Pilgrim Or Tourist

I dig into the brave choice to stop flocking to what’s popular and start noticing what’s truly here—right now, in your body, in your backyard, and in the quiet space where purpose begins.
I share how nature becomes a teacher when you step outside with bare feet, open hands, and no itinerary. From daffodils surfacing through cold soil to the simple joy of clearing a berry patch, I show how local, daily pilgrimages can break open a guarded heart and soften the noise of the matrix.
Take this as your invitation to see what is there, not just what you came to see. Listen, then try one small pilgrimage today—five minutes of silence, a walk on grass, a moment of honest prayer—and tell us what you discover. If this resonated, subscribe, share with a friend who’s ready to wake up, and leave a review to help others find the show.

And as always, I pray this finds you in great health, with vibrant energy and of course PEACE! Much love

Transcript

Field Trip, Not A Vacation

SPEAKER_00 0:00

It's only been in the last decade or so that I have finally realized that my life is an unending field trip. And I continue to try not to be a tourist, but to be an adventurer, a traveler, an explorer, a learner, and a pilgrim. And I want to welcome you to Free to Just Be, the podcast where my personal dance of transformation hopefully becomes an invitation for you to begin or continue on your own dance of transformation. And I'm your host, Teresa Marie, an ambassador of Qi, and I am here to share my daily observations, my Earth School lessons, and everything to do with the awakening and ascension that we are now experiencing as we navigate this powerful energetic shift unfolding across humanity and the planet. But before I begin, I want to invite you all to hit that like button, subscribe, and share this episode so together we can grow a community rooted in awakening and real human connection. This is Free to Just Be. Let's begin. And I want to welcome you in on this spectacular Saturday morning. It is so warm here in Middle Tennessee already. I want to say it's in the mid-50s already, and we are heading towards the 70s for the next three or four days, and that makes me so very, very happy. And I want to just kind of touch base a little bit this morning before I head out into my gardens because spring is upon us, and everything to do with new life is beginning to percolate outside, and I can't wait to get out there. But I I couldn't do that until I dropped into the mic what God's laid on my heart today. And uh I want to touch upon some things that I've been pondering as I was in my yard yesterday, and I'm gonna bring in the 33 Days of Eucharistic Glory again today. I'm loving, loving, loving this book. And I finally discovered it's like it was so interesting when I first mentioned this book, I don't know, four or five episodes ago. Um, you know, even now I'm I'm going through the book, and there's nowhere, you know, most books, there's the title, and underneath the title is the author. And then when you open up the book, there's usually a page where again it says the author. Well, no, there's no author anywhere that I could find in this book, which really speaks to the humility of Matthew Kelly, who is the author of not only 33 Days, but many, many other books that I don't know about you, but I'm gonna pursue a lot more that this author has written because this book has just really been um amazing for me this last month. And I'm using it as I go through my 40 days of Lent. And so, that being said, that background, I I'm gonna talk to you about the title of my episode today: Pilgrim or Tourist. I'm gonna talk to you about my garden and all the Sila thoughts. Of course, those are the pause and ponder thoughts that were birthed out of my time uh five or six hours out in the yard yesterday. And I'm gonna give you an actual place, a pilgrimage that you can accomplish today. So let's go ahead and kick in, shall we? Well, as many of you that have been following know me, they they know that I not only love quotes, but I like definitions. Um I'm a word girl, I love words, word pictures, anything to do with words. And so before I jump into tourist or pilgrim, I want to define those terms. So a pilgrim is one who journeys to foreign lands or journeys to a shrine or holy place, and of course, you can't have a pilgrim definition without the English colonist who landed at Plymouth Rock in 1620. But now, what about a tourist? A tourist is one that travels or tours for pleasure, travel primarily for enjoyment and indulgence, and and tourists often quote unquote flock to popular destinations. And I just wanna I want to give you a word picture of both of those, right? So if uh as Maxim Corky said, that all of us are pilgrims on the earth, then let's discuss whether we're a pilgrim or a tourist. Well, I want to kind of for food for thought just tell you that when you look at the world today and you know we're constantly talking about the Matrix Mary-Garn and the programming that we are one by one, inch by inch, uh trigger by trigger. If you are on this ascension journey and a true pilgrim, as they come up in our life, we begin to look at them, sit with them, and eventually make friends, which ultimately dissolves that program. So little by little we are getting off that matrix merry-goran. But that merrygoround has taken the concept of being a pilgrim and turned us all of us into tourists. Think about it. Just just think about it. What does a pilgrim do? Well, a pilgrim sees whatever he sees, but a tourist sees what he has come to see. Notice the difference. A pilgrim is just being, and whatever comes up in their life, they observe it, they enter into it, they see what is there for them to learn. Maybe it's something that they want to explore further, like a program, right? That would be the pilgrim version. But what have we become, Humanityville? Myself included. I just open with sharing with you that it's only been in the last decade, maybe the last 15 years, that I've truly, truly recognized that we're here just for a certain amount of time and then we're gone. And what do we do with that? Now, a tourist is one who journeys to foreign lands. Now, if you take the concept, I've given this word picture many, many times. I even shared how about three months into my moving meditation practice of Tai Chi moves, I had a lucid dream and it was out in the woods, and then I dreamed about it literally in the sleep realm. And it was when I came onto the planet. And, you know, of course, we can go down the reincarnation path here or whatever, but I believe for myself, and and you, I can't believe for you, you have to believe what you believe. But I believe that I came here to planet Earth as a pilgrim, as a pilgrim, and my job here, first off, was to recognize that I came into this dense 3D, this three-dimensional duality, um, this dualistic planet, right? And my first job was to awake and remember that I wasn't a tourist. I came as a pilgrim. I came to help other people break out of that matrix merry-ground and dissolve their programs and get on with being the pilgrim who I came here to be, right? So we come on Earth and suddenly it's like we'd completely forgot that we are on this sacred journey, this journey back home, right? So we get dropped on the planet, and our whole entire life is learning to wake up, remember that we're pilgrims, peel away all the matrix programming, and then be the lighthouse, the bridge, the salt, the the shining, so that others can do what we have learned to do, to walk out of the matrix programming. So now let's talk about when we arrived. When we arrived, we had no recollection that we were already holy, that we were already free, that we were already this incredible spark of God, that if we would just remember that and flame that spark, we would have this holy fire, and it would be the trip would be so much easier. But I'll use myself as an example. Here I am at 65 years old, and it's only been 15 years that I finally realized that my life was an unending field trip, right? Which is why I have said to the Lord, the request, that I want another 60 years of great health and vibrant energy, because I've got a lot of catching up to do as a pilgrim. Because I've recognized that I've spent the majority of this physical life here on earth as a tourist. You come onto the planet and everything, we're not in the uh the the beautiful cloud of just spirit. No, now we've come down to this dense place and we can witness everything that our God created for this planet. And some of you, you know, might be of the uh the pilgrim sojourner believer that this is just this big huge experiment that we're on, right? And God created this space and even came to the space to remind us who we are. We are righteous people, we are God-fearing people, we are the little g to his OG. He is God Almighty, omnipotent and omnipresent, and we came down with a little spark of him in us, and he told us that we would do even greater things, but then we get here, and oh baby, do we become tourists? Look at this mountain, look at this lake, look at the colors, look at the birds, and it's just like wow! And then all the programming comes in, and we end up being tourists. And what do tourists do? They are here for primarily enjoyment and indulgence. That's what the definition says. What do tourists do? They flock to popular destinations. Oh, buddy. Now the word picture gets a little more filled. Now we're seeing the colors, right? So we take on this earth suit when we're really spirit, and we're still spirit on the inside, right? And we have this earth suit, and now as a tourist, we want to do everything that a person in an earth suit does. And we want to indulge in everything that makes this body happy. And you know, it's I I was thinking about this, you know, as I'm I'm doing my exercises this morning, and I'm uh raising my arms up and I'm I'm looking at my arms and I'm looking at the crepe skin on my arms. And oh my gosh, the tourist says, Well, I don't want to wear short sleeves or a sleeveless blouse because then people will say the the see the cre the creepiness or the crep creptiness of my skin. And yet I look at my arms and I am so proud of my arms because you know what? I work my muscles. And even though I'm carrying probably 20, 19 to 20 pounds more than I should have on my frame, I'm still a beast. I'm still in beast mode. I lift weights every other day. I do push-ups, I do sit-ups, and if you look at my arm, yeah, maybe there's a little bit of skin hanging, but I've got myself some guns at 65 years old. But see, the Taurus mode of being on the planet says, oh, we just want to look good. We don't want to do any work, you know, to keep ourselves that way. We just want to put on the potions and the lotions and and, you know, the retinol and all the chemicals, and and we want to do everything to make ourselves look good on the outside, forgetting that health is our first wealth. That would be a Taurus version versus the pilgrim version. The pilgrim version is is gonna look at this life, and here I am. I'm in what they consider the latter years, and if you look at testimonies of people in their latter years, they'll say, Well, I don't give a rip what anybody thinks anymore, right? But this is how we're supposed to be when we get here. But it takes us a long time, at least those of us in my age group, to get to that place. But now we're in fire horse energy mode. And anybody that has been searching, anybody that has been playing with that pilgrim way of being, which you know, we see whatever we see, and we observe everything. And we ask God, what is it in this situation that I'm supposed to learn? What am I supposed to discover here? Instead of the tourist who flocks to the popular destinations, right? We're gonna go to Cavo, we're gonna go to uh Disney World, we're gonna go to uh wherever people are telling us that is the attraction, right? And when we get to those attractions, we go to the places that people tell us to go. Versus the pilgrim. Now, even in the pilgrim realm, we're going to Machu Picchu, we're going to um uh Sedona, we're going to uh where there's energetic portals, we're gonna go to the holy land where Jesus walked, which eventually I'm gonna get to as well, but for different reasons, for the holiness of that place, right? We want to have these experiences, and and often when we travel there, we don't realize that going to these holy, sacred places or energetic portals opens up our heart and our spirit and it causes us to awake and remember who we are, right? Tourists, we just flock to whatever is the next best thing next to sliced bread, right? Oh, the big boom when we we thought that it was such a good thing to go to a store and buy a loaf of bread that's already sliced, and now it's filled with all these preservatives. Do you know that yesterday I went into my um bread box and we we eat very little bread in this house right now? And to prove that, there was a quarter of a loaf of bread. There was probably six slices left, and the only reason we had purchased the bread is because we had a hankering for BLTs, right? And so we got a loaf of bread that particular week. And it'd been weeks, weeks, at least three weeks, if not a month, that that bread was sitting in my bread box, along with some tortillas. We eat tortillas a little bit more frequently than bread these days, right? And I try to avoid all of them. But this six slices of bread that was in my bread box didn't have any mold in it, smelled a little fungadelic, but that just proves to you that the matrix version of bread is not bread that you need yourself. No, see, we left needing bread, and then we went to the food processor and the bread hook, and then we just said, Oh, we don't need to make bread anymore because we have this beautiful thing that every other tourist flock to, and that is sliced bread with all the preservatives that keeps it on the shelf far longer, as I just proved. That's what tourists do. And little by little we begin to recognize, just like I did, that our life is an unending field trip, and we're here to not be tourist, looking at whatever the matrix tells us to look at. Oh, the the most uh traveled places, the most special places. You can look it up on the internet, and there'll be a list of places that people have on their quote-unquote bucket list, places that they want to go. When they don't realize that it's off the beaten path, it's just like when you go hiking, or uh I'll use the example of caving. Uh, it's been a good ten years since we've been caving, but when we used to go into caves, there were what they called tourist caves or show caves. And those were the caves where man went in and they put chandeliers and they they made tables inside the cave, and and they take you on this paid tour. And you could pay up to 50 bucks or whatever, and they would take you on a 30 minute or 45 minute or an hour tour of this cave, and they would march you through areas of the cave where they'd show you formations and and crystals and such. And then there were true cavers who would go further and beyond and see the real richness in a cave. And I am privileged to be part of the two percent on the planet that have done and seen some of those. Now, not big like um Mavis did, uh, who was the first woman who repelled into a cave, and I had the privilege of sitting next to her on a cave trip. But that's the difference. You can be a tourist and go where everybody else goes, or you can begin to be the adventurer, and it's the same in the Ascension Awakening Journey. You can listen to the people who are feeding you what they want you to read and see and do on the awakening journey, and many of us start there. It's it's the opening of the book. For me, my awakening journey began with Louise Hay. And what got my attention was learning how to love yourself because I had such self-loathing for most of my life, and where did that self-loathing come from? Matrix programming, right? So there's a big difference, and when you begin that awakening, you start to listen to other people, listen to their journey, read their books, listen to their podcast, and then you begin to go off the beaten path. You begin to recognize that you know what? I can't listen to another podcast. Um, and that is kind of where I'm at. Why? Because I have literally cut my screen time in less than half. I choose to do other things, I choose uh to still support some of those podcasters that are there to awaken others. And I'm getting to the place now where I'm gonna open it up and say, hey, if I have helped you, then leave me a donation, right? I'm getting to that place. Um, I'm getting ready this spring to launch my moving meditation classes, but I'm gonna go to the people. I'm not gonna ask the people to come to a specific class, I'm gonna say to my local communities, hey, I have this moving meditation practice that absolutely cracked my awakening journey wide open four and a half years ago. And I believe that instead of paying XYZ an exorbitant amount for a class or even more money to attend monthly classes, no, I want everybody, my brothers and sisters in Humanityville, to experience this meeting, this remembrance of what it feels like to move with the energy, the intrinsic power that created us, the chi. And I want so many people to experience this that I don't want to charge for it. But oh buddy, does that not go against the tourist, the flock to popular things of the Matrix? The Matrix says, get, get, get, get. The pilgrim says, I want to give, give, give, give. I want to give back. I want to share what I've learned. I want everybody to experience this and trust that because that is the pilgrim concept, that is the true energy ascension concept, that all of it will come back to me anyway, because that's what life is. It's a continuum, right? So, all of that to be said, the question that I have to give to you, the question that I've been asking myself for some months now, am I a pilgrim or am I a tourist? I can't answer that question for you, only you can answer it. And now that we're at that spot, I'd like to share some of Matthew Kelly's words from the 33 Days to Glory book. The truth. We are all just passing through this world. We are pilgrims, and life is a pilgrimage. It's a sacred journey toward a very specific destination. And that destination is what I've already shared. It's the coming home, it's the realization that we are a spark of God, and that we're to fan that spark into a roaring holy fire, right? But we forget this, Matthew Kelly says, or have never been taught it. Or we get distracted and fall into thinking that we are simply Taurus. You see, when we got here, the powers that be wanted to feed on our beautiful, glorious, incredible light. And so they had to tell us these tales, these matrix lies, these programs began to kick in immediately, right? But what Matthew Kelly tells us is that life is a pilgrimage, but sometimes we need an actual pilgrimage to rediscover life. Sacred journeys which focus our hearts, minds, and bodies and souls on what matters most. It's a journey from confusion to clarity, and it allows us to live more fully than ever before with passion and purpose. And that's true. People go to Machu Picchu and they go to the Holy Land, and often they're going because of the Taurus concept. Oh, their church is going to the Holy Land or their Bible studies going to their holy land, and they don't even realize that when they get there, their hearts are gonna break open and their true ascension journey is gonna begin. One last quote I'm gonna share with you from the Michael Kelly book. He says, Life is a pilgrimage, but it is easy to get caught up in the things of this world and forget this truth, that we're not here as tourists. We're here, we came from God to this planet to remember that we came from God and to share that light and that salt with as many people as we can as we sojourn back home to the light of God, right? Some people call that heaven, but heaven is just another dimension, folks. We're all energy, that's all it is. And we're here in this big planet, this earth school, which is like an experiment of how to get back home to that light in the fifth, sixth, and twelfth, the dimensions beyond, which is where we came from, right? So he says life is a pilgrimage, but it's easy to forget and get caught up in the things of this world and forget this truth. And that's why sometimes you need a pilgrimage to rediscover the true meaning and purpose of your life. Did you ever think that your dark nights, not just one night, but nights, your dark nights of the soul are part of the pilgrimage? Did you ever think? Surely you know that when you come on the other side of that dark night of the soul, you have rediscovered more meaning and more purpose from your life. Because each dark night of the soul, each pilgrimage into the darkness, we discover more about ourselves. We discover little by little that we are already free deep down inside us because we're love and light. We're not trapped in these avatars of physicality that we've allowed our spirit to be housed in until people think that we cannot escape this body until we die. And that's not true, because the true pilgrim begins to recognize that awakening and that ascension journey takes us to places of what? Being, being quiet, being still, and it's in those pilgrimages of going places where we allow ourselves, hopefully, if you're listening to a podcast called Free to Just Be, you have incorporated those itty bitty pilgrimages every morning when you awake. You allow yourself to sit in the stillness, you allow yourself to come back into your center, which is your light and your love, and to sit there and get yourself grounded and ready to go back out into this earth school we call planet earth, and to discover yet even more threads of the matrix that we need to dissolve. You see, this is how we start out as a tourist, and we end up even on this earth school planet as a pilgrim. And I'm gonna share with you today, you don't need to go to the Holy Land, you don't need to go to Machu Picchu or Kenya or pick a place that the Matrix tells you that you need to make a pilgrimage to, right? Because folks, this life is is not forever here on Earth School. We are only passing through this world. The only forever forever, the only place eternal life really is is where God is, in the heavenlies, where we came from. Really? You're saying really, yes, really, and we have forgotten all of that. So I want to give you the truth that a pilgrimage doesn't need to be an international adventure. And I'm gonna close with that because if as a pilgrim you see whatever you see, and you stop being the tourist that only sees what they've come to see, then what I'm gonna close out with could literally be the pilgrimage today that opens up your heart. And I'm gonna lay it out for you here. Satish Kumar said this, and I'm gonna dovetail right into where where I'm gonna tell you that you can go. Think about it. Do you even have a relationship with nature? You might be at the stage in your awakening or ascension journey that you are beginning to recognize that you need to have a place to step out of the Matrix merry-go-round for five minutes, ten minutes. Or if you're like me, you want hours now. You want hours out of that matrix, like my five hours out in my yard yesterday. And let me tell you, I was so full of joy. I probably smiled more out there in my yard, clearing my berry uh patch than I have in weeks. And you can too. So let's go back to what Sasish says. The best way of forging this relationship, maybe you don't have a relationship with nature. Maybe you're still embedded in the program that says, ew, I don't want to go outside, I might get sunburned. Ew, I don't want to go outside, there's ticks and fleas and and spiders and I and mosquitoes. I I don't want to go outside. I I'd rather be in a hotel room where I can be the tourist. The tourist who is traveling primarily for enjoyment and indulgence. I want to indulge in the hot tub. I want to indulge in having a waiter knock on the door and say, Room service, I don't want to be outside in nature. Maybe that's where you're at. But I want you to think about when you're on vacation. Where are the best moments? Generally, people say when they go on a beach vacation, the thing that they love the most is walking the beach, swimming in the ocean. Or maybe you're more of a woods person and you go to a cabin, you know, up in Chattanooga, up in Gatlinburg, the tourist section of the mountains. And you discover like I did 15 years ago when I thought I was surprising my husband with a Valentine surprise. And we went to Gatlinburg and he went, Gatlinburg? And I was like, Yeah, we're gonna get a cabin and we're gonna be in the woods. And he's like, Okay, and we travel, and as we get closer to Gatlinburg, and we get into Gatlinburg, we're in a traffic jam with all the other tourists. And we get to our quote unquote, what I thought was gonna be a cabin in the woods all by ourselves. No, we were in Cabinville. We were in an area where people slapped up cabins. Yes, we were in the mountains, but when we looked out our mountain cabin, we saw the cabin next door, and the one on the other side of us, and the one in back of us, and the one in front of us, and to even be in the mountains, we had to leave the cabinville and try to find the mountains. Do you see the difference? But then when you step off the Taurusville of your vacation and you venture away from the Taurus, that's where you discover Mother Nature in her finest, right? So, what is the other? I'm just gonna do the complete Maxim Gorky quote now for you, since I painted that word picture for you. He says, all of us are pilgrims on the earth. I have even heard it's uh no, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, the satish, the satish quote, forgive me. He says, our relationship with nature, the best way of forging that relationship is to be what, a tourist? No, he says to be a pilgrim, not a tourist on planet earth. In other words, bust out of that matrix program that says, ew, I don't want to be outside. I want to be with my screens, I want to be inside, I want to glamp. I don't want to tent camp. I want to glamp. I want to be up off the ground. No, be the pilgrim, venture into a tent sometime, venture into Mother Nature, and you'll discover that your heart absolutely bursts open. Remember that the pilgrim sees whatever it is he sees. And so I'm going to explain to you what you and I can do today. As spring is beginning to emerge. Have you seen the daffodils in your neighborhood? Have you seen the crocus poking their heads out of the cold ground? I don't know where you are in the world right now, but if spring is beginning to spring, then I highly suggest if you're in the America and you're in states like Middle Tennessee, Alabama, the Carolinas, Florida for sure is already warm. Get your earth suit equipped to equal whatever weather and temperature that you're experiencing where you are, and prepare yourself and step outside somewhere in Mother Nature, even if it's just your backyard, and go like a pilgrim, expecting nothing, but actually you can anticipate being wowed. Because you see, God in his wisdom allowed Mother Nature to just continue her glory on planet Earth to do just that, to wow you, to crack open your heart. And if you go out there like a pilgrim and not a tourist, a tourist is gonna expect that there's gonna be water out there and there's gonna be pathways. And if you just go outside and just say, God, show me your glory today, and you step out and it may be a bird that lands on a branch. It may be grass on your bare feet for the first time because you said, you know what, I'm gonna try this earthing stuff. I'm gonna try this stuff that they call grounding. I don't like walking on grass with my bare feet. I might step in dog poop or something, right? That's the matrix talking. But instead, today you're the pilgrim. And the pilgrim, you know what? For years, when we were real pilgrims, we didn't have shoes. And then we had moccasins, right? But it still connected us with the frequency of the earth. And so maybe now you're experiencing walking barefoot for the first time on Mother Earth, and all sorts of physiological things are gonna happen, and it may just crack your heart open as well. Because you see, as Maxim Gorky said, all of us are pilgrims on this earth, and I have even heard it said that the earth itself is a pilgrim in the heavens, which takes me back to just that. The earth is just an experiment, folks. It's just a place for us to come back home to our creator God, who created everything. That fits this so well. It's hung in my bathroom. It's hung in between two mirrors so that we can read it every morning. And it's a poem by Thomas Merton. And this is what it says. My Lord God, I have no idea where I'm going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it'll even end. Nor do I really know myself. And the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I'm actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does, in fact, please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I'm doing. And I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. The desire to be a pilgrim, Humanityville. And I know that if I do this, you will lead me by the right road, though I may not know nothing about it. Therefore, I will trust you always. Though I may seem lost in the shadow of death, I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone. Amen, Thomas Morton or Merton. I don't know about you, humanityville, but I know I am a pilgrim in the world. But I am at home in my God. In the earth I wander, but in God I dwell in a quiet habitation. He's always with me. He never leaves me. And right now he's asking you, are you a pilgrim or are you still a tourist? Well, take a pilgrimage today and find a slice of this beautiful earth school that we call Planet Earth and have the pilgrim attitude today, Humanityville, and just see whatever it is that God wants you to see today and see what happens. And if you're courageous enough, leave a comment at the end of today's show. Because we would love to know, I would love to know how your ascension journey is going as well. And as always, before I head out in my own yard, for as long as I possibly can, because today is my last day off, I wish you and pray that you have the greatest health, with the most vibrant energy, and of course, lots of peace today. Much love.