0:00
..insults and painful situations and so on
0:08
But very early on, in my Reiki life, I realised that part of my path was to….. really be able to go into very painful places and come out of it intact, which…. I don’t know I have done a lot of therapy over the years. I started going to a therapist when I was… when…3 or 4 years in Reiki, about 1983/1984 and I still have a therapist. I see her every month or two, but she’s there and I know that when I really need.. when I get confused or I need to work something out. I try to do it myself, I find this to be the most responsible to do in light of what I am doing for a living, so to speak…
1:13
The first 10 years of my life as a Reiki Master was exceedingly painful in the sense that I was working out some very old, very primary issues in my personality. And I now, when I look back on it, don’t really remember the pain. I think that that’s pretty usual for people but I do have a lot of gratitude for those people around me who stuck by me, who supported me, and who were there at times when I really needed strength or honesty or … individual attention.
2:07
I know that there are a lot of my colleagues who… their life-plan is to avoid conflict at all costs. And I don’t…that’s not my plan. So maybe I’m lucky in that way 0221 that I didn’t see it 0223 (räusper) as being an adversarial or a…. 0231 that I didn’t see it as adversarial path, but I saw it as a path that was very appropriate to someone who really had blinders on and walking through a dark forest and not being able to see what’s coming from the side and often not being able to see the little twig that I would stumble over and you know, I fall down and pick myself up.
3:01 (räusper)

3:01
Sometime in the mid 80ies I remember realizing that I had lived a lot of my life at the mercy of other people and what they thought and my mother kept pointing this out to me but I had no idea what she meant at the time (laugh) what she was talking to me. But I realized that as a master and as a lineage bearer, as grand master if I didn’t feel a complete Yes in everything that I did, then I wouldn’t do it. That was my motto. And I still use that to this day. I don’t have to have reasons for it to be a Yes, because often there are no reasons. Because it looks like on the outside that I shouldn’t do it, but on the inside, if I say Yes, then I just do it. And my thinking is that.. if I make a decision for a Yes then I can always make another decision later because I didn’t… I can’t blame anybody else, because I can’t say “oh well, that René he told me do this and then, you know, well he shouldn’t have told me that and now so I am in this hot water “. And if you do it yourself , then you can always make another decision. And it’s really OK for me to go: “Whoops, I thought this was the road I wanted to take, and it isn’t”. So I’m backing up, I’m turning around … or I’m taking a detour or something else.
4:50 (räusper)
I also learned that what people bring to me as a reflection of who I am at the time … and I see that I am also a very reflective person back. So if somebody comes to me with a kind of attitude , then watch out, because I can just turn into that attitude so fast, it’s a little scary for me actually.
5:25
I have a few relationships in my life, where … it will always be a contrary kind of relationship but in that contrariness there is … there is a deep and abiding faith of care in that relationship, and that the safety is there to be contrary and to be aggressive sometimes, to be myself if I need to be and to reflect back to the other person who they are. Not.. I don’t do this consciously, I don’t think “oh, I’m.. now I’m gonna be reflective” . But it’s just something that happens inside of me. 0610 And ähm .. So (räusper)
6:15

6:15
So, it’s been a rich path and I don’t see it as a path of faults and stumbling, I see it as a.. as a path where I’ve been able to confront myself on many different levels and many ways by many people. And these gifts that I’ve received have come to me and have allowed me to be a better person for it. 0647 And ähm.. you know the (räusper)
6:51
The last big test for me was when I found out I had breast cancer 5 or 6 years ago and all of a sudden it was my body betraying me. And then I thought “Yes, but you travelled around for 22 years, you didn’t take care of yourself, you didn’t drink enough water for sure, you didn’t have days off where you renew yourself…”. And I read this article by this man, who said that cancer was a response of the body to adverse conditions and so he listed all the adverse conditions and I had every one of them. (laugh) .. and I thought “well, ok, so this is an opportunity to change that”. And that was the attitude that I went into treatment with and I feel that it was the greatest gift that.. another great gift that I have received, you know, in this life. And I am better for it, for sure.
8:07

0:00
… So in the beginning one of the things that I got into for a while was this idea that if people knew everything about me then they would not dislike me or they would understand me even more. That was … it’s one of my big things: to be understood. And so… I did these… for several years I did these workshops for master candidates, called self-assessment workshops. And they were sort of like group therapy … encounter groups… And we were really lucky because we didn’t really get in trouble with these but we sure were creative and it was really fun and really confrontive for everybody, including the facilitators..
1:15
And out of that I realized that I was my own worst enemy: that, you know, people would come and say: “Oh Phyllis, I hear that you’re doing this and this and this” and I’m going “well, where did you hear that?” and they said: “from you” and I said: “really? And in my trying to explain all my thoughts and everything, they took it a couple of steps further and begin to have assumptions about who I was. And finally in one of my therapy-sessions I realized that I had to become selective in the sense that… There is this wonderful illustration called “Johari’s window”, it was from a psychologist and his name was Johari and he had his clients make this diagram like a window and then you put 4 boxes in the window: your private self, your public self, your potential and your blind side. So of course the blind side is things that you don’t know about yourself but everybody else knows. And your private self is what you know but nobody else knows. And these two were kind of switched for me: my public self was really, really big and my private self was very, very small. And you know, I realized that I as a human being have a right to privacy, and that I needed to really change that. So it took me a few years, but I managed to do it.
3:16

3:16
And then this whole kind of … mis… all these like misconceptions and so on… 03:26-03:30 (coughing)
3:31
that were following me around just disappeared in the sense that they were replaced by people’s personal experience with me of being hateful or loving/spiritual or eating meat and not being a vegetarian is one thing, but to have this be told through this kind of gossip chain is really different. So I feel that… that my .. that was a defence mechanism that really did not work for me because I was my own worst enemy as far as PR goes, public relations.
4:17
So I don’t know if that answers your question but it certainly is where I came from…
4:23

0:00
(René: ..you agree with that?) Yes, I do… 0007 I feel that we are in a very interesting position as Reiki masters. I don’t know the daily things about people very often. I don’t know if they are married or if they have a relationship, I don’t know if they have children, I certainly don’t know the names of most of their children, I don’t know where they live, I don’t know what their daytime job is if they happen to have one. I only know a few little details that come up in coversation and I don’t hold on to them very much because it would be impossible.
0:52
But, eg. for my 1st degree students when they sit in the chair for initiation, they open themselves to me totally energetically. And that is a truly amazing intimate moment that will never ever be shared by anybody else. So that responsibility, that moment of initiation brings me to, I believe, to an energetic and spiritual connection with this person for a life time and perhaps we’re renewing something from other lifetimes, I have no idea, I have my own theories about that.
1:48

1:48
So… I’m a human being and I need to be able to work things out myself as well as for my students to work out their issues with their parents or their teachers or their children, they need to work things out for themselves. And as a master I place myself in the position of being a reflector to them and also being reflected on, a lot of people call this projection. And I denied this for a long time, then obviously, it got to be so obvious that I couldn’t deny it anymore. And then.. because I was in therapy it was really easy for me to see it is a responsible thing for Reiki masters to process their own projections and their own issues without involving their students, because when the do, and I’ve seen this happen in my life and I’ve seen it happen in other masters’ lives, it’s so messy.
2:59
Well, the only good thing that comes out of that is, you learn how to apologise and you learn how to clean up your mess, but it’s not a skill that (laugh).. you really really want to use so often. And.. as I grow older of course, there are less and less opportunities for messes, because my own physiology, my own understanding of who I am as a person has changed, so I don’t end up getting into unconscious messes so much now….thank goodness.
3:38

3:38
But when you’re 30/40 and… when you’re 30 or 40 years old you’re in your prime, you are high on this … living this life as RM and your ego and your sense of who you are kind of goes…gets inflated sometimes. And you end up.. you know, just not being very kind or very human or very thoughtful and… So those are the times when therapy really helps, because… whether we like it or not our lives are really a product of oral tradition and that oral tradition starts back when …through the family constellation. So from, you know, generations ago how those people raised their children and how the family grew and matured and who you are in that particular process of your family…
4:51
I find this form of a therapy, which is kind of a misnomer, actually I think … revolutionary because it takes into account all of who you are: past, present and into the future. So…. having somebody to talk to, paying someone to talk to for an hour and having their undivided attention for an hours a week, is something that I feel RM really need in their life. Some masters don’t do it, because they don’t feel that’s necessary, other masters go to other things that provide the same place like meditation, sometimes it’s sort of extreme exercise, I would call it, like, ähm
0547 (räusper)
riding your bicycle for four or five hours every week at one time or something like that. I mean there are these ways to work out your issues without talking. I am a talker, ok, so therapy works for me. But my parter is a bike-rider, bicycle rider, so you know, she works stuff out in her head by going on these long bike-rides, which would not work for me at all..laughs…
6:15

6:15
And some people walk and so on. So it’s… it’s an interesting process, but it’s important that this particular activity be conscious because if its not conscious and you have your own process remain in an unconscious state, then…. you will for sure involve your students and people around you into your drama and then to extract yourself is really difficult. I know because I have been there.
6:51
The woman that I was talking about … in my early Reiki life was part of a drama that I have created and that my husband and I have created. And I could totally understand her feeling so unsafe, that she just couldn’t be with me at all. And … and jet I really trust her teaching of Reiki, I trust … I know that she is dedicated to Reiki and dedicated the rest of her life to Reiki. So in that way, you know, it comes to this kind of question about success. It’s like…. was I successful as a Master? Well, yes, I was, but I wasn’t very successful as a friend and I wasn’t very successful in my own inner family relationships where she got swept up into it. And then…there.. at this point there is really no way to go back and extract ourselves from that and it happened. And sometimes there irrevocable… there is irrevocable damage that happened. And it’s good to accept that so and not have to… you know..lessen your own guilt by making it OK for you. But I think for her it will never be OK. And that is sad but it is true. And I hope that there are not very many people in my Reiki life where I have created that kind of situation.
8:38

0:00
Well, it took me a while to 0010 (räusper) it took me a while to come to an understanding of forgiveness. Because what I did instead, was I just took the responsibility on myself. And so my hardest thing was to learn how to forgive myself. And it was one of the things that we… I believe inadvertently touched upon in our self-assessment workshops. And there was some amazing times when people would … we would do roleplay or we would do communication exercises and somehow it would touch somebody so deeply that they would be catapulted into the process of forgiveness, much to their surprise I think and ours as well.
1:12
And for me …I found that forgiveness was a kind of miracle that happened when a certain set of circumstances occurred all at the same moment. And then somehow there was this revelationary occurrence and then forgiveness began to work….
1:44
So I have spent a lot of time in my therapy sessions trying to divest myself from the responsibility for everything that happened in the world, in my world especially. And to be able to forgive myself for being human, I mean that was one of my first things, is to know well you’ve made mistakes. Well, no I haven’t! I haven’t made mistakes and I am responsible for this and I’m in fault and …. So that was my line. And to get over that line
0216 (räusper)
and to come to a place of being able to forgive was really a major piece of work for me.
2:28

2:28
I have been in some family constellation work through students of Bert Hellinger . I’ve been very taken by depth of forgiveness that happens as a result of simply , in my book, understanding circumstances. So
0251 (räusper)
2:56
I haven’t done my own personal familywork, with family constellation work, which I would like to, but the situation has never come up. But I have done work within the lineage, so we had a constellation where there was a person standing in for Mikao Usui, standing in for Chujiro Haysashi, standing in for Hawayo Takata and standing in for me, Phyllis Furumoto. And then… for the successor of the lineage. Fascinating, really fascinating. And what happened was, is that in all of our imagination we found out that we had never connected like Mikao Usui with Chujiro Hayashi and imagined them having conversation, which is exactly what happened in the constellation. And for Hawayo Takata to have conversation with Chujiro Hayashi, which of course she did many, many times, for hours, I’m sure.
4:06

4:06
But I never imagined that, so to hear these people converse together and to say “Well, I always wanted this from you.” And the other person saying “But I couldn’t have given you that, that you had to find for yourself.” And then the energy of forgiveness and reconciliation coming in that same moment was astonishing, it was very moving for me and allowed me… I think they came at a time when it allowed me to divest myself of last ideas that as a lineage bearer I had to be perfect.
5:00
I knew my grandmother wasn’t perfect, for sure. And ..it was always my big paradox or my big….dilemma of how to hold my grandmother as the woman that I knew she was and my experience of her as a granddaughter as another person of the planet and as a Reiki Master 0526 knowing she was not hum… ähm 0528 knowing she was not perfect and yet hearing how.. she was so perfect for everybody else. So that was an interesting play in itself in this constellation. So I found it to be… I find it to be very interesting and it’s something actually that I’m still working on…0550 to get clear about
5:52

0:00
So the first thing that happened… well, so my mind goes to “Who would be on this list of forgiveness or making amend, coming to reconciliation actually, the best that I know. And when I go there, I think well.. is this really necessary?… And so there are two answers to this question “is it really necessary?”
0:46 (räusper)
On one end.. one level I feel that the gift of accepting who we were as human beings at that time and being able to understand both sides of the coin… both sides of the situation, is a kind of reconciliation of itself and doesn’t need to involve the other person.. necessarily.
1:15
On the other hand, for some time and in some instances I can when that would be really beneficial and be able to happen… by simply going out to dinner and talking about what happened and then come into a realization that both of us were in circumstances where we really just had to do what we did….
1:50
But what happenes in that instance is that… I believe it doesn’t build the ability to accept what’s so. And that for me is a kind of a foundation principle. It’s like … I met, I met this man at the beginning of when I was Reiki master in 19.., no, yah, in 1980. And I fell in love with him and we got married and we were married for about 7 years. And there were parts of our life which were ecstatic and they were incredibly creative, because we’re both very creative people. And in that creativity, we were undisciplined. So… (laugh)… we also created very painful situations for each other. So a sort of like the very best of ourselves and the very worst of ourselves kind of got brought out in this situation.
2:58

2:58
And when I talked about irrevocable damage, it’s like I feel that in our relationship unconsciously, unfortunately for the first few years, we did irrevocable damage to each other in the sense that we knew where our… because we were so intimate and so close, that we knew exactly where that sacred wound was in each of us. And that, you know, somehow we kept pounding on this sacred wound until it became so painful that the blissful parts and the creative parts of our relationship didn’t actually match this other part and that the pain just got too much for us to deal with being together.
3:56
It’s been a very interesting thing because we’ve stayed “friends” so to speak, very close friends, and he entered into a relationship almost immediately after we’ve separated. But she always felt like the second wife, for years until I actually had to go home at some point to kind of clean up this relationship. Burn has letters and burn… everything that we had that I felt like had attachment, and really release this relationship back to neutral, almost, so that she could actually take her place as his wife. And I…
4:44

4:44
I feel that still there is this place that we never go to anymore because we know that we’re vulnerable with each other and we don’t really trust each other and actually I feel like both of us, not just him, which I’d like to think, but…( laugh).. also myself. I feel like in that sense we are untrustworthy with each other, that there is this kernel of some piece of our relationship which is untrustworthy and that we recognize that and in that recognition I think it’s just realistic to accept it and do the best we can of what we have and be able to enjoy that piece and enjoy each other and not go to the places that would again put us in this place of irrevocable damage. And so..
5:50
I think that’s a good example of that and I feel like that there are people in my life, I could make a list of those people, and what it’s taught me about myself has been invaluable. So in my next relationships I was very careful when I went there and in my present relationship, 0614 you know, there’s a…  I won’t say it because it’s really nasty, but
06:19
there is this phrase that as a sort of a wild Hippie person, which just flung around like … you know, we just used it for every situation and so it became part of my vocabulary and in Reiki of course part of my private vocabulary, but this is a phrase that really goes to the sacred wound part of my present partner and I got it after a few instances that it would be better if I could not say this phrase, you know, in our conversations. And…
7:05
In this situation she was conscious enough being able to say „You know, if you say this again, I’m out of here, no matter how much I love you, I can’t stay here“. And I was conscious enough to say „Well, I don’t wanted to do that. So, you know, I’m not gonna do this anymore“. And I have, sometimes when I feel really hurt and upset, but it’s gotten.. she’s gotten less sensitive but I’ve also gotten much more sensitive. So in the sense that we learn from these places where we’ve created this irrevocable damage… I just hope that, you know, there is something better that comes out of that, you know for myself and for people who come to.. come into my life afterwards. And then I can honour my realtionship with this man that I was… that I’m still very much in love with, but I still… I can’t live with him for sure, that is not possible. So .. interesting..
8:18

00:00
Yes, perhaps it addresses a question I have for you… which … I reali.. I’m really comfortable in saying these things …  I do say them in public a lot. I mean .. y’know depending on the situation. (pauses …)
00:40
But I guess I have to just trust the context in which this will be presented in … y’know like … does this really have to do with Reiki? And then I answered my own question by saying, of course ,it does and especially in the sense of the theme or the purpose, the mission of the film itself … I had to kind of had to go around that for a minute and check that out.
01:11

00:00
My parents met at the university of Hawaii after my father was discharged from the army. He was a part of the very famous 442^nd Japanese Amercian Battalion and ended up in Italy and he ended up loving Italy. And it was sort of an interesting thread through his live. And he was in pre.med at the time and my mother who really was an artist from her soul out … got pushed into be a pre-med student by her mother, my maternal grandmother who was Hawayo Takata.
00:57
And I am sure that my grandmother had in her head, that her daughter would go to pre-med, be a doctor and also be a Reiki Master she becomes a doctor and also a RM. My mother was with my grandmother at the time she met Chujiro Hayashi in Japan and received first degree from him. She never went on in Reiki because her idea was that she was going to raise a family and she didn’t want to have a career so to speak of Reiki. So … you know, times were spontaneous and who knows what it was like back then after the war in Hawaii but they ended up eloping because grandmother thought that my father would never make anything of himself.
01:51
And, so they eloped and they got married. And they eventually.. he ended up going to medical school in University Dallas, Texas. So they moved to Dallas, Texas and he went to med school there and then that’s where I was born, so I was born in Dallas. In ‘48.  And there is this rumour in my family that said that my grandmother, who was very into auspicious names, wanted to name me Dallas because it was a booming town then and … would become a very big city and she thought that would be a great name for me but luckily, anyway in my own story, I got saved from this by my mother who said «No». … So I ended up to be Phyllis. And I have no idea why.
02:53
I was born with a cleft pallet and I had a speech impediment from when I was very small, obviously when I started talking. My first 7 or 8 years of schooling I went to a speech therapist.. I just hated my name because the sounds that were hardest for me were f, s, t and r …it’s all through my name, right. So I just thought that his was very cruel. (laughs) And eventually I asked my mother «why did you do this?» like «why were you so set on my being able to speak clearly?» And she said  “because you are going to grow up and speak to a lot of people” And I went (shakes head), well, she is crazy
03:54

03:54
You know, that was about the time I started to take voice lessons, from this German opera want-to-be in a neighbouring town. Her name was Misses Stolz. For those of you who don’t know Stolz is the German word for proud. She was very proud. And very, you know like typical, big bust and short y’know with crazy hair all piled up and everything who’ll just wack us with a stick, y’know, if we didn’t do something right. And I just couldn’t understand why I had to put up with this. And not only that, I didn’t really know if I had a good voice or not. Because I was going there for enunciation.
04:43
It was kind of a crazy time. At the age of 4 my parents moved to Iowa City in Iowa. Because they had a very, very good medical school there and that was the internship for my father. While he was there he was asked to continue his residency into neuro surgery where in that time it was just a very baby specialty. But my mum got pregnant again with my brother. And he decided he hat to go work. So he went around and interviewed for jobs because they decided to stay in Iowa. My dad was a  great gardener, I mean, my mother and father came from plantation workers in Hawaii and they were were farmers back in Japan who were .. immigrated to Hawaii.
05:46
And … so I assumed that was one thing. The other thing was they didn’t want to go back to Hawaii. Because they wanted to be kind of free of the Hawaiian immigration culture at the time. And then he in his interviews he met up with this man named Jim… James Warrol who was about 10 years older than he was and had a pract… a medical practice. And was looking for a partner and when they met, my dad said, «well, we just felt they we knew each other and that we were brothers». Which was very interesting cause my father was not at all esoteric or, y’know, I mean I… we, we never talked about emotions with him. But for him to say this, must have been … the experience must have been very profound.
06:46

06:46
So we ended up in this very small town in the south-east corner of Iowa. That’s where I went to school all my years of … in the United States Grade School, so from 5-18. And basically I saw my life as being really terrible. My Brother was born almost 5 years after I was, so I was almost 5. I had been an only child, very pampered and very dotted on for 5 years and then, all of a sudden, the son comes. In Japanese families, sons are very important. And he was also a premature baby. So he got lots of attention. And I felt totally not cared for at all.  And then a couple of years later my sister came, so very close together. Actually, they’re.. I think they are an year and a half apart.
07:54
So, it was kind of .. one thing over another thing. And then in school – because this was right after the war – people were not happy with having a Japanese child in school. And the teachers were extremely weird. Mostly, the prejudice and they kind of hateful experience I had in school were from teachers. They would… the kids would tease me about being Japanese and I would, of course, fight for my self. And … I was the one that got her mouth washed out with soap. Or, y’know, got to stand in a corner. Or.. and the other kids never had any kind of retribution from the teachers.
08:49
It was only when I was 64, if you can imagine, and found out that I had a metastasis from my breast cancer.And so that my girl friends from this time, I’ve met them when I was 4 when I moved to Keosauqua, three of them came and we talked about my relationship with my mother which was very fraught and my family life back in those days and who they saw I was during that time. And it was a revelation, really, I mean, this was really true reconciliation. 0934 OK, I’m gonna take a little brake here..0937
09:42

00:00
So one of my friends who is very, very small in stature, she is about 4-10 or 4-11 even now and probably weighs under 100 pounds. So you can imagine as a little girl of like 7 years old she was very small. And she said, «you know, I saw these things happening. And I would go home and talk to my mother and say, y’know, what can I do because the teachers are just so mean to her.“ And her mother said, «just come home and talk to me about it and I will go to do something but you can’t do anything because if you do something then you end up creating a schism in the class where it’s like kids for and kids against”. So she was a pretty wise woman.
00:57
When we spoke about this it was very emotional for me because at the time up to the time of being 64 I always thought I was just this lone person and I felt really alone. I couldn’t talk to my parents about this at all because the rule of the family was «to mind your family duty and never lower your fathers head». So whatever happened in school I had to take. I never went to my parents. I don’t know if they actually ever knew, tell you the truth.
01:38
And, when I was in high school I happened to belong to a class that for this little town was the largest class in its history. Till up to then in 1966 our graduating class was one hundred …(laughs)… And, since then there’s never been a class  that large since then. Out of that class there were like 20 people who became … in the United states we take this very special test for college entrance and there were about 20 people who scored so high in the test that they got offered scholarships from … everywhere, I mean it was an amazing class. So I was a pretty lazy student. I didn’t do that well, I mean I did well enough for my parents not to get too upset. But I was not a straight A student. So I had this reputation of being lazy. And I couldn’t get over it, I mean, now I have a kind of inkling about what my rebellion was, at the time y’know about studying and so on. But I couldn’t get it then.
03:06

03:06
When I was 16, the summer when I was going to turn 16, I was in a car accident with a friend of mine who.. whose birthday was earlier in the year, so she was already 16 and she had her licence. And we drove in a place where we weren’t supposed to drive because it was all gravel roads. (Cough) In this accident she got killed instantly, and I was in the middle seat and I was .. I had a concussion and a number of other small injuries. And I was in the hospital for I think a month. And then her brother, who was on the outside of the front seat, had a broken leg. He was quite young at the time. He was like maybe nine or something.
04:01
So, I had this relationship with Mary, my friend, who had died, all through High School and all through College. And she would come to me in the da… in the night when I was worried about tests. And she would say, «Phyllis if you had read the book you wouldn’t be in this state .. (laughs)
04:24  then when I got into Reiki and kind of esoteric situations and stuff I realized how amazing those conversations were with Mary during that time of my life. Pretty interesting.
04:42 But that accident changed my life because my grandmother became much more protective of me. My parents became very protective of me. And even though I had been somewhat protected before now it was really a lot. So, I wasn’t allowed to go out on dates and I was wearing these shoes that I had, I still have some congenital malformation of my hips or something. So I had to wear these special built-up shoes. They were really ugly, I just hated them.
05:24
And, I mean, I just felt like a very put upon child, I mean, y’know, I was not pretty, I certainly didn’t match the standards of beauty that all the other girls of my class did, blond, you know, straight legs, so on and so on. It’s like.. it was very strange. And then I went through College. My College career was pretty fraught, for the first two years. And then I had to take a year off. And I came back and I found out that if I actually went to class and read the books, that I could actually get very good grades, it was pretty amazing. So I had to thank Mary for that.
06:12

06:12
My father was a doctor. So, whenever we got sick., which was not often, I have to say, we… he came, he would look at us, kind of poke at us with his finger and say, “you’ll live, go to school!” I mean, I never missed a day of school. I was late a lot in school but I never missed a day in school. So when I graduated at the age of 18, from this school, the principle had to give me this certificate that said that I had never missed a day school in twelve years. He said, «but I don’t know why I’m giving you this certificate because you were late probably half of those days. (laughs) And I said, «well, that’s really lucky for me.» (laughs)
7:12
I felt not very well cared for by my father but my family was definitely raised in a way, where, you know, you got sick, you went to the doctor, he gave you a pill or a shot and you got better. I mean, that was our idea of healing. Which wasn’t really healing. It’s kind of curing. So that’s how I went out into the world with this idea that I was not, I was not worthy to be a friend of anybody, I saw myself as very ugly, as having very little to offer people. And that I had friends was kind of a miracle. I didn’t really understand why I had friends. And that they just happened to me and that when they happened my parents would take care of.. would be there and they would take care of whatever was going on. And because of this hip thing that I had, which I can’t really explain, because nobody ever explained it to me, 0837 when I was 24 or so, no 25 I foun.. I was taken up to the mountains by some friends of mine.*
08:51

00:00
ähm.. OK. 0006 When I was 25 or so I was taken up to the mountains of Colorado by some friends of mine who wanted to go skiing but it was a very bad snow year. So, we all decided to go cross country skiing. And I could do that, no problem. So I was really happy to go and so on. So we went up and we went to the condo and it started snowing and it snowed all night and the next morning all of my friends said «see you later, we’re going to go down-hill».  So, I went, well, crap, what am I doing here? So I had maybe 50 Dollars in my bank account and I decided that I was going to learn how to down-hill ski since I was stuck there by myself.
00:52
So I took lessons, private lessons because I didn’t want to be in a class full of little kids. And the instructor said, «I don’t wanna teach you today. It’s the worst time to learn how to ski because there is so much powder on the beginners slope that you’ll just always fall down.» I said, «listen, this is my only day, this is my last 50 Dollars, I’m going to learn how to ski!» And somehow, even though it was pretty upsetting sometimes, just falling and getting up and just falling and getting up, it kind of captured me. And luckily for me they had friends in other ski areas that could get us free tickets. So I started downhill skiing and it freed me, it freed my body so that I could actually move effortlessly and that freed my spirit somehow. It was really an amazing transformation. Very touching.
02:01
And I ran into this guy, Hall O’Leary, who had been presented with a challenge. He was a ski instructor at this place where I was going and… There is a huge children’s hospital in Denver and they were going to bring up like 30 kids to learn how to ski who were, this is not politically correct, who were mentally retarded (mumbles ‚kind of time‘?). And they asked this group of ski instructors, «who would like to take this on?» and nobody raised their hand. And Hal thought, «this is an opportunity to do something really different. I’d like to do this».  So, he started it and out of that started the, well, at first it was called «the handicapped ski program», now it is called «the disabled ski program». It’s the largest of its kind in the world and he went around the world during the time that .. in the 1980ies and 1990ies. And started a lot of the disabled ski programs all over the world. He is amazing and from the engineers who were parents of the kids and stuff, they invented all… a lot of the ski equipment, the special ski equipment for these kids and for the adults.
03:34

03:34
So that was at the time the Vietnam Vets were really having a hard time. And there were a lot of amputations and so on. So they found out how they could ski and (cough), I mean he just took off. So somehow he had a really amazing gift for this. I mean, he was very irreverent. So, he would just say “come on, you gimp, let’s go skiing!” And they would go skiing and he treated them not special! But just like everybody else. He would just say, “ are you gonna be a gimp all your life or are you gonna be a skier?” Right, and it was just this amazing place where he had the way with people to just be there for them.
04:31
So, he told me, «you’re perceptually handicapped.» And I said, «well, what does that mean?» Here I am 28 or something and he goes, «well, you know, unfortunately because you’re perceptually handicapped, even if I told you what it was you wouldn’t get it.» And I went, “well, thanks Hal, good friend!” y’know.  ‚Cause he and I became very, very close. So, after I left skiing at Winner Park, for Reiki, about… I, I brought back people after a couple o‘ years I started to bring pepple to Winner Park to participate in the handicapped ski program, the same old ski program, and to practice Reiki there. I wanted them – my Master candidates especially – to have this experience of learning how to ski and being on a mountain where they saw blind skiers and amputated… amputees skiing and little kids skiing. And, so they couldn’t say: I can’t do it.
05:40

00:00
As I was enjoying my skiing and my wonderful life as a ski bum, I turned 30 and … when I was having my birthday party I realized that I needed to find something to do with my life, a  vocation. And I went through all the jobs that I could think of and nothing actually fit. Little did I know that my mother calling me later on that fall and asking me to travel with my grandmother next summer, the summer of 1979, did I know that that would be the answer to my question, you know, about my own vocation and what I would do with the rest of my life.
01:04
And after I was starting practicing Reiki I would bring students back to Winner Park to the ski hill and experience what it was like to ski, or learn how to ski, with all these people who were not «able bodied» we said at the time. And the other intriguing question that happened for me was this question of when we gave them Reiki, what were we expecting? What was healing? That was the big question back in those days because it was like 1985, 86, 87 and I had had, you know, 6 or 7 years to think about what is healing.
01:54-01:57 (coughing)

01:57
But because I was raised the way I was with my father as a doctor I just thought this was kind of strange why would we give these people Reiki? We’re not going to give them back sight, we’re are not going to grow another arm or a leg, we are nto going to make them smarter, I mean, y’know, not to be irreverent… So how are we going to change their lifes and what was the purpose of giving them Reiki anyway? Finally, after having had some very intense conversations with some of these people who were my age, I realized that healing was all encompassing, it wasn’t something that was what I might call now ‘curing’. It wasn’t in a like… what I realize in my idea of a whole person was that a whole person would have their sight, would have 2 arms, 2 legs, 0307-0311 (coughing) would have all their faculties and it was obviously not true.
03:18
So I had a lot of confusion in these days  and it took me another few years to really understand the concept of healing and also of wounds. It’s like … I realized that in treating people with amputations it’s really obvious where their wound is, but where you have a person who has an emotional wound, that’s not so obvious. And that everyone is amputated somewhere and that we just …  put all of our pity, and all of our superiority sometimes into taking care of physically disabled people when in fact we are also disabled, it’s just not physical. So these are some of the insights that I had during this period of time.
04:17

0:00
So as well during this time is when I was just finding my legs as a master, so to speak, and working out my own personal issues, as I said before. And the skiing process really helped me to manage some of these processes in a way that was very humanistic. That I… that I found out then what Hal had meant by being perceptually handicapped. And that was that my perception of myself was so skewed, so distorted that it distorted the rest of the world. And it was a handicap because it was so distorted that it.. it actually didn’t match the real world very much at all.
1:10
As I came into this realization I understood that my practice of Reiki had brought me back into myself and given me the gift of knowing… my strength, my chara.. part of my character, understanding beauty and understanding that we make our own world, really, and my world was pretty tortured and …. really painful. And I have come out the other side, I don’t fell like I’m really much different but my viewpoint on the world is that it’s a friendly place, which is very different than when I started out….
2:13

2:13
As … and during this time, you know, as the Vietnam war ended and we went to the postwar part of finding out where are.. our idealism went to, I went to something, when I first was a Reiki master, called the est Training and it was one of these encounter groups with mass… a mass amount of people. So I think that there were something like 330 people in this room and this one person was the facilitator. And you couldn’t… in theory you couldn’t go to the bathroom during the sections, which now I totally understand because they didn’t keep us there for an abusive amount of time but I realized that going to the bathroom is really an escape that hardly anybody could say no to. But they did and that’s what was confrontive about them.
3:15
But they taught me in this group est Training that our reality is sort of what we make of it and that…. it allowed me to look back on all these basic things that had happened to me in my life and create a story about it, which was really the first glimmer of understanding what’s it’s like to be on a path, rather than to just be in life and sort of “be a victim” of your life
3:58

3:58
So I am a little bit sensitive about the word “victim” and the word… and the other ones that surround this word because…. it feels a lot like an analogy that I tell my students that if you were in a rowboat going down a river and you had oars and you didn’t use them, you’re a victim. It’s your choice to put the oars in the water and have a… and participate in your own life then you have a possibility to make decisions and to have some sense of where you want to go. But you’ll never not get out of the river of life, so you can’t be totally in control but you can be partners with it.
4:55
That’s what I feel like I’ve learned in Reiki through my life. And it’s changed the perception of my life and as I said 2 years ago when I had this metastasis diagnosis and these three women came and we… they like helped me rewrite my childhood so that now what I realize is that I was brought up in this small community, which I hated, that people really cared about me even though I didn’t feel like I cared about them and that everybody watched me because I was the doctor’s daughter, so… I hated that too, but also they cared for me, so I was in danger, somebody would come and take care of me, right? 0550
5:55

0:00
I was the only Japanese kid running around the streets and so I was obviously … you know different, and so therefore on the outside. So a last story about my childhood… so… and reconciliation.
0:22
I went to my 40th highschool reunion, which was kind of scary. And the first night we were sitting at these big banquet tables of about 12 to 15 people at a table. And… you know, I mean, it’s amazing, you know when you go to these reunions it’s like.. 0047-0051 (cough)
0:52
Some people have not changed at all, you can recognize them and they just look at little older and other people you are going “who are you?”, like they totally changed somehow. So I was sitting at the table and somebody came up to me and said “were you in our class?”. And I went “what? I’m Phyllis Furumoto, Japanese”. “Oh, you look so different”. I said “really?”. And somebody else said “well,”.. in the table “well, I never noticed that you are Japanese”.
1:39

1:39
So it was interesting for me, even in that moment, like… it’s almost 10 years now that I’ve been there at this reunion, that as kids, some of the kids didn’t notice that I was Japanese and didn’t notice the difference. And yet from my point of view I was always different, always on the outside. So all of these different things, I say “well Reiki has given me the possibility to rewrite my life, to have it be more accurate, to have it make more sense and to understand the degree of distortion that I lived in for a long time.”
2:26
So at this point I feel pretty congruent. It’s a work in progress but the …. Experiences that I had in growing up allowed me to become a stronger person and to be able to handle adversity without feeling a victim and that for me has been a really valuable lesson in my life.
3:00

0:00
ähm.. 0007 It took a few years for me to understand that my mother had been with my grandmother during the time that she met Chujiro Hayashi and began to practice Reiki. And what I understood from her was that she had been initiated in 1st degree with Chujiro Hayashi. And then that was it. She didn’t do 2nd degree. And for most of the time in our relationship from 1980 when I became… understanding about being a Reiki master, she was not happy with the way that Reiki was being taught, that it had been changed through the culture and that we didn’t respect it.
1:08
It was a kind… it was something like.. in polite society you don’t talk about religion, politics and then I had to add Reiki, because her political ideas were very different than mine, so we never talked about politics and we didn’t talk about Reiki because in the end, you know, when I got older and more mature in my Reiki understanding… for her, Reiki was something private, it was not a series of phenomenas, it was… it was something that was practiced without.. being surprised in some by how it worked.
2:09
What she saw in the students of my grandmother and me included, 0216 was that we.. we shared a lot, we shared a lot about… (repositioning herself)
2:32

2:33
We shared a lot about what we were doing with each other and that wasn’t something that she liked, that we were constantly trying to figure out the psychology of what was happening, that we were always astonished that it worked… things like this. So for her this was kind of sacroligious, anti-Reiki so to speak.
3:04
As she grew older, she grew very possessive of her mother because… I feel that she understood my grandmother’s passion for Reiki and that is was sort of her destiny to be this person in Reiki and at the same time, I don’t know if my gandmother would have been a different kind of mother, but as a mother she was… well, they didn’t have an easy relationship. So it was an interesting process to see them, those two and then me, because the three of us felt like if I backed up as an observer, felt like we were the three women in the household sometimes and everybody else faded into the background. And that was interesting and a lot of it had to do with……I feel that a lot of it had to do with my mother’s perception how Reiki should be practiced.
4:30

4:30
So in the end when I had cancer and I started… and I was living in the same town as her, I was receiving hands-on-Reiki like from 7 to 5 times a week, almost every day, not from my mother but from friends of mine and people would come in and stay for a couple of weeks and treat me and so on. So, she would never let me treat her but she offered to treat me a couple of times and that was very special…
5:11
She said that she wanted to be a mother and that she didn’t want to take Reiki on as a career, so to speak. And I used to think that this was a kind of sacrifice, but I realized it was a choice of hers and that she made that consciously and I appreciated that.
5:39
Now that she had passed, I feel much freer in what I can do in the public and what is… what I can open up to the public because I feel that I have… I have taken on some of her understanding of what’s private with my grandmother, the line between grandmother as a private grandmother and Hawayo Takata as the Reiki master.
6:15
One of the things that has been exciting for me in … now I go back to the archives and what I’ve said about going through my grandmother’s things, my mother actually gave me in 1980…something when my grandmother … after my grandmother died… that they will be, I hope, will be housed in the Japanese-American-National Museum in Los Angeles because it… she will be held as a whole person, not just a Reiki person, but as a Japanese-American woman who did this amazing thing and dedicated her life and has touched the lives of people all over the world. So for me that’s an amazing story.
7:07

00:00
Yes, it was my understanding that my mother really pushed my grandmother to see me. You know, she would… my grandmother and she  would talk about Reiki and about the different people who had come to Keosauqua to visit my grandmother because at that point she had moved closer to my mother. Because she was supposed to be retired but I can’t imagine being retired from Reiki and that was true for grandmother. So my mother, even when I was there she would just say, “It’s Phyllis look at Phyllis, she is your perfect person!”And I would go: «No! I’m not your perfect person.» But in the end it seemed as though my mother saw something in me and in my connection, future connection with Reiki that I din’t see, for sure. And neither did my grandmother.
01.12

0000
Ähm… I think she objected to some of the ways Hawayo Takata had been …(pauses)  start again.
00:23
I feel that she had reservations about the way that people treated my grandmother, Hawayo Takata, as their master. A couple of  people in California used to buy her clothes, and sort of dress her up. And she wore a wig for a while because they wanted her to. So she kind of became this like dress-up doll that … it wasn’t really her and eventually all of us including my siblings and my mother convinced her not to wear a wig because it looked so weird. And, she had beautiful white hair and to just wear her hair, her natural hair.
01:23
So in the last 2 or 3 years that’s what she did. But there was this place where people put her on a pedestal and treated her in a way that was not very … actually not very respectful. Because they were using her for their own means. And my mother was very sensitive to that. I don’t know if she had issues with the way that Hawayo Takata was teaching Reiki, I don’t think so. But more how her students treated her and what they wanted out of her. You know as a Master. Because there were other masters that Hawayo Takata had initiated who were good students. You know, they didn’t do that and they would call every month and give my grandmother a report about their practice and about their classes and talk to her about their Reiki and so on. And those were the people that my mother really approved of.
02:37

00:00
Hawayo Takata’s importance in the practice of Reiki covers, I think, different … different facets. One is that she took this practice and became a practitioner. And she treated thousands of people with all kinds of ailments and all ages and some for one treatment and some for treatments over years. So what she did was she really proved the aspect of healing of Reiki. And that it was combined also with obvious 0053 sort of ähm  … what would she call it? … 0058 common sense, practices of diets, not smoking for instance.
01:06 (räusper)
So, sometimes she would tell her clients, or her patients, «you can come for Reiki but you have to quite smoking.» Like this. Or, «you wanna lose weight, I put you on a diet and you come and get Reiki.» You know. So, she took this practice and from her two hands really gave the practice of Reiki this depth and understanding that it can be used for anything. She totally trusted whatever happened in the treatment. She would say, “not sick – reaction!”  Ohhkay! (laughs)
01:55-02:03 (cough)

02:03
The other thing that she did for Reiki was she literally brought Reiki from Ja.. Japan and from the Japanese Culture into the Hawaiian islands at a time when Japan was going to go through a major demolition of their culture and of their values and also just of their country.
02:33-0235 (cough)
So, I don’t know if the researchers have discovered how many of the Masters, for instance, had died during World War 2? What had happened to the clinic? But Reiki was definitely pushed underground in Japan and for Hawayo Takata it was a flowering time. It was a time to build up her practice and to become well known.
03:03 (Pause) 03:09
And then what she did in the years that followed the war was trans… translate Reiki as a practice from one culture to another culture to from the Japanese culture, which was quite specific, to a world-wide culture. And that she did this … well, I don’t know how conscious she was of doing it. But I would’ve .. I would  loved to have asked her some questions about what her process was of doing it. But I also know that the system itself as an ent… as an energetic entity has its own momentum in development. So she was not necessarily doing it out of her own conscious will but following the energy of Reiki and following where it was going and seeing that there were some things had to be either emphasized or brought forth in order for the practice of Reiki to flourish.
04:25
And I find this to be an amazing feat. I’ve just come to this understanding in the last 10 years how… what a magnificent job she did. And I feel that if she hadn’t done it, that it wouldn’t have been so accessible to people.
04:51

0:00
After Hawayo Takata died in December of 1980 the master community was slowly informed about this.. about her death by my mother. And what I mean by slowly is that at first she didn’t call anyone, I don’t know for how many months. And then she was starting to go through my grandmother’s papers and compiled a list of people, because some of the masters who my grandmother had initiated she was not acquainted with and didn’t know. Others she knew from the conversations with my grandmother and because they came to visit my grandmother, in Iowa.
0:59
As the masters began to be informed, many of them called me and recognized me over the phone in the sense that they said “well you’re your grandmothers successor, now what are you going to do?”. And it was a questions that I couldn’t really answer.
1:19
So 1981 passed by very rapidly because of course I stayed with my family through X-mas 1980 and then into 1981 (0133) (cough) ähm
01:42

1:42
And during this time I didn’t really know what to do. And then it was evident at some point that Barbara Weber wanted to be recognized as the successor. And I believe that it was somewhere in the late summer or early fall, but again I don’t really know for sure, of 1981 that I went to visit Barbara Weber and asked her if we could do this together. And she said no.
2:22
There was another big question mark about a couple of master who had been initiated and I was surprised because it seemed like the had been initiated before my grandmother’s death which I was a little bit shocked about. But nobody would give me a straight answer. So I flew into Chicago to visit the Chicago masters and talked to them and I believe that I met everyone that year except for a woman named Iris Ishikuro, who was from San José and I never did get to visit her.
3:07
Eventually I realized that the masters had not been able to mourn their teacher of pay some kind of ceremony, you know do a ceremony about her, so I organized this meeting in Habi Hawaii in 1982 and I believe then it was in the spring, sometime like May or June. And this was the first time that a group of masters had come together and we stayed for a week together there. (0347) …(cough) (drinks)
4:01

4:01
some of the masters brought their spouses, some of them brought their adult children and we had a couple of little children I believe there too. And we had such a lovely time together that we decided to meet again the next year at Barbara Brown’s house.

04:28 ..(cough)….

I really do feel better (laughter, Andi in the background.) OK. Well, try my Ricola (RICOLA, René singing) I mean, the best thing Switzerland ever produced. (laughter, Thassos: except us, of course!) Yes! (René: dont forget we’re really Italians, Thassos) … (René: you know why Toblerone is called Toblerone?) … (actually the company is called Tobler and the first one for export, was Tobler One..) Is that really true? (René: well, the legend says so). OK, so… Try not to have a very strange protrusion of my mouth…. ähm
5:46
In this meeting in Hawaii we spent quite a lot of time talking about the succession and about Barbara Weber and her kind of threats to the rest of us. And we also spoke together about her way of teaching because when we started to exchange treatments, it was evident that we had different hand positions, we started in different places
6:23 (cough)..6:28
and a couple of the masters had, what I would call, special gifts that came up
0635-0640 (cough)..
and so their treatments looked quite different than the rest of us. So we spent some time having a demonstration. Ethel Lombardi, I believe, was a gifted healer herself and when she received Reiki this brought out this gift and the gift was, in her own words, to pull out energy out of the body and so that’s what her Reiki treatments looked like. So she kind of did a little class or something for us all and some people didn’t like it at all, some people could relate to it and some people thought “well that’s interesting but it’s not Reiki”.
7:31

7:31
Everyone there basically acknowledged me as a spiritual lineage, as my grandmother’s successor. And.. I remember the daughter of Virginia Samdahl was there and we had a talk. And she said “Well Barbara Weber is my master and I have great affection for her and great loyalty to her, but you carry something different and I can acknowledge you as a spiritual lineage”… well actually that … that wasn’t really coin, so I have to say “I can acknowledge you as your grandmother’s successor but I also acknowledge Barbara Weber as my Reiki master”. So in some way she was the first one that articulated this difference between – what I would call – the initiation lineage and the spiritual lineage, although that wasn’t actually named as such at that point…. Yeah, I think that’s true…
8:44
The next year when we met, there were more masters that had been initiated by me by this time and other masters that had been initiated by some of the other masters of Hawayo Takata and… a few masters initiated by Barbara Weber…. It was there that we didn’t really mean to come together and find a name for this group but it just arose out of kind of an organic process. And I think that that’s true that in… if you have a group of people that meet with a certain aim, then you end up naming yourself. So this group founded the Reiki Alliance.
9:39

9:39
And we talked a lot about the nature of Reiki, about the nature of the practice, about the things we wanted to preserve, about the things that we…excuse me…. that for us were not included in the practice and so on. We had really wonderful sharings and ….these two meetings were very important for me as … I felt…. recognized by people in a way that was very different. So some people who were familiar with being a devotee of a guru, an Indian guru, they wanted to wash my feet and kiss my feet, which I just… was really hard for me. Other people wanted me to get dressed up, have really nice fingernails and so on, which I didn’t ..(laugh).. and other people wanted me somehow to be holy or wise or, I don’t know why but I was just myself. And at that point I was a pretty naïve… ja, pretty naïve person, in a lot of different ways.
11:09
After the Reiki Alliance was formed that year, then the next year…. then the next year we decided to go to California. And I have no idea why I did this, but I end up….ended up renting a couple of big houses up on Donnner’s path in California near Lake Tahoe and that’s where we had the masters’ meeting. And it was out of that meeting that a little book was borne. People wanted to preserve the oral tradition but somehow be able to give their students something for the class. So I totally opposed writing this or putting this book together. So at one point one of the masters, who was very clever actually, came to me and said: “Well, if there was such a book, what would it be like?” I can remember her question to this day. And I said: “Well it would be very small, like pamphlet thing, it could have the story of Reiki in it, the pictures of the lineage and the precepts and maybe something else and it would not be for sale at the open market, it would just sold by the Reiki Alliance as a Reiki Alliance Publication”. So that’s how this little, what we call the “Blue Book” got formed and eventually Paul Mitchell was the one that put it together.
12:57

12:57
This phrase “the spiritual lineage” came in the second meeting at Barbara Brown’s house when we were trying to put together statements of identity for this Reiki Alliance. And I still believe that these statements have great foresight and also a great challenge. I can’t say them right off hand but one of them says something like… “we recognize all masters as equal in the oneness of Reiki” and the Reiki Alliance members today still argue about this phrase. But I believe that all masters of Reiki are equal in the oneness of Reiki. It doesn’t mean we are the same and it’s very important for me…it was very important for me that this thought was a founding stone, a corner stone of the Reiki Alliance because I didn’t want anyone to feel that this Reiki Alliance was a like an exclusive club. But actually my fear became realized and when the new form started to appear in the mid 1980ies or actually in the late 1980ies the Reiki Alliance rally closed it’s door and became very specific to the practice that was passed on from Hawayo Takata to her masters. And that was fine for me but I also wanted them to realize that “they weren’t better than” and this is something that is still in discussion in the Reiki Alliance today.
14:53

0:00
Well, I’m just trying to remember, if I can, if there is another motivation to put that in… it may be that that was a little bit of a defensive statement because Barbara Weber had put out that she was the only true Reiki master that had been initiated and that it was maybe from that standpoint that some of the people voted for that particular statement. I wanted Barbara Weber to join the Reiki Alliance, that was my dream and for all of us to work together. I would say that….
1:09
..that maybe 85% of the masters were initiated by Hawayo Takata was a member of the Reiki Alliance at some point. And at that point, because we all practiced the same system it was really easy to say that, that “all masters are equal in the oneness of Reiki”. And for me it means the same thing as in the US constitution, that all men are created equal. And I.. I feel that that’s true still today and is our challenge not to go into our human ego and decide that we or our lineage or whatever is the best. It’s just so, this is the practice that I have. I cannot say this is the best practice. I can only say that this is what I’ve received from my grandmother and in my way of honouring her I want to be as and practice as close to what she taught me as possible and that’s true for all of the masters that were initiated by her.
2:24

2:24
It’s interesting for me that although sometime we had little differences in hand positions, at the end what we would say is “and that is what we were taught”…(laugh)… So…
that particular phrase joined us together in a way that really nothing else did. It was really like having a common mother, if you want to use that analogy.
3:10
To back away from this a little bit, in my opinion all human beings are on this planet and they all have a path and for some reason Reiki has become an expression or a… an accessible expression for people to enact their path of mastery. Because I believe that everyone who is born on this planet is on a path of mastery at some… of some kind. And it is… it depends on what their path is, what their destiny is if you will, whether that path shows up in parenting or in being a doctor or being a teacher or being a farmer or being … you know, whatever.
4:08

4:08
And that there is this… time frame now where Reiki has appeared and allowed us to develop into masters, like it’s kind of a self-taught masters’ course… in some way, with the help of Reiki, the energy. So… in that sense I don’t see… well, in that sense I believe that if we are truly masters, we’ll be able to understand that particular statement and actually support it, because I believe that it’s true. It’s a piece of wisdom that we came up with that was way beyond actually our mental consciousness at the time. (0501) That’s what I feel….
(René: beyond the individual’s comprehension?)
Yah, but (0508) we all agreed to it so somehow I think we were wise beyond our years, so to speak.
5:15

0:00
Well…again I… this is totally my theory, it’s not based on facts at all, but a theory and my theory is that in the Japanese tradition there are ways for people to recognize successors and one of the ways that Hawayo Takata was recognized as Chujiro Hayashi’s successor is that she was left with his house.. with everything with all his material possessions, with everything. And it was understood of course, that she could have kicked the Hayashis out of their house and taken it for her own. But she didn’t, she wanted to go back to Hawaii. So she of course allowed the Hayashis to stay in their home and to run the clinic and so on.
1:00
When my grandmother died everything went to my mother. And she, I believe, actually whether she was a Reiki master or not, handed the lineage in some way these inheritance piece to me. And…
1:26
And at that time the phrase was the Grand Master, so the master of masters. Now… I don’t know where this phrase came from. There were a group of my… of masters that my grandmother initiated both in California and in the Chicago area, who were older women, who probably had… knowledge of the Masons or some group like that and so for them… instead of using the word Sensei or another word to indicate an honour in Japanese.. (0222) (burping)… excuse me, (0224) they would call her the Grand Master.
2:30

2:30
Now, I’ve thought and talked a lot about this, and someone once wrote as a rebuttal somewhere about the spiritual lineage: “well Mikao Usui never talked about himself as being a member of the lineage”. And I thought: “Well, hello?! Of course not, he didn’t know there was going to be a lineage”. You know…. There’s master and student, but I feel lineage doesn’t come till you have the third person, because then you have a line that is drawn and then the fourth person really becomes a lineage. So a lineage doesn’t start with one person or even two, it has to contain at least 3 people.
3:16
So my grandmother and in some of their innocence or wanting to make her feel important or whatever their motivation was, I believed they used the phrase Grand Master, which is used a lot. It’s also used now to translate some of the martial art terms of the person who is in charge of the Dojo in martial arts and so on, as the Grand Master, but it’s not something that I relate to …sort of in this lineage base.
4:01

4:01
So it was hard for me, this phrase “the Grand Master”. Now I don’t care, people can call me the Grand Master, that’s fine. But then in…2000… no in… 1992 Paul Mitchell and I actually formed a business entity, called “The Office of the Grand Master”
(0429-0431) (cough)
And at that time I was not so interested in the form of the practice. He as a person who was a catholic brother, was used to a lot of ritual and organization of the church, the catholic church. He also had taken many, many years of Aikido, so for him this emphasis on form was really important. And I was not so much into form as I was into essence.
5:09
So our partnership started out that way. Now I feel like we are both very balanced in this form/essence thing. And sometimes I’m much more strict than he is on the form. But that’s ok… The thing of it is, that at that point…. In martial arts, because I had to have something to compare it with, there’s often the founder or the founder’s successor that holds the essence of the practice. But the Dojo master holds the form-practice and teaches. So Paul and I saw us, ourselves, as him being the Dojo master, so to speak, and my being the essence person. So that point, to make it much clearer… I don’t know who came up with the phrase personally, but then I introduced this phrase “lineage bearer” because I knew that I was that. That I was the successor and that in this lineage I was the bearer of this lineage. And that I didn’t feel like was disputable, that’s what I was recognized as.
6:40

6:40
Now, what does Grand Master really mean? Well, you know, I still to this day don’t really know and at the point where Paul and I were sort of giving each other duties, he knew that he would never be the lineage bearer and he still to this day is very clear about that. And so that allowed me to have, what I would call “an accurate title”. The further away I get from Hawayo Takata’s death the more easy I am with this term Grand Master, because I feel whether I like it or not, I’m growing into it.
7:38
During the … master intensives that Paul and I facilitate together we have identified 5 roles of masters. So it helps me in organizing myself when people say “I’m a Reiki teacher” (0758-0802) (cough)… and not go into a judgement that says “no, you are a Reiki master”. So the roles of a master are, that I feel, are identifiable, are: initiator, teacher, student, mentor and tradition keeper. So each of these 5 roles of the master have a different quality and mastery is really about being able to hold all of those and be active in all of those.
8:44

8:44
So you know, we all do … well most masters, although not the ones that don’t teach, are initiators but we know very little about the responsibility of being an initiator. What we are all familiar with is the role of teacher, so we can teach, instruct, you know, and give people advice and so on. So that seems pretty easy. But when you put this with the role of mentor, then it gets a little complicated. So what I realized at some point is that if I’m a Reiki master, then that means I’m a master to every student of Reiki. I am not just a master to those I teach. So this for me as a mentor enlarges that. So any Reiki student can come to me and say: “Well I have a question” or “I’m confused” or “How can I renew my practice” or whatever. And I can answer them and we can either have a very short relationship or for some people I enter into a kind of conscious official.. relationship called mentoring. So teacher and mentoring for me are very close but are very meaningful.
10:14
And then there is, you know, the role of being a student. We are always students of the system and if we don’t remember that then we get caught up in a kind of unnatural hierarchy that often results in ownership of students, so they’re “my” students and you can’t have anything to do with them and you know, they try to protect their students against the influences of the outer world, but in truth, what’s happening is they’re not open to really being students themselves. So they need to preserve this kind of relationship in which they are always the master.
11:02

11:02
The last one we have identified tradition keeper is a really interesting one. And for me it has a lot to do with oral tradition, that there are some traditions that we have a human beings that is important to be kept, I believe, for the health of humanity. So the piece about oral tradition is really important. What is not exciting for me these days, is that I see so many mothers going back to work, when their child is like one month old. And I agree that it is a shame that a lot of these mothers who do that are economically pushed to do that. But I see that a lot of mothers who are economically pushed and who could stay home for 6 months don’t. And instantly their child is in some kind of day-school with people who may or may not actually care for children.
12:12
And it is this kind of … teaching, where the child gets all these teachings through whoever is around them at that time. They are totally open to the world of stimulus and you know, whatever they’re receiving? So the importance of oral tradition for me (1235-1238) (cough)… goes far beyond the idea of no books. And I believe that this element or this role of a master is really important and will become more and more known.
12:55

12:55
In the same light, to kind of get back to my topic again, I believe that the Grand Master has it’s own individuation with roles and that one of them is lineage bearer, one of them is the form keeper or something like that but we haven’t gotten to explore that and I think once we do, we will understand more about the essence of what is meant by this phrase. Whether or not that phrase actually communicates in, is totally … I don’t know, we may come up with something really different.
13:35
One of the things that is not understood at all, it seems, by the general public and by the Reiki community, is that a Grand Master is actually recognized. It is not taken. So in the process of my becoming recognized as a Grand Master, I could not say to people “I’m in, vote for me”. It needed to be.. come from the other side, it needed to be recognized. And in that recognition, I believe, that the Reiki community grew me as a Grand Master, that every master of Hawayo Takata did have the seed of lineage bearer or Grand Master in them. It was the recognition of me and my willingness, whether I knew it or not, to take it on and the energy of Reiki that came to me, whether my grandmother wanted that to be or not, that really grew somebody very different than the masters who were initiated by Hawayo Takata.
14:56

14:56
And it doesn’t mean that I am wiser or have a better viewpoint of the system or anything, what it means is that I have a more global view. And one of the things that really separates Paul and I from all the other masters that Hawayo Takata initiated or recognized, was this global view, this idea that we were much more than Reiki masters to our own students, that we were actually growing into this mast… universal mastery path and that in this as a group of Reiki masters we really could have influence on the outcome of humanity. And….
15:46
It was amazing to me that the masters who were initiated by Hawayo Takata did not understand the influence and the impact that they had on the entire Reiki community. You know, they would say stuff like: well, you know… you know the members of the Reiki Alliance, like all their students, I don’t care about them. I was going: “how can you.. how can you not care about them?”… (laugh)… “How can you not care about the system… that we’re practicing?”
16:22-16:27 (cough)
They really took it as a linear kind of progression, where, you know, Hawayo Takata was master and their teacher, they taught exactly as she taught them, in theory, which I truly believe was from their heart. And so it didn’t matter to me and it still doesn’t matter to me that these masters could be members of the Alliance, their form could be really different than most of the Alliance members but they still for me practice the same system, because that blood line, so to speak, the energetic blood line of Hawayo Takata still ran through them.
17:15

00:00
no, ähm … (0007)
As members of the Alliance they came to conferences and so on. We would share treatment. And their treatment their treatments were quite different sometimes. Members of the Alliance would say “well, how did they get in the Alliance because our form…we’re supposed to have a common form?” And I said, «Yes, but for these Masters… these Masters share the bloodline of Hawayo Takata.» And for me as long as they don’t consciously change their practice, then they are practicing this system.
00:51

00:00
My membership of this circle of 22 masters initiated and recognized by Hawayo Takata was very important to me. I felt that this circle held the energy of Reiki and the practice of Usui Shiki Ryoho up until now… And now there are four members of that circle still alive, that we know of. And Wanja has been not teaching for a couple of years. So now its Rick Bockner, Paul Mitchell and myself. We were the youngest when she initiated us all. And … I felt that as the Grandmaster, as the recognized lineage bearer that I was the spokesman for this circle. That in truth I couldn’t do anything to «change» the system or to alter the message without actually going back to the circle and somehow having agreement among us.
01:28-0130 (rülps) Excuse me.
 I think that from their point of view I was doing a lot of things they didn’t like but most of the things they didn’t like I didn’t like either. But it was happening, and so what can I do? y‘ know, like all the change… all the different kinds of forms of practice. There was no way for me to control that. And… I learnt that very early on that, y’know, my job was not about control, because it was impossible to control people. I didn’t have the personality of a police person. So, there was kind of a joke about having Reiki-police
02:13

02:13
But it was important for me to be able to hold the totality of what Hawayo Takata passed on as practice and know that the totality really was about the 22 masters and in all the different ways and variations that we practice.
That the truth of the practice was in the whole, no’… was not in this person’s practice or that person’s practice but in the whole group’s voice of the practice. And right now, y’know, what’s sad for me is that that circle is now not alive. In the sense that most of them have died.
03:00
So, now what we’r… what I’m working on is creating something called, which is not just being created now, I mean, it’s already in existence but the… to create consciousness about something called the “Master-Body”. Which for me is this collective of all Reiki Masters and that whether or not you choose to be an active member of this body you add to the body energetically, just by being a master.
03:33

00:00-00:13 Well, my real answer is, «I don’t know.» But I’ll back that up by saying other things (René: you don’t need to mention her name…) No, no, its fine.
00:20
This is a question that has arose again, interestingly enough, in the last few months, about Wanja Twan, for instance, who… because… I know that she recognizes me as my grand-mother’s successor but she is a very stro.. and she is a very strong master. She has influenced her teaching according to what she remembers Hawayo Takata teaching. But also her own very strong personality which is Scandinavian
00:57
which has again a whole other color. I find the Scandinavians to be really interesting people. Very esoteric and very … esoteric isn’t really quite the right word… Well, I’ll come up with word… but anyway. So, what Wanja has done is that she’s declared her successor as her daughter Anneli. And this has caused some confusion in the Reiki community, for instance, in the UK where Wanja has a very strong following. And as does Anneli now. And the students are getting confused about whether or not they acknowledge me as lineage bearer
01:55-02:00 (cough)
So, some of the masters and students of Wanja do not recognize me as the successor of this practice. They recognize Wanja in some way as their initiating master and as the person who carries the lineage of that practice. They don’t acknowledge a spiritual lineage. And Wanja does. So, even though Wanja is very subtle about her recognition of me, on some level, she doesn’t communicate that to her students. And so this creates a schism or can create a schism within the UK community because people don’t understand o’… the students don’t understand why the spiritual lineage is important.
03:06

03:06
So, it’s an interesting paradox, that Wanja… I feel really recognized by Wanja as my grand-mother’s successor. But I also see how strong her initiation-lineage is. So, for me, I… there are two things that I carry: I carry my initiation-lineage as a Reiki Master and then I carry the spiritual lineage as the successor to my grand-mother, Hawayo Takata. The two lineages for me are the same. But for Paul Mitchell – for instance – they are not the same: his spiritual lineage comes to me and my successor. His initiation lineage goes from Hawayo Takata to him and then to his masters.
03:57
So in Beth Gray… the issue with Beth is that she … I don’t know whether she was initiated by my grandmother, I know that she was recognized by my grandmother as a master, I believe that John Gray initiated her as a master. And I have kept this kind of «secret» for many… well, since 1980. And.. I believe it created confusion in her. Because she wasn’t clear about her own lineage and so she couldn’t be clear about the lineage that she passed on. She was also very careful about the people that she initiated as masters.
04:53
I don’t know how many master she she did initiate, maybe 3. One gal who was in Queen… no, one gal who was in New South Wales has died. She was a young woman, she was like 40 something and she died very suddenly; (0513) I should know her name, because I’ve met her, several times.
05:20 Barbara McGregor  (René interrupts with a name proposal)
05:29

05:29
Barbara McGregor and then there is another woman who was from Sydney area that she initiated. And Barbara McGregor in my viewpoint, sort of took took Beth’s tendency to dramatize and sort of expanded that. So, a lot of her material anyway when I first was in Australia in the early 1990ies then that Beth was the first occidental Reiki Master. Well I don’t even know what that means.  She certainly wasn’t the first “white” Reiki Master, for sure. She definitely wasn’t the first Master, so, I don’t really know what that means.
06:26
And then they sort of put titles on her to make her to make her special. The really sad part for me about that is that Beth Gray was an incredibly special person. She didn’t need a title, y’know, to indicate her specialness. This is the part that really bother me a bit. Because people would ask me, «well, what does that mean and is this true?» and it put me in a place, of either lying or being evasive, which I am not very good at. Or trying to explain this very strange claim that really meant nothing to me.
07:09
Because I didn’t know what they were using “occidental” as. Y’know. So…  The woman in Sydney and her partner came very often to visited Beth. And it was kind of sad for me because her reluctance her reluctance to initiate Masters in Australia, which may have been wise, actually, forced all of her very loyal students out to be initiated by masters they didn’t care about. They were masters who had been initiated for maybe 2 months as a Master and just wanted to, y’known, reproduce themselves or whatever. And they had no relationship with the Master that initiated them. They were really Beth Gray’s students and continued to be Beth Gray’s students
08:07

08:07
and continued that teaching without her blessing as a master. And there is something about that that was really sad for me. So, our… our and I will say “Our” consciously, our understanding of recognition of mastery and lineage was so slim at the time that we were doing all this that I have to say, that we were really lucky we didn’t get into more of a muddle. (0841) And that now it feels like
08:45-08:47 (coughing in the background)
on some level because I don’t know anything about real lineage I can kind of invent what I want to about lineage and its OK but I also feel like it also is very inclusive… for instance … there are masters that I have initiated who don’t practice the system I do, their form is very, very different, so I don’t recognize them as Usui Shiki Ryoho Masters. At the same time there are other Masters who started out definitely not in this form of practice but have come through taking the intensives from Paul and I, but also through their own willingness to just connect with the energy of this practice
09:34
that they become practitioners though they were initiated into another practice of Reiki before which is fine for me. Some of them don’… can’t trace their lineage because they wer… they went to some kind of a music festival and in the middle of the music festival somebody said, «I’m going to initiate you as a Reiki Master.» and they do. And they don’t even know their name. But y’know, somehow they… that initiation was sincere enough that they actually followed the path of mastery and ended on my doorstep. And I said, «Well, Okaay..if you want to do this and are committed and you are sincere, then why not?»
10:18

10:18
So, there is a really large mix of form and essence. And for me there is…  it’s important for us to have a common practice, which is the form, and there is also this important factor to recognize that all Masters are equal in the oneness of Reiki. And that we can change form to suit our incongruity of our own practice
10:58
So, when I’ve read about Japanese Buddhist practice, I think there is like 12 main sects,  S E C T S and you can sit in a Zen temple for 20 years and then all of a sudden decide, «no, I need to go out in the world» and then «oh, I see I need go sit in this other sect for a while and do… and explore Buddhism through that way.»  There doesn’t seem to be any animosity … or (1138)  ähm… what’s the word (1143)  … competition. It just is so. It’s like you follow the path of Buddhism, you can follow the path of Buddhism in these different expressions. That’s how I would like to think about Reiki.
11:58

00:00
It isn’t that it it’s not painful. (0007-0011) (coughing) It can be confusing. And it can be thoughtless. But basically I think we’re moving into an era in which people see that there is a pathway and that my students will.. can go to another form and find what they are looking for there. And then there are other people who can come from another form and find what they are looking for here. And without this movement … what’s really important in nature is crossbreeding. And, y’know, it’s really important not to end up having a monologue.
01:00

01:00
And, y’know, at first with all these different forms I used to think that it was a betrayal of my Grandmother and her teaching, y’know, to stray from this form. (0114) But now what I’m seeing is that we just created (0117) we just created our own (0119) ähm… we created our whole ähm …(shakes head) (0131)  we created our whole field (0134) of different forms of Reiki practice, (0138) so that people could enter however they came to Reiki and that people could find their way through Reiki. So then it becomes even a multi-level path, not just entering into one practice staying there for the rest of their lives. But having the … the ability to follow their impulse to other things.
02:04

0:00
Another application of form and essence is this piece about what… and the answer to the question “what practice is it that I follow”. So there is one, is initiations, that’s essence for me and the other is the form of practice, that’s the form, obviously. And there are many masters that I have initiated, who don’t practice this form but they have the initiations. So… and then as I said before, there are other people who have been initiated into another practice, who adopt this form. So for me both of them are equal. I don’t find that form is more important than essence or the other way around, they create a kind of partnership….
1:07
Those people are very.. in some way in a kind of bloodline, as you said, people who can trace their initiation through from Hawayo Takata or me or from Chujiro Hayashi. Then the… evaluation is on the form, because if the form is in alignment with this practice, then they’re practicing this system. If their form is somewhat out of alignment, but their intention is to practice this system, then they are.. they just have alignment issues.
1:58

1:58
If they are not intending to practice this system but are very close to the actual form of this system, then their intention is that they are not practicing this form – they are practicing another form. But then there are people who don’t practice this form and they are, you know, some percentage outside of the alignment and their initiation is from another form, then it seems that they are really practicing another form. So… I hope that was really clear?.. It seems not clear. Anyway…
2:49
If you want to speak about Barbara McGregor, I actually don’t know what her practice is, so I couldn’t make any kind of judgement. I do know that her…the way she teaches and her attitude toward other masters and so on is not in alignment with this system. She is very much of a woman on her own. And her students are her students… and I have known other Reiki masters who are like that as well. That they won’t teach or mentor anybody else’s students. And I have found that always to be disconcerting but I also accept it..
3:52
RV: when you say: ‘this sytem’, that’s equivalent to Usui Shiki Ryoho?
4:03
Yes, but now to be specific: it’s Usui Shiki Ryoho honouring the lineage of Mikao Usui, Chujiro Hayashi, Hawayo Takata and Phyllis Furumoto. Because without the lineage you can’t differentiate from all the other practices that practice but don’t honour this lineage.
4:27

0:00
One of the confusing things about grandmother’s teaching is that she called what she taught “Reiki” and she called the energy “Reiki”. However, the practice of Reiki was like a shortcut for Usui Shiki Ryoho and maybe Usui Shiki Ryoho Reiki. So… we all called it Reiki until like the beginning of the 1990ies. And then there were so many other Reiki forms of practice emerging that it was very difficult to know who we are talking about, it was very confusing.
0:52
Then in about 1993 or 94 there is this gentleman who was a master from Germany, Shunjan Joop Hilger. And he decided to take care of business because he knew that I wasn’t doing this, which I… appreciated his motivation, I didn’t appreciate what he did, but I appreciated his motivation. And he trademarked in Germany… the words Usui Shiki Ryoho and the Usui System of Natural Healing and the Kanji of Reiki. And so… I challenged him because he was starting to threaten people, that if they didn’t comply with his idea about what the practice was, then they couldn’t use the words.
1:55
So I went into a 2 year trademark…. what’s it called.. challenge I guess or something like that (background voice) … and I challenged him to the right to trademark these. And the attorney that I used in Köln..in Cologne said, when I told him my whole story, said: “well, if you are the recognized lineage bearer, the Grand Master, then they are yours.”
02:29-2:45 So … (talks to herself ….pause )

2:46
So he didn’t… he actually …(0250) Joop actually settled out of court eventually, but it took about 2 years and a lot of money. And.. I..when I went to… so what happened was: I was awarded the right to trademark these things. However, I needed to … they erased his trademarks, they took them away from him. And then it was up to me to establish trademarks again. So immediately we applied for a trademark of these things. But in those years, I think there is about 3 or 4 years in there that Reiki went from not being known at all to actually being publically known. So then it was not possible to trademark because they had become “words in common use”, which are not trademarkable. Interesting
3:53
And that was true for UK and true in the United States. So I ended up without any trademarks, which is actually good. But in the rest of the world, some of the countries that were able to trademark Reiki and so on, still hold these trademarks. (coughing)
4:21

4:21
Once I got into the trademark thing, I found it fascinating, by the way. There was a way that we could have established an industry trademark so that everyone who passed a certain, very minimal criteria for Reiki could use it. And it wouldn’t have cost us very much money, because there would have been a lot of people to maintain this trademark, but…
5:02
Even if I had been able to trademark Reiki and keep it for this practice, I wouldn’t have made much money, because …the money you make in trademarks depends on how much people can actually pay for the trademark…(laugh)… and you know this is not much. So people though I was gonna become a billionaire or something having trademarked Reiki and I kept saying to people: “You know, Reiki is not Coca Cola”.. I mean…
5:36
So that was really interesting, but what happened is that some of the other Reiki forms of practice did go and trademark their own name, which was wonderful because that started then to separate out of Reiki as a big heading or the Usui System of Natural healing, it kind of took away some of the entities that were using Reiki. I ended up doing.. it’s going back to the original Japanese phrase which was Usui Shiki Ryoho… and then some other people started to use that also and then I just added the lineage so that it could be… the practice could be identified.
6:30

0:00
I think for the most part, and this is my judgement, that people who were angry with me about Trademark had no idea what was happening and they still don’t understand it and they still hold onto ideas about trademarking that are actually not accurate and they didn’t trust me. So there are these kind of different aspects of it. So I was not…
0:39
Joop was the one who wanted to control how people practice Reiki, that was why some German masters said: “You know, I want you to do something about this”. So I was the only one who could have taken the trademark away from Joop because they were actually, essentially mine. And he… he applied for them not in my name, but in his name. And he wasn’t willing to just give them to me because obviously I wasn’t doing my job as the Grand Master, so why would I all of a sudden do it? Right? That made sense, I mean I totally understood him. And I didn’t want to control people, this was my thing.
1:23
But what I learned about trademarks is this: That in the business world you get to choose your own name and this name is what people know you by and your reputation and your, now we call it: branding. And all of that becomes a part of this name, there is an energe…. they recognize that a name can engender this energetic field and can actually inform people what they’re actually getting into. So….
2:01

2:01
You know one of the things that’s been interesting is names that were made up like Xerox. What an interesting thing a word that was made up for a copy machine and a whole line of business products, business machine products. And now if we want to make a copy of something printed, we say: “could you go Xerox this for me?” and it may be not a Xerox-machine but a machine made by Sony or some other company, right? (0234) So we don’t use… can you go, ya, so…
2:42
So the thing of it is, is that Reiki was becoming so well known and there was some question mark about what this word really meant. So it was a way for the Reiki community to come together to actually define what Reiki was and to allow those, that what I would call, “sincere” who really had Reiki to come together and to create what I called earlier an industry trademark. And the examples for this are in the US, and I believe this is true in Germany especially, is that when you get something that’s wool, by pure wool, there’s a little trademark that you find that looks like a skein of yarn, it’s like threads going this way and this way and this way and that’s an international industrial trademark. So everything that is really true wool can use this trademark.
3:51
And that’s what could have happened with Reiki. So there would have been simple criteria that people would have, you know, met like you were initiated by a person in person as a student, for instance that could be one of the criteria. So then, everybody, you know, all these people who would have liked to have used the trademark could have, you know, given some money to support the trademark. Because in order to use a trademark you have to (0435) have  somebody every month ohh, (0437) have somebody every month go through the trademark magazines to make sure that nobody is registering trademark that is close to yours (0446). ..(cough) and so on … (0451)

4:52
And that could have really cleaned up the… what I would call the “fringe” element of Reiki where people are really combining Reiki with different things and calling it Reiki but there … it’s not really Reiki and most Reiki people would agree with that. they would have had to use another word, which would have been fine.
5:23
So.. that was one instance where I felt really misused by the German Reiki Master community because they were the ones that came to me, a lot of them, and said: “Joop is sending us threatening letters, could you do something about this?”. So then when I asked them to support what I was doing, they couldn’t do it, they wouldn’t send me money or anything. So I did it anyway. Cost me about 60’000 Dollars.
5:56
And you know, it was for their benefit, it wasn’t mine. I wasn’t practicing in Europe and in fact I wouldn’t have cared. Should Joop have taken me to court it wouldn’t have stood up, he could have sued me for use of the trademark. But actually, since I was the original owner of the trademark, it would have been really a crazy situation.
6:24
I don’t know what would have happened if I had just let it go. I mean, I think that he might have tried to take somebody to court or shut them down as a Reiki Master and I don’t really think he could have. I mean that could have maybe been nasty but I don’t think he would have been able to do it because he had no authority, recognized authority in the community at that point. And at that point, I was still recognised by most people as the Grand Master. So it was a very interesting juxtaposition in the mid 1990ies. Now that is not so true because the proliferation of different kinds of Reiki and how many Reiki students they’re just in numbers in the world.
7:13

0:00
The Reiki alliance to become the organisation of licenced Reiki Masters, so Reiki Masters that were really clearly Usui Shiki Ryoho. It would have left the other practices open for anybody else, they could have applied for their own trademark, their own name and then everybody would be clear about who’s doing what.
0:36
And I wouldn’t have asked for money, I mean, they actually to apply for a trademark is not, if nobody is contesting it, is not that expensive. And if you want to maintain a trademark in that way, its not so expensive. The industrial trademark much different because you have to really adhere to a criteria. Because, if you ever bought a garment that was supposed to be pure wool and it had this little wool emblem on it, and it ended up to be rayon then you would be really disappointed and that trademark wouldn’t have any designated identifying power anymore and the same would have happend with Reiki.
1:26
So it’s very interesting, so people just assume that if you have a trademark you’re gonna earn money, which is really crazy. Mostly, as one of my business… my master who was in business and he sold medical equipment, like these new innovative medical equipment things to hospitals and medical centers and stuff, he said trademark are terrible, he said you don’t want to get involved with them, they cost lots of money and they are just a headache
2:01

0:00
The one thing additionally that I want to say is that technology was not my friend .. (laugh)… One of the things that I feel like really was…. very disturbing for people is that because this was such a controversial issue, there was nobody that I could turn to, to communicate this stuff out and the Internet was not there yet. People didn’t have E-mails, I mean, I didn’t… I don’t think I used E-mails at the time. And Jürgen, my friend, Jürgen and another friend of mine kept saying: “Phyllis, you have to get a Computer, you’ll love Email and pretty soon you won’t be able to live without it”. And I went: “I am not getting into this!”.
1:02
So, if we had been technologically now, you know, if we had been in mid 1990ies where we are now in technology, I would have been able to have.. keep everybody informed and actually educate the Reiki community about trademark. And we could have done something then, that would have been really neat and very beneficial for everyone. But it cost me (0131) (burp and background noise) that 60’000 Dollars was also my education because I sat for hours in trademark attorney’s office and they had to explain to me like the very basics of trademark  and how they worked and how I was paying money for and so on. And…. it was a good education for me and if I ever have to get into trademark again, I actually can figure it out.
2:03

2:03
There are a couple of other interesting points: nr. 1 I wanted to create another name for the Reiki that I do like … .. well like Barbara Weber came up with «Radiance Technique», she trademarked it, it was totally clearly hers, nobody fought her for it and it was really clean. You know, and that’s what everybody could have done in that moment, is to just have been clean. But it wasn’t, we weren’t there, we weren’t mature enough at that time and I am including myself and I couldn’t think of another name, so I went back to Usui Shiki Ryoho, which was not trademarkable because it was in common use and also… because it contained a man’s name and the man was not alive to ok it.
3:05
So then, after I couldn’t think of another name and couldn’t trademark Usui Shiki Ryoho then I thought, well this is Reiki just telling me: “ok, you stood up to somebody who wanted to sort of… exercise control over a certain group of masters and it was good that you said «no”. And I appreciate the Reiki Alliance for supporting me in handling the costs of this particular law suit.
3:49
And I feel like it was a good thing for us to do, for the whole Reiki community, because now…. in the… now people can not trademark Reiki and so it’s still… it’s the same, we still have freedom of use and… no one has to be the Reiki police. (laugh) .. So we get back to that again.
4:21

00:00
Well, it’s very hard to generalize why people are angry and specially around this. And as I said a lot of it has to do with peoples‘ misunderstanding about the use of trademarks and what the bring you. The other thing is that, you know, when we adapt a practice like Reiki that touches us in this kind of essence place of our humanness, then we want to protect it, to control it in the sense of, you know, making sure it’s not harmed, to be sure that other people don’t harm it themselves. We don’t want it taken away from us. We don’t like betrayal. And so … depending on your own attitude about what those controls must be
01:02
or how want’em protected or how … I should have done my job to protect it then of course there … I can understand why there would be a lot of anam… anger and animosity because I just didn’t do my job. I mean, that was Joop’s .. as far as I received from his communication at the time, his bottom line, was that I wasn’t doing my job so that he had to do it for me. And now that he was doing my job I ended up appearing taking it away from him. And.. you know, I can see that. However, people assume that there was a way to control the proliferation of the different of the different forms of practice. And I believe there was absolutely no way to control that.
02:02
I mean, this started happening from the moment Hawayo Takata died or before. And I liken it to our human need to make things our own. So as a kin.. as an example which seems kind of flip
02:24-02:30 (coughing)
it seems kind of flip but actually, I think we all can relate to it, as we go into a hotel room that is made to be neutral and immediately we open our bag, we take out our stuff. I used to have a whole hotel room thing. I’d always have a pareo or a beach shawl, Sarong kind of thing, I put it over the TV. And then I’d have the pictures of the masters, I’d put them up. Have a little candle, put my stuff in the bathroom, scatter it around, take the towels down and fold them the way I want it. You know, I’d undo the bed because I hate having the bed tucked in at the bottom.
03:16

03:16
You know, those kind of things, bit I’m making the room mine. And it’s the same thing for the people that I know who created different forms of practice. Now, whether or not that motivation was because they were naive and they thought, «that this was OK because after all Reiki is Universal Life Energy. So anything that I do to Reiki and to the form of practice is fine because its universal.» That’s one part. The other idea was that, «well, I don’t like this part of the practice and I don’t see any necessity for it, so I’m just going to leave it out. Because, why should i… why should it make a difference?»
04:08
But in my, in my own defense, if I may say so, or in my own theory, Hawayo Takata gave us a recipe and it produced a kind of kind that I really like. If I still want to have this kind of cake, I am not changing the recipe. And my … and this is where the analogy actually ends. I want this cake to become even better. So, the more I practice the recipe, the more of my energy goes into that cake and then it becomes my cake, not the recipe’s cake. So this is my, my feeling. But for a lot of people, you know, they didn’t like the thought that people had to pay money for Reiki,
05:08
so they dropped money. Or they said, «you can pay by donation.» That was one of the first things that changed. People didn’t want to have a guru, they didn’t like the spiritual lineage they couldn’t relate to it, so they dropped that. Some people didn’t like the precepts. They dropped that. Some people didn’t like the formal hand positions, so they dropped that. Some people didn’t like touching the body, it was too invasive. So then they had Reiki working over the body. So, there are just all these different things that ended up getting taken away or added. «ohh, gosh I had such a wonderful experience of this kind of, you know, crystal practice. I’m going to put this into my Reiki practice.» So that gets added.
05:57

05:57
Or they have a dream about another symbol, so they add that symbol to the practice. So, you know, I just see that it’s all these people making Reiki their own. I can.. I don’t even now I want to control them, because they’re not actually threatening my practice. I’m the only one who can threaten my practice. Because I’m the only one who can change it. I… no one else can force me to change my practice. So, a lot of people don’t get this! They feel that if they’re surrounded by people who don’t eat rice and they do, that eventually they’re gonna have to succumb to not eating rice. But that’s totally your own choice.
06:53
And this is the part about mastery that is really important to understand. There is only one person who can change or corrode your practice, and that’s you. And … and I feel that it’s really easy to blame somebody else for your own frustration. But this is how … and this is how I worked this whole thing out, is that, I just thought, well, I can’t be angry at these people because I see that they’re just doing something very human. And so, I let it go after a while. That’s my only surmising. Actually.
07:42

00:00
Well, I’m a little distracted by another question. (René… tell us first what the question is) (laughs and pauses
00:26
I’m.. I believe .. and this pertains to both, so I’ll see I can wrap both o’them into it. (0033) I feel that the calling to be a Reiki Master is an individual’s calling to mastery and that they’re choosing Reiki to be the form though which they gain mastery. I don’t feel it’s appropriate to set criteria for the certification of masters. I don’t know how you would do that and I don’t know how you could be fair, in the sense of, there were masters that I initiated especially in the early days that I might have known for three months and I initiated them as a Master because in those days I didn’t know better and the really amazing thing is that a lot of those Masters still are practicing as Masters. And have.. ya, have proven to be very sincere students.
01:41
But if their criteria is that they have to have been trained by…  for a year, for instance, as a Master, then they wouldn’t qualify and I think that’s kind of strange. On the other hand there are Masters who took the first, second degree and Master’s training all at the same weekend. But after ten years, they’ve worked their way through the whole process so that now, as Reiki Masters, they’re actually quite stable in what they’re doing. But that depends on the individuals. So it’s very hard to set criteria in this and I would be interested, not in having a part in the decision, but being… but seeing what’s happening before a decision is made.
02:41

02:41
And, this may or may not happen. So, in light of that … I’ve gone through many stages of … preparing masters, that’s what I call it, actually, and now what happens if someone comes to me, they ask me if they could be prepared for Mastery by me. And I’d say Yes. And I’d say, well, you know, Reiki actually prepares you. You can… we can have a conversation. And basically it’s you living your life as though you were a master. And at some point in that time, Mastery will fill your body. Will change you, will… you will embody this energetic we call Mastery. And that will be the time that I will initiate you, recognizing this fulfillment.
03:48
And then your job really begins. Because then you start having experiences as a Master and you grow from that. So this is a part of your studentship. I definitely have a list of things to do and I use the four aspects and nine elements for people to kind of write their own program of preparation. The average time between somebody coming to me and declaring themselves a Master candidate and the initiation is from 5 to 10 years now. And…
04:41
it was interesting when I realized that I had breast cancer, I was going to chemotherapy and so on, some of the Master candidates just lost it. I mean, they were so concerned that I was going to die before initiating them. And tha… those were interesting conversations! And they said, «can’t you speed this process up?» and I said, «no», I said, «you know, if your path as a Master is to be prepared by me and I die before I initiate you, then that’s a part of your path. And I’m not changing this program for you or for anybody.» That was interesting… those were interesting conversations, yah.
05:38

0:00
Well, in 1982 when the masters, mostly the masters of Hawayo Takata met, in Hawaii, it was decided that I was the only one who would initiate masters. And I don’t know really where this decision came from, but it was a wise decision on the parts of other masters. Not because I was the best person to do it but because in tradition the Grand Master is the person to perpetuate the system. So they would be the only person to initiate masters. At the same time it meant that… the masters who came out of this system would get the same “training” or preparation and they would have something in common and hopefully that training would be… thorough and the best, you know, that somebody could offer….
1:24
Then.. and I felt honoured by this because I felt that all the masters knew that they could initiate a master and they were.. some of them were told before you die it’s important for you to initiate at least one master because then Reiki won’t die. And so…
1:53
I don’t think any of us realized what an amazing journey this would take us on. At one point I had certificates printed shortly after Hawaii and I got 1st degree, 2nd degree and I got master certificates done and I wanted to print 50 and the guy said “I’m not printing 50”, because it was the old kind of printing, where it was really a printing press. And he said: “forget it, you know, I’m gonna print you 2 or 300 and if you don’t use them, that’s fine but I can’t print 50”. And I thought “well, I’ll never use them”, of course I did….but not in the short time to 1988.
2:45

2:45
So… in 1986 or so other masters started to talk to me about initiating masters..(0254-0256) (cough).. Barbara Weber of course was already initiating masters, a master by the name of Barbara McCollough was already initiating masters.. I don’t know about Virginia Samdahl and Ethel Lombardi but by that time Ethel Lombardi had broken off from Reiki and started her own… workshops called… MarilEl, called MariEl. And so she did… she did that to honour her master, so it wouldn’t be called Reiki.
3:41
And what I received from their sort of …abdicating their own power and energy to initiate masters to me, is that I felt supported and I felt that that support went through the system. And it was probably the best thing that could have happened to the system for those 6 years.
4:06