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Episode 175. A podcast conversation about community, courage, enoughness, and our upcoming Mother-Daughter Guatemala Adventure
There are some things we can learn just by reading about it.
And then there are (many other) things we need to experience.
This is one of the reasons I’ve fallen back in love with culturally immersive travel in my 40s.
I first traveled to Honduras when I was in college, and something about it in hindsight feels like what became a spiritual path. I loved learning Spanish. I loved experiencing a culture different from my own. And I loved being reminded that the way I had learned to see the world was only one way of seeing it.
Then life happened.
Graduate school. Building a career. Raising kids. All the achieving and doing that can slowly crowd out the things that once made us feel most alive.
Over the last few years, I’ve found myself returning to those parts of myself.
And next April, I’m taking my daughter Claire with me.
A Mother-Daughter Adventure in Guatemala
I’m co-hosting a Mother-Daughter Guatemala Adventure with Christina and Owen of Culture Chalk, and in this episode of The Innovative Therapist Podcast, I sat down with them to talk about how this experience came to be.
Christina and Owen have five children and moved their family from British Columbia to Guatemala in 2021.
What began as something they called “The Giving Experiment” eventually grew into Culture Chalk and a life deeply embedded in their local Guatemalan community.
Their original experiment was simple:
What would happen if they stopped making money and return on investment the primary factors in their decisions?
What would happen if they tried to actually live out their values around generosity, community, and loving their neighbors?
Their answers didn’t come from sitting around thinking about these questions.
They came from living them.
And that theme kept coming up throughout our conversation:
Some things can only really be learned through experience.
What do our kids learn from the lives we actually live?
As parents, we tell our kids to share.
We tell them to be grateful.
We might tell them that having more stuff won’t necessarily make them happier.
We tell them to be kind and generous.
We might remind them that other people live differently than we do.
But what happens when they actually get to experience another way of living?
Owen and Christina described watching their own children become more resourceful, compassionate, and generous as they grew up immersed in their Guatemalan community.
They also shared something that really stuck with me:
If we want our children to learn generosity, what does it look like for them to actually watch us give?
Not just giving away something we don’t need anymore.
Giving when it costs us something.
Not just telling our kids what matters.
Living it in front of them.
That’s part of what excites me so much about taking Claire on this trip.
What if we let our daughters experience the questions?
At one point in our conversation, Christina and Owen described bringing kids into a local family’s home.
A child might look around and ask:
Where are the beds?
And discover that one bed is shared by an entire family.
But that same family might be joyfully welcoming visitors into their home, offering them coffee and bread.
Suddenly, a child is holding two realities at once.
Material scarcity.
And deep generosity.
Hardship.
And joy.
There doesn’t have to be a lecture afterward.
The experience itself creates the questions.
What does it actually mean to have enough?
What makes someone wealthy?
What do I really need to be happy?
What matters to me?
Those are questions I want my kids to have the opportunity to wrestle with.
And frankly, they’re questions I want to keep wrestling with myself.
Connection often isn’t convenient
One of my favorite parts of our conversation was hearing about how community functions where Christina and Owen live.
They described women gathering at Lake Atitlán to wash clothes together.
Yes, washing clothes at home would be easier.
But doing laundry at the lake means talking, laughing, sharing stories, watching children play, and being together.
We talked about how much of modern life has been designed around convenience.
Grocery pickup.
Self-checkout.
Delivery.
Technology that allows us to do almost everything without needing another human being.
And yet so many of us feel lonely.
Maybe convenience isn’t always the same thing as nourishment.
Maybe needing one another isn’t a problem we need to engineer out of our lives.
And maybe community itself asks something of us.
It asks us to tolerate discomfort. To navigate conflict. To interact with people who see the world differently than we do. To stay curious.
Those are muscles I want my kids to develop.
They’re muscles I want to keep developing, too.
And what about our daughters’ relationships with their bodies?
This piece feels especially important to me because of the work I’ve done for years around binge eating, body image, and our relationship with food.
I know firsthand how much life can get swallowed up by worrying about food and our bodies.
Our appearance.
Our weight.
And one of the questions I hear from women all the time is:
How do I keep my daughter from inheriting this?
There’s no perfect answer.
But I know I want Claire to experience her body as the incredible vehicle through which she gets to experience her life.
Taste incredible food.
Walk through a colorful market.
Learn.
Dance.
Explore.
Connect.
And yes, climb a freaking volcano (an inactive one… don’t worry!). 🌋
I want our girls to experience deeply nourishing themselves physically, emotionally, spiritually, and relationally, while discovering just how much their bodies allow them to do.
Nine days that become part of her story
The mother-daughter experience Christina and Owen and their family created came partly from Christina reflecting on her own transition into womanhood and asking herself:
How do I want this to be different for my daughters?
How do we create openness?
Trust?
Compassion?
How do we make room for conversations that everyday life doesn’t always give us space to have?
School. Work. Activities. Phones. Laundry. Emails. Dinner. Repeat.
Even when we desperately love our kids, it can be surprisingly difficult to create the space to simply be with them.
That’s part of why travel has been so powerful for me and Claire.
She still talks about a trip we took to Costa Rica together. She remembers what it felt like when it was just the two of us exploring somewhere new.
Those experiences become part of our shared history.
As Owen put it in our conversation, even nine days can become a fundamental memory a child returns to:
I was important.
My mom chose this time with me.
I learned something about myself here.
And that, more than checking Guatemala off a travel bucket list for Claire, is why I’m going.
What we’ll experience in Guatemala
We’ll spend part of our time in San Juan La Laguna on Lake Atitlán, immersed in the community where Christina, Owen and their 5 kids live and works.
The experience includes things like traditional weaving and chocolate making, visiting the market, learning about Mayan history and traditions, exploring villages around Lake Atitlán, cooking and eating incredible local food, and an Amazing Race-style scavenger hunt where the girls get to practice Spanish and navigate the town.
Then we’ll travel to Antigua and build toward one pretty spectacular finale:
Hiking Acatenango and spending the night overlooking an active volcano. 🌋
Culture Chalk has intentionally designed the experience to gently move families outside their comfort zones while providing support throughout the trip.
For me, that’s a huge piece of this.
International travel can feel intimidating, especially if you haven’t done much of it with your kids.
Group travel helped me build my own confidence traveling internationally with Claire. And interestingly, I had already traveled to San Juan before I ever met Christina and Owen.
They had no idea when they reached out to me.
And in one of the restaurants they visit often (their final goodbye parties are often there) is where I was hit with an inner knowing to “create family based play and connection experiences.”
Just a few of the several strange little synchronicities that made me think:
Okay. Maybe I’m supposed to pay attention to this.
If part of you is excited and another part is nervous…
Good. I get it.
When we first started talking seriously about co-hosting this trip, I had the immediate feeling of:
YES. This feels right.
And then some fearful parts showed up.
Not necessarily logical fears. Just the normal uncertainty that comes with doing something new.
As Christina talks about in the episode, courage doesn’t mean waiting until fear disappears.
Sometimes it’s noticing the fear and getting curious about what lies on the other side of it, and taking the aligned action anyway.
So if you’re reading this with a daughter in mind and feeling that little tug of I want to do something like this with her, I’d encourage you to pay attention to it.
You don’t have to decide anything today.
Start with a conversation.
Join us in Guatemala
Next April, Claire and I will be joining Christina, her daughter, and a small group of mothers and daughters for this experience in Guatemala, and I’d love to have you with us.
You can learn more about the Mother-Daughter Guatemala Adventure through Culture Chalk and secure your spot here:
https://culturechalk.org/mother-daughter
And if you’re curious but have questions about whether this would be a good fit for you and your daughter, email me directly at info@drshawnhondorp.com.
I’m happy to talk through the experience, hop on a call and answer questions, or help you figure out whether joining us feels right for your family.
Sometimes the experiences that change us aren’t the ones that make our lives easier.
They’re the ones that help us see our lives differently.
And I can’t wait to experience this one alongside our daughters.