My Reflection on Early Shamanic Signs

As a child, I knew I was different. There was a constant feeling that something was missing, that I didn’t quite belong anywhere. I carried a quiet loneliness I didn’t have words for yet, just a deep sense that there was more to life than what I was seeing.

I struggled to fit in, especially with boys my age. Their way of being felt foreign to me. I was drawn instead to spaces that felt gentler and more emotionally open. Even then, I was deeply affected by other people’s pain. Seeing someone suffer stayed with me, it settled in my chest and didn’t let go. What I remember most clearly is the sadness. As a child, I felt an overwhelming grief when I saw others suffering. It wasn’t distant or abstract; it lived in my body. In second grade, I made a promise to myself that felt simple but absolute: I would grow up helping people. I didn’t want a big life or a conventional dream. I wanted to ease suffering, to make people feel cared for. When asked what I wanted to be, I said a “priest,” not out of religion, but because I had seen someone devote their life to helping the poor. Something in me recognized that path immediately. Looking back now, I see it clearly; long before I had language, belief, or framework, my life oriented towards compassion and service.

Around the age of five or six, I began experiencing sleep paralysis. What started quietly soon became relentless, an almost daily occurrence. During these episodes, I would hear screaming directly in my ear, along with deep moaning and groaning sounds that felt close, intimate, inescapable. I saw tall shadows, seven or nine feet tall, looming over me, surrounding my bed, spreading across the ceiling above. Some pressed down on my arms and legs, holding me in place. At times, the voices sounded like an old Hmong grandmother yelling at me; other times, they cried in grief, weeping into my ear. Not long after the sleep paralysis began, the night terrors followed. They were vivid and terrifying. Some nights, ghostly figures appeared in my dreams. Other nights, they took the form of man‑walking, reptilian creatures. At times, I found myself in unfamiliar, frightening places I had never seen before. Often, I dreamed of tigers chasing me through villages in Laos and across the mountains of our Motherland in China.

When I was around seven or eight, my great‑grandmother’s spirit came to me in a dream to tell me she was going to pass. At the time, she was in a vegetative state, unable to speak or respond. In the dream, she spoke clearly and calmly, telling me she was going to go. Two days later, she did. All of this happened before I was ten years old.

As a child, hearing the sound of shaman gongs stirred something deep and aching within me. My spirit would fill with an overwhelming sadness, not the kind born from loss, but from recognition. It felt like a deep connection, a longing without an object, a pull toward something familiar yet unreachable. At the same time, the smell of joss wrapped around me with a warmth I couldn’t explain, like the scent of my grandmother’s cookies; soft, comforting, and full of love. Together, the sound and the smell made me feel both homesick and held, as if my spirit was remembering a home it had always known, even if my mind could not yet name it.

When I entered my teenage years, the sense of being different intensified. I began to know things without any explanation; by looking at something, touching it, or simply being near it. It wasn’t a voice, and no one told me anything. I just knew from deep inside my body. It felt like instinct, but sharpened to an edge, like the moment your gut tells you something is wrong. The feeling stayed. It pressed in. Elder Hmong spirits began appearing more frequently. Sometimes they came asking for food. Other times, they were lost, searching for their families, demanding that I take them home. At times, they were furious. They showed me their decomposing faces and rotting bodies, not gently, but deliberately, as if to terrify me. Sometimes they appeared on my ceiling at night, pinning me in sleep paralysis, watching me while I could not move or speak.

Soon thereafter, I began dreaming of flying. I flew over dark lakes and big ocean water, to the peaks of mountains where the air felt thin and dangerous. Once, I reached a golden kingdom at the top of a mountain, a place that felt ancient and forbidden. Other times, I flew alongside a close friend of mine who had already died. I spent a significant amount of time with him after his death, and it was this continued relationship, crossing the boundary between the living and the dead, that ultimately triggered my shamanic journey. My teenage years were consumed by depression. It wasn’t just confusion about identity; it was a deep, unrelenting grief that had no clear source. I carried a longing so intense it felt like mourning something from long ago, something I had lost long before I was born. The sadness followed me everywhere, heavy and quiet, as if I were remembering a life, or a calling, I had not yet been able to name.

Looking back now, I can see how much sadness I was carrying at such a young age. I struggled with suicidal thoughts and I self‑harmed, trying to survive feelings that were far bigger than I knew how to hold. But even then, something was guiding me. I wasn’t meant to die at that point in my life. There was a quiet, steady voice inside me, perhaps my younger self, reminding me that there was more beyond the suffering. It didn’t explain what that “more” was. It simply urged me to keep going, to stay a little longer. And I listened.

By the time I reached college, the experiences continued. The night terrors, sleep paralysis, and clairsentience never fully left me. This was not the result of poor health; I was physically active and strong. I ran regularly, had competed in track during high school, and played on a co‑ed volleyball team. I even ran frequently as I entered my freshman year. Despite this, unexplained physical pain began to surface in my hands, legs, and back. I experienced tremendous migraines that would last up to three days. It would come and go, with no clear cause. At the same time, my sleep paralysis intensified to the point where waking up felt uncertain. I became afraid, truly afraid, that I might die in my sleep. Alongside this, the visions continued: brief, fleeting moments, glimpses of ghostly apparitions that appeared and vanished just as quickly.

At the time, I did not understand what was happening to me. I only knew that something was unfolding inside my body and spirit, without explanation or permission. But most things in life are like that; we rarely understand them while we are living through them. Meaning often arrives later, after the fear has passed, after the body has survived what the mind could not yet name. Every shaman’s path and initiation is different. There is no single way it is supposed to look, no universal sequence that guarantees legitimacy or clarity. And now, in this moment, I find myself in a place where I no longer fully recognize Hmong shamanism as it is practiced or spoken about today. That is neither good nor bad. It is simply different; reshaped by adaptation, reform, loss, and survival, just as all living traditions are. But one thing I know to be true, and that is, if you're going through a period of transition or confusion, know that there is more to life than what you're feeling right now. It is after we have overcome it that we learn what it prepared us for.

My experiences are not proof that shamanism works, nor are they meant to validate a belief system for anyone else. They are simply testaments of my own spiritual suffering, and of the fact that the child who believed there was something more was not wrong. What I lived through was real to my body, my spirit, and my becoming. What I know now is this: I am here to serve. That was the truth I carried long before I had language, long before I had a name for what was happening to me. Whatever path I walk, whatever form it takes, that calling remains. It is what I was brought here to do.