychology creating barriers between therapists and patients, experts, and individuals. All in the service of perpetuating the colonization so many of us are still under. She will share a personal tales from her days as a psychologist that made her question the myths she was raised in and the harm it can cause. Even the harms of clinical psychology and psychiatry.
This episode is not just about highlighting problems, but it's also about seeking solutions. Or letting go of the ideas of solutions entirely. Let's get inspired by the hero's journey, learn about growth and self-discovery, and dream together of where we can all be together in new ways. Join Frances on this enriching expedition and let's step beyond the bounds of the colonized mind together.
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You can find me here: https://www.patreon.com/dropoutpsychologist
Frances is here:
Youtube: www.youtube.com/@dropout.psychologist
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More: linktr.ee/dropout.psychologist
Email: dropout.psychologist@gmail.com
Hello, i'm Frances. Welcome to Not All Spirits Are Jerks, a podcast named after my main spirit guide, and he he is one of the jerk ones. He's, in fact, quite a huge jerk. Today, i'd like to share with you one of the most beautiful memories that I have had in the last several years. It's from the last time I was in Mongolia. If you're new here, welcome.
Speaker 1:Very briefly, my story is I used to be a clinical psychologist. Now I'm recognized as a shaman in Mongolia. I'm initiated into a lineage And there they do call me a shaman, which is the only reason I would use this word for myself. If you want to know more about my story, check out season one, episode one. So this memory is from a full moon ritual that I was doing with a shaman mentor of mine in early fall. So it wasn't quite super cold yet, but it was cold enough that it was nice to have the fire nearby.
Speaker 1:About 10 of us gathered on the outskirts of Usambatar, which is the capital of Mongolia, a home of about a million and a half people. Because there's so much light pollution in the city and that urban environment, we needed to drive a good ways out to be able to get a clear view of the the sky. There's no other sky like the sky in Mongolia. The stars shine bright, even brighter than in the heart of Texas, and to get there we all piled into a car in ways that I've only also experienced in Mongolia. I think we had about seven or eight of us in a sedan. We're just laughing as we're bumping over the dirt roads, sitting on each other's laps. So this was a gathering, kind of like a hangout before the full moon ritual as well. Everything is a social event. When it comes to my experiences in Mongolia, i have such a good time there. It's a very I don't want to say laid back culture, but it's definitely very different than some of the more uptight spaces that I sometimes find myself in. So before we began the full moon ritual, this was a time to set up a fire, pull up some chairs, and some women pulled out these huge thermoses and began pouring us some delicious sort of maybe mutton kind of soup, a potato, salty, hearty, just the kind of thing you want to be eating on a cold, late fall night there. And then, as the evening went on and the moon began to rise with the stars up above us, we began our full moon ritual. After the ritual, i looked out across this empty landscape We were by a river and some horses in the distance And I saw this woman walking alone, raising her arms up as if like gathering energy around her and then slowly washing her arms down across the crown of her head and sweeping back through and out her whole body. She was just walking slowly, doing this several, several times.
Speaker 1:Now there's some things you need to know about how Mongolian shamanism works. Mongolian shamans or shamans. We're just one of the many different kinds of sacred healers that are found in all cultures throughout the world. So shamans are found in Central Asia nearby regions. Other cultures have their sacred healers And what makes them different are the methods. I think fundamentally all sacred healers, we're working with the spirits and they're helping us transmit information, balance, harmony to communities, lands And, we could even say, time. I believe the work of the shaman changes as the cultures change around us, so some of what shamans do today is going to look different than what was happening a few hundred years ago, because the imbalances are different. What is the same across all cultures for sacred healers is we're working for the spirits, but the way that we bring these messages and information, teachings, healings forward. They look different.
Speaker 1:In Mongolian shamanism there are a couple key core things that all of us shamans are going to have, even though we're like a rowdy bunch And many times we completely contradict each other. The first thing is we all have what's called an onga, and I do talk about that in a different episode. So when I named this podcast after my spirit guide, he's not just a spirit guide, he's my own God. It means we're sort of bonded for life And he is my boss. Basically I have to do what he says, but he teaches me healings in return And for the most part he's helpful. But he's also been known to play a trick or two on me And that's why the spirit this podcast is named as it is after him. So all shamans in Mongolia, we each have our own different onga, and that onga might have been a shaman ancestor in your family, from the community. You may know them by name, you may not. They may have come from recent times, they may have come from several hundred years ago And some onga have never actually been in human form, their helper spirits coming down and transmitting information into this realm through this human vessel.
Speaker 1:Now there are many paths to becoming a shaman in Mongolia And one of those paths is you know you are on your way to becoming a shaman, but you're not a shaman yet And you have to do a lot of training to prepare both your body and your mind to get ready for this intense, energetic experience. That's going to be completely life changing. If you're not ready for it, i think you can lose your mind. But because they have the traditions in place in Mongolia, they know how to recognize the people who are on their way to becoming a shaman years in the future, so they can start the training early. This isn't the only way to become a shaman.
Speaker 1:My path was quite different. I had a very spontaneous eruption and I was basically recognized. I mean, that's skipping over some years, but there was no training or preparation involved. I popped out sort of spontaneously. I suppose looking back, i could say the years of preparation did come for me, but it was training from above. So in contrast to me, this woman that I was watching she was in those years before, not yet a shaman, but she knows she is being called and she really needs to take that training seriously. There's absolutely no equivalent to this in the West, and that's what this woman was doing, as she was scooping up the air overhead and brushing her hands down across her body.
Speaker 1:Although it's a little bit more difficult for me to explain the most beautiful part of this without sharing part of my journey with you, the path of coming from the background of being a clinical psychologist and now being a shaman. This is not the same thing as like. Before I was a doctor, now I'm an anthropologist, because doctor and anthropologist both of these professions, while they sound really different, these are jobs that are both coming from a certain kind of culture. For me to have gone from clinical psychologist to shaman, i actually had to sort of like erupt out and go into a different orbit and be able to leave behind parts of the culture that had raised me. So, speaking of anthropologists, i'm not an anthropologist, i'm not a researcher, and that's part of why I think some of these stories are so unique, because anthropologists, they really can only see with their eyes, as I've said before. But we don't see with their eyes, we see with our minds, we see with the stories and the preconceptions that were already in there. And for the more anthropologists, when they're studying something as mystical as shamanism, without having that lived experience of actually being able to journey between the realms. They get fixated on the rituals, the objects, the calendars, the personalities, the grand stories, but they're missing the real story. So what I share here for you, my hope, is a fun journey in through the window to experience a little bit of what life actually is like as a shaman. A shaman is so much more than a profession. It's a type of soul And we're odd. We're different, but in healthy functioning cultures we aren't outcasts. We're a central part of a healthy functioning culture because we're the healers not the only kind of healer, but essential kind Grandfathers and aunties. These are a different kind of healer. They're healers too, and what I've come to understand is none of this is about the past. In healthy functioning cultures today, throughout the world that I've been to, the sacred healers, they're just part of the culture.
Speaker 1:However, i was raised in a very colonized and colonizing culture. I was born in the suburbs of the USA. I am not indigenous, i'm of primarily European ancestry And I spent my summers swimming in pools and eating nachos. I went to college and I was raised in a household where that was the expectation. I was very much like in, like the center node of the project of colonization, which is still ongoing. And when I say center, i don't mean more important, i don't mean central, i mean like really into the machine that was pumping out the culture that others were being having like put upon themselves. Of course it was being put on me as well, but when my experience is swimming pools and nachos, i'm not experiencing the oppression as much as others, or so I thought.
Speaker 1:See, the thing about being raised in any culture is every culture has their myths and the myths help the culture function. Colonized spaces like the dominant culture of the USA and Europe, other spaces as well. We have our own myths, just as much as any culture, and these myths are central for helping the projects continue, projects that continue to lead us into the situations where, despite there being an abundance of everything that we possibly could need in these cultures and spaces, there are so many people living in poverty and they don't have enough. These myths really are the building blocks of the project of colonization. But the myths are insidious. They're like little mind viruses. They're not out there, they're inside, and that's how these movements like decolonize your mind. This is what they're talking about, because we can't decolonize the outside without first decolonizing within and without first going inside to explore. What little story, what little virus story, what myth is being replicated within myself that I am then putting on others? This is how the projects of colonization continue.
Speaker 1:So myths from this dominant culture that raised me. They give us beliefs like I need to earn my spot on this earth, like my worth isn't inherent. The same zeitgeist that got us, like the industrial revolution and the steam engine, transforming how we thought about transportation. This thought, it's turned into the project of the self, as if you need to progress, to always becoming better. Like are you better than yesterday? Are you better than last year? Is your project bigger? Are you making more money? Are you more, more, more.
Speaker 1:And all of this betterment is, i think, supposed to be pointing us towards some mythical land of when we're finally perfect. Isn't it absurd? Like, when you really think of it, this is like tearing us apart, these abstract ideas that we've swallowed. They don't exist in all cultures, and if you're not from this dominant culture in the USA, you may be able to relate as well, looking at it from the outside. In What a ridiculous myth to be living under. There is no stopping. There is literally in the myths. In these spaces There's no space to just take a breath and rest and say that's enough, that'll do pig. And then there's the myth of the history, of this story that we're in. Like history is in the past and we just we learn from it and we acknowledge it and we move forward.
Speaker 1:It was raised in a very, very liberal household, like hippie liberal kind of not quite hippie but almost hippie liberal kind of family. I think that we were very embracing of the realities of the history of the project of the USA, but still within the household that raised me, it was we just spoke about it all the time. We would watch documentaries. It was very lived experience because, especially my dad He was growing into adulthood in the wild sixties. He would share his stories from that time And I was always captivated by it. But there was something in the way the story that was told to me that it was like and this is the history, this is our past, this is how we get to where we are And now we move forward. In those stories there was never a sense of like, responsibility of like. And what do I do now? How do I? how do I make this different? for all, that's not exactly true. He my dad and his mom especially even more was really involved in the civil rights movement. He grew up in New York and Virginia and has a lot of stories from that time as well. So I think my sister and I we grew up with a very, very strong sense that it's important to take action as you can, and probably that spirit, that energy moving through my family line, is the energy that's now coming to you through some of the motivations I have for making this very podcast here In this colonized culture. That raised me. It raised me.
Speaker 1:I believe I've always had the soul of a healer, and if you're listening to podcast, you may very well also have a healer soul. Sacred healer or not, we're all important. So I believe my healer soul was called a clinical psychologist because the myths that were raising me were saying if you're interested in helping people's minds, well, the belief would be that the sickness was in the mind and if you're interested in helping, that's the role that you can play. And so when I first began hearing spirits myself, when I was in private practice, the only myth that my culture gave me was to say that I was sick. We've so lost our way that when something happens outside of the box that we've been raised in, we don't know how to go outside of that box. We'd much rather hold on to the, the enclosure that we've been put in and accept the stories of ourselves as sick beings, rather than looking at the enclosure around us.
Speaker 1:I'm wondering if it isn't the culture that's sick. I now see, looking back, there's no space for mystery in the dreams of the colonized mind. In colonized spaces, we have forgotten to dream to the point that man has become the unit of measurement And we can look no farther than something I heard very recently, just a couple days ago, on the BBC. That explains what I mean. In fact, this is like a confessional podcast in some ways. The way I was thinking about how to put this episode together and as I was thinking, my jerk on got said turn on the BBC. And this this is how he got my thinking queued in to writing this podcast is what I'm about to share with you.
Speaker 1:I turned on the BBC just in time to hear the beginning of an interview with the current US poet laureate, ada Limon. Now she has been asked to write a poem that will be engraved on the side of a spacecraft that's going to be going on a mission Nessa's Europa Clipper mission. It's just going to travel out in the nearby neighborhood, about 1.8 billion miles away, to explore some of Jupiter's icy moons. So in this interview she was talking about how she went. I think she went to spend some time on sabbatical in Hawaii and was trying to get into this space and trying to figure out how do you write a poem for the infinite like this?
Speaker 1:And she said she was sitting in meditation one morning and a phrase just came to her There are still mysteries. And as she's talking about it in the BBC interview, you can look it up for yourself. She almost seemed slightly mystified by her own words And she was remembering how there's still so much we don't know. In a way it was quite saddened by this sentiment That's the best she can do that there are still mysteries. I mean, we're living in a great mystery. Do we even truly know how skin heals when it's cut? Feel like how can that not be your like? first thought waking up in the morning? No disrespect to this great poet, loria, and she certainly is a poet of our times, but there are still mysteries, as if that's a reminder What is going on. This is a. This is central to my experience and perhaps yours as well. And just quick side note like oh, it's so embarrassingly on brand for what we're talking about, for colonized minds to be seeing exploration or the myth right behind it, being and settlement of now places even in space. Oh my gosh, sit down.
Speaker 1:They went on to interview a person that was part of the mission and they were saying well, we're going to go visit the moons of Jupiter because underneath a skin of ice lies an earth-sized shape ocean with what is believed to be water, and perhaps there is life there. And I was thinking, wow, the greatest ways that we can figure out how to dream is to go. And we're talking about some unknown region and we're comparing it to the skin on our body, and there's an earth-sized ocean below. It's all relating back to us and something that we already know, and perhaps there's life there. You know the definition, i'm sure, of life there. They mean material form. I'd be curious if there were naga's there. These aren't mysteries to me. To me, the greatest mysteries in the universe are something we all have access to. But so long as I've already lost the seat at the table that fed me.
Speaker 1:I'm going to go ahead and offer my poem for this mission The dream of the colonized mind. When men no longer can dream, they dream of themselves And see themselves in the stars Rather than seeing that the stars are in ourselves, a vanity project of the mind, while hearts cold to the children who go hungry, ooh, burn. Now what I'm going to suggest to you is that there is a relationship between the myths that have brought us to this point to have these space missions, which I do find absolutely fascinating and I am captivated by. I am just being playful with this because I think it's just such a beautiful metaphor for what's going on. I'm going to suggest that the myths that have got us to this point of this project Are also related to the myths that we find within clinical psychology and psychiatry. For ease of just speaking, i'm going to say clinical psychology that's enough of a tongue twister as I'm trying to enunciate, but I mean the related discipline of psychiatry as well. They're kind of bed buddies.
Speaker 1:So here are three of the myths of clinical psychology that I like to play with in my mind as a way to explore and kind of detangle some of the thinking that got into me. The first is the myth of the individual. Now, this is a very convenient myth. If you go into a space to be diagnosed, the diagnosis is like a sticker that's put on you your anxiety, your depression. I do want to acknowledge that there are some things that I feel like are very biologically based, like perhaps dysthymic disorder or bipolar disorder I don't know, that disorder is a word that I'm comfortable with, but that I understand is something that might reside within the individual, and I am aware that there are genetic underpinnings found for almost every diagnosis created within the DSM, the diagnostic and statistical manual. If you want to have a larger conversation with me about it, we can do that some other time.
Speaker 1:But here's how I see it now. It is all connected. Even if you're getting down into genetics, you didn't spontaneously generate. These genes have their stories as well. They're the stories of your ancestors and not just the stories of your ancestors. They're the story of the history, of what your ancestors have been through Migration, food patterns, times of like, not access to food. It's the story of the land. Even when we get into genetics, that isn't the story of you alone. There is no individual. There's only networks of connections, and this really becomes a problem when we start thinking about how we try to help lessen people's suffering in these spaces like clinical psychology.
Speaker 1:Okay, story time, and this story is a bit sad but it weighs really heavy on me because, as I'm sharing this right now, most of this podcast has been ghost stories and spirits and traveling realms, but this is a real central passion of mine to be talking about how I recognize now that I, in my good hearted way, was contributing to the harm of the spaces in these colonized spaces by playing in the role of a clinical psychologist. I wanna really fully take that responsibility And really I think this is the bare minimum I can do. I don't expect any praise or admiration for this. This is me, yeah, just shining light back on my role in all of this. I am not innocent. As I do this and I reflect back on it. There are always just certain people that I met that stick with me more than others, and this is a story of a girl.
Speaker 1:I was working at my postdoc. I was doing a rotation on an inpatient psychiatry unit. It was one of the only ones in the USA at that time that would take children, i think, down to like five, perhaps five or six, and a girl came in because she was having hallucinations. Now the goal of the treatment was basically med management. Spoiler alert Of course I see, she was one of us. She was a sacred healer in her community. She was raised in a Christian community in the South and they saw the devil in her And the things that she was seeing around her were quite scary, and so she was brought in to find a medication that would finally shut the doors of her perceptions to other realms.
Speaker 1:None of this is how we talked about it on rounds, and I was tasked with the treatment of helping her learn how to use like cognitive strategies to manage when she had a hallucination. I had absolutely nothing even near adequate training for that, and I remember I was sitting with her watching TV one day because I didn't really know what else to do. She was only gonna be there for a couple weeks. I wasn't gonna be able to get past the door of rapport. I mean, she was under 10 and sleeping alone in this hospital unit at night. It's a locked unit. You don't have any of the comforts at home. You know the fluorescent lights above you the dead hospital food, not to mention if she's open to other realms. There's all kinds of things floating around those hospital floors. It must have been so scary for her And the idea that anyone in that kind of space could heal, could do real deep processing work is just you know, it's like it's ridiculous. This is where the myth of the individual causes one of the ways it causes harm. We're removing her from her community and we're giving her the story that there's something wrong with her. I don't think I honestly don't think it's too far to say The minds that brought us locked child psychiatry units. These are the same minds that created residential schools. It's the same sick thinking that you can remove a child from the community and cause anything other than lasting trauma.
Speaker 1:This girl had a really loving family and a very comfortable support network around her at home. She didn't need to be in this facility. So I'm sitting in the TV room with her one day just watching TV. I was only gonna meet with her maybe four or five times Her entire stay there And it felt like with nothing else to go back on. The best thing I could do was just offer a friend And we're chatting and I'm asking her a little bit about what's going on. She's so shut down, this poor sweet thing, removed from her community through the myth of the individual, removed from her relations with these strangers. We had very different cultural backgrounds So it was hard to even know if they're where to meet, with the shared space between us, me being the clinician. So we're just watching TV and she's sweet And she is gravitating towards me because I think in that cold environment it was a sell for her to just have a kind adult around her And it probably felt a little protective for her too.
Speaker 1:So as we're sitting there watching TV, she suddenly bolts straight up, her eyes become as big as an owl's eyes at night And she freezes. And I said you see something, don't you? And she proceeded to describe the nastiest, ickiest thing you could imagine, or maybe even more than you could imagine This little girl. And it was sitting on top of the TV and it was watching her And she said this thing just told me he knows when I'm alone at night and he's gonna wait until I'm alone And he's gonna jump on my chest and he's gonna steal my breath.
Speaker 1:It's heartbreaking to me when I think about it because now, looking back. I believe that that is a spirit that was talking to her. It may not have been able to do the threats it was saying, but it knew what to say to make her scared and I didn't know what to do to make it go away or to tell her how to take care of herself. I was just sitting in my eyes with a little girl who was having hallucinations And now I wonder well, where did that spirit come from? You know, there is no individual. That spirit came from somewhere. Maybe her brother was hanging out and bringing with other people and brought the spirit back home to the house. And he didn't know it because he was in the healer and he didn't have spirit eyes. But this icky thing jumped on her, the closest host, you know. Even I wonder now, like that's so random that I would think it was the brother that brought it home.
Speaker 1:And I don't mean in any like devious, evil, intent way, it's just, that's how these things work sometimes, as they hop around To be isolating people and then approaching the individual as treatment. It's all, it's just, it's madness, it's foolishness, it's like blindness, because you cannot tell me one diagnosis that I will not say and that resides in the culture. It's manifesting in the individual, and the individual is experiencing the suffering. But it's often the canaries and the coal mine, it's the most sensitive of us who are experiencing the most suffering because we are shining a light on the harms of the system. Boy, i specialized in eating disorders and I saw that again and again and again, but I never thought of it that way. While I was the clinician or the therapist for the person with the eating disorder, i would be talking to them about their phobia of food. That's not the issue, is it?
Speaker 1:I dream of a shamanically informed healthcare system. Why not? This isn't so far out there. It really isn't. We would have to work out some details like billable hours for when I'm traveling the other realms, or like how do you charge for soul retrieval? Is it the size of the soul that you bill for? But I think we could get past these logistics and this could happen. Dream big, dream big. Why can't we have like when I would be doing rounds, we would be sitting with? you know, you had like the social worker, the occupational therapist, the physical therapist, the nurse? Why can't you have a shaman at that table too? And the shaman can report back and say, yeah, we did a clearing at the home. There were several portals. We put some light around her and we're going to start teaching her some skill development. She's a healer. Why can't this happen? It sounds so out there, but is it Why? And like even if that's too much? maybe the healthcare systems in Europe and the USA and Canada and these spaces aren't quite ready for that?
Speaker 1:So what if the intake assessment was like looking at access to foods? It's so quickly become systemic because a lot of these people that we were working with didn't have access to healthy food. Who does these days? It's shocking to me now to recognize just changes in diet can really bring about changes in the experiences of the mind and things like all of these things. For so many. It's not the panacea, but the fact that we're not considering matching the right foods for the right person. And, of course, that brings me to like food sovereignty and these sorts of issues.
Speaker 1:It's related to mental health, the myth of the individual. Well, it slides quickly into the myth of like separation at all, doesn't it? Or imagine, if we assess something like land displacement Are you living on the land of your ancestors And if not, what can we do to help you grow healthy connections with the land that you're on. These things impact our experience of well-being. This, i think, is why the myth of the individual really helps the projects of colonization, because if we're putting the blame on the individual, we don't have to look at the system. It's just a little tweak of thinking that keeps power structures in place. So if we can start pulling that out of our own hearts, it really opens our minds to start thinking much more creatively. Maybe we can even have, like the plant medicine person on staff too. You could have someone like me. I don't work with plant medicine at all, i just use consciousness But maybe we could have a plant medicine specialist as well. Maybe a little ceremony is all that some of these people would need to move healing along.
Speaker 1:It's funny, but it's not funny. There are places for psychedelics in these conversations as well. Why would that be something that isn't happening now? It's not coincidence. Who is being served by these myths? Again and again, i ask myself that And it's never us, it's never us.
Speaker 1:The next myth that I would like to share from clinical psychology is the myth of the expert, the myth that there's someone other than you that's the expert on your journey. Ultimately, i think at the beginning it feels good because someone else is helping out and it's. You can just kind of let go and relax and say I don't know, i don't have this under control, please help. But ultimately I think it reinforces the myth of helplessness, of disempowerment. Have you not been able to find your own center? If you believe someone else can know you more than you, how can you ever explore deeper within yourself without looking for permission from the outside rather than going deeper?
Speaker 1:When I was thinking about this one, the first person that came to mind was this supervisor that I had again when I was on this postdoc. So on this postdoc, most of the clinical work that I did was with individuals with eating disorders, all different levels of care, all different kinds of eating disorders. It was a very women-dominated lab space. It was primarily research but we did clinical work as well. But there was this one supervisor who was male and he was so cocky I think he just really got off and having all these females around him and he was a supervisor of young graduate students and postdocs and we would have to like traipse into his office once we can share our clinical cases with him and he would provide feedback. And you know it's so strange. He was always right, we were always making the wrong decisions and I would try to talk back to him not talk back like in a sass, but like kind of explore with him, and it was always shut down and he would do it in these like real icky, like mind manipulation ways of somehow turning it back on me. I just always left their feeling less than and so frustrated because I don't feel less than. I am a little sassy. Oh, he just got under my skin and so many people around the lab. I know we all had the same experience but we were helpless because he was the expert and we had to follow his guidance And that very same mentality. Of course, what he's modeling for us is when we go into the therapy room, we need to be the one with all the answers. Luckily for me, whether that myth is there or not, i never was the one with all the answers and some of my quote unquote clients are the ones that were my best teachers in this.
Speaker 1:There was one person that I worked with for many years and I was so close to her. I truly loved her and she was gosh. She was an incredible person. She had a diagnosis of autism a severe eating disorder at that, and she had a graduate degree and was working within her field and very functional from the eyes of society. But society was tearing her apart. She was so sensitive and she had spent her entire life trying to fit in socially and just fit in in this sensory environments and rhythms that weren't hers that she was becoming sick. She was sick, but it wasn't her sickness. It was her body's response to these assaults on her system.
Speaker 1:The way that health insurance works in the USA, well, they're bastards. As you probably know, whether you are from there or not, it's a for-profit industry and so they'll do anything to deny coverage. In fact, my brother had epilepsy and he had been on medication for decades and decades and then one day the insurance company just randomly denied coverage, and it was hundreds of dollars a month to pay for this medication that he'd been taking forever and was life sustaining. And I was told by my father that the insurance company will just randomly, really randomly, deny coverage every once in a while because it is in their bookkeeping, it's in their favor just to do that every once in a while and see who doesn't have the ability to appeal it or if it doesn't get recovered again, it's an evil system.
Speaker 1:This woman that I worked with, she was so intelligent, she was so insightful. I had no idea what to do. I was a little newbie, but she and I really, i think, had a very special connection and I felt really comfortable talking with her in these ways and saying I have no idea, i have no idea what's right for you, but I think that opened the space for us. Well, it gave me permission to no longer be the expert no-transcript. It opened the door after a while for us to grow a really truly unique and special connection and I hope was space for her of being able to explore being herself. Some really beautiful things came out of that connection and Yeah, but I can't say anymore, it would become identifying.
Speaker 1:So because of this for-profit shit into healthcare industry, at one point she needed to go into a higher level of care because of the eating disorder. Her weight was so low, it was medically dangerous and she was denied coverage in every single facility in that area because she had a diagnosis of autism And they said well, we don't do dual diagnosis. It was. It was a for-profit driven decision. That was life-threatening for her and I think I remember that day. I Remember her and I being in my office Just crying, and we both were crying And we spent a long time there. Do, looking back, see us as just too little, two little seeds in the earth sitting next to each other, not sure what to do, but but sharing space and connection together. Was that going to be what she needed to heal? No, but when I gave myself permission to no longer feel like I could be the expert, i at least could be present, because the truth is sometimes scary things do happen to us and sometimes those scary things are completely artificial. They're decisions by medical for-profit companies putting our lives at risk, and I'm proud of myself for at that time, being able even When I was like really in the center of that machine, for being able to just drop everything and be present with her.
Speaker 1:She eventually did get into a facility and so I was no longer her like patient, her therapist on record, but I would come visit her and we would go for walks and she actually She was so interesting and How gentle she was with me, such a teacher for me, so many of the people that I was the therapist, for they were, they were my teachers And she's interesting in how gentle she was with me when I, when I knew so little, and I remember we took a break on this walk We were out in kind of in a wooded area and there was some water nearby and we were sitting on some rocks. We saw a snake scurry past and into the water. It's really beautiful day, very mild temperature, mild breeze, huge green trees overhead in the area, just really nice, nice Phenomenal display of elements. And she said you know, energy is real and humans, we can move energy. This is long before any of this stuff happened to me and I was like, okay, girl, but we were kind of friends at that point and I was like, yeah, i, i don't know, she's like I can show you. And I remember she took her keys out, can kind of held them she. So she put like her one hand out her left hand Palm up, and then with her right hand She was holding her keys, sort of like you would like a pendulum maybe, but just dangling it right over her left hand. And she said I'm gonna think of something that makes me angry. And The keys started vibrating and She said now I'm gonna think of something that makes me calm. And The keys went into rest.
Speaker 1:What that day in my mind that didn't know how to dream. I came up with a million explanations She was too hungry to be thinking clearly like full confession was one of them. The wind, the breeze, had just blown by. I didn't really see what I just saw. Nothing in me could dream Something so to me far out as to imagine that humans have energy pulsating through them. But she is the first one that showed that to me. Aren't minds just endlessly fascinating. I literally saw her do this. I knew her well, i trusted her, and I was so unable to get out of the enclosure that I had been raised in. I was able to dismiss what I saw and experience with my own eyes. It's fascinating how much we can trick ourselves by the stories that we tell ourselves. This is just one memory that just always stays close to me. That was a beautiful space for me, and she was my teacher in allowing me to no longer have to be the expert, and in that I'd like to think that there was there was some True healing for both of us.
Speaker 1:I don't want to make it sound like I was some like Wise old therapist knowing the ways of the wind and the trees. I was really rigid in some ways, like I think it was always me. So I was a little bit eccentric. I certainly wasn't gonna be like your typical therapist. I would think I was like more Open and comfortable and vulnerable with people. But in some ways I was trained in a very rigid way. And I remember Another client Oh, i never have favorites, but she was absolutely one of my favorites and She actually painted a picture for me and I put it on my wall in my office and when I told her I was leaving Because I was moving to Nepal, because all of these things, she was furious with me and she took that picture down And even in my moment of sadness I thought, good for you.
Speaker 1:It was her communicating how angry she was with me in a very, i think, healthy way. She was furious with me So some time before she had come in and she had had, she'd had like a Experience that she wanted to talk about. That was really difficult for her and shocking in therapy, i know, and I made him, i made a like empathy fail. I went. It's like I was taught even in relationships To like save your relationship. Always ask this question of your partner Before they tell you something. Say do you want like comfort or solutions? Well, in therapy that day she wanted comfort and I skipped right over Empathizing with her or showing any compassion. I went right to solution Well, why didn't you try this? Maybe next time you try this. And she was furious with me.
Speaker 1:Of course I had this ding dong response because in my head I did believe the myth that I had to be the expert To me. She was suffering and I had to have the answer for her. She had such a beautiful temper. I didn't think of it as beautiful at the time. It's quite scary. We're scary as a therapist, but now I see it's beauty. We're still on touch, actually years later. So she knows all about what I do now and She, she acts like she doesn't believe, but sometimes she sends me messages and asks me things or I think, hmm, interesting, anyway.
Speaker 1:So I made this, i made this empathy fail with her, and But I I didn't know what else to do in that moment because I remember for me It was coming out of a place of compassion, that something had happened to her that was difficult and I wanted to help, but that was filtered through my training as you're the expert, and so I went straight into this training mind for her. It was like that supervisor in my head came out and came into my relationship with her. So not only was she left feeling isolated and alone, she was left, i think, in that context, probably feeling a lot of shame, because it would have come across as like I'm the expert on her And here's what I would have done, and that's not what I meant at all. It was a complete, it was a fail, a big fail. I noticed the flexibility of my story about myself when I think back right now, because sometimes I'm like, oh, i was pretty good as a psychologist, i know I helped people and other times I find myself Asking the same question myself and thinking, oh my god, i was terrible as a therapist. The truth, i'm sure, is somewhere in between.
Speaker 1:When I think about this myth of the expert, it's harming The, the people who are supposed to be in the role of expert, because we aren't experts on another person, and it makes us feel helpless. And I think it often makes us feel angry at our clients. Quote on quote clients, what I would have called them then Frustrated right, why aren't you progressing these kinds of things? and it makes them feel helpless and angry as well. And I think it also prevents people from digging deeper into their own truth. Like, no matter how many people I ever met with Let's say anorexia and there were many It trained me to start thinking about the anorexia in them, the anorexia it prevented me from seeing them and they had their own unique story And I was not trained to see it that way at all The myth of the expert.
Speaker 1:It also creates Separation. It creates this idea of the truth. It creates this idea of like really hierarchy, right, like the healed and the to be healed, and It just reinforces that whole like Just junky thing of like you like kind of scurry into your therapist's office and close the door. It's not like anyone is live streaming from inside our therapy session, why not? There's such a like The, the play, the drama that plays out in that cultural script just reinforces the sense of shame that there's something wrong with you. There's something so wrong with you You have to go to someone outside of yourself. It's tricky because, yeah, of course now in some ways, like I Help so many people going through their own openings.
Speaker 1:I think I do see things, or like a Dula comes to mind, like I do see things and pointers that I have that I think can help people. But now I have a different mindset. I see I'm like the, the old wizard on the trail and Appointing them a certain way, but it's their journey. I don't feel so possessive of the outcome anymore and I think it's it's a much more Open space for both of us to be human and present. So one of the things that I was joking about with a sacred healer friend of mine a couple years ago She knew me when I was a therapist, when I was a psychologist, when I was square. She knows me now and she helped me along the journey. She was one of my wizards on the path, pointing me along when I was like what is happening? I was psychologist Oh, what a blessing to have her.
Speaker 1:I was joking with her one time, sort of fantasizing, looking back, like what I wish I could have done. What When I was a psychologist? Like you know, roasts, like comedy roasts, where you'll have the person of honor, but the person of honor, everyone else makes fun of them. I was thinking how beautiful would it be if, when I was a therapist, i could have had all the people that came to see me as like quote unquote clients and they all met each other and could just roast me Like, joke about, like, oh, she said that to you. Let me tell you what she said to me. We're like I always assigned homework at the end of session. I still do now as a shaman but they could have been roasting me about my stupid homework assignments. That didn't make any sense. It would have been so healing for them to all meet each other and make fun of me, and it would have been joyous for me too, because it would have been taking us outside of those stupid roles altogether and just say like yeah, but we're community, we share space together. You know why can't that happen?
Speaker 1:I really hope I can get to the point where I can have all the people that I work with as a shaman basically do this. This is my dream is that it'll have to be in a virtual way, because everyone is so spread out across so many continents even. But I would love for there to be a space, like a discord server for me and everyone who sits with me And we could all just have like virtual community together and and share that space together No hierarchy. One of the things we could do is all be wizards for each other. Everyone I meet has their own gifts. Just take just undoing that expert bowl altogether and also roasting me. But this is not an invitation to roast me. Now. It's very different if you just send me a mean email. It's not a rose. This only works if there's kind of like a shared agreement. Please, no spontaneous quote unquote roostings. Not, this is not the invitation for it.
Speaker 1:The third myth is the myth of progress. Oh, colonized spaces. We love progress, and progress becomes progress of the individual, which becomes being better, like feeling better. Oh, sweeties, that's not how it works. If you look up the hero's journey, this idea of like having to go through crisis I mean, watch Lord of the Rings, you have to go through your crisis to, to go through that fire, to become the next It's not progress, it's like growth, like, do we look at a flower that's blossoming and say it's progressed? No, it's blossomed. We need to go through these really, really difficult experiences and sometimes lose all hope in order to be found within ourself. And I don't know that there's room for that within the therapy room not as I held the space or as I was taught to hold the space There was like the weekly check in and like symptom assessment. So I was a clinical psychologist and that's different than a therapist that you might just go see to have questions about, like you know, kind of guidance in your life.
Speaker 1:Clinical psychology We're looking at diagnosis and symptoms and symptom reduction And in that there's an assumption, fueled in part by the discipline and then, right behind it, the insurance companies, that you should see progress, and progress means getting better, but oftentimes people get more sick. Look within yourself right now and what ways do you hold yourself to the standard and what ways do you expect yourself to be better tomorrow than you were yesterday? Do you expect yourself to be a better partner, a better podcaster and better shaman? The myths of colonization and the myths of clinical psychology they get into these spaces of shamanism as well, and I don't have to go any farther than my own story to recognize that myth. I would say the first couple of three, four years I was a complete banana field. It's just, it's the story of the shaman.
Speaker 1:In some ways we're going to get more sick and that becomes our journey, our hero's journey, our shaman illness, to pull us onto our path, not just to recognize and learn what our gifts are, but to hone them, to become truly skilled at them enough that we can help others. We have to go through our own hell before we can help others through theirs, and there's no room for that story within the myth of progress, within this colonized story of progress. I don't even know what progress means. I think it just means like continued consumption, without regard for who or what is hurt on the path. Progression is like the myth of the stock markets as much as something intimate, like working with their therapist and coming in and saying I had a slip. And I see this a lot when I sit with people, even now, like virtually. When I say I sit with people, most of it is online Because we're coming in, even we're coming into these like shamanic spaces and we're in a state within ourselves that we're ready to be taking this path, either through training or seeking the quote unquote healing.
Speaker 1:People come to me and they expect me to cure them And I'm not going to cure you. I might be able to help you tap into the resources within yourself, i might be able to clear some things, but sometimes even needing a clearing. What you need to get out of that situation is to figure out why was your energy in a certain state in the first place, that you were able to have something come on you And you don't want a shaman doing that for you. We can't. And also you need to learn how to do that for yourself And the reasons why you may have holes or empty spots within your energy field. That's going to be again.
Speaker 1:There is no individual. It's often a continuation of the story of your immediate family, your ancestors and the community and history of what's happened even for generations and generations before you. Humans don't heal you, but we can help you set off on your own heroes journey. I wish that that was more well understood because, because I share all of this with you, to say yes, i've identified what I like to call the myths. What I like to say are the myths of clinical psychology and they contribute and ripple back into these greater myths of colonized spaces, and the myths of colonized spaces, like progress, ripple into our most intimate experiences within ourself. It becomes like an echo chamber, but we can't hear what's going on because we've been raised in it and it just becomes the background noise And what I find is, if you're speaking English, then you may still be walking on the path of the sacred with this colonized mind, and that becomes the obstacle. So I encourage you to just reflect upon this the myth of the individual, the myth of the expert on you, the myth of progress, and what ways might these be obstacles on your own heroes journey?
Speaker 1:This takes me to that beautiful night in late fall in Mongolia, when I was done with the full moon ceremony. Most of us were just sitting around the fire. Everyone was speaking Mongolian. There was a lot of laughter and a lot of it, i think, was at my expense, but I don't mind. I mean it's so weird, for I'm sure people out there is seeing this white shaman. They fully accept me and you know you're accepted when they'll laugh at you. And a few of the jokes were translated for me, but I think not all of them. It was just a really a really open time because we had just done the ceremony and the moon somehow looked so much bigger and closer, and the stars, they all seemed like they had moved forward towards us or we had moved towards them. Physical space somehow had a different configuration, even though with their eyes we'd be seeing the same things. Our minds had shifted, our hearts had changed.
Speaker 1:So I looked out from this fire at this one woman who had walked out in the distance, somewhat in the distance, and under this huge full moon, i could see her sweeping her arms up and pulling in this energy into through a crown chakra and pushing it down her body, just slowly doing it several times, as she would do, she told me later, at every full moon. It was her practice, training her energy field to be able to call the onga into her body. She was preparing herself for the day that she would become a shaman. And there I was, this girl from the suburbs raised on nachos, my childhood memories filled with chlorine, smelling hair and bare feet, all bundled up by this fire in Mongolia. A recognized shaman, no longer needing to know the answers and no longer even being so attached to the word shaman at all. And I looked out, this woman, and I saw one of the most beautiful things that I've seen in years. I saw my own mind and how much it was ready to dream again. And in that moment I didn't have any concepts of healing or doing anything or being anything at all, i was just part of the great mystery. One little star and part of this great big mystery were all in Well.
Speaker 1:This episode was much different than the other episodes I've had on this podcast so far. We are always exploring different realms, but this one we explored one of the spookiest realms of all, going within the spaces of the colonized mind. I hope it wasn't too spooky for you. May you have incredible journeys and dream well tonight. See you in the Dreamtime, friends.