Answer the Call of Participation-
When understanding, wisdom gathering, unlearning and remembering isn’t enough.
Dear Community,
January has for many reasons been a blur and the chaos of our world has much to do with it. I have simply not felt ready to form my own thoughts and feelings into words.
So let’s start with some celebratory news! Dorrinda, my podcast co-host and I, celebrated the end of Season-1 with a beautiful Gratitude Party for our 2025 interviewees. Thank you Chandra, Ana, Linda, Scott, Juan Pablo, Kelly, Zoe, Blake and Jaime! We had such a wonderful evening hearing from everyone about how this experience has impacted them and what they would like to see as our intentional community of healing and connection continues to grow.
We are beyond excited to kick off our second season today with an episode that highlights one woman’s journey through cancer. (Weblink & YouTube for your listening pleasure!)
Kim Fowler graces us with her personal wisdom on what she describes as a, “soul-altering journey that changed my life—inside out.” Her core message of rising-up through hardship, embracing the warrior mentality, and finding community through it all has left a deep imprint on me.
Her words of embodied wisdom helped me sort myself out and make this through line…
Besides editing Kim’s podcast in January, I’ve been reading a book that is rocking my world. (Stay with me here as I connect these dots!)
“There comes a moment on every soul’s journey when understanding is not enough. We have gathered wisdom, we have unlearned and remembered, we have touched the truth of who we are —and yet something deeper calls us. That call is not for more information or insight.
It is a call to participate—to bring all that we have remembered into motion.
Participation is where knowledge becomes wisdom, where healing becomes service and where our individual transformation begins to ripple outward into the collective field.” —Dr. Blake Suzelis
My friend Blake is becoming one of my favorite people to quote—he is a channel of pure wisdom and love. (Yes I envy him for this, and he can be heard on Season-1 of the podcast!)
The through line began when I read his words, “understanding is not enough.” After being annoyed and then hoping he was wrong, I recognized my resistance was due to the fact that for most of my life I have been someone seeking, prioritizing and facilitating understanding. I’ve spent 1,000’s of hours studying my behaviors, emotions, and traumas. Attempting to understand my small self, my reactions and inner narratives, as well as the larger arc and meaning of my life. (Don’t even get me started on attempting to understand humans in general, because yes I have been doing that for a lifetime as well.)
So, if understanding is not enough, then he has to go and say, nor is “gathering wisdom and unlearning.” And further still he says, even if you have touched the truth of who you are, there is one final step in our evolution.
(P.S. the most inconvenient truth is coming NOW)
So if the pinnacle of my life and our human evolution isn’t understanding, wisdom, or knowing our truths, what else could there possibly be? Now I’m beyond annoyed. I feel a hot, prickly agitation rise from my belly to my throat, noticing now I’m holding my breath, as if I’m about to breathe fire and turn the pages in front of me into a pile of ash. Let’s just say, this is not what I was hoping my January would include, nor something I would be proud to report back to Blake when he asks, “what did you think of my book?!”
I took several intentional breaths (deciding to leave my fire breathing techniques behind) and read on…
“Something deeper calls," he says. Not for more information or insight, but “a call to participate—to bring all that we have remembered into motion.”
And what does this call to participate look like anyway??
My schedule is pretty booked. And I’d appreciate a timeline for this work!!
(Insert plenty of time to calm down, digest and return once my resistance faded and my ego jumped in the backseat.)
Okay, it’s true, I wouldn’t be writing this at all if I didn’t feel like Dr. Blake had brought me to my spiritual knees, for no good reason!
So let’s break this down.
“Participation is where knowledge becomes wisdom.”
Which sounds to me like putting things we know into action to test our theories or truths. Which is exactly what I know the wisdom process to be. Check.
“Participation is…where healing becomes service.”
Okay, so I’ve healed many of my habits and beliefs over the years and I can see how that healing has given me the potential to bring myself into service to others. Check
Participation is…where our individual transformation begins to ripple outward into the collective field.”
I have believed for much of my life that my own transformation was the end—the final ascent in a human life. But I can also see and feel how this place, where we feel deeply and utterly changed for the better, has the potential for rippling out into the collective. (And now this expanded potential leaves me with goosebumps!)
So that brings us back to Kim’s story through cancer. (There are no coincidences in my life anymore, of that I am sure.)
Kim not only shares about how cancer transformed her life, of which she actually feels grateful for, but how she felt 100% compelled to pay that forward. She says, it wasn’t that I wanted to be of service to others with cancer, I NEEDED TO. She was deeply listening to her own call to participate. To ripple out her individual transformation to the collective community around her.
Yes! And YES!
Sometimes it takes a lived example to help land things that feel so “out there,” beyond what we feel is in our wheelhouse or capacity. So thank you Kim and Blake for showing me how this evolution thing works. This is exactly how community works and how we can all answer our own calls to participate—in a time when that is exactly what’s needed.
Don’t wait until your personal transformation feels fully baked, whatever that may look like, ask yourself today what 1-thing you know (wisdom) that is ready to be shared in the spirit of service and ripple that out by taking some action. For you, for them, for us all.
It is truly the time to bring all that we have remembered into motion. To answer the call of participating in this collective evolution.
With love and gratitude for ya’ll
Kari