Excerpts | Embracing Wholeness in Diversity

Karen Evanoff

Navigating Cultural Identities

I grew up in a 2-room log cabin in rural Alaska.

During the cold winter months I breathed holes onto white-frosted windows so I could see outside. My home town, a small village of less than 200 people, is a place far away from any city highways, big stores, or gas stations — our cabin had no running water or electricity and the ‘machinery’ was my dad’s dog team. Our culture grew on independence and figuring things out ourselves. There was nowhere else to turn but to ourselves or each other.

This is the way of life I come from. Traditions or ‘ways of being’ was not a thing to define — it was, and continues to be, life lived based on the environment and what was passed on from our ancestors. The Dena’ina language, stories, songs and values all relate to and revolve around the land. I remember clearly the first days of school: white walls, fluorescent lights, a teacher with lipstick and high heels. Nothing, absolutely nothing, related to the world I came from.

Greg Thomas

Cultural Intelligence and the Jazz of Human Wholeness

Back in the early '80s, as an undergraduate at Hamilton College, I discovered details about the transatlantic slave trade that troubled me deeply.

Acidic bile against white supremacy arose, filling me with rage. One day, while walking toward the shared kitchen area, I heard a joke being told in a dorm room. I paused by the door and heard the punchline: Niggers. I heard nervous laughter. And realized that to some of my classmates, I didn’t belong because of the color of my skin.

Yet, ultimately, the grand tradition of jazz helped me resist biting into a rancid apple of hatred. I had fond memories of a local saxophone legend who once told me: “Greg, you learn all of the scales, chords, arpeggios, and patterns — but after you have them down and you begin to improvise, let that stuff go and just play.”

Through the healing medium of music, artists touched my soul with a depth of artistry that came from their very being. I couldn’t hate them for the sins of those who happened to share their skin tone. I would take another path.

Akasha Pete Saunders

Embracing Wholeness by Leading From Diversity Within

I thought that the journey to recognition, wholeness, and living my purpose began with a few steps across a university stage with a PhD diploma in my hands.

I was in for a big surprise. The journey took way more steps than I anticipated. And it was not across a university stage, but along the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage. All 500 miles of it.

Someone appeared to me while walking the Camino. They were inside my awareness and manifested as a person — an authentic expression of the highest ideal I could see for myself, but did not know at the time. This superior ideal is most loving, tender, transparent, free, and lighthearted.

My name had been Pete Saunders, and now my name was Akasha. The first time I said the name to myself, it felt like a giant tree woke up inside me, stretched, and said: "Now you see me; now you are awake." I felt a sensation in my physical body. A tree was standing tall. Rising up inside of me.

Vernice Solimar

Embracing Paradoxes: Oneness and Differentiation

We are both the ocean and the waves.

I grew up in Spanish Harlem. My mother died when I was 12. My sister and I moved into a small railroad apartment with my aunt, uncle, and their two kids. Six people, a few rooms, and the constant low hum of anxiety about not fitting in.

I remember the day my aunt and uncle went to see a larger apartment. Before they left, I heard my uncle say quietly, Don’t say a word. Let me do all the talking. He was afraid the landlord wouldn’t lease to them because of my aunt’s accent. I was young, but I understood what it meant. Assimilate or lose the room. Literally.

School made the same demand. Speak without an accent. Dress American. Blend.

And yet the neighborhood told a different story. Stay-at-home moms gathered in bodegas and mercados. Salsa played in every kitchen. When friends came over unannounced, my aunt started cooking rice and beans without a word — there was always enough. People argued, danced, prayed the rosary, and visited botanicas, sometimes in the same afternoon.

That world held me. And the outside world kept telling me it didn’t count.

It took decades to find a frame that could hold both. Not melting pot, not salad bowl. Something larger. The closest I’ve found: we are each the ocean and the wave at the same time. Distinct, yes. Separate, no.

Susanne Cook-Greuter

The Common Ground of Our Shared Humanity

Not belonging meant certain death in early tribes. Exclusion, segregation, even genocide are still in practice to make clear who belongs.

Everyone has to negotiate the double need for inclusion and belonging with the need for autonomy and separate selfhood. We want to know whom we belong to and what status we have in our groups. Not belonging meant certain death in early tribes. Exclusion, segregation, even genocide are still in practice to make clear who belongs to “our” group and who is seen as a threat to our beliefs, values, and existence.

Human beings need to be seen as humans with dignity, respected and feel welcome and loved to thrive. That is a requirement for all, and yet it is often withheld from those that do not fit a group’s definition of who belongs and who is different and therefore not worthy of love and respect.

The lottery of your birth provides a different set of contingencies. I believe that we have no control over whether, where and when we were born. Relatively few people fully admit how little control over our life circumstances we have and how much of our sense making is shaped by this fact.

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Sushant Shrestha

Roots and Wings: Belonging and Thriving in a Multicultural Landscape

The cost of rebellion is the loss of belonging.

Every new place demanded a different version of me. A different way of thinking, speaking, fitting in. I moved through countries, languages, and cultural frameworks, and each time I arrived somewhere new, I rebuilt myself to match it.

I thought I was expanding. I was also losing something.

In breaking from my home culture, I went unmoored. I poured myself into college, into finance and psychology, into fraternity life. These gave me structure when I had none. They gave me an identity to step into. I chased it all. Scholarships, certifications, prestigious clubs, a seat at tables that felt important. I was constructing a resume of belonging — proof that I had made it into a world that would recognize me. Each credential was a bid for acceptance in a culture I had adopted but never fully entered.

But no amount of achievement filled the gap.

The cracks in that system took years to show. I watched the modern education I’d trusted separate knowledge from wisdom, science from lived experience. Finance divorced from the natural world. Psychology that studied the mind and left the rest out. The more I excelled inside these structures, the more clearly I saw what they left out.

Then came the harder part: I had to unlearn most of what I’d built.

The traditions I had left behind, the knowledge systems I had adopted to replace them, the teachers I had revered — all of it needed questioning. That process wasn’t clean. Letting go of a framework you’ve staked your identity on is genuinely painful. There’s no elegant version of it.

I started over. Not from nothing, but from a different ground.

Voices from the Book