“Smell Like Your Sheep”: The Hidden Shamanic Wisdom Behind Francis’ Favorite Metaphor

In memory of Pope Francis (1936–2025), who dared to stink of love.

Introduction: The Pope Who Broke the Perfume Bottles

For centuries, the Church has carried itself with the scent of superiority. Gold chalices, marble thrones, silk vestments. Cathedrals like palaces, altars raised high so the shepherds could tower above their flocks. Popes lived like emperors, speaking of humility while wrapped in royal garb, blessing the poor from balconies too high to smell them.

Let’s be honest. The Vatican—like many spiritual institutions—has long smelled more like polished furniture and incense than blood, sweat, and tears. It has often served as the world’s most luxurious fortress of virtue-signaling. And in the middle of this high-gloss pageantry walked a man in scuffed shoes and a simple white cassock. A pope who didn’t just speak of service but embodied it. One who refused to play the holy celebrity and instead told his priests:

“This is what I am asking you—be shepherds with the smell of sheep.”

And he meant it.

He wasn’t pointing to a poetic gesture. He was calling for a spiritual revolution—one that doesn’t just visit the wounded but lives among them, until the lines blur and the scent sticks.

When Francis Reeked of Reality

Pope Francis didn’t just preach proximity—he practiced it. He visited prisons and knelt to wash the feet of inmates, including Muslims and women. He went into favelas and refugee camps, hugged the sick, touched the disfigured, and invited the homeless to his birthday breakfast.

In one now-famous moment, he embraced a man covered in boils—riddled with tumors, his body rejected by most of society. Francis didn’t recoil. He held the man like a brother. No gloves. No sanitizing. Just presence.

That’s what “smelling like your sheep” looks like.

And in that act, he reminded us of something ancient, something shamanic—something real: that true healing begins not in separation but in shared suffering. That to lead, you must kneel. To guide, you must walk barefoot on the same burning earth.

The World of Appearances and the Fetish of Image

Today’s culture is obsessed with looking the part. In the age of spiritual branding, even humility is marketable. The robes may have changed—replaced by linen shirts, mala beads, and aesthetic Instagram posts—but the detachment remains.

We have spiritual influencers with carefully curated personas who preach about the ego to sell their snake-oils—from half-naked gurus flaunting their curves in Bali to sun-kissed mystics channeling abundance while peddling online courses. Gurus who claim to have transcended duality but block anyone who disagrees with them online.

This isn’t just hypocrisy. It’s spiritual cosplay. It’s the seduction of playing holy instead of being human.

And here’s the truth that Pope Francis embodied: even the most enlightened being on Earth is still just a person. A flickering fragment of an unfathomable mystery. A body of contradictions. A soul muddling through the fog like everyone else.

You can master every scripture, download every starseed upgrade, channel light beings from Sirius—and still be emotionally immature, confused, or cruel on a Tuesday morning. Why? Because we’re all just trying to find our way in a universe that exceeds our understanding.

We can’t fully comprehend ourselves, let alone life, or God.

We are, every one of us, a mystery to ourselves. This is not a flaw. It’s the human condition.

And that’s what makes the Pope’s words so powerful. When he said, “Smell like your sheep,” he wasn’t placing the priest above the people. He was saying: “We’re all in the same barn.” We’re all in the mud together.

The Trap of Clean Compassion

There’s a kind of compassion that never gets dirty. You’ve seen it. The kind that offers well-packaged advice from a safe emotional distance. The kind that tells people everything happens for a reason while avoiding their pain like it’s contagious. The kind that performs caring but won’t sit with you in the vomit of your grief.

That’s not love. That’s a defense mechanism.

True compassion doesn’t speak first. It listens. It trembles. It smells.

The kind of love that heals is feral, not filtered. It risks awkwardness. It shows up unsure, unshaven, unready—but present.

That’s what Francis knew. That’s what shamanic paths teach. To show up real, to drop the posture, to enter the jungle of human suffering with nothing but your bare soul.

Not to fix. Not to save. But to sit.

The Mask of the Spiritual Professional

Religious hierarchies love structure. Titles. Authority. They love the illusion that wisdom flows from the top down, like sacred wine from heaven’s bureaucracy.

But the true teacher doesn’t sit above—they sit with. They don’t only quote scriptures—they ask questions they still don’t know the answers to. They cry with you, laugh at themselves, admit their failures. They smell human.

Pope Francis refused the high throne. He chose the floor.

That’s what made him dangerous—not his liberal theology, but his radical humanity.

Shamanism and the Dirt Path to Wisdom

In shamanic initiation, no one graduates by being right. You don’t get a certificate for memorizing cosmic truths. You get wrecked. You get disassembled by the jaguar of your own darkness and rebuilt in the bones of the people you dared to judge.

A shaman does not heal by pretending to be above. They descend. They enter the same pain as those they serve. They lose certainty. They get humbled by the forest, by sickness, by their own arrogance.

Only then do they return.

If you haven’t been undone, you can’t hold someone else through their unraveling. If you’re not willing to smell like fear, grief, failure, and longing—you’re not here to serve. You’re here to control.

Francis understood that. His metaphor wasn’t about proximity. It was about identity. He was telling us to lose the mask. To dissolve the boundary between “the spiritual” and “the suffering.”

Because they are the same thing.

The Humble Boat

The deepest spiritual truth might just be this: none of us know what the hell is going on.

We don’t know why we’re here. We don’t know what happens after we die. We don’t even fully know who we are.

And that’s okay.

From this humility, we stop pretending. We stop performing enlightenment. We stop selling certainty. And we start showing up—messy, loving, confused, kind.

We row the boat together. Each of us paddling with our contradictions. Each of us crying out into the fog. None of us with a map—but all of us with a heart.

That’s where real help comes from. Not from answers, but from honest presence. Not from being a lighthouse, but from being a fellow sailor, soaked and shivering and saying, “I’m here. Let’s row.”

Smell Like the World You Want to Heal

Francis’ death leaves behind not just a legacy, but a challenge.

A challenge to all of us who claim to care.

To activists who post slogans but never visit a shelter. To spiritual teachers who refuse to be vulnerable. To seekers who want bliss but avoid pain. To all of us who have built altars on pedestals.

He invites us back to the ground.

To presence. To humility. To stink.

Because healing doesn’t come from being right. It comes from being near.

Pope Francis, you weren’t perfect. You were better than that. You were human. And you smelled like us. Thank you.

An Invitation to Go Deeper

If something in this piece spoke to you—not just in your mind, but in that quiet place beneath it—consider this an open door.

The Free Your Mind Masterclass is not about pretending to have the answers. It’s about asking better questions. It’s a space to gently unravel the stories you’ve inherited, the identities you’ve performed, and the beliefs that may have kept you from fully meeting life as it is.

No spiritual posturing. No performance. Just honest exploration, shared presence, and the tools to begin seeing with new eyes.

If you’re ready to sit with yourself—not to fix, but to understand—
If you’re longing to remember something deeper, something real—
Then I invite you to join me in this free masterclass.

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Because sometimes, freeing your mind isn’t about adding more.
It’s about finally letting go.