For the founder, leader or professional whose life still looks like it’s working: why the next chapter may begin with an old pattern, not a new purpose.
“The hardest days were the practical ones: sorting through costumes and equipment, closing systems, releasing objects and deciding what to keep.” That is how Nikita Thakrar remembers closing the physical studio of the dance school she founded and led for twenty years. “Ordinary things carried the weight of an entire era.”
“There was grief in recognising that something could have been meaningful, successful and deeply loved, and still be complete,” she says. The next morning brought no plan for what would replace it. “I simply continued. I listened, wrote, walked, prayed and allowed myself not to have the next identity ready.”
A life that still works from the outside but no longer feels entirely true on the inside is not confined to the owner of a dance school. Workplace research points to significant unrest even at the most senior levels. In Deloitte’s 2023 Well-being at Work survey, run across the US, the UK, Canada and Australia, 75 per cent of C-suite respondents said they were seriously considering quitting for a job that would better support their wellbeing, a higher share than managers or employees.
That threshold is where Nikita works. An identity and purpose mentor, TEDx speaker and author, she is the creator of the Journey from Karma to Dharma® body of work, which she teaches through her company, Journey with Nikita Ltd. It is written for the accomplished founder, leader or professional who has built a successful life, business or reputation and arrived, in her words, “at a threshold where the identity that carried them there no longer feels entirely true.” She helps them recognise the patterns they have inherited and meet that transition “with depth, discernment and practical steadiness.”
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The Search for the Next Thing
When the restlessness arrives, Nikita says, the usual response is to go looking for something new. “People often respond to inner disconnection by searching for the next role, strategy, relationship or achievement. But a new direction will not create freedom if it is being chosen through the same inherited beliefs, loyalties and identities that created the old life.”
That, for her, is the mistake: “assuming that they need to find a new purpose before understanding the patterns shaping the life they already have.” She sees it most in people whose competence has become part of their identity. “They know how to perform, provide, lead and succeed, but they may no longer know who they are without being useful or exceptional.”
Work carries much of that weight. In a McKinsey survey of more than a thousand US employees, published in 2021, 70 per cent said their sense of purpose was largely defined by work, and the senior executives in the sample raised that average.
“You may not be lacking purpose,” Nikita says. “You may be living through patterns that prevent you from recognising or pursuing it.” The work begins by seeing those patterns clearly, she says, “not judging them or dismantling a life impulsively, but understanding what they once protected, what they now cost, and whether they still belong in the person you are becoming.”
These ideas form the foundation of Nikita’s forthcoming book, Journey from Karma to Dharma®: The Bridge from Inherited Patterns to Conscious Purpose, due for publication in January 2027. Structured around three movements, Remembering, Reclaiming and Embodying, the book explores how inherited identities and recurring patterns shape our lives, and how greater awareness can lead towards a more conscious expression of purpose.
Before Anything Is Replaced
“The first thing I tell someone who senses that the identity which carried them this far has completed its purpose is: do not rush to replace it,” she says.
“A threshold is not a problem to solve as quickly as possible. It is a place to listen.”
Nikita Thakrar, TEDx Speaker, Author and Creator of Journey from Karma to Dharma®
What she does differently, she says, is that she does not treat the pattern as the enemy. “A pattern often began as an intelligent response to something a person experienced, inherited or needed to survive. If we try to destroy it without understanding it, we can create another form of self-rejection.” Her part is to help people discern what the pattern has been protecting, what wisdom it contains, and what must now be integrated or released. “My gift is not only seeing the pattern. It is knowing how to meet it.”
A composite account, drawn from recurring themes in Nikita’s work, concerns a client navigating a difficult international relocation. He had become increasingly resentful and dissatisfied with the life he was building. On the surface the problem was the move, but as they explored it he recognised that the transition had activated a much older pattern, one in which he had learned to associate personal worth with achievement, appearance and material success. “The move had not created his sense of inadequacy,” Nikita says. “It had exposed the standards through which he had been measuring himself for many years.”
The work, she says, was not about persuading him to be positive. “His external circumstances did not change overnight. What changed was his relationship with them.”
“This is not about fixing a broken person. It is about helping someone become available for the truth of who they are now.”
Nikita Thakrar, TEDx Speaker, Author and Creator of Journey from Karma to Dharma®
She met the same question in her own life long before she met it in a client’s.
A New Name at Sixteen, a Teacher in India
At 16, she legally changed her name because she “didn’t connect with the name I was born with.” It was a shock to family and friends, and, in her words, “the start of my journey with identity.” At 18 she travelled to India, beginning a formative decade of dance, yoga and spiritual study under the guidance of a teacher and mentor. Her training includes Kathak at Nupur Zankar in Mumbai and a yoga teacher qualification through the Sivananda Yoga Vedanta tradition.
She established her dance school at 20, initially running it from the side of her parents’ home, and opened her own studio at 26. Days after the studio opened, she experienced a serious health crisis that led to major lung surgery. Months later came the diagnosis of a rare autoimmune condition, accompanied by frightening uncertainty about her future and life expectancy. “After facing a shortened life expectancy, I made a conscious decision to build a life that’s rich on every level,” she has written.
DNC Dance and Yoga Studio in Slough became the centre of that life, a purpose-built space for children, teenagers and adults. Alongside it she trained in neuro-linguistic programming with Sue Knight, to master practitioner level, and in 2019 found reiki “by serendipity,” going on to train in it and create her own treatment, Reiki Ritual™. During the pandemic, she wrote, “Ancient wisdom started pouring through me about chakras, karma & dharma.”
It was the studio, though, that she would have to release.
The Year the Studio Closed
She turned 40 in 2025, the year the dance school celebrated its twentieth anniversary, and chose to close the physical studio and gift the school she had spent two decades building. “The studio was not simply a company,” she says. “It held decades of relationships, memories, creativity and identity. It was evidence of what I had built and who I had been. Even when I knew the chapter was completing, allowing it to end felt like dismantling part of myself.”
What she took from it became one of the defining truths within her work. “The moments that appeared to disrupt or dismantle my identity were often the very experiences that revealed what was no longer true,” she says. Over time she understood that the ending had brought her closer to the deeper expression of her purpose, not further from it. The skills, relationships, creative experiences and spiritual study of those years “were not lost. They became part of the body of work I now teach.”
“The wreckage is not separate from the path. Sometimes, the wreckage is the path.”
Nikita Thakrar, TEDx Speaker, Author and Creator of Journey from Karma to Dharma®
She holds three of her lines together as one arc: “‘The wreckage is the path’ names the threshold. ‘Remember who you have always been’ names the return. ‘Dance with Your Dharma’ names the embodied life that becomes possible afterwards.”
Writing, Walking, Silence
“When I am developing a piece of work, I often move between writing, walking, silence, prayer and movement,” she says. Much of Journey from Karma to Dharma developed that way, with chapters, frameworks and visual ideas often arriving while she was away from her desk. It isn’t an absence of discipline. “I have learned that discipline and receptivity are not opposites. My best work emerges when I create enough structure to hold an idea without controlling it before it has had the opportunity to become fully itself.”
The work now has several ways in, from the free Dharma Library and a focused Soul Consultation to the self-directed Karma to Dharma Academy, the nine-month Dharma Diploma and immersive retreats.
As the work expanded into a book, programmes, retreats and media, her husband, Sinan, helped simplify the digital infrastructure behind it. “His involvement signalled that the vision was no longer mine to carry entirely alone,” she says. “Belief does not always arrive as praise. Sometimes it arrives as practical commitment.”
To anyone starting out in transformational work, her first advice is “not to confuse visibility with authority, or intensity with depth.” The rest is about restraint. “Learn to listen without rescuing. Learn to recognise a pattern without reducing someone to it.”
Where Nikita Is Now
“I am preparing for the January 2027 publication of Journey from Karma to Dharma®: The Bridge from Inherited Patterns to Conscious Purpose,” she says. “The book brings together the framework that emerged through my own identity thresholds, two decades of teaching and leadership, and my work supporting others through transition.” The new book follows Meditation Through Poetry, a collection of poems on birth, death and life drawn from a lifetime of writing, which she began “as a form of self expression in my childhood and for therapy in my adulthood.”
In June 2026, she gave her first TEDx talk at TEDxTruro in Cornwall, under the title Dance with Your Dharma: Creativity as the Bridge from Chaos to Clarity. “I loved being on stage,” she wrote afterwards. She speaks on identity, creativity, conscious leadership and purpose, and her video podcast features conversations with voices in transformation, including Denise Duffield-Thomas and Emma Mumford.
She is now developing the work for wider audiences through speaking, media, leadership platforms, literary events and thoughtful conversations about identity, creativity and purposeful reinvention.
Dance is still part of her life, on different terms. For many years it was her profession, community, responsibility and public identity. “Now I am rediscovering it as a private and creative language. It reminds me that not everything meaningful needs to become a business, programme or outcome.”
“Movement helps me return to myself when words become too organised or the mind becomes too dominant,” she says. “It is one of the places where I experience presence without needing to explain it.”
Five Reflections from Nikita
Don’t rush to replace it. When the identity that carried you this far has done its work, treat the threshold as a place to listen before you treat it as a problem to solve.
Ask what the pattern protected. It may have begun as an intelligent response to something you once needed to survive.
Look beneath the obvious problem. What looks like the move, the role or the business may be an older standard you have been measuring yourself against.
Honour what is ending. You don’t need to know what comes next to let something complete.
Hold structure and receptivity together. Give an idea enough structure to hold it, without controlling it before it has become fully itself.
From the Diary of Nikita Thakrar
Nikita Thakrar is a Crowthorne-based identity and purpose mentor, TEDx speaker and author, and the creator of the Journey from Karma to Dharma® body of work.
| Role | TEDx Speaker, Author and Creator of Journey from Karma to Dharma® |
| Based in | Crowthorne, England |
| Previously | Founder, DNC Dance and Yoga Studio, Slough (twenty years) |
| Books | Meditation Through Poetry, and the forthcoming Journey from Karma to Dharma®: The Bridge from Inherited Patterns to Conscious Purpose (January 2027) |
“The wreckage is not separate from the path. Sometimes, the wreckage is the path.”
Editor’s Note
Executives Diary features Nikita Thakrar because her work addresses a question senior people seldom put into words: what to do when a life that is working no longer feels entirely true. Her answer is not a formula for reinvention but a way of reading the pattern underneath the restlessness. It rests on two decades of teaching, ten years with a teacher in India, and the closing of the studio of a school she led for twenty years. What convinced the editors is that she describes her own threshold as plainly as she describes her clients’.
Executives Diary, Editorial
