A long (somewhat funny) story about why we are hiring a Travel Director and not a Tour Guide
Summary: For the Greece trip we will have a Tour Director and not a Tour Guide. The Tour Director will help oversee our itinerary and getting us where we need to go with meaningful details of the area and our agenda. For anyone desiring the official story, I encourage you to acquire a guide book from a source like Frommer’s, Rick Steve’s or other reference guides that you can bring with you and have.
What this means for you: At certain sites (Delphi first day visit and the Acropolis, for example) we will have an official Tour Guide available. Please know that you are not compelled to be nice and listen. You can wander off on your own, or even pull me aside to ask me questions and what I’m “getting” about the area. This is your/our trip, not the Tour Guide’s.
Photo: Bridgette Aldrich (her website is here) alongside us in Jordan Feb 2018 in the Wadi Rum desert where a mother camel was grazing with her calf.
Back story: After doing several of these trips, I’ve learned that hiring a traditional, conventional tour guide has some downsides. We aren’t going as typical tourists. We aren’t going to be filled with memorized facts and figures about a version of history that is limited, often distorted and routinely repressive energetically. Tour guides in these highly visited, world reknowned historical destinations require specific training, education and certification by their governments, proving that they are telling “the story” that the present historians and government officials want them to tell. They guide all the tourists to The sites, as if nothing else of interest is beyond the site fencing, up in the nearby hills and caves. They pretend everything we need to know is from the official tour guide and everything we need to see is behind the ticket window, within the defined historical site boundaries.
But, a group like us are going to feel it ourselves, personally experience the energies of these historically relevant and significant places. The official narrative is less interesting and even less relevant. The official narrative is never the full story – we see this in present day headlines as well. Today’s headlines become tomorrow’s history. A chilling notion in many ways.
In previous trips, I hired an official or established guide. I knew they added something I didn’t and together we would complement each other nicely. I knew I needed to request tour guides that were open to sort of sharing with me the role of facilitator and presenter. With each trip, I did what I could to explain who and what we are and why we are coming, asking them to make sure and give us our own space, our own time at each site, whether we would use it for messages, for meditation, for personal energetic connection and revelation.
The approach worked very well in Jordan in Feb 2018. Our guide, George, “got it” and followed through only sharing about 10% of his normal information. He watched us curiously and ended up connecting to us in soulful, timeless ways that made us and him smile.
In the Yucatan in April 2015, in Egypt Feb 2018 it wasn’t ideal. Great trips for sure ~ but I’m an over achiever, content while also curious about how things can be even better lol (you benefit from that approach btw lol). In those instance, the guide over shared, regularly, and spent time at sites that we then didn’t have for our own version of experience.
I realize, that even when asked, the guide cannot help themselves.
Guides by nature want to be helpful, to inform, to share their country with us. George in Jordan was unique – I see this now even more clearly. The other guides seem incapable of giving us the 30-100% of a site’s visit time for our own experiences, especially with a well planned itinerary, a schedule to keep and a binder filled with information they feel it is their job to share. Truly, they are getting paid to inform, teach and guide. Asking them to get paid but only do 10-20% of their usual job is an integrity problem for these great, well meaning, lovable individuals. Plus, they tend to love us lol and that makes them want to share and delight us with even more information and sharing. The irony is rich and humorous if you really think about it.
Additionally, the desire for us as guests in other country and culture to be polite and respectful gets in the way of us having the personal experience we desire at these absolutely fabulous places on Earth. Still, this is our trip, not theirs. They are so well trained and so experienced at exactly what they want/need to say at certain points of the road trip, specific locations, exact site highlights, that we lose time, space and freedom to personally experience it as we are desiring.
For me, I’ll share that it is energetically draining as the spiritual host/facilitator because I’m not there for what they are offering. I hire them because they offer something I can’t – the present, official narrative. I’m setting up these amazing trips and offering them to you ~ our fellow Bringers of Light (our audience/co-creators) ~ to assist us in connecting to the spaces, the times, the energies, personally and as a group. So, my human Jill in the background is trying to be respectful, polite but really just wanting to throw their binder off a cliff, give them a hug and ask them to be quiet and listen for about 80% of every site we experience. They can’t, or won’t. I see this now.
Even with the recent Mary Magdalene trip to France our wonderful, soulfully connected guide who was very much allowing us our own space and experience in Sept 2016 had now in Sept 2018 become a more professional, rehearsed guide, studying her binder of materials each night so that she didn’t forget anything at the next day’s sites. Ugh – some of it was helpful, relevant to our mutual Mary Magdalene connection but a lot of it wasn’t.
One specific example of conflicting truths that can arise: At one new amazing secret spot this soooo special and awesome French guide (with her own Mary Magdalene connection) found these amazing outcropping of rocks and caves. A hidden treasure that only certain locals even know about. She shared this new site with us and it was amazing! She got out her binder of info (uh oh) and began sharing the history that human sacrifices were done by the culture that lived there long ago. I gently offered the group (as I did in the Yucatan on the same subject) that I didn’t sense that there were human sacrifices at that site by those people. She pointed to the binder page, read the narrative, the science and said that it was proven there was human blood evidence on the stones. I was thinking, “so human blood traces are evidence of a human sacrifice?” Please just consider that for a moment (most seem not to question history, which is just an official narrative of something that happened). I smiled and the group seemed to understand. The truth as I’m shown it is that there are many reasons why human blood traces could be found in these stones or in any location from long ago cultures: 1) as a celebration of female fertility and the menstrual cycles occurring in the healthy child bearing population, 2) as a celebration of birth and a new member of a community arriving from beyond time/space, 3) a healing ceremony of someone that was injured, 4) an accident/injury happened there, 5) possibly even the assistance of death/euthanization in the tragic situation of a lethal, suffering community member. I don’t accept that these older civilizations are inherently unsophisticated, uncivilized barbarians. The Egyptian pyramids and their sophisticated temples are just one area of evidence to this truth that we are not automatically more sophisticated or civilized just because we are here in current times. Some of these ancient cultures lasted far longer than ours has been here. And at these sites where supposed human or even animal sacrifices were supposedly held, I just don’t agree so easily that those experiences took place. My connection/sense isn’t evidence and I understand this. But their narrative about evidence of blood isn’t evidence of a sacrifice either. Binder or no binder (smile).
All of these trips have been wonderful!!! Some of you have been on all of them with me which is a great sign of how well we do this (together!). But, they can be better and we are trying another way to make it better, which I feel very encouraged about.
Loving you,
Jill