 Did you know that there are over 2,200 known religions in the world? We are all born into one belief, religion, or faith, which influences how we see the world and everything and everyone in it, including ourselves. Do our beliefs divide and separate us, or do they bring us together in greater harmony? When you look up with awe on a star-filled night, do you ask who or what created all of this? Have you ever had a profound or deeply challenging experience in your life that changed your beliefs at the core of your being? Enlightened Pathways takes us on a journey of discovery to understand just how spiritual transformational experiences impact our lives and the world around us. Join us now as we deeply explore all that nourishes, heals, and inspires us. Welcome to Enlightened Pathways. Welcome. My name is Robert Rebecca, and I am your host today for Enlightened Pathways. With me today is my guest, Nikki Lamarbe. And I met Nikki all about four years ago as I started a little journey around the country, and I met her at a festival in Quincy, Quincy, Kinsey, Massachusetts, Quincy, Massachusetts, yes. I always hear it pronounced very differently. So Quincy, Massachusetts. And I was wandering through the festival, and I was kind of quite down and out, because I was experiencing some significant shortfalls in my life at that moment. And so I was walking through the festival, and I passed by this little booth that was selling this beautiful jewelry, and it just stopped me in my tracks. And I stopped, and I looked, and Nikki and I started having a conversation. And we quickly realized that we were quite kindred spirits. I've learned a lot about Nikki since then, and I've followed her journey across the country. She is a crystal healer. She works a lot with selenite in her healing methodologies. She traveled around the country to some selenite digs, and dug up a lot of selenite over the past couple of years, created this beautiful mobile van that she's traveled around in. And so I'm very grateful that you showed up here this weekend. And we had our own little tours here in Maine as well. So as I've learned about Nikki and her journey, one of the things that I've really appreciated is her depth of being. And I've really resonated with that in my own spiritual growth. And her own creations have helped to ground me in my own spiritual path. So with that, I'd like to introduce you to Nikki. Thank you for having me. Very welcome. I was so happy to get the email and invitation to come and talk about my favorite subject of all time. Your favorite subject? It totally is. Excellent. Why don't you tell me about that for a minute? Like, 26 minutes is not enough. Yeah. So my life is about my spiritual journey, and my work is about it, and my consciousness is about it, and just focusing on where I'm at, being aware at what I'm feeling, what I'm thinking, or attempting to every moment of the day. So yeah, it's a beautiful thing. That is. Then did you start to recognize your spiritual connection early in life? Yeah. So for me, it was early. I was raised Catholic. I'm the youngest of seven children, and we grew up in the country in the tiny town of Menden, Massachusetts, and I was let out in the morning with my dogs, and I would play until I heard the cow bell to come in for lunch. And so there was a lot of beautiful quiet time in nature, and I would have these moments of bliss. I would be perhaps in a tree, climbing a tree, and just having this moment of stillness where I could hear the wind blowing through the pine needles, and all of a sudden I would have this overwhelming euphoria flow through me, and it would last only a few seconds, but each time that happened, I would want to capture it, and I would think, oh, what made me feel that way, or what was I thinking, what was I doing, and it wasn't like getting a gift and feeling joy about the gift. It was something different, and yeah, so those were the first moments, and then my father was French Catholic, and my mother was Irish Catholic, and they grew up in Malboro. Usually the two did not mix, so he would speak often at the dinner table, Sunday dinners, about the hypocrisy within the Catholic religion, and how the French and the Irish, and they couldn't even get along, and they're all Catholic, and how can that be, and then he would bring my attention to, or bring everybody's attention, to the fact that we'd go to church, listen to a beautiful sermon, be touched, moved, and inspired, and then get into the car, and people are trying to cut each other off to get out of the parking lot. So that really made me start thinking, and that was at, like, seven, and I remember thinking to myself at that age, how are we ever going to end war, poverty, injustice in this world if we can't get out of the parking lot? That's a great question. So that really set me off, then two of my brothers became Jehovah's Witnesses, which started a whole new dialogue in our family of religious introspection and just observing in my own family the lack of inquiry as to why my brothers became Jehovah's Witnesses. So after college I ended up studying with them for, I lasted about six months, and if you've ever studied with the Jehovah's Witnesses they have a book, and you read, they have you read, and they tell you things, and they bring it back to scripture, and then you have to answer these questions at the bottom of the page, well, they, obviously people who just are led easily would read the question, answer based on what they had read in the book. Well, no, I kept going back to Genesis. It was like, okay, this doesn't make any sense to me because in Genesis it says blah, blah, blah, and how can you, how do you equate that, and yeah, we, we didn't do very well. And it wasn't antagonistic on my part. It was really trying to understand, if Genesis says this, how did we get here? And what was it that started you to question that, that even inspired you? Because I loved my brothers, and I felt all of this tension in our family Mother's Day was a contentious day. My father would be very upset at my brothers who are witnesses because they don't celebrate holidays. How could you do that to your mother? And so just trying to understand, you know, always going back to how can we love each other more? And that's what Christ's teachings were about to me. It seems very simple. Do unto others as you would have done unto yourself. And I think, yeah, people just stop and take a minute to think instead of being led by the dialogue, especially nowadays, it's been a challenge. But one of the funniest things that happened to me was I was 14 and I walked into the kitchen and it was after school and there are my, my older brother Ed was the first to become a witness. And then my, the next in line for me was my brother Richard, he's four years older than I. And they were talking about, they got really quiet when I walked into the kitchen. I was like, Hey, what's going on? What are you, what are you talking about? I could feel the energy shift. And they said, Oh, you know, we're talking about the Bible. But and, and we, I was like, Oh, okay. And so you could see the gleam in Ed's eye like he wanted to tell me. He's like, but you can't tell mom because you're at that impressionable age. Right. I'm like, Oh, I won't say anything. So they start, he starts telling me about Armageddon and revelations, which is some heavy duty stuff. So here I am listening to all of this. My eyes are getting wider and wider. Like, Oh my goodness. This is the, you know, the good angels are going to come down to have it from heaven and help the bat or get rid of the bad angels. And there's going to be this big battle. And all I could think of was I want to help the good angels. Like that's all I, I became like obsessed. Like, how can I help instead of being fearful that I'm going to be destroyed because I'm not a Jehovah's Witness? Do you know, I was just like, Oh, no, I want to help. I want to help. But so it's just interesting that. And then as I grew older from there, so I was about 14 then. I just didn't, I was like, if you believe in a, if it's a vengeful God. Yeah, I'll take death over that. It was just like, I don't want to do. And it was just so counter against my nature. It didn't make any sense to me. You either believe in love or you believe in fear. The two don't, they're polar opposites in my brain and way of understanding. So most people think it's love and hate, but it's love and fear. It really is fear. I mean, yeah, to me, my understanding of it is that fear begets hate. Yeah. So it really is that fear response. And so much of the dialogue today is based on that fear, is using people's fear to lead them in a certain direction. And I just have gone the opposite way, like trying to stay in a love vibration every day. It's a much better place to be, isn't it? You know, feels good. It does feel good. And I know that for someone like me, it has taken many years to navigate a history of challenges, to keep it simple, to understand where my source of power, my real authentic source of power was coming from and what it was really connected to. And being brave enough, I don't know if brave is the right word, but finding the courage enough to be willing to explore it. Because I, too, grew up in a religious household mostly, and Catholic school, and Sunday school, and what have you. I was told what to believe, but not explained. I was taken away by choices. And when I started to discover I could make my own choices, for me it was a lot of guilt and shame about making it as, oh, wait, if I don't believe in the God that I was brought up to believe in, I am going to have this. Right. Yeah, and that's not everybody's experience with growing up in those churches, but it was my experience. And I was the one who had to live through it and grow through it and find a way on the other side of it, where I could start questioning carefully. Yes. And asking difficult questions until now, I feel an immense freedom to explore my consciousness and awareness and that source of power that I experience within myself, that I experience with other people. Yeah, that connection. I love, is it the Christian scientist? No. What's the other one that says that the only sin is believing in the separation? Like that we're not connected to each other, that we're not one consciousness streaming through into these bodies, these separate bodies? I don't know which one it is, but I resonate with that a lot. Yeah. Separation is where, because if it's me against you, who am I really going to choose? I mean, the human psyche is built around self-protection and self-preservation. And so if there is that separation, I'm going to go for survival. Right. Instead of looking at it as me and you and understanding the different lenses, sometimes I look at it as like one of those beautiful stained glass windows and the light of source energy or God or the oneness shines through, the scientists would call it the quantum field, shines through that beautiful stained glass through all the different colors and shapes and lines and expressions of that one light. I find that the concept of being connected, being one, the unseparation of not just between me and other people, but everything, tends to create a life that I feel I am in flow with. Yes. Yes. And the deeper I go into that flow, the easier and more fun life becomes. Like just this morning, I was visiting with some friends and I could hear their thoughts before they would say their thoughts. And so and then they were like, I was just thinking that. I said, I know I heard you. And it just becomes, yeah, so much more fun and easier to communicate with other people and to really hear their fear and feel in their energy where what's going on? Yeah, absolutely. It's wonderful. What do you think has been helpful for you over the past few years? We've been through COVID, we've been through and we've been through some interesting things on this planet over the past few years and that I have found challenging to reconcile with my own concept of unity and wholeness and unconditional love and acceptance and participation. And I find myself many times in a place of contention as opposed to, again, wholeness, cooperation or something like that and having to re-explore and repurpose my connection so that I can still find a way to fit in and be part of. So in your own experience over the past few years, what has that been like for you to navigate? It's been a challenge and I feel like sometimes the greatest gift that we can give somebody else is a good old slap in the face. And not in a mean way, but in a wake up way. So I use social media for my work and my life, so I'm very present there. And I have given myself permission to unfollow, block, delete people that are very stuck in the mud about this is the way I'm going to look at the world and I'm not listening to anybody else or anything else and I'm being rude and demeaning and cruel. And so how do you deal with that in a balanced way? I'm not going to enable those people by continuing to keep them on my social media and some people are like, oh, that's so mean. But in a way, it's taking a stand and it's saying, no, there's a better way. There's a better way to communicate and I am open 24-7 to have any conversation with any person always. But forgiveness comes with asking and apology. There's a two way and you can't just, I won't ruin my own vibration, energy, sense of peace and centeredness by having discussions and conflicts with. And I feel like that's OK, that it kind of, when we walk away, a good friend of mine told me the other day, he said, I realized that a certain friend had unfriended me. And he said, I asked her, have I been too much on the deep end? And she was like, yeah, like you kind of have. And so that was that proverbial slap in the face. It got his attention to really stop and say, huh, I may want to rethink this. Like, what's more important to you, loving human beings or being right? And I feel like love is the answer. If we could just go back to that and be committed to peace and conversation, I think we'd get back to a better place. But it's been devastating. And I feel like so many of my friends in the spiritual community have bypassed spirituality 101, kindness, compassion, respect, understanding, integrity, authenticity. That's what spirituality is to me. And I feel like when we lose sight of that over being right, we're an ego. And it does get difficult at times for me to hear people who profess to have embraced a certain belief system, you know, a certain popular religion or have you. That is supposed to be quite loving and accepting in an unconditional way. And yet their behavior is everything but. Exactly. And so it's like, well, wait a minute. How do I put this and this together? You know, how do I make sense of this? How do I not say that I don't believe you because, you know, you're being too faced about it? It's again, yeah, the hypocrisy. It's hypocrisy, yeah. And if you could just live the beatitudes for one day. And I told my Jehovah's Witness brothers, I said, listen, you know, you think all the Catholics are going to hell. The Catholics saying other people are going to hell. And I'm like, if you all could just follow Christ's teachings and live the beatitudes for one day, then come and talk to me about, you know, how you're going to be saved. And I'm not like, and if a God is going to be like that, then sign me off. Like I don't want to participate in that. Like it just feels so counter. Like it doesn't make any sense to me. Well, you know, it's interesting because, you know, you and I have a similar concept in the construct of how, you know, our human psyche works and how we engage in reality where we hold a belief. And that belief is designed to inspire us to act in a certain way. Exactly. However, if I say that I'm unconditionally loving, but my actions are not, where is that disconnect? And what is it that's going on inside me or a person that's able to justify that disconnect? Because I am of the belief that there's a positive intention for everything. Totally. So even if I'm lying, there's a positive intention. If I'm deluding myself, there's a positive intention behind it, you know, in some way, even though I'm not aware of it. But what is it that makes that happen? So I'm always curious how to unravel that so that I find myself able to what sort of want to use this, that I find myself able to distinguish whether or not I'm actually walking my talk. I told a good friend once, I said, Frank, I will always love you. I may not like you, but I will always love you. Yeah, it's OK. So in that unconditional love, I completely have love, compassion, and understanding. I may not choose to be in the presence of the other. We've got just a few minutes left. The time flew by, right? Told you. I know. And so I have to ask, it's like, what is one of the most important things that you value within your belief structure that you think might be beneficial to our audience that they might be able to latch on to? It's just I feel like making peace a priority, like just making inner peace a priority, taking that deep breath, giving yourself a couple of seconds. Mm-hmm. I love that. I love that. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. Yeah, thank you, everybody. And unfortunately, that is all the time that we have today to spend with Nikki. And I am so grateful that you made time to come up here and be with us in person. It's such a huge thrill. Love to be in here. Thank you. Thank you. If you'd like to get more information about Nikki and about her crystal healing practices and about the beautiful everything she makes, just spectacular, you can visit her website at crystalandstonesstudio.com. Thank you. And I'll put that up here on our website so you can find it there. And it'll also be in the credits as well. And just a few closing remarks and a shout out to today's executive producer and sponsor, Bridge to Heaven Healing and Lipin Lizards, which is the premier source for healing crystals and readings with four locations, including 1, 2, 3, Main Street, Freeport, Maine. You can visit www.lipinlizards.biz for more information. Also, a big thanks to our co-executive producer, Dr. Anna Kabeca, the creator of Mighty Maka Plus, the daily nourishing supplement that improves metabolism and reinvigorates the body. Visit Dr.AnnaKabeca.com for more information. Also, if you would like to get more information about this show to reach out to us or to sponsor us, please visit www.deepbeing.org. We would love to hear from you. And a quick shout out to the crew, Director Packard and Carton, Audio and Sound, Dale Ashby and Cameras, Travis Nadeau, as well as to the Portland Media Center and their team, Tom, Dino and Warren. We wouldn't be here without them. Thank you for watching Enlightened Pathway is in spending your valuable time with us today. Until next time, play, have fun, be happy.