Soul Power
The Edge Interview with Nikki de Carteret
by Tim Miejan
Nikki de Carteret's spiritual journey began when she took up meditation at the age of 18 to find inner calm and balance. As a student in Paris, she went through a dramatic "out of body experience" and encounter with the Light that altered the course her life. Later while working as a researcher on a program for the BBC in London, she came across women yogis who taught the ancient Raja Yoga of India. A meditation experience linked her back to the Light.

For the last 19 years, Nikki has been a teacher with the Brahma Kumaris, one of the largest meditation-teaching institutes based in India. This university has centers in 87 countries, and Nikki is currently director of the Vancouver Meditation Center.

As a meditator with 24 years experience, Nikki's passion is to facilitate processes that help people to "ground" their spirituality in a way that becomes integral to their everyday living. Nikki does not advocate a quick route to spirituality, rather she encourages a lifetime deepening of self-awareness and soul appreciation.

Since 1992, Nikki has worked in the Middle East, extensively in Jordan, with key catalysts involved in human development, education, business, and governmental reform. In 2001, she headed a team in the design and facilitation of the first Arab Regional Forum for Young Entrepreneurs sponsored by the European Union and the Young Entrepreneurs Association of Jordan. After September 11th, she facilitated a high-level dialogue among Arab business leaders sponsored by the Young Presidents Organization on "Building Bridges Across Cultures and Faiths."

In March 2002 she witnessed first hand the emotional trauma of conflict as the citizens of Israel, Palestine and Jordan went through a collective outpouring of grief, anger and fear. "During those days of extreme chaos I understood that words have no meaning," she says. "There is nothing one can say to people in trauma. One can only be there and provide a supportive and loving presence."

Since that experience, Nikki has become fascinated with the "power of soul presence" as a tool for personal and organizational transformation, especially in areas of conflict and stress. She is the author of Soul Power: The Transformation That Happens When You Know (Dimensions, 2003), a discovery of spirit and of spiritual growth. She spoke with The EDGE by telephone from her office in Vancouver, British Columbia.

You indicate that the purpose of your book, Soul Power, is to chart the passages or stages of growth that most of us go through when traveling the spiritual path. Where does this travel lead us?
De Carteret: Where we're meant to go. For each one of us it's a different place. In my own experience, it leads you very deeply into knowing yourself and feeling comfortable with yourself. If you're lucky, it can lead you to knowing God more deeply -- understanding what life is about.

It was very funny. I had a seminar just recently on conflict resolution, and one of the ladies asked a question and I said, "Oh, that's very deep. That's like the meaning of life."

And she said, "Oh, that's what I want to know. I want to know the meaning of life. Forget all the rest of this stuff, tell me what that's about."

And she didn't let go of it. She kept on, you know, throughout the two days. So, in a way, if you're lucky, it leads you to the meaning of life. But, for each person it's different, because each person journeys differently and each person, based on who they are and what they're needing to discover, will discover that. So that's why the journey leads you to where you're meant to be.

What is the soul?
De Carteret: Well, my specific understanding of soul, after many years of investigation, comes from the spiritual insights that I've gained from my own path of Raja Yoga Meditation. In this particular meditation, we understand the soul to be a luminous being of light. In other words, the soul is non-physical -- it is metaphysical, which means it is beyond the physical. You cannot actually see the soul like you can see your arm or your leg. But, you can experience the soul. And when your third eye -- what the ancient mystics have called the third eye of knowledge, the third eye of wisdom -- opens, then you are able to have what spiritually is called Divine sight. You can begin to see and, therefore, you can begin to experience yourself as that luminous being.

I like the use of the word "being," meaning full of life.
De Carteret: Yes, totally. That's what makes this exploration of soul so exciting. I've been on my spiritual journey 24 years. If a gun were put to my head and somebody said to me, "Stop, stop doing your spirituality," I'd say, "Well, you know, shoot me, because what's the point."

It's a bit of a funny analogy, but the soul is so exciting and everything that you need to know about yourself is recorded within this being. The soul is like a little record, a microchip. I call it a spiritual microchip that contains everything within there -- all your thoughts, all your feelings, all your memories, all your patterns, all your tendencies, your characteristics. Who you are is that being and, of course, it's deep. You can go deeper, deeper, deeper into that self-knowledge. Many of the mystics knew that. Francis of Assisi was heard to utter that prayer, "O God who are you and who am I," because that's the fundamental question: "Who am I?" I'm a soul. If you understand that you're a soul, you will walk through that doorway to self-knowledge, self-realization.

I've had classes and I've done interviews with people who teach people how to go into the Akashic records. Would you say that those records are part of the soul?
De Carteret: Well, that's a very interesting question. I would see that the Akashic records might be a term that might be given to the information that we can access when we tap into soul. Now, to my way of thinking, there are two types of records you can tap into, and I tried to express this in the book in one of the chapters on process, "It's All About Change."

I was expressing that when you tap into the personal, you can actually get access to the global. So, what's very interesting is that the more you tap into soul and to yourself as a soul, your whole record of this birth is there. All your previous births are there on records, so you can tap into all of that information about yourself. You don't need to know details. It's not important to know who you were and all of that. What's important to know is the essence -- the essence of your being.

Now, when you've become clear about your own essence, an amazing phenomenon is that you are, therefore, able to tap into what we might call the global reel. Everything in this world is like a drama, and everything is also recorded. So then you can tap into everything there, too. That's the way I would see the Akashic records. It's a slightly different interpretation of them. It's the two dimensions -- the personal and then the global.

You had an experience at the age of 22 in which you experienced the light. What was the light you experienced and how did the event change your understanding of yourself?
De Carteret: The being that I met after my car accident when I was trying to heal myself was God. As I write in the book, I didn't want to admit it was God. I was scared, I guess. At 22, I didn't want to attach labels to that experience, but over time I came to know that, of course, it was God because the light was so overwhelmingly beautiful that it was not a human being that I met. It was a being beyond a human.

I don't think immediately after that experience I knew what had changed in me. I knew something had happened to me and I tried to put it together as best I could at that age, but obviously, something had deeply changed within me at a deep, psychic level. Unbeknownst to myself, I guess, I was walking my path towards my destiny, which was to become a spiritual being. Two years later, when I was a journalist in London, I began a very serious meditation practice. I don't think I consciously chose that direction. I think that direction chose me. I was just pulled into it, but obviously it was because of that experience that it marked me so deeply.

I started meditating at 19, but I would say I started my real path at 24 when I sat and learned the method of Raj Yoga, which is to connect soul to the Supreme Soul. Then I had that same experience as what I had in Paris. I felt myself literally lifted beyond this world and into a dimension of light and I connected to that being again -- and I had that same experience of love and light and power and healing. I was having experiences of God quite often at that point.

But I would say that the whole largeness of that experience only became clear to me maybe 10 years later, when I was in my 30s. I think I finally saw what destiny was pulling me to do. You can't always understand things at the time they occur. It takes maturity to put it together.

Many people don't have life-changing car accidents or near-death experiences. Do you have a feeling for why some people have these big awakening experiences and other people do not? It's just something we need, like a wake-up call?
De Carteret: It is a bit of a wake-up call. If I look at myself, I think that I had quite a big ego. Because of my background and my upbringing, so many things had influenced my being that I needed something dramatic to shake me out of who I thought I was, which was based just on social constructs and superficial labels that people had placed on me -- and those that I had placed on myself. So I needed something dramatic, as I have all my life, to make me pay attention, I think. I don't do anything by halves, you know. And, I think different people are different. Some people need softer things, they need slower things, they need to come to things gradually. Everybody's different.

Yes, it seems that some people awaken in more subtle ways.
De Carteret: Yes, I see that all the time. As a teacher of meditation, I see people shift gradually. At our meditation center here in Vancouver, we have a little Chinese group that's been coming and learning. We have a Chinese teacher who teaches in Mandarin. So, I went to just be with the group, and I saw before my eyes people awakening slowly, but surely and sweetly, you know, to who they are. And that's just as valid as what happened to me, but different.

And yet we live in a time that seems focused on instant gratification, and it seems like we're becoming more and more impatient, especially with regards to the spiritual journey. Some people want to get there instantly and they'll pay anything to get it. What does your experience tell you about time as it relates to spiritual enlightenment?
De Carteret: Oh, that is such a big question. Let's answer the first part of the question first.

I think the biggest danger in North America right now is the instant gratification. One reason that I wrote the book was to address that. My process was to place before the reader the understanding that spirituality is a journey and a process that cannot be rushed. There's that beautiful story from Zorba the Greek when he finds this little caterpillar cocoon and he sees that the butterfly is moving. It's about to open and so he lightly blows on it. He puts like his hot breath on the cocoon and it opens and the creature that emerges has crumpled wings and, therefore, cannot fly. In the process, he realized that you cannot rush a butterfly out of its cocoon.

In our societies in North America especially you see a lot of people gravitating to spirituality without much understanding of what the processes really involve. I think that can sometimes be quite dangerous for people -- and I've seen the results of that.

What is the danger?
De Carteret: It leads to intensification of ego, of ego gratification, and people then have then a harder time when it comes to trying to work through those ego-defense mechanisms. They get very stuck in many patterns and so they don't actually progress -- and this can lead to unhappiness. It can lead to all sorts of things.

I've seen many people walk through our doors who are experiencing that and it makes the journey tougher on them, actually. In the old days, things happened more slowly and you had a lot more respect for the process and for the people teaching you, so you didn't try to rush your process. You knew that you had to take it a step at a time.

A friend of mine in California, she calls the tendency in North America -- and it's quite funny, her way of expressing it -- such that people try to jump from the nipple to the podium. That's the way she puts it, and I like that. That means that people just get their first taste of spirituality and then they want to be a teacher.

We are living at this moment in time, in precarious times, and I think everybody is aware of that. People are wanting answers and they're wanting to know what's really going on -- and I think that's totally justified. But we are living in a period that might be called "dark times." We need to understand why there is so much chaos and darkness in our world right now. And we need to know that just as in any cycle of nature, things have to go through their dark period before the spring can come. We have to go through winter times before spring can emerge. History repeats. We've seen that throughout the whole history of humanity the cycles of time where there have been great civilizations -- and then they all fell. Every one of them fell. But something new emerged after that. I feel it's important to give people hope right now. In spite of the chaos and the darkness, there is a spring emerging, if we pay attention to the spring. I think that's a very important message for people.

I had an experience in London giving a talk in Covent Garden just at the time that the Iraq war was starting. I was talking about the darkness that we are experiencing and half the audience was crying because it was real. The darkness was real for them, and they couldn't make sense of what was happening. So I encouraged them that there is a light at the end of the tunnel, that there definitely is a light, so we need to focus on that, no matter how painful the dark times are. This experience was the same in Italy, just prior to that. Everybody was so angry, so upset, so distraught by the fact that we were once again at war.

You offer a very revealing sentence in your book that said, "At some point in our lives each of us needs to turn within." Is that when the spiritual journey really begins?
De Carteret: I think so. It's when we have to really look at ourselves -- and actually, we have to keep turning within again, and again, and again. Even if you're teaching something like conflict resolution, which is a communication skill and a relationship skill, even then you have to look within, because 90 percent of conflict is driven by internal conflict. So, it's again and again and again.

It's not just at the beginning.
De Carteret: If something's not working, turn within. Learn what's not working within and then you'll understand why it's not working outside.

Speaking of not working, also in your book you talked about meeting somebody at the meditation center you were setting up in Vancouver who asked you, "I know all the spiritual stuff, but why can't I make my life spiritual." How did you respond to that?
De Carteret: What I told that young man, number one, is that he was reading far too many books. He was going to far too many lectures and it was all outside of himself. It was all in his head, but he hadn't actually taken something on board and made it his own.

We talked about how in our culture that people want to get things quickly and get it for free, just soaking it up through osmosis without putting in the work. Also in our culture, we elevate people like pop idols, and in elevating people we don't actually validate ourselves. So we can look at all the spiritual teachers and elevate them and think how wonderful they are, but until we say, "Well, I'm going to do something for myself," then we don't actually start to apply the knowledge that we have.

Spiritual application is a huge piece that's needed, and that requires consistency, attention, dedication and discipline -- words that we don't necessarily always want to hear. But when you start to apply yourself, then you start to see the fruits of your effort. And, I tell people that it's like anything you do. I used to be a professional tennis player and coach and, by gosh, you've got to work at it, every day. You have to go out and you hit that ball every day. It's the same with meditation. You need to meditate every day.

You mention that particularly in the chapter on practice.
De Carteret: You can't just think, "Oh, I'll go to a lecture and I'm spiritual." It does require that you do something for you -- and that I think is the hardest thing to teach people. As I say in the book, so many people come to our center and they want to learn meditation, but do they do it? No, because it's challenging to sit with yourself and it's challenging to deal with your monkey mind and it's challenging to deal with some uncomfortable feelings that might come up inside of you. But if you apply yourself, the beauty of the experience that you can receive worth it all. Once you've got just one small experience of the beauty, then that inspires you and motivates you to do your practice.

You have a chapter on silence. In our society, there is distraction upon distraction and silence is almost the opposite of the way we're told to behave by the media. Why is it important that we become comfortable becoming silent?
De Carteret: Because if we don't become silent, we won't ever know ourselves. If we don't ever know ourselves, we won't be happy. We'll always be looking outside for somebody to fulfill that missing piece of us. We will always be driven by desires and by our attachments and we will continue to suffer, and as the Buddhists say, feel sorrow.

The media is totally the agent, I would say, that has distracted people from themselves and takes away power. Actually, it disempowers us, sadly enough. We think it empowers us, but at the level of consciousness and in terms of concentration power, watching too much television disempowers. That's why children today have such low attention spans. They just can't concentrate for more than a second and it's because of too much external focus and not enough internal focus.

When I learned meditation, I think we had more concentration power. We were able to do it more easily. Now, when I see people coming into our meditation centers they can't concentrate at all. Their attention span, like when you give a lecture, is about 10 minutes.

I was just going to say that this may be generational, but I think everybody who lives in this society may be prone to what the kids are going through.
De Carteret: Yes, I think so. And, they feel the demands on them. A lot of people come to meditate and they're so tired they fall asleep. I think people are really, really tired. For ages, I resisted the internet, because I just knew what it was going to do, but yet to live and work in our global community you need it. So I'm on board, too. But, every day you sit down and you see how many e-mails you've got, and they all want instant responses, so we spend half of our lives with respond, respond, respond, respond, respond.

And there you go. Now, just when you leave the television, you're sitting at another screen.
De Carteret: Exactly. And what does that do to us? I teach people that they have to be very, very smart now to know how to manage their lives. At a professional level, I teach people self-development and life strategies and get people to really focus on what it is they're really trying to do with their life. What is it that you're really wanting for your life? And how can you create the best possible life for yourself? We have to make strategic choices about how much we give, how much we do, how we lead our lives. People are afraid to do that because they think, well, x, y and z demands that I do that -- and so we have to have the courage to do what we need to do.

You spend a lot of time in the book talking about God and you offer a number of exercises to help us re-establish a relationship with God. Why is this needed and what does it do for us? It's something a lot of us don't want to deal with.
De Carteret: I think there're so many reasons for this. One is that we have become distanced from God. Secondly, we don't know God. It's like trying to find a needle in a haystack. Three, we're afraid of God. Four, we're angry at God. So we've got a lot of confusion in our minds about our relationship with God and sometimes all of those things need to be sorted out.

From my tradition, what helped me most of all to cultivate a relationship with God was to know that God is a being of light, and that God is a being I can connect to in meditation. I have that experience of light. I have that experience of love. So it is a very real, direct, personal connection. God is not some distant, theological being that is remote and is acting upon us in some way, but God is somebody we can enter into a relationship with. When I understand that God is a conscious being of light, of energy, and that God exudes the qualities of love and peace and happiness and tenderness, when I connect to God in meditation what I'm actually doing is drawing God's energy or power into myself. It is a process of osmosis at this point, when I truly connect.

The strongest substance flows into the weaker substance, so I do receive God's energy. This is what literally can empower the soul. By having this direct connection, we are empowered, our self-esteem rises, our sense of worthiness increases and the more worthy we begin to feel, then the closer again we can come to God.

I think what turns people away from God is their own lack of worthiness or misunderstanding about who God is or old belief systems that have distanced them. In my tradition, we clearly understand that God is a being of kindness, not a God of anger or revenge. Therefore, when I experience God, I have a loving experience, a kind experience, an empowering experience.

The whole purpose of the book is to show people that they can come back into a place of mastery, of self-respect and dignity, and we can change a lot in ourselves on our own, but the deeper levels of our patterning that have become negative we cannot change without God's power. We definitely need to re-establish that connection. So, I would say now as never before we need God's energy and God's healing light. It's really crucial now.

When you were speaking I was thinking of the Marianne Williamson quote about our deepest fear is that we are inadequate, that we play small.
De Carteret: We play small. And it is from playing small that we then hide from God or we push God away or we think that God's going to judge us. Or we think that it's because of God that I lost my child. We blame God for things we do not understand. But, when we have full spiritual comprehension, we know that we are responsible for our own actions. So whatever is happening in the world is a direct result of our own actions, not God's actions. Our consciousness affects ourselves and other people, and it affects the planet. The planet is erupting because of our negative consciousness. God didn't start the war in Iraq. God didn't put a hole in the ozone. I think it's a lot of spiritual ignorance that pushes people away from God.

My last question is about soul power. What does that mean and how do we come to manifest it?
De Carteret: Soul power means that you know totally who you are and you stand in your power as a spiritual being, which means that no thing inside or outside of yourself can destabilize you, because you know who you are and you're stable in that. And when you are in your soul power, then you are acting from your highest place of truth, from your own pure essence, as a luminous being and you have the power then to bring that spiritual energy into everything that you do so that your life becomes a life that is one of service where you live to give, not to take, and where you're able to create environments where others can move forward spiritually, too.

For more information, visit Nikki de Carteret's website at www.soulpowerseminars.com

Tim Miejan is editor of The EDGE. Contact him at (651) 578-8969, toll-free 1 (888) 776-5687 or e-mail editor@edgenews.com
Copyright © 2004 Tim Miejan

Aug 2004


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