Regula Curti: Awakening Beyond
With everything in the world that can possibly divide people and nations, is there something that can unite us, find common ground between us and ultimately take us from the illusion of separation? My guest this week on Destination Unlimited, Regula Curti along with her husband Beat created the Beyond Foundation in 2007 using music to inspire mutual respect, compassion and dialogue between religions and cultures around the world and to awaken tolerance and love.
This concept has grown and blossomed since 2008 with the release of three amazing albums and the just-released fourth creation Awakening Beyond.
An Interview with Regula Curti: Awakening Beyond
Interview by Victor Fuhrman on Destination Unlimited on OMTimes Radio
Victor Fuhrman: Regula. Thank you so much for joining us.
Regula Curti: Good evening, Victor. Thank you.
Victor Fuhrman: Please share with our readers your personal story and how music became an integral part of your life.
Regula Curti: Music was always a very important part of my life. I grew up with singing, with music, with playing the violin and especially also with realizing that, for me, singing and music has a healing effect. So, when I was sad, I would go run to my room and play my violin and sing and feel good about it later. So, music, the healing aspect of music, was with me in my earliest childhood, and I dedicated this aspect to my entire life.
Victor Fuhrman: And how did you get involved in yoga?
Regula Curti: That was many years ago. I was in Thailand at a resort. I’d never done yoga, but they had a very nice teacher there. And the first lesson was touching me so much that I knew yoga will be a part of my life and a part of my health and part of my mental health, as well. I started to look deeper into yoga and found my own masters and teachers in India, especially Yogi Bhajan, who is the master of Kundalini Yogi. I was very much touched by this technology of yoga because there is so much singing involved – not just singing, soundings. And as a musician and singer, it’s just the right thing to do.
And I continued this path, just kept in yoga. It gave me the strength and the power and the creativity to realize that yoga would not–you do not speak for yourself only, you do it for other people or to give something to other people. It’s about giving yourself or devoting yourself entirely to an idea, to uplift people.
Victor Fuhrman: How did the mantra the affect you when you started chanting?
Regula Curti: It was an early morning session, two hours before sunrise getting up and practicing yoga and singing. I was singing the seven chants of the Chakras, and I immediately was touched so deeply, realizing the enormous power of singing mantras. I went into my day realizing that I had to find a foundation, Beyond Foundation, to really give all my time and all my knowledge and my capacity to this Project Beyond. So, it was actually this early morning rising and singing which gave me so much power to realize what came in the next ten years.
Victor Fuhrman: What does the word Beyond mean to you?
Regula Curti: Beyond came from that wonderful Rumi quote, Rumi, the Persian poet – “Out beyond ideas of right doing and wrongdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.” To create with music a field, a neutral field was the goal of our music. It is beyond names, it is beyond gender, beyond faces. It is a field you open to meet people which is a field of love at the end, a field which doesn’t know any differences.
Victor Fuhrman: Two of your neighbors in Switzerland joined the project in 2008 with the launch of Beyond Music. You lived in an amazing neighborhood, including Tina Turner and Dechen Shak-Dagsay, who I had the pleasure of interviewing earlier last year. How did this lovely synchronicity come about?
Regula Curti: Dechen I knew from her music. I was playing her music in my yoga classes for years. And I thought she was one of those Tibetans living in the Himalayas and was not aware that she lived opposite the lake just nearby. And finally, I got from a client the card of her address and–a business card, and I realized, oh, she’s in Switzerland! So, I contacted her, and we started to have a wonderful friendship and started to sing together. We also sang at reunions of business people, or I remember once we went to an important center where Jewish people and Palestinian people came, and they needed just music to neutralize the field.
So, we did, and they were asking us to do you have a CD, and we said no. So, we were looking at each other, and that was the beginning of the first CD “Beyond, Buddhist and Christian Prayers.” And we realized we were in the process of creating that we are not strong enough, that we needed a celebrity to push us and to help us to really bring that message into the world.
And, well, there are no coincidences in life, but my husband lived in the house where Tina Turner lives now, and Tina Turner wanted to know the people who were living before her in this house and invited us for dinner. And that’s how I met her. And we had immediately shared such a strong understanding of spirituality and about the effect of singing.
And I remember that beautiful evening when Dechen and I were together, suddenly, we said, “Tina Turner, she has to be part of that project!” So, I contacted her, and she said yes.
Victor Fuhrman: How wonderful. It almost seems like there was a natural energy between the three of you. We talk about synchronicity that there are no coincidences. There must have been this natural energy when the three of you got together and recognized each other and said, “We are sisters in this project,” wasn’t there?
Regula Curti: That’s correct. It was like a deep understanding of each other and just a gratefulness that we find together in this life. We don’t know, perhaps we met in another life already, to fulfill in this life this vision and this job to bring people our music.
Victor Fuhrman: The first time you mingled and blended your voices together, what was that experience like?
Regula Curti: It was realizing that the essence of all is one. As we merged our voices, Dechen and myself, it was so natural when I was singing the Christian chants, and she was singing the Buddhist mantras. It was blending so well, and we realized that the essence is one, is just another, just all the words we sing, but under–or beyond those words is the same belief, the same message.
Victor Fuhrman: Absolutely. And that wonderful blending together must have been transcendent. It’s almost like being in a chapel of amazing singing, raising you up, raising the energy.
Regula Curti: It was like that. I was singing an “amen,” and the moment I was finished singing, I felt that I could leave now this earth because it was fulfilled. It was so strong that I could almost say “that’s it,” I can go now, I delivered it.
Victor Fuhrman: Wow, what an experience that must have been, ready to go. So, the first album that you created together was called “Beyond: Buddhist and Christian Prayers.” Tell us a little bit more about how that came together.
Regula Curti: Well, Dechen and I, we were starting these projects together, with her beautiful Buddhist voice living in Switzerland. We were meeting like in a reunion at the monastery, the famous monastery Einsiedeln Abbey and had the chance to help the Abbott of the monastery to bring His Holiness, the Dalai Lama to Switzerland into that monastery to celebrate interreligious conference with His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, and Abbott. And there, the two representatives of the two belief systems, they encouraged us to be inspired by another belief system but to go deeper into the old belief system.
So, for me, that was very important because I am raised protestant in Christian belief and was leaving the church in a way to practice Buddhism. And when the two representatives said that to us, I realized I had to go back to see if in the Christian church or in our Christianity there are similar chants or prayers to sing which have the same effect as Buddhist mantras. And I found out that we have many beautiful repetitive prayers like The Rosary, Ave Maria, Kyrie, and Amen. And I started to practice that all over again and realized, oh, they bring me to that same place within me, where I have a good place like the Buddhist mantras I used to sing before.
