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Video 1 Question 1, Day 1, Berlin, 0000-0316
Topic: Insights gained at World Congress of the IAHR in Erfurt in September 2015
I think the biggest and most profound revelation that I’ve had sofar in my time in Erfurt and listening to all these scholars talk about very detailed and sometimes very esoteric aspects of religion and of spirituality is that as my grandmother said, Reiki is not a religion and I’ve been confused about that in myself a lot and I realized that part of that confusion is that I was confused about what is spirituality and what is religion and weren’t they the same. So it turns out that historically after the war or after World War II, during the age of what they call «modernization» (laugh) which is an interesting term… this.. the concept of spirituality and religion started to divide and they started to become two things, which is really interesting for me. So that was just something to be with that I was not quite settled with this concept that they are divided. I mean one can contain, religion can contain spirituality but somehow spirituality can not contain religion and it’s an interesting weave,  spirituality now is defined as a process of reforming your personality through.. stimulus that is brought to you by activities or believe systems or interaction with other people that touch your spirit or your soul. And.. so.. I find that to really describe my experience of practicing Reiki. because of this modernization process that’s happening in religion that people often describe religious experience as a spiritual experience and actually for scholars they are not the same. 

One comment on “V001 Q001 D001 T0000-0316”

  1. 30. Juli 2016 um 14:51 Uhr | 
    René Vögtli

    ein Testeintrag

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Video 1 Question 1, Day 1, Berlin, 0316-0438
So I found that really interesting because it starts sorting.. making me sort out myself and sort these experiences that I have, so that I can be more comfortable in belonging to what is commonly termed a spiritual movement, that’s what they call Reiki, is a spiritual movement and absolutely not a religion because of the strict definition of religion.  So I’m…that was, that was a fascinating process and I feel like it’s still going on inside of me. 

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Video 2 Question 2, Day 1, Berlin, 0000-0244
Topic: Insights IAHR Congress - Continuation of Video 1

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Video 2 Question 2, Day 1, Berlin, 0244-0420

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Video 2 Question 2, Day 1, Berlin, 0420-0558

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Video 3 Question 3, Day 1, Berlin, 0000-0245
Topic: Insights IAHR Congress - Continuation of Video 1 and Video 2
Well,  one of the things that define a religion is their set of belief systems and doctrine, we call it. And for Reiki I feel we actually have one, but nobody wants to call is that because it’s a very scary word. But… it’s a more simplistic kind of doctrine, like Reiki on, Reiki off and you know practice, that’s how you’re going to achieve any kind of further knowledge and so my grandmother’s little phrases that she used all the time, like «practice, practice, practice!» or «let Reiki teach you».  This one has become one of my favorites, because every word for me has an implication, like «let» is about surrendering, let Reiki teach you, so you know, it’s like that posture of letting is more like an open arm-posture than (closes arms) «okay, come on, you know, just try and change me», you know. 

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Video 3 Question 3, Day 1, Berlin, 0245-0525
And Reiki is also this energetic, so when you start to experience being led by an energetic field and understand that, you know, this Reiki is what has organized our world into these interlocking systems, inter-nested systems, and that we are part of that system, allows us to again find our placement and find our understanding of how being a part of a system is actually a more powerful place than trying to control the system, which was a part of the religious doctrine that we’ve all adopted in one degree or another. 

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Video 4 Question 4, Day 1, Berlin, 0000-0302
Topic: Justin Stein's thesis
his paper is on …what happens to an oral tradition when it’s taught through a number of generations and it goes from one culture to another culture and the changes that happen within the practice. Is this… Why are the changes made? And is there a developmental process actually going on? And these kind of questions. And then.. so that’s the general kind of theme of his thesis. And then what he did, was he used Reiki as an example of that and especially the time of Hawayo Takata because she was the person who took Reiki as a Japanese practice, well actually Usui Shiki Ryoho, and then brought it to another culture and then within that (1:16) how did she… let me start again. (1:26) How did she translate not just the language of Reiki but the culture of Reiki? How could she bring the Japanese culture into the practice of Reiki at the times and the moments when it was important for the actual practice to be understood? for instance some people have said “well, she made Reiki more Christian because she was teaching Christians” – but, this just drives me crazy but ähm 

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Video 4 Question 4, Day 1, Berlin, 0302-0520
So I feel like she did a wonderful job of translating not just the language but the culture. And he does a very good job considering how difficult it is to historically go back and rebuild history in this way. The other thing I like about Justin’s presentations is that he doesn’t have a Reiki attachment. He doesn’t need to like prove himself that he is like the fountain of all truth in Reiki. And it’s just so refreshing.  He’s just doing his job as a scholar trying to get this paper together so that he gets his doctorate degree. And there is no hidden agenda  in his papers… that I’ve noticed anyway.  And with that I can take in a lot of what he’s saying that can be confrontive  04:42  … in a way that feels like, «well, you know, I just have to sit with it for a while and after a while it will become easy… So this is a small but significant thing for me, because I always heard her say that she had been with Mikao Us…. no! sorry, with Chujiro Hayashi, her teacher for a year and maybe it was a year altogether. But she was in Japan for like 6 ½ months, I think, the first time when she learned Reiki. 

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Video 4 Question 4, Day 1, Berlin, 0520-0711
Justin said: «Well, you know, I have the the steamship manifest, you know, that shows when she arrived in Japan and when she left… so, you know, this is like physical evidence. So I went «well, hmm … OK». (laughs) And you know, what I find really amazing for me, is that (0544) in telling the Reiki story in… well (0547) in accepting the Reiki story and listening to it from my grandmother all these years and then it obviously, because Reiki has been so profound for me the history has gone into me, into this like profound sacred box or something inside of me. And it’s not to be changed. So when there is pressure to actually shift things a little bit, it takes time, I mean it’s not going to be «well, ok, it was 6 months instead of a year». It’s a very significant thing for me, because it changes the pace of the story for me. I don’t know how it will be for, you know the other people in the Reiki community. For some people who are maybe a little bit less precious about the history than I am, it will be a relieve, because they’ll say «ok, so this is all based on facts, now I know I am not lying, so now I can tell the story, you know easily with more confidence». 

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Video 4 Question 4, Day 1, Berlin, 0711-0928
So..ähm.. I do believe eventually that what will happen and what I am working on, actually this is my l’le project, is to keep the teaching story and to write the other story that’s like a parallel with it so that people actually don’t try to mix the two, which is what’s happening now … they are trying to make the teaching story more accurate, and the teaching that is not the point of the teaching story, to be accurate or to, you know, to have facts in it. So I feel that it will be really interesting to see if I can do this in meeting these scholars and so on and these researchers and really kind of putting together this historical thing that actually has very …there is a lot of parallels with the whole, you know, with the stories and so I’m hoping to be able to do that at some point and 

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Video 5 Question 5, Day 1, Berlin, 0000-0219
Topic: Archive - access?
ähm. I just spent 5 days in Erfurt at this conference called International Association of the History of Religions (kind of an awkward title for an association) and in this association there was one panel that was brought together about Japanese spiritual movements and Justin Stein, a doctoral student from the Toronto University, presented a paper there , part of dissertation and another women, another doctoral student, Hirano (I don’t know her last name), she also presented a part of her paper and then there were two others, who presented papers that were  relevant to the history of Reiki and the influences on Mikao Usui as he grew (0108) to aehm… as he grew to … (0116) develop the practice of Reiki as we know it now. So, this follows a whole process that I’ve been involved in in the last two, years, brought on actually by my mother’s death. There are a couple of reasons why: One was because when she was alive, it was very difficult for me to investigate and to go deeply into my grandmothers‘ life and so on because she was very protective of it. And the other part was that when she died, I had to go through, along with my sisters, all of her papers… and deal with them and we are still going through them. So I thought «well if I die, who is going to do this for me?» and the obvious place to start was with these boxes of my grandmother’s things that I had actually never looked into. 

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Video 5 Question 5, Day 1, Berlin, 0219-0424
So I invited Justin Stein and Robert Fueston who is another researcher in Kentucky I believe that’s where he lives, and Paul and Susan Mitchell and Joyce, my partner. And we have formed a kind of archive team. So it’s been a really interesting process to go through it and of course the researchers, Justin and Robert, want everything to be public instantly which freaks me out… So my questions is alway: «is this the right context in which to present this to the public?». And it’s been… we’ve had wonderful discussions, because we have very different points of view and very different ideas about what should happen. But I don’t intend for it to be exclusive necessarily, it’s just at this time it’s exclusive, because I don’t really know how to allow the public to be able to access these. So my next step is to find a place where actually scholars can access them in a way that feels appropriate to the material. 

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Video 5 Question 5, Day 1, Berlin, 0424-0622

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Video 6 Question 6, Day 1, Berlin, 0000-0223
Topic: Archive - Continuation of Video 005
I can’t really use my mother altogether.. you know, I mean I was busy running around doing teaching and, you know, being my kind of gipsy-self. And these things were just stored in a box and I didn’t think anybody was really interested in, you know, it was not a big deal. And then, about 20, yes 20 years ago when William Rand started to do his research, he just really… all my little walls of resistance came up and I… I sort of ignored all this stuff that I had because I didn’t know what I would find and I was afraid of what I would find, I think, you know in all this stuff… or what I wouldn’t find, you know it’s kind it goes both ways. So… then, you know I met Justin probably 4 years ago now and I also before him met 3 or 4 other people who were doing research in Reiki and then.  I’ve gradually become more willing to be more open with it and I think the door really opened when my mother died, because it was… I didn’t have familial retribution, then.. 

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Video 7 Question 7, Day 1, Berlin, 0000-0151
Topic: "Teaching Story" versus historic facts
So… when.. in 1979 when I travelled with my grandmother, I first heard the story of Reiki, I just thought «… it’s only unbelievable». And.. because you know I had no experience of Reiki, I didn’t even know what Reiki was really, as far as to practice or the energy or anything. And I had to use other people as a kind of test to see whether my grandmother was like really crazy or if she was actually saying something that was a value to people. But people sat and listened to her and they were respectable people and you know, it’s like.. I just finally had to surrender to.. that she was saying things to people that I couldn’t relay to but these other people did, I mean, they were awestruck by this whole thing. 

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Video 7 Question 7, Day 1, Berlin, 0151-0459
(0257) So, then Paul and I started to do these Masters intensives together in 1993. And when we came to telling the story, I would tell the first part of the story and then he would tell the last part of the story. And so it was interesting to listen to him and see what he left out and what he said and so on. And what we realized was that information does not carry energy as well as story. So we left out the date she was born and we left out you know, all this stuff and just talked about “when she met Reiki”. (0340) I had this insight that, (0350) ähm (pauses) (0358)  it was not the story of four people but it was a story of Reiki and how it emerged through these people’s lives. Which was a good perspective for me because it really helped me when people started to add birthdays and you know, when people died and all this factual stuff… but it’s not about people. It’s about Reiki.  And then…when the memorial stone was found was a really big thing, because that was the first real kind of substantial body of information, and lo and behold, what was on the stone collaborated my grandmother’s story. Well that was like «shuuu» relieve! 

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Video 7 Question 7, Day 1, Berlin, 0459-0748
And what I have done now in… recounting how she actually told the story and the things that I have changed of the story is things like this: she used to say «and he studied for 7 years, and then he went to the US for 7 years and he went so and so for 7 years, you know, he was the in monastery for 7 years». And I realised that the 7 year thing … But I realized that the 7 year thing is kind of a Japanese way of saying: for a… he did this for a long time… but they have to be kind of more precise or there is something magic about 7 years or I don’t know why… So it’s like not understanding the actual contexts of a lot of her way of tell you the story. These were changed into kind of «facts» just by dropping them.  I call this a teaching story,  because it is… you know the content of it is to teach the way the Reiki came into the world, the way that the practice emerged, some of the very fundamental principles of working with Reiki as an energy, some of the fundamental lessons of every Reiki student. And it is of course based on historic fact but it is teaching story and that’s where the magic lies. But for those people who actually want to have history, I think it is really important to have some kind of accompanying history that underlies or creates a foundation for the teaching story. I don’t firstly need it but I know that some people do. 

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Video 8 Question 8, Day 1, Berlin, 0000-0308
Topic: Healing of individual and society (in and with Germany)
When I first started to teach Reiki and then started to travel around to meet groups of Reiki people, we were very much involved in personal healing, like how did Reiki affect people and how did Reiki affect the individual.  When I first came to Germany however, I was really struck by the profundity of what happened in Reiki classes here.  And what was happening with people, is that they would say «Oh, I haven’t cried for 40 years» or «I haven’t thought of the war 20 years», and… or «I haven’t..», you know they were taken back to a time when their emotions were sort of stopped and held.. you know, kind of hold. And it seemed that Reiki pressed the hold button or the pause button and then they could feel their emotions again. And in doing that, it really felt that they were healing individually their own confusion and fear and shame and guilt about whatever happened around them during World War II.  

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Video 8 Question 8, Day 1, Berlin, 0308-0558
I was having people come from the Netherlands and France and Belgium and the Scandinavian countries and so on to this place near Hamburg. And almost immediately what I heard form them was «well, it was really difficult for me to come here”. And I went, being an American: «why?». And they would say: «Well, I swore I would never come to Germany again in my life after the war». And this happened so many times and so many different memories and painful experiences came up with their being here in Germany, but… and then there was the other side of it: So there is this guy who came to my workshops, and he really, I mean, looked like a Gestapo officer, you know the stereo-type kind of guy, and I just.. his name is Hans. And then he said «Well, I’m a citizen of the world, I’m not German». And I said «Hans, you’re really German and if you don’t own this Germaneness then you’ll never be able to use it in a way that heals people” And after a few years of this, people started to come back and  one of these Dutch guys who really touched me, he was big truck-driver kind of guy, you know, not very well educated and he had been driving all through Europe all these years. He said «You know, every time I came through Germany he just said ‚okay, don’t stop, don’t break down, I don’t wanna speak the German language, you know, I’m not into Germany». And he said: «You know what happened? … When I came this time I thought I’m coming home”… 

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Video 8 Question 8, Day 1, Berlin, 0558-0813
..and it just so touched me because there was obviously a healing, you know, that went far beyond the individual to this society that just had so much pain that they didn’t know what to do with it and that reiki was coming in and it could be expressed and it could be dissipated.  if you think about it the pain comes back but there is some understanding also of the humanity of everybody that was involved.  And I found that to be really profound. And it’s happened in many other places in the world… And I also believe that in every country where Reiki has profoundly been practiced, which is now pretty much every country in the world, even Africa, that there is something shifting in the society.  

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Video 9 Question 9, Day 1, Berlin, 0000-0205
Topic: How Reiki spreads globally

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Video 9 Question 9, Day 1, Berlin, 0205-0417

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Video 9 Question 9, Day 1, Berlin, 0417-0605

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Video 9 Question 9, Day 1, Berlin, 0605-0923

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Video 10 Question 10, Day 1, Berlin, 0000-0345
Topic: Phyllis' contribution to the world
I went from a place of just getting that this ‘task’ of mine was to first fulfil a family duty 03:09 (to carry on Reiki) and then to initate new reiki students, because that was my job, so to speak, and then this other piece where it became this wonderful practice of standing in as much presence as possible while surrendering all of myself. And this to me is the path of the master and really the contribution to the world. Yah! 

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Video 11 Question 11, Day 1, Berlin, 0000-0233
Topic: Success, numbers - What makes a Master successful?
Well, I would estimate, and this is very rough, I would estimate probably around 10’000 first degree students in the last 30 some years. for masters, I’ve initiated probably 360 masters, something like that. And out of those perhaps half are not practicing Reiki at all anymore and practice and out of those some percentage like maybe 10% or so have broken off from me and are teaching their own system of Reiki, you know, whatever that is.  1:32  So the interesting part for me is that in my history of initiating masters, in the beginning I initiated people who were my grandmother’s students and I had a feeling even though sometimes I didn’t talk to my grandmother expressly about somebody, I could feel that they… that she had this connection with them and was preparing them as a master student. I only had 1 of my own students during that time come to mastery. And now it’s not a very…that’s not been a very successful relationship in the sense that she separated from me immediately after the initiation and we’ve had a very difficult relationship and a very separate relationship after that.  

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Video 11 Question 11, Day 1, Berlin, 0233-0515
And then there came a time in the 1990ies where Reiki became sort of a fad and I think that we.. I didn’t have enough… wisdom, perhaps, to understand that I had been riding on my grandmother’s energy in the beginning, then somehow by the mid 80ies.. the end of the 80ies and into the 1990ies it was my energy that was holding these masters, but it wasn’t big enough. So in the mid 1990ies when this explosion of all these different kinds of Reiki practices came about, for me this thing I called «the golden age of Reiki» stopped 

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Video 11 Question 11, Day 1, Berlin, 0515-0710

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Video 11 Question 11, Day 1, Berlin, 0710-0934
I have been able to sustain myself but it’s not without worry sometimes, there were times when I have been totally, totally without money and people have had to… my partner has had to support me 0841 So there are different things and people think that I’ve, you know, that I’ve earned a lot of money and this has been a very lucrative thing. But what’s true is that money has flowed in and out of my bank account like a river and … and nothing really is dammed up, I don’t hoard it. So it isn’t that I spend a lot of money on fancy cars or anything, but I spend it on the Reiki community, because that’s my investment in the future, my future and for me the future of the world. 

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Video 12 Question 12, Day 1, Berlin, 0000-0206
Topic: Success, numbers - what makes a Master successful? - Continuation of Video 011
Hawayo Takata had a very interesting way of working with this. She was very mindful of this thing about how to … how to initiated masters who would actually surrender to Reiki on all these different levels. So she this group of masters who reached almost retirement age  who had made their money and they had grown children and they were kind of ready to … ready to be in the world to be themselves. And then there were the young people, only a few of us, who hadn’t had families yet and who were willing to just say «ok, I be Reiki master and this is what I’m doing with my life». And the interesting thing is that that’s what we did, I mean… my colleagues who are my age, Paul Mitchell and Rick Bockner, who I’ve been together with all these years in our path of mastery, we always, you know, surrendered to the will of Reiki so to speak. And it didn’t mean that we didn’t do other things sometimes but it’s been a really wonderful opportunity to see that we could live our lives for 35 years in this way and come out of it feeling very rich. We’re not rich on an American level of «success» but we are rich in the way our lives are and what our priorities are and the wonderful people that we have in our lives and the profound experiences that we have almost every day. 

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Video 12 Question 12, Day 1, Berlin, 0206-0435
And I really believe that there is a quality of mastery that calls for this and that not everybody is ready to take this step and in the ..  in the beginning like in the first 20 years or so I used to feel that it was my job to convince these people that they really needed to quit their job. So one of the women that I initiated in the late 1980ies, she was.. had a very good job at the government and she was ready to quit and she did with her job. So I initiated her, she started her Reiki practice and then, about 2 months later, her boss came to her and said «Want you come back, like halftime for a year?». I went: (looks aside) «This is a temptation» (laugh). But she did it anyway and then of course that expanded into a full-time job she was struggling with this piece where she felt like as a Reiki master she wasn’t successful because people didn’t come to her classes and so on. I said «Well, you know, you don’t have any space in yourself to hold the class and to hold a class of 15 you have to have a lot of space and all your space and all your energy is going into your work. So you either quit your work and become a Reiki master or you be a Reiki master while working, which is a really different energetic…. formula» 

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Video 12 Question 12, Day 1, Berlin, 0435-0731
So about 10 years ago I had to go to her and say «You know what? I’ve really given up convincing you to quit your job (laugh) and I really want you to know that I totally trust you and I realize that in the message that you’ve been getting from me all these years is that I haven’t trusted you. And that was true. So I… if I trust my path then I have to trust your path the same way and so I just have to trust that this is what you needed to do. And I’m glad that you never succumbed to my will because then it probably would have been a disaster.» So this was an interesting insight for me as her master to support her process. She was willing to quit her job, she totally demonstrated it but then the universe came back and said «ok.. (laugh).. this is what you need to do now». 

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Video 12 Question 12, Day 1, Berlin, 0731-0939
There are lots of different stories like that but I feel that if people go in with the premise of understanding that mastery is about surrendering everything and that there are no safe spaces.  

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Video 12 Question 12, Day 1, Berlin, 0939-1206
I feel like the economic piece is very… like we’re very attached to our economic health, whatever that means or safety, maybe. But some of the most profound and attachments that I have are attachments about who I am, who I think I am. And so those become actually more difficult than surrendering to Reiki and saying «Ok, Reiki if you want me to teach, you know, let me know». But I’ve had to go through transformational processes where a part of me that I believed so fervently was me had to die and something else had to come back instead. And those are actually in some way the most difficult because there is no physical, tangible counting of attachment, you know… you… you just get you’re attached and you don’t know how to deal with it, you can’t really give it away, you have to work through it. And so for me money is a great indicator of attachment, but it’s not the only one and maybe it’s not the most difficult. 

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Video 13 Question 13, Day 1, Berlin, 0000-0240
Topic: Reconciliation with friend/student
Yes, Oh Yah, the thing is that … our relationship, 0016 my relationship with this student was very complicated and I was a very young master. So, for me what happened is that I opened these different parts of myself to her that was not wise and it wasn’t because she wasn’t capable, it was just that I wasn’t being a Reiki Master. She became best friend I revealed things to her that I would not have done if she were only …only (hand-movement: inverted comma), sorry, if she had been my Reiki student and that was the only relationship that we had. So I said things to her that … were taken out of the context of a friendship and put into a Reiki context. I felt betrayed as a person, as a friend but I don’t feel betrayed as a Master. So, and it’s hard to separate the two because obviously I’m, it is all the same person. So, I learnt not not that I couldn’t be friends with some of my students but that I have to be very, very thoughtful about the boundaries of different relationships and what actually I depend on and so on and so on; it’s been an interesting dynamic. 

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Video 13 Question 13, Day 1, Berlin, 0240-0409

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Video 14 Question 14, Day 1, Berlin, 0000-0129
Topic: Reconciliation with friend/student - Continuation of Video 13
I don’t know if she has understood that this is the part of the pain for me … and I had to have a number of years before I actually realised that even though ähm….yah and … I have to say that within me there is some resistance to exploring this further even though we’re getting older and older. It might be kind of sad if we don’t do this before one of us dies. I know that she is doing well as a Reiki Master and I can take comfort in that and I realise that being her friend was just not a functional situation. And so maybe it is fine to just leave that alone. And .. You can’t … I think that I’ve come to also to a place of saying to myself, well, if the circumstances arises that we are able to talk, then of course I would. 

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Video 15 Question 15, Day 2, Berlin, 0000-0250
Topic: Betrayals
I feel that the largest sort of betrayal or injustice in my life was definitely not understanding the point of my going on this trip with my grandmother 1979. And that.. I mean people laugh and I think the think I’m joking, you know, the difference between, you know, a person who decided to quit everything and become a ski bum, because skiing really transformed my life on a physical level as well as lots of other levels . And then I went off in the summer to travel with my grandmother, a person that I didn’t really like, and I was really uncomfortable, we’ve had a really painful relationship with and at the same time I feel that somehow underneath it, Reiki was calling me, but I could only say that 20 years later, I couldn’t have said that at the time. And I really did think that I was going with her to carry her suitcases, make sure she didn’t get robbed or carry the money anyway and make sure she ate well. So… much to my surprise it ended up to be the initiation as a master and my first teaching on how to teach classes and so on. And my first understanding about what Reiki was for her. So, I felt betrayed by my mother who encouraged me to go on this trip, never saying “Well you know, if you go, you’re going to, you know, working with your grandmother and so on”. And then, when my grandmother initiated me, you know, and I heard this kind of funny like clapping-hand-noise, and she says “And now you can work with me”, you know, I really did have this picture of carrying suitcases, counting money and I never.. I never imagined teaching Reiki, because up to that time I didn’t even know what Reiki was. So…. 

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Video 15 Question 15, Day 2, Berlin, 0250-0516

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Video 15 Question 15, Day 2, Berlin, 0516-0750
And then my grandmother died. That I felt was a betrayal, because she had told me that she would live until Christmas, that she would for sure be there for Christmas. And she died on December 11th I was really angry for a month or something because I felt that she had not kept her promise and that I would have done something really different if I had known that. But whenever I thought that I would always hear her words say “Reiki comes first” and then I would get even more angry because for me family duty was really the most important thing in my life at that point. 

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Video 15 Question 15, Day 2, Berlin, 0750-1033
A few month after my grandmother’s death Barbara Weber declared herself to be the successor, or tried to. And people … the other masters that Hawayo Takata had initiated called me up and said “well I recognise you as a successor, now what are you going to do?” . And I went “Well, I don’t know” And she turned me down. I think it was a wise thing for her, it was all or nothing. And I feel it was also wise for me, I just didn’t know that. And then she started to…. and then she started to publish her Newsletter, saying she was the only true master that Hawayo Takata had initiated and so on. So another betrayal came about, but very quickly I realized it was the greatest gift my grandmother had left me, because if somebody had not challenged all of us, at once, then we would not have found this place in ourselves that was very clearly a master and knew that we were masters and that we were able to… go to that place of mastery and out of that place develop ourselves as masters. So she gave us a great gift, it was a very contrary gift, and at sometimes very painful because we all wanted it to be love and light and cooperation and everything. But, you know, I had lived most of my life through adversity, so (Laughs) .. it seemed pretty OK for me. 

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Video 16 Question 16, Day 2, Berlin, 0000-0302
Topic: Betrayal / Life's motto? - Continuation of Video 15
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. 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. 

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Video 16 Question 16, Day 2, Berlin, 0302-0616
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,  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. 

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Video 16 Question 16, Day 2, Berlin, 0615-0807

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Video 17 Question 17, Day 2, Berlin, 0000-0316
Topic: Image (People's perception) and privacy
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. 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 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. 

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Video 17 Question 17, Day 2, Berlin, 0316-0423
misconceptions  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. 

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Video 18 Question 18, Day 2, Berlin, 0000-0148
Topic: Do you think a RM needs a therapist ?
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  

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Video 18 Question 18, Day 2, Berlin, 0148-0338
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 

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Video 18 Question 18, Day 2, Berlin, 0338-0615
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, 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. 

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Video 18 Question 18, Day 2, Berlin, 0615-0838
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. 

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Video 19 Question 19, Day 2, Berlin, 0000-0228
Topic: Reconcilliation, forgiveness
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. 

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Video 19 Question 19, Day 2, Berlin, 0228-0406
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. 

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Video 19 Question 19, Day 2, Berlin, 0406-0552
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. 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.  

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Video 20 Question 20, Day 2, Berlin, 0000-0258
Topic: Reconciliation, forgiveness / Irrevocable damage - Continuation of Video 19
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…. 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. 

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Video 20 Question 20, Day 2, Berlin, 0258-0444
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. 

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Video 20 Question 20, Day 2, Berlin, 0444-0818
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. 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  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. 

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Video 21 Question 21, Day 2, Berlin, 0000-0111
Topic: Phyllis musing purpose of this video
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. 

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Video 22 Question 22, Day 2, Berlin, 0000-0354
Topic: Family origin, childhood and first discremination
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 

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Video 22 Question 22, Day 2, Berlin, 0354-0646

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Video 22 Question 22, Day 2, Berlin, 0646-0938
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. 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.  

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Video 23 Question 23, Day 2, Berlin, 0000-0306
Topic: Friends, Healing of Discrimination, Teenager
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.“ 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. 

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Video 23 Question 23, Day 2, Berlin, 0326-0612
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. 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.  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. 

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Video 23 Question 23, Day 2, Berlin, 0612-0851
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,  

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Video 24 Question 24, Day 2, Berlin, 0000-0334
Topic: Skiing - transformation
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  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.  

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Video 24 Question 24, Day 2, Berlin, 0334-0540

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Video 25 Question 25, Day 2, Berlin, 0000-0154
Topic: Vocation and What is "Healing"?
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. 

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Video 25 Question 25, Day 2, Berlin, 0154-0417

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Video 26 Question 26, Day 2, Berlin, 0000-0213
Topic: Early Mastership - change of perception
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…. 

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Video 26 Question 26, Day 2, Berlin, 0213-0358

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Video 26 Question 26, Day 2, Berlin, 0358-0552
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? 

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Video 27 Question 27, Day 2, Berlin, 0000-0139
Topic: Childhood perception - reunion

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Video 27 Question 27, Day 2, Berlin, 0139-0300
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. 

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Video 28 Question 28, Day 2, Berlin, 0000-0233
Topic: Mother's idea of Reiki and her disapproval
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. 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. 

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Video 28 Question 28, Day 2, Berlin, 0233-0430
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.  

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Video 28 Question 28, Day 2, Berlin, 0430-0706
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… 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. 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.  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. 

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Video 29 Question 29, Day 2, Berlin, 0000-0112
Topic: Mother pushing Phyllis
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. 

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Video 30 Question 30, Day 2, Berlin, 0000-0237
Topic: Californian crowd putting Takata on a pedestal (connects to Video 28?)
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.  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.  And those were the people that my mother really approved of. 

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Video 31 Question 31, Day 2, Berlin, 0000-0202
Topic: Takatas importance - translate into Wester culture
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) 

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Video 31 Question 31, Day 2, Berlin, 0202-0451
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. So, I don’t know if the researchers have discovered how many of the Masters, for instance, had died during World War 2?  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. 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. 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. 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. 

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Video 32 Question 32, Day 2, Berlin, 0000-0142
Topic: After Takata's death - discrepancies and struggle for succession
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. 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. 

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Video 32 Question 32, Day 2, Berlin, 0142-0401
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. 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. 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  

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Video 32 Question 32, Day 2, Berlin, 0401-0731

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Video 32 Question 32, Day 2, Berlin, 0731-0939
Topic: Foundation of The Reiki Alliance
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… 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. 

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Video 32 Question 32, Day 2, Berlin, 0939-1257
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. 

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Video 32 Question 32, Day 2, Berlin, 1257-1453
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. 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. 

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Video 33 Question 33, Day 2, Berlin, 0000-0224
Topic: After Takata / Alliance's "equal in Oneness" - Continuation of Video 32
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…. 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”. 

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Video 33 Question 33, Day 2, Berlin, 0224-0408

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Video 33 Question 33, Day 2, Berlin, 0408-0515
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.  I think we were wise beyond our years, so to speak. 

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Video 34 Question 34, Day 2, Berlin, 0000-0230
Topic: Origin of GM, Lineage Bearer - succession

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Video 34 Question 34, Day 2, Berlin, 0230-0401

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Video 34 Question 34, Day 2, Berlin, 0401-0640

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Video 34 Question 34, Day 2, Berlin, 0640-0738
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. 

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Video 34 Question 34, Day 2, Berlin, 0844-1102

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Video 34 Question 34, Day 2, Berlin, 1102-1255

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Video 34 Question 34, Day 2, Berlin, 1255-1456
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. 

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Video 34 Question 34, Day 2, Berlin, 1456-1710
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. 

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Video 35 Question 35, Day 2, Berlin, 0000-0051
Topic: Origin of GM, LB, Succession - difference in treatments - Continuation of Video 34

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Video 36 Question 36, Day 2, Berlin, 0000-0213
Topic: Circle of 22 and Master Body
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.  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 

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Video 36 Question 36, Day 2, Berlin, 0213-0333
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.  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. 

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Video 37 Question 37, Day 2, Berlin, 0000-0306
Topic: Australia, titles and other lineages

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Video 37 Question 37, Day 2, Berlin, 0306-0529

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Video 37 Question 37, Day 2, Berlin, 0529-0807

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Video 37 Question 37, Day 2, Berlin, 0807-1018

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Video 37 Question 37, Day 2, Berlin, 1018-1157
So, when I’ve read about Japanese Buddhist practice, I think there is like 12 main sects   S E C T S 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. 

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Video 38 Question 38, Day 2, Berlin, 0000-0100
Topic: Australia, titles .. / "inclusivenesse" as in Buddhism - Continuation of Video 37
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. 

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Video 38 Question 38, Day 2, Berlin, 0100-0204
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. 

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Video 39 Question 39, Day 2, Berlin, 0000-0158
Topic: "This system" - Form, Essence

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Video 39 Question 39, Day 2, Berlin, 0158-0427

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Video 40 Question 40, Day 2, Berlin, 0000-0246
Topic: Battle for Trademark

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Video 40 Question 40, Day 2, Berlin, 0246-0421

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Video 40 Question 40, Day 2, Berlin, 0412-0630
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. 

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Video 41 Question 41, Day 2, Berlin, 0000-0201
Topic: Trademark / Misuse in Germany - Continuation of Video 40

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Video 41 Question 41, Day 2, Berlin, 0201-0452

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Video 41 Question 41, Day 2, Berlin, 0452-0713
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. 

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Video 42 Question 42, Day 2, Berlin, 0000-0201
Topic: Trademark - Continuation of Video 40/41

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Video 43 Question 43, Day 2, Berlin, 0000-0203
Topic: Trademark, technology and other names- Continuation of Video 40-41
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. 

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Video 43 Question 43, Day 2, Berlin, 0203-0421
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. 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) ..  

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Video 44 Question 44, Day 2, Berlin, 0000-0747
Topic: Trademark, Controlling alterations to system - Continuation of Videos 40-43
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.   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. 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.  

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Video 44 Question 44, Day 2, Berlin, 0316-0557

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Video 44 Question 44, Day 2, Berlin, 0557-0742
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. 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. 

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Video 45 Question 45, Day 2, Berlin, 0000-0241
Topic: Certification, Master training

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Video 45 Question 45, Day 2, Berlin, 0241-0538

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Video 46 Question 46, Day 2, Berlin, 0000-0245
Topic: Alone Phyllis initiates Masters and dropping this limitation

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Video 46 Question 46, Day 2, Berlin, 0000-0406

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Video 46 Question 46, Day 2, Berlin, 0406-0552

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Video 46 Question 46, Day 2, Berlin, 0552-0740

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Video 46 Question 46, Day 2, Berlin, 0740-0942

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Video 47 Question 47, Day 2, Berlin, 0000-0201
Topic: Responsibility of initiating Master Continuation of Videos 45 and 46

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Video 47 Question 47, Day 2, Berlin, 0201-0400

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Video 47 Question 47, Day 2, Berlin, 0400-0642

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Video 48 Question 1, Day 2, Arizona, 0000-0145
Topic: Reiki Home: reconciliation amongst styles but also with Nature
I started to think about the nature of our Reiki practice and how we relate to the earth and (0132) how we relate to (0134) (räusper) excuse me, how we relate to (0137) other things, other than ourselves, other than human beings, and I’ve been thinking all these years that the reiki community has grown and grown and grown… 

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Video 48 Question 1, Day 2, Arizona, 0145-0421
These lands were grass lands and the grass was about this high (points) and when the cowboys, the settlers came through these valleys they realised this was great pasture for cattle. And as in the late 1800s as California started to raise cattle they started to do cattle-drives that went across the Southern part of the United States and into St. Louise and other places where they could ship the meat back to the East coast.  3:43  So when they came through here the cattle grazed on the grass, they trampled it, they were in such numbers that very quickly the grass died because they didn’t have time to regenerate. And their …they also brought seeds from other places. So we got Mesquites trees everywhere and the land became defensive because it needed to be. So, cactus started to grow, there was less water feeding the top soil. So, it got drier and drier so the cactus came more and more. Now it is a very prickly landscape… 

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Video 48 Question 1, Day 2, Arizona, 0421-0553
but in those days it was a very soft landscape. So, the secret is to gain water… to have water stay on the top of the surface of the land instead of running off so fast. So, a lot of ranchers here, who have taken this to heart, have gone up into their foothills and they take the material, that’s natural material like rocks and twigs or branches or dead trees or whatever is lying around, and they build these little dams every so many feet down a water shed and in doing that it just stops the water for maybe 30 minutes. But that water soaking in to the land changes the whole landscape. 

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Video 48 Question 1, Day 2, Arizona, 0553-0817

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Video 48 Question 1, Day 2, Arizona, 0817-1032
and you know, it would just be a Reiki space and that would be one way where we can actually share reiki with people in a general way. So I’m really excited by that and then as we started to really look at our plan what we realised is that this was going to affect our own practice and our own ideas about our practice.  all Reiki Masters   (pauses, looking right, left, frowning) “all Reiki Masters?” “well, that’s a thought” (laughs). 

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Video 48 Question 1, Day 2, Arizona, 1032-1200
So we really opened the vision to including reconciliation with forms of reiki practice with different, even … different, I would say, factions or groups within the practice that I have, Usui Shiki Ryoho. And to be able to come together not to teach each other our systems but to share what we have in common which is so much more profound, what we have in common, than our differences. Our differences are mainly on a kind of physical level, of doing, but the difference … the similarities are about our humanness, our humanity and how we are touched as human-beings by the practice of Reiki. And what develops in us, in our practice of Reiki and that for me … (shakes her head in awe) far outweighs our differences. So, somehow if we can come to this place in ourselves, I believe this group of people that is working on manifesting this calling that we call Reiki Home .. 

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Video 48 Question 1, Day 2, Arizona, 1200-1350
..if we can do this in ourselves then I feel like it’s possible to do it around the world. 

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Video 49 Question 2, Day 2, Arizona, 0000-0156
Topic: Reiki Home: reconciliation styles and Nature - Continuation ov Video 48
We are incorporating or inviting or visioning that this will be a reconciliation place for all Reiki practices to come together. Not, as I said, not to teach each other our practices, not to convince each other who is right or wrong but to live in peace, to rally live supporting each other because I believe that.. what humanity is asking for is a way to get in touch with our human spirit and to be able to nurse that spirit just in a very simple way like we do with Reiki, our Reiki practice. where Reiki, the energy comes from and you know should we have oral tradition and have a master who stands in front and in person and initiates or is it okay to accept you know distant initiations and so on. All these questions, they really are the meat for some great conversations, not about finding out who’s right or wrong but to deepen our understanding of the universe and these questions Reiki is leading us to 

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Video 49 Question 2, Day 2, Arizona, 0156-0258
And I believe that this is what Takata said when she said “let Reiki teach you”. She didn’t say “go practice Reiki however you want to”. She said “let Reiki teach you” and one of the things that I learned about Reiki is that when you get a question that’s the great learning, that’s the place where you get to go deeply and sometimes it takes you years to find the answer.  And I believe if we all came together and connected and discussed these questions we would further our own individual practices, our own individual understanding of the universe and raise the practice of Reiki in the world to… a recognized force in our social transformation. 

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Video 50 Question 3, Day 2, Arizona, 0000-0202
Topic: Archive

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Video 50 Question 3, Day 2, Arizona, 0202-0413

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Video 51 Question 4, Day 2, Arizona, 0000-0156
Topic: When did the Master Symbol emerge?

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Video 51 Question 4, Day 2, Arizona, 0156-0519

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Video 51 Question 4, Day 2, Arizona, 0519-0732

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Video 51 Question 4, Day 2, Arizona, 0732-0938

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Video 51 Question 4, Day 2, Arizona, 0938-1105

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Video 51 Question 4, Day 2, Arizona, 1105-1238

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Video 52 Question 5, Day 2, Arizona, 0000-0202
Topic: Difference of Symbol amongst Takatas Masters?

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Video 52 Question 5, Day 2, Arizona, 0202-0302

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Video 53 Question 6, Day 2, Arizona, 0000-0246
Topic: Hypothesis: Takata introduced Master Symbol to bridge Japanese culture (of DKM) to West

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Video 53 Question 6, Day 2, Arizona, 0246-0404

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Video 53 Question 6, Day 2, Arizona, 0404-0555

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Video 54 Question 7, Day 2, Arizona, 0000-0124
Topic: difference between technique and spiritual practice

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Video 54 Question 7, Day 2, Arizona, 0124-0303
I feel that one of our great lessons in our society is to be able to hold uncertainty and to be able to hold the unknown until it becomes known. And it’s not this particular practice of a master is not supported by our culture, which is.. you know in the information age, which is if you have the information then you are the man or you are the woman that’s, you know, the go to person. I don’t want to be the go to person, you know, this is not me. I am a student of this practice and I can encourage other students of this practice but I am not an expert, no one is an expert and you only get experts in technique… 

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Video 55 Question 8, Day 2, Arizona, 0000-0130
Topic: Men vs Women?

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Video 55 Question 8, Day 2, Arizona, 0130-0350

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Video 55 Question 8, Day 2, Arizona, 0350-0616
But the other thing was that we didn’t know what we were doing, we didn’t have any personal boundaries. We all had been given this gift of this connection to Reiki universal life energy and we found that we could do anything we wanted, literally. And you know, women and men would come to these classes, fall In love with their Reiki Master and the Reiki Master would say, well this is where Reiki is guiding me, right? So, you know, people would have affairs with their students, they would create very dysfunctional relationships with students , they….. and in some way in France this was called out because of their sensitivity to cults, C U L T S, cults and they termed Reiki as a cult. Well actually the Reiki Masters, most of the Reiki Masters who were French in that moment and you know the 1990s they actually acted like cult leaders because they didn’t understand how to be Reiki Masters, 

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Video 55 Question 8, Day 2, Arizona, 0616-0753
So we had no boundaries, you know, and we got called on the carpet, we were really lucky actually in.. I say “we” as a huge community going into this that something really terrible didn’t happen, but it didn’t.  7:01 We figured out, in 1990 the Reiki Alliance figured out that they needed to have a code of ethics, because things were getting so bad. And it was not just between students and masters but between masters themselves like people would have gatherings and people would have affairs and then, you know, we ended up having to hide affairs from the spouses of these people who were also acquantancies and good friends of… I mean, it was… as a social wreck… you know  then the ethics, the code of ethics started to come in and people started to say “ok, let’s… you know… get some…. you know handle on this you know… let’s be mature about this”. 

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Video 55 Question 8, Day 2, Arizona, 0753-1026
that’s one way to use our power is through our sexual expression. Another way to use power is power over… this is an expression where, you know, it’s kind of the cult leader thing, you know, like I know the truth and I’m giving yo what I got in my Reiki class was you have access to your truth and no one else does. I don’t know where I got this message, she never said it like that, but that’s definitely what I got and what all of us got.  So when we would have discussions it wasn’t like “I’m right, you’re wrong”, it was like.. the end-sentence was “and this is what she taught me”. This is what I glean from her teaching. Well, how could you argue with that? You couldn’t, so you had to like open yourself and just allow that all these little differences were also a part of her teaching and that you could keep your own without being threatened by everybody else and welcome and embrace your brothers and sisters Reiki Masters you know equally even though we weren’t the same. It was a tremendous opportunity. 

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Video 55 Question 8, Day 2, Arizona, 1026-1231
Topic: story vs history
The Reiki story as is told by Hawayo Takata in truth… you know like in factual truth, I have no idea you know how factual it is and I never cared. But what I do get when I tell the story, not because I believe it, because I tell you in the first ten years I told that story because that’s what I needed to do as a Reiki Master. And when I saw what it did to the people who were listening to the story, I thought well there is something more going on here than I can perceive   I mean as a young master I was just astonished by the effect the story had on people by the energetic transmission that came through that story. 

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Video 55 Question 8, Day 2, Arizona, 1231-1432
And I believe that there is truth in that story, a kind of bigger truth that no fact can destroy. And that .. this concentration on fact has been a little misused, not.. I don’t think.. not consciously but through the motivation of saving people from the untruth, whatever that is… which I can’t go there myself… And the other things is that … I feel like there is a drive in some people and perhaps it’s more male than female, for having really solid foundation, really like mental truth, like I know this to be true (1338) (cough) …. and  

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Video 56 Question 9, Day 2, Arizona, 0000-0225
Topic: Men vs Women? - Continuation of Video 055
So, if we could generalize and say that this informational truth was sort of masculine and the feminine truth was from feeling then there would be a wish for me to bring these two together and it’t kind on my bucket list of things to do before I die that somehow these two will come together peacefully, not in competition but in understanding that they actually complement one another.  

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Video 56 Question 9, Day 2, Arizona, 0225-0404

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Video 57 Question 10, Day 2, Arizona, 0000-0210
Topic: What would you still contribute to achieve peace amongst "factions"
I believe that movements like the Australian Congress (for whatever better word)… I believe that Reiki Home as it matures will bring these factions together in a way that is the right time. And then when we meet it will be able to be done in a way that people will say “well, that wasn’t so difficult! Why did we think that this was impossible?”.  So I have to give up dying…. And probably other things in my personality that I can’t see right now. But I have to be able to make the space open for the conversation and I work on it myself. 

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Video 57 Question 10, Day 2, Arizona, 0210-0336

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Video 58 Question 11, Day 2, Arizona, 0000-0110
Topic: Reconciliation with researchers
Certain people bring out certain qualities in us, you know, when we partner with them and it’s really interesting, you know, we always polarize. So you know the more macho the researchers are, you know, and now I feel like Frank Petter and William Rand and some of the others have softened a bit. I don’t know if that’s really true or not but it feels like they have. So I feel less defence, defended and so you know it’s like this is part of the process it’s going to take to have us come together not particularly in the sense of being in the same room talking together but being able to use their data and find it ok and then… you know what I mean (0054) So.. (René in the back ground) Oh no! This is not on the record (Thassos: this was on record) … I’m kiding, I dont care. (Thassos in the back ground). (0111) 

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Video 59 Question 12, Day 2, Arizona, 0000-0142
Topic: Would you go to a closed meeting with Rand, Petter, Ellyard?
Well there.. at this point I have to say that… I have to consider my physical health, so most likely not. But in the sense of an ideal situation, it wouldn’t work unless we had a higher purpose. We couldn’t just meet to meet because what’s the point?  I don’t want to necessarily be friends with them, I don’t want to learn their…. form of Reiki. I don’t want to teach them my form of Reiki, I mean I’m not… that’s not an agenda item on my part. So the question is more to the point why would we meet, what would be the motivation for us to go and it would have to be something pretty astonishing, 

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Video 59 Question 12, Day 2, Arizona, 0142-0315
So that’s all I am saying is that we would have to have really interesting conversation at hand. 

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Video 59 Question 12, Day 2, Arizona, 0315-0330
reconciliation is the force that brings us together. Just to be clear: I could do reconciliation without meeting them. 

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Video 60 Question 13, Day 2, Arizona, 0000-0144
Topic: Disparity between Western and Japanese Reiki? Reiki-Politics?
I don’t know their systems, I don’t know what the differences are, so I haven’t a clue so I don’t see the disparity personally 

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Video 60 Question 13, Day 2, Arizona, 0144-0334

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Video 60 Question 13, Day 2, Arizona, 0334-0546
In Japan, because of the culture..  Japan introduced Buddhism to it’s… brought Buddhism in kind of the year 536 or something. And out of that time many different… sects like SECTS of Buddhism emerged. They basically all practiced Buddhism in the sense that they take the words that… were attributed to Buddha and the methods that he used to attain enlightenment, they have approximately the same identification of enlightenment what the term means, but they take only a small portion of his teaching and one method to get there. And that’s the difference of all these sects. But they all know that they.. their foundation is all the same practice. And I would love Reiki to become that way because it means that there is no competition, there is no right and wrong, just different forms and different methods to get to the same relationship with Reiki, the universal life energy. 

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Video 60 Question 13, Day 2, Arizona, 0546-0843
So here is one sect that says you’re supposed to chant and use language, the other sect doesn’t use language at all. But they don’t fight against each other. They just simply see that perhaps a student of one sect could go to the other because they advance and then they decide “oh, now I need to go and sit in silence” or the other way around. And the point is that they know that their service is to the student and his benefit. And this is the part where we in Reiki are not, we don’t have yet, we don’t serve the student, we decide that our practice needs to be big and important so that we can be big and important. And we are not paying any attention to the confusion and the disarray that this brings into a student. And so not only do they have to put up with that with their own disarray inside of themselves and their own spiritual practice and figuring out what’s going on, but then they have to figure out this whole other mess that is there. And for me the mess is an adolescent stage of development, which is where we are.  This practice is only a hundred years old, give or take a year or two and… you know we are not there yet. You know, Buddhism is, you know…. In Japan now we could say it’s an 1800-year-practice. So in those 1800 years yeah in 1800 years of practice they figured out a few things, and competition is one of them. 

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Video 60 Question 13, Day 2, Berlin, 0843-0847
and maybe they never had competition, I don’t know. 

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Video 61 Question 14, Day 2, Arizona, 0000-0153
Topic: No Video - Rajive and Don Alexander

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Video 62 Question 15, Day 2, Arizona, 0000-0248
Topic: Can divergence of beliefs of different styles be resolved?
So for me, I don’t feel that these differences can be resolved nor is it … beneficial to be resolved. People have differences of their opinion, they have differences of practice, it’s like a recipe for a certain kind of cake, every good cook has their own little take on how to make this cake really taste like the authentic yellow pound cake for instance you know. And that’s the richness of human mind and the richness of our understanding of the universe. And I…. you know having a unity for me is not having agreement. I don’t believe in agreement, I don’t believe in sameness because in nature.. look.. no two snowflakes are the same, no two crystals of water are the same, no two human beings are the same, no two leaves are the same. What makes us think in our human existence that agreeing with each other is such a great thing? Now for some people it is very important to learn through experience of money as a commitment process and for me as a practitioner of a system that asks US$ 10’000 for mastery we are asking that person to commit their life and the US$ 10’000 for me is the least of their worries. They have to commit to surrendering their livelihood to Reiki, they have to commit to support their family through Reiki, they have to commit to break and let go of all of their believe systems they have about themselves and about the universe and to be open to changing everything in their lives. 

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Video 62 Question 15, Day 2, Arizona, 0248-0501
It’s not a matter of bucks in the bank, definitely not…..  3:54  It’s part of our spiritual practice.  And everybody, as far as I’m concerned, has the capability to hand me US$ 10’000 when they’re ready. And it has proven to be so time after time after time. And most of these people, this is the most money they’ve ever accumulated in their lifetime and probably never will again. 

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Video 62 Question 15, Day 2, Arizona, 0501-0627
So it doesn’t matter how many loaves of bread a Dollar buys in your country, this is not the point. The point is: are you willing to really give yourse 

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Video 62 Question 15, Day 2, Arizona, 0627-0925
So we’re again talking about a spiritual practice. We have to get above social norms and social judgements and social understandings about how much dignity a person can have. 

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Video 62 Question 15, Day 2, Arizona, 0925-1048
I love the story because it so identifies a lot of my own prejudices and my own believe systems that I had from the very beginning and a lot of these were broken when I, the first time I went to Russia because not only did I go to Russia .. I was really broke at the time, I hardly… I didn’t have any money to pay my employees in my office and here I was spending, you know, a thousand Dollars to go to this country and maybe not come back with any money because of course Russia had no money, that was my believe system and that they wouldn’t…if they did have that they wouldn’t pay for Reiki… 

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Video 62 Question 15, Day 2, Arizona, 1048-1415
So when I got to Russia I was told that I would have one day with people who wanted to be master candidates and at that time there were 2 or 3 Russian speaking masters and they had just be initiated but all the other masters initiating in Russia were from other countries and flew in and did classes and flew back out. And they were not able to ask for US$ 150 for first degree, they just couldn’t bring themselves to do that. So I was to address these master candidates and of course one of the big questions was about the money, US$ 10’000. So I tell you I did a lot of Reiki treatment on myself, I did a lot of nashing of teeth and I knew that I had to walk in there and say “you pay your initiating master US$ 10’000, I don’t care what they ask you, you pay it!”  I went in and I said “you know, this system is like a recipe and I want you to know that I paid US$ 10’000 to my grandmother for my commitment to Reiki, for being a Reiki Master and at the time I had no idea why I was doing this, because I didn’t even know what that meant. And I said “over the years I’ve initiated many masters and I want you to know that whether you know it or not, you will be a Reiki Master in this system and you will be a Reiki Master in a world community and though you cannot imagine travelling outside of Russia, now, you will! And when you go outside of Russia, I want you to be the same, I want you to have the same commitment to the system, I want you to have paid the same money and I want you to be able to hold your head up and say I’m a Master of Usui Shiki Ryoho, just like you! 

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Video 62 Question 15, Day 2, Arizona, 1415-1520
… They stood up and gave me a standing ovation and I nearly fell to the floor. And some years after that I was in a master seminar with a man who was there and he said “you know, you came on the eve of the USSR breaking up because that was the only way legally I could go to Russia actually. And he said “here was this giant that had been brought to it’s knees and split apart and we had no dignity left and when you said that to us you gave us back our dignity and our desire to be a Reiki Master in the world.” And he said “we never even imagined that”. And he said “you gave us something to work for”. 

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Video 62 Question 15, Day 2, Arizona, 1520-1700
17:00 

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Video 63 Question 16, Day 2, Arizona, 0000-0139
Topic: Reconcile Head and Heart
In nature there are always activating forces and restraining forces. It is natural to have restraining and activating forces. And sometimes, you know, you would think that … some people say “oh, this is an activating force but this is a restraining force, and I would say “no, no, that’s an activating force and this is a restraining force”. So it becomes really a personal, subjective judgement about what’s activating and restraining. The point is that it’s something that is coming together and seemingly in conflict.” 

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Video 64 Question 17, Day 2, Arizona, 0000-0151
Topic: Reconcile Head and Heart - Continuation of Video 63
And what happens in activating and restraining forces is that there is a reconciling force. And always the reconciling force is something that’s greater than these two positions. Right? Like there’s this physics theory that… I try to remember how to say… which is that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. And that’s also true about this activating/restraining thing is that the reconciling force, which we might call Reiki, brings something to creation and there is something new that evolves because of this. So in our human endeavour we always will have somebody saying “Yea” and somebody saying “Nay” and there will be a reconciling force and then something new will be created. 

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Video 64 Question 17, Day 2, Arizona, 0151-0246

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Video 64 Question 17, Day 2, Arizona, 0246-0407
So.. in the sense of people squabbling about “I have the right Reiki” or “I have the only Reiki” or “I have Reiki from… you know, Krishna or whatever” you know all of this is working out the individual’s process and also it adds to this restraining and activating force on this global level what we call the .. what I call the global Reiki community. And Reiki is our reconciling force and I believe that when we are really ready to surrender to that reconciling force and are able to hold the creative dissidence that is happening right now, we are going to get something really great.  So if we can imagine ourselves in a cauldron just being stirred by the great hand of Reiki… 

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Video 64 Question 17, Day 2, Arizona, 0407-0647
We’re preparing and we are also composed for something much greater than we could ever imagine And I believe that it doesn’t matter about heart/mind because… in the Japanese language it’s heart/mind, they are connected… Kokoro I believe is the word. So heart/mind and it has to be balanced. So in the martial arts when you’re standing with a sword, ready to kill someone, well actually the military in Japan, when you are standing with a sword, ready to kill somebody you have to have Y E S!! And it has to be the congruency of your heart and your mind saying YES. It has to be complete because otherwise you dishonour the person you are killing because you are not fully present. 

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Video 64 Question 17, Day 2, Arizona, 0647-0750
Presence means having your heart/mind in alignment and being there. 0653 So our western idea….OK?  Our western idea of separating heart/mind is really not beneficial to us. And I believe it is actually why people are so… now… are to traumatized by war, because they don’t go in to the battlefield with YES. They go into the battlefield with their mind saying yes and their heart saying no. And they come out totally damaged because a human being, a soul cannot handle that kind of dissonance. It’s too much. 

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Video 65 Question 18, Day 2, Arizona, 0000-0204
Topic: Takata’s role in the cultural exchange and the resistance she faced
Many people ask about the reason why Chujiro Hayashi didn’t accept Hawayo Takata as a student in the beginning.  I actually have this question and it was kind of unanswered for a few years and then there was some understanding that came to me that in Japan…. during this time there was a lot of confusion and some of that confusion was about nationalistic ideas of Japan’s culture being exported to other countries and in the same way other countries’ cultures being imported into Japan, which was not actually welcomed because for the most part the Japanese considered everyone else on the planet barbarians.  

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Video 65 Question 18, Day 2, Arizona, 0204-0224
So they didn’t want their refined culture … represented by flower arrangement, tea ceremony, martial arts and those kind of things, they didn’t want them to be taken out into the barbarian world and destroyed, basically. So when I found this out I thought “well maybe that was one of the reasons why he refused her”, I don’t know. Even though she spoke Japanese as her first language, she was fully Japanese in parentage but she was born in Hawaii and was going to go back to Hawaii, that was very clear. 

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Video 65 Question 18, Day 2, Arizona, 0224-0528
he reconsidered and after consulting the other members of the association, he was willing to take her on as a student. And she became of course the most diligent, the most disciplined and the most passionate of students.  4:09 

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Video 65 Question 18, Day 2, Arizona, 0538-0735
So I don’t know how long she went somewhere… but she came back on an appointed day and Chujiro Hayashi kind of made a speech, a farewell speech to his students about what his predictions were, about Japan attacking the US and how they would be in war and what, you know, Hawayo Takata could do to save her family and herself and so on. And also he recognized Hawayo Takata as his successor by giving her all of his worldly possessions, that’s a very usual thing to do in Japan for succession. And then he laid down and in a little while stopped breathing and went into transition. This is what Hawayo Takata would say in her story.  I won’t get into this but I believe that this… she said that this was the most … spiritual moment of my life. And when she said that you just had this feeling of this man, knowing that this was his time to die and knowing that he could actually choose it and that he did it. And I don’t believe it was through a suicide. Maybe some historian researcher will tell me otherwise but even so he still chose this moment. And in Japan that’s a very honourable death. 

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Video 65 Question 18, Day 2, Arizona, 0735-0858
So then Hawayo Takata eventually went back to Hawaii and during the war many of the people in Hawaii were put into internment camp  or (0745) they were contained in their plantation … (räusper), exuse me. (0754) They were contained in the plantation housing areas. So Hawayo Takata somehow and it is said that she followed Chujiro Hayashi’s instructions, she was able to travel from island to island freely. And she gave Reiki treatments, she taught Reiki, she did a lot of things but that was very, very unusual for a Japanese person, either man or woman, to be able to leave their island of residence and travel freely, that was unheard of. Her family never were put into internment camps and my mother tells stories of taking cookies and treats to her friends who were in the camps. So there were camps in Hawaii.  And this some people don’t believe and some people say it didn’t happen but I believe my mother. (laughs) (0856) (räusper)  

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Video 65 Question 18, Day 2, Arizona, 0858-1148
So in one generation they went from basically being slaves to running the state of Hawaii and to healing the people in the state of Hawaii through their professionalism. And this particular change, you know, was really interesting because my grandmother Hawayo Takata at the time she was, I don’t know, I mean how much money do you think she collected for Reiki treatment then, I have no idea, you know, a few Dollars. But some she’s a very frugal person, somehow she saved all her money, would buy a little plot of land, which is very Japanese, you know, land is it. So you buy a little plot of land and then you buy another little plot of land and pretty soon she moved to Honolulu in the 1950’s and was able to buy a piece of land on McCauley Avenue and it was on this land that the first condominium unit in Honolulu was built, amazing. For a Japanese woman who was born on a plantation to have done this through Reiki. 

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Video 65 Question 18, Day 2, Arizona, 1148-1300

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Video 66 Question 19, Day 2, Arizona, 0000-0138
Topic: The conclusion from Takatas achievement for today … walls in 2016?
So it was true that in my early years after the time that I was 30 it seemed like, and I will say “seemed like”, I used a lot of other people’s opinions to make my own decisions. However there was a part of me that the really important decisions that I made, I didn’t care what anybody thought. You know, I married a man that I should have never married because my mother told me that I had to get married because I couldn’t live out of wedlock with a man. So that was about the last time I ever did really anything important in my life, let somebody else’s say so. 

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Video 66 Question 19, Day 2, Arizona, 0138-0348
However, when I came to Reiki and then my grandmother died. It seemed instantly but it was a couple of years later. And then I was recognized as the lineage bearer or Grand Master of the system, her successor. I tried to listen to all the voices and somehow come to a compromise about what I should do and what should happen and what direction will we take and so on. But I started to find my own will and that was very important for me. One of the very first times that I had a difference of opinion with this group of masters was in 1983 when we were drawing up the foundation of the Reiki Alliance. And people really wanted to exclude Barbara Weber, because at that point she was saying really nasty things about us and ….being very righteous, I think that’s an accurate word.  I wanted to include her… I was… I did not found the Reiki Alliance in order to have my own organisation. I really want this on the record! I wanted to found an organisation that would lift everybody up to a higher purpose so that we can all sit in the same circle. So I kept inviting Barbara Weber Ray and her… the masters that were her students or her masters actually to please come to the Reiki Alliance, so that we could have a place to sit and talk. 

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Video 66 Question 19, Day 2, Arizona, 0348-0536
But that wasn’t going to happen. And that’s okay. But I just felt that that was really important. And then as the years went by I just realized that if I could say YES, a full Yes to anything that I did, initiating a Reiki Master, having a first degree class at a certain place, getting married to my ex-husband… my husband then or moving to Canada or moving back to Santa Fe or wherever, whatever I was doing. If it were my decision then I could own it. And if I needed to make another decision, I could make that decision, but it would be all mine. And that’s what I have gone to since then. And it’s frustrated a lot of people and it sometimes frustrates me but I feel like this YES is a very important piece and what it did for me was it broke down the walls inside of me. I felt like I had all these different personas inside of me and they were all fighting with each other. And when I needed to have congruency then I needed to break all these walls down and listen to all the voices inside of me and come to a place where is was really YES. 

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Video 66 Question 19, Day 2, Arizona, 0536-0756
And then I started looking around and by that time I was in Germany,  I lived in Germany for five years and I lived in Hamburg, which is very close to Berlin and I had initiated a master who lived in Berlin, West Berlin, who was going to the East to teach classes, illegally. And so the Berlin wall was very real for me and I was there when it opened. I mean “opened” is a very accurate word, because it just opened.  I thought to myself “I hope the world learns a lesson from this”. That you can put up an artificial wall but it doesn’t keep families from loving each other or wanting to be with each other, it doesn’t keep people separated. It just is an artificial structure that brings pain. And it seemed at that moment, because of the way that the wall opened that maybe we had come to another order of relationship in… between nations and between people in the world. And I have to say that after this there has been a kind of… in my opinion, a kind of back-stepping that.. and maybe it’s going forward and we’ve met another impasse. But somehow today, in 2016, you know we’re looking at countries in Europe building walls, literally building walls again, because they want to keep out their brother and sister who are starving to death, who fear for their life so much that they’re leaving their beloved homeland. 

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Video 66 Question 19, Day 2, Arizona, 0756-0956
There is a wonderful saying that says “if you have enough build a longer table rather than a wall”. And it’s like this is what we need to do.  

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Video 66 Question 19, Day 2, Arizona, 0956-1236
Now I’ve always said to people, especially in the US, you know, if you want to make a difference in the world, do your self-treatment, because this will change the atmosphere of your life, make it more peaceful and that will make your community more peaceful and so on, which I still agree with. And now we have to put a little bit of our .. we have the saying  … where our money where a mouth is. We have to actually give. And I’m surprised that there aren’t some kind of way that we can all give money and create a way for these people to be supported. And I just think that we are being so uncreative with the solution and that spending on top of that millions of Dollars to erect more walls, just seems like totally crazy to me. 

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Video 67 Question 20, Day 2, Arizona, 0000-0156
Topic: Barbara Weber versus Phyllis as successor to Takata?
But because there is another factor which is that the energy came to me and this Hawayo Takata had no control over. I believe that this was also true about Chujiro Hayashi. He might not have wanted Takata, Hawayo Takata, to have been the successor but he got where the energy was going and he surrendered to it. It wasn’t that I was the favourite of my grandmother, let me tell you. She wanted me to be very different. And she was not happy with me but she also recognized something inside of me, that I didn’t even recognize myself in truth. And…. 

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Video 67 Question 20, Day 2, Arizona, 0156-0245
As a juxtaposition, during the time when I started to travel with her and take my training with her, she and Barbara had a falling out and she wouldn’t even speak Barbara’s name. She was so angry. And because she had a heart condition my mother said “don’t even ask her what’s happening!”. But she wouldn’t have said anything anyway, it was so painful for her to talk about it. So there was a split between those two and there was a resignation almost that I might be her successor. And I’m not playing myself down, I mean… 

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Video 67 Question 20, Day 2, Arizona, 0328-0453
This was all very interesting, you know, because I hardly knew what Reiki was, much less try to work out all these nuances on an energetic level and on a personal level and you know here I was asking .. asked to be the Grand Master and all the people were older than I was, including the people that were around my age, they were still one or two years older than I was, they had mostly all… had years more of experience in Reiki and I was supposed to be their Grand Master.. I mean… you know, I didn’t really seem appropriate at the time. 

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Video 67 Question 20, Day 2, Arizona, 0453-0638

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Video 67 Question 20, Day 2, Arizona, 0638-0841
Barbara took the stands of being the only one who had better training than us, that had received a… more symbols and so on and eventually said that she was the only Reiki Master that my grandmother, Hawayo Takata, had ever actually initiated, that all. the rest of us were not really Reiki Masters. So that put me and all of us into this question “Are we really Reiki Masters?” And that was the best thing that could have happened to all of us, including me, because I had to go inside myself and find this truth. You know, am I a Reiki Master or not? Do I feel like I’ve gotten what I need from my Master? And eventually the answer was yes. So… She pushed me in a lot of ways, some not nice. But I have to say and I said this at the time in the 1980s, she was the gift that my grandmother left me. She made me, forced me to go inside and find the strength that I needed to have this position. And to be able to nourish and have the community nourish this part of me because I believe that all of us initiated by Hawayo Takata had the possibility of being her successor. I mean, I don’t feel like I was special in the sense of I had more education or I had the right education or I had her bloodline or anything… that… that actually I don’t think had anything bearing on the case at all. 

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Video 67 Question 20, Day 2, Arizona, 0841-1008
And then when I was recognized then the community nourished this part of me and kept recognizing it and grew me. So the first 10 or 15 years was a gardening project, really, of the Reiki community and they did a great job because I came out of it whole, I feel like the community came out of it a better.. a better community. And I feel like I’ve grown into a .. I’ve grown into a Grand Master. And I’m… that’s not about recognizing myself or … what can I say … well, it’s not announcing myself as a Grand Master, like many people have. It’s about acknowledging the achievement of a community to grow it’s leader. And I think they’ve done a wonderful job. And in that process I’ve healed a lot of my personality quirks, well they don’t ever go away but I feel them to the point where I feel like I can be a good human being and that’s all what I can ask for really. 

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Video 68 Question 21, Day 2, Arizona, 0000-0208
Topic: Individual as successor or can it be a group?
The succession question for me had been one that has been foremost in my mind since 1983. And … of course back then I was so young, that I was gonna live forever, and we didn’t really have to think about it. But I did think about it because my grandmother’s death created so much havoc for all of us and at that time of course we were still in this conversation with Barbara Weber and I thought my grandmother could have been more clear and so on. And at the same time realizing how advantageous it was to have a restraining force, you know, this activating/restraining, it was fabulous.  

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Video 68 Question 21, Day 2, Arizona, 0208-0320
Then about maybe 10 years ago or so… oh no before that, maybe 15 years ago I really thought, if I … my ideal situation about my successor is that they would appear now so that I could.. they could be with me and they would learn from me and so on. And I had in mind a young woman to do this and … basically it’s clear that she has her own path, that it’s not this. So I gave that up and I thought well, okay, if that’s not it then what? 

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Video 68 Question 21, Day 2, Arizona, 0320-0417
I didn’t know how the succession would work and that I needed to study it and I needed to really get the master community involved. I always thought that the successor would come from the body of masters that I had initiated, which kind of makes sense and it might actually be so. I have no idea. I don’t have a person in mind at all. There have been people who have come to me and said “I feel like I’m going to be your successor”. And I just have studied them over the years and I don’t have this feeling, right now anyway. 

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Video 68 Question 21, Day 2, Arizona, 0417-0528
So when I .. found out that I had cancer and the treatment for it was so effective and so quick actually, I feel like the Reiki community was alerted but we didn’t do anything about it. And I believe my body really has served me because  three years ago we started on these… having these weekends called succession weekends. And they were not about voting to see who the best candidate was, which actually people did come thinking that. 

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Video 68 Question 21, Day 2, Arizona, 0528-0725
But we are working on … investigating what are the functions of the spiritual lineage? Is there an energetic essence called the Master Body? Which I have spoken about from 1985 or 6. I believe there is a Master Body. There is an energetic Body that includes all Reiki Masters and especially all masters in the system and that they carry responsibility for the system because they’re masters. And we investigate what is the process of succession? What actually happens energetically? You know, where will this succession go? And what I’ve realized personally for myself is that of course somebody is not going to apprentice with me and be the next me. Somebody is going to appear at the time that’s very close to my death and they’re going to be recognized as the lineage bearer. And this person will take Reiki a whole other step that I cannot even imagine. 

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Video 68 Question 21, Day 2, Arizona, 0725-0911
I still have my little antenna out seeing when this person will arrive. But what I’m now looking for is not almost like who they got initiated by or whatever, it’s how their mind works. Because what I realize is that what was perhaps different from me that I was different from many other people who could have been the successor is the way my mind works, was inclusive, was universal, could see patterns, could make sense of what seemed to be conflicts and appreciate that they actually were necessary in order to go to the next step and things like that. 

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Video 68 Question 21, Day 2, Arizona, 0911-1117

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Video 68 Question 21, Day 2, Arizona, 1117-1153
So, whoever comes now, they have have what we call a millennial brain. They have to…. they have to be able to really see you know the globe and our world community as one. And all these young people do. I mean they get it by you know, being born with computers in their hand. I mean… I don’t know…. I don’t get it. But I really get how different their perception is and how oecumenical their view point is. 

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Video 68 Question 21, Day 2, Arizona, 1152-1154
touching …really touching 

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Video 69 Question 22, Day 2, Arizona, 0000-0156
Topic: Individual as successor or can it be a group? - Continuation of Video 068

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Video 69 Question 22, Day 2, Arizona, 0156-0328

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Video 69 Question 22, Day 2, Arizona, 0328-0453

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Video 69 Question 22, Day 2, Arizona, 0453-0638

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Video 69 Question 22, Day 2, Arizona, 0638-0841

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Video 69 Question 22, Day 2, Arizona, 0841-1000

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Video 69 Question 22, Day 2, Arizona, 1000-1102
And it’s touching, really touching. 

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Video 69 Question 22, Day 2, Arizona, 1102-1300
Topic: continuation from Video 068 ...one individual as successor or group?
So the succession may of not be one person, I don’t know. It could end up being a group of people, but for sure the master body of this system needs to be able to open to another way of thinking and another way of being as masters, I would say a higher expression of mastery in order for the succession-process to be successful. And what I mean by successful is that it is done not without conflict because I don’t believe that there is a possibility of no conflict but I believe that we can see the conflict as a natural progression toward a creative resolution, reconciliation. And if they don’t keep that in mind, if they vote… if they want to take a vote by personality, then I will have failed. Because this position is not about personality, I mean, I would have lost, hands down if they would have taken a vote on personality, because my personality was a wreck. Reiki healed me. This having to force myself out of my personality idiosyncrasies to think bigger and to think, you know, more humane, you know, it made me this way. You know, I might have had leaning sort of. But y’know it made me give up a lot of personality distortions. And it’s not about personality….. 

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Video 69 Question 22, Day 2, Arizona, 1300-1459
So the succession process is a process and it is very exciting because last weekend… a weekend in February in Mexico a small group of us got together to speak about succession. And because my cancer is active again and I don’t know how many years I have of active duty so to speak, I feel time really pressing on me now.  

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Video 69 Question 22, Day 2, Arizona, 1459-1606

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Video 69 Question 22, Day 2, Arizona, 1606-1736
I’m very, very excited by this because … it gives me not hope but a way to carry this system forward into the future and I believe that not only the system but the whole of the global Reiki community. 

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Video 70 Question 23, Day 2, Arizona, 0000-0200
Topic: What do you mean by "THIS system"? / Do you consider yourself GM, lineage bearer for all of Usui Shiki Ryoho?
When I refer to this system or the system or the system as I teach it or the system that Hawayo Takata passed on I’m speaking about a system called “Usui Shiki Ryoho” which was the original name of the system as Hawayo Takata taught it, however she just called it Reiki because it was easier. I guess. And… Usui Shiki Ryoho translated roughly into English is “The Usui System of Natural Healing”. But they didn’t understand that the naming the system actually named a certain form of practice. So when that became more clear then I also in the late 1990s decided to add the lineage because that really identified it as a specific practice. So for me its Usui Shiki Ryoho honouring the lineage of Mikao Usui, Chujiro Hayashi, Hawayo Takata and Phyllis Furumoto. 

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Video 70 Question 23, Day 2, Arizona, 0200-0357
One of the things that happened in the mid 1990s is that there was a gentleman in Germany who 0221 trademarked  0223 äh Usui Shiki… no …. trademarked 0226 Usui system of natural healing, trademarked the Reiki Kanji and a number of other things and felt that he was doing this in service to this system because he felt that I wasn’t doing my job, which he might have been right, I have no idea. So I got into a very interesting conversation with him, we’ll call it a conversation between our attorneys and eventually they awarded these – trademarked phrases and the symbols, like the Kanji being a symbol at that point to me, because I was the rightful owner. 

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Video 70 Question 23, Day 2, Arizona, 0357-0526
You asked about the Reiki Alliance and the Reiki Alliance is an organization that was founded by… partly by me and a group of masters initiated by Hawayo Takata, in  983. And now of course the membership of the Reiki Alliance includes members from all over the world and from many, many different masters. The Reiki Alliance is a kind of … association for masters who practice this specific system. 

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Video 70 Question 23, Day 2, Arizona, 0526-0648
Topic: Do you consider yourself GM, lineage bearer for all of Usui Shiki Ryoho?

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Video 71 Question 24, Day 2, Arizona, 0000-0128
Topic: What do you mean by "THIS system"? / GM, LB of Usui Shiki Ryoho? Continuation of previous Video 70
So a master for me has a least five different aspects. There is the initiator, the teacher, the mentor, the student and the tradition keeper. So when people say “I’m a Reiki teacher” my response in my head is to say, “Oh, I see, so you’re not claiming responsibility for being an initiator, for being a mentor, for being a student or for being a tradition keeper”. And for most of the Reiki teachers that I know that’s true actually. 

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Video 71 Question 24, Day 2, Arizona, 0128-0316
So then as Grand Master I believe that there are several different aspects of Grand Master which we are starting to articulate now which is very interesting. And one of those aspects is bearing the lineage, is actually the lineage bearer.  

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Video 71 Question 24, Day 2, Arizona, 0316-0439
So when Paul and I formed the Office of the Grand Master I thought it would be clearer if I were also be referred to as a lineage bearer.   Now whether or not one person will be able to be the Grand Master of this practice Usui Shiki Ryoho in this lineage … I don’t know. 

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Video 71 Question 24, Day 2, Arizona, 0439-0551

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Video 71 Question 24, Day 2, Arizona, 0551-0804
So I’m very excited by this process and… excited because it expands my awareness of my own life and what I’ve been doing all these years. 

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Video 72 Question 25, Day 2, Arizona, 0000-0121
Topic: What do you mean by "THIS system"? / GM, LB of Usui Shiki Ryoho? Continuation of previous Videos 70 and Video 71
I have this idea that this practice is like a heritage seed. It isn’t the practice that has the most members or students anymore but  from which many of these came. So whatever happens to this system is going to affect the other systems of practice, the other forms of practice. And that’s okay because we are all interdependent anyway, I mean it’s obvious that we are. 0103 And ähm … 

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Video 72 Question 25, Day 2, Arizona, 0121-0301
Whether or not those people in practices that are named Usui Shiki Ryoho recognize me as the Grand Master, my passing and the succession will affect their practice to a certain extent. Not because they want it to but because it just is so, I believe that and it will affect… as it will affect all the other practices that call themselves something else. Mainly because a lot of people have founded their practice in resistance to me. And if you found a practice in resistance to me then I hate to say it, but you are as connected to me as those who feel like they are connected to me.  One of the things that I have asked people over and over again if they want to start their own practice, please go ahead and do so but name it something else so that students have an understanding about what they are practicing. So all the people who have Usui Shiki Ryoho as their, you know, name of practice are holding that name in some way in resistance to change it. Because if they chose Usui Shiki Ryoho at the time, even in 1988 they would have recognized me as the lineage bearer. Because it was in fact the only system basically that existed. 

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Video 72 Question 25, Day 2, Arizona, 0301-0443
So anything out of that should have been renamed and I’m not attached to this at all. I’m just saying to sort it out. This is for me what would have sorted it out much better. I did try actually to find a name for this system to separate it .. not separate it, but to differentiate it from other practices but I couldn’t do it and probably that’s true for them too. So okay. But in Japan this is very common, they change the name a little bit, they use a different character and it changes the name of the practice. So people are very clear about honouring each other and their own practice. And one of the things, this is little digression, but one of the things that are sad for me that in Japan what happened because of the way Reiki “returned” to Japan, it returned in a sense of resistance against me and resist… and also in competition. And you know that’s totally for me not the Japanese way. 

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Video 72 Question 25, Day 2, Arizona, 0443-0620

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Video 72 Question 25, Day 2, Arizona, 0620-0733
So fusion sometimes results in confusion. And I believe that one of the gifts of having clear different practices is that students get to choose which practice they can come to, that’s right for them in the moment.  I’m not a proponent of putting all the practices together and having one universal practice, that is not going to save the day. What’s going to save the day is for us is to be respectful with each other no matter what. 

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Video 73 Question 26, Day 3, Arizona, 0000-0210
Topic: Adaption into national requirements? (SwissReiki)

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Video 73 Question 26, Day 3, Arizona, 0210-0313

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Video 73 Question 26, Day 3, Arizona, 0313-0531

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Video 73 Question 26, Day 3, Arizona, 0531-0720

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Video 73 Question 26, Day 3, Arizona, 0720-0917

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Video 73 Question 26, Day 3, Arizona, 0917-1120

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Video 73 Question 26, Day 3, Arizona, 1120-1357

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Video 73 Question 26, Day 3, Arizona, 1357-1511

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Video 74 Question 27, Day 3, Arizona, 0000-0127
Topic: Adaption into national requirements? (SwissReiki) - Continuation of Video 73

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Video 74 Question 27, Day 3, Arizona, 0127-0245

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Video 74 Question 27, Day 3, Arizona, 0245-0400

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Video 75 Question 28, Day 3, Arizona, 0000-0231
Topic: "agreeing to disagree" ... Respect
This phrase “agreeing to disagree” puts me in mind one of the very first principles that I learned in practicing Reiki and that is “there’s no right or wrong way to be”. So I would like to say that this statement “agreeing to disagree” puts me in a place of being against somebody or disagreeing with their opinion. I would like to say, maybe people think this is a little too slippery, that we simply have different opinions. And I honour their opinion as much as I honour mine. If I don’t do that, then how could I ask others to honour my opinion or my practice without me honouring theirs? There was a period of time in the early 1900… 1990s, excuse me, 1990s where many of the colleagues that I was involved in and had workshops with and we were in community together, they made very snide remarks about some of the “new” forms of practice. And it didn’t sit very well with me but I didn’t know why until I finally figured out that they also reported to me conversations they’ve had had with students or members of the public where there was a kind of not so nice remark made of our practice and I said to them… well I said “If you don’t change your attitude toward the other practices, then how do you expect to be respected?” You know, it’s like “Do onto others as you would have them do onto you”, you know, it’s a very old, wise axiom. …. 

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Video 75 Question 28, Day 3, Arizona, 0231-0347
And actually in the last few years what I’ve come to realize is that the truth, the actual universal truth can only be found if all of us are willing to sit in circle and honour our own positions and speak our own positions without fear of retribution or judgement and be able to hear each other in the same way, so that we… if we could see these as vibratory waves, we would see these words come together and form a group voice. And this group voice is really the truth part. 

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Video 75 Question 28, Day 3, Arizona, 0347-0453
So we all have a measure of truth, because it’s our truth, it’s our individual truth and I have to assume that everybody who speaks their opinion or their idea about Reiki or about hand positions or about whatever, is speaking their own truth. They are not making it up. So if I can hope that that critical assumption is accurate, then for me we own our own truth and each of our voices is a part of the greater truth. 

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Video 75 Question 28, Day 3, Arizona, 0453-0600
Having said that, I am very clear about the practice that I teach and hold and I have ended up, you know, thinking myself a total liberal in politics and the way that I live my life. And being called conservative by my own students, “well why don’t you even consider changing this part of the system?”, “Well because that’s not what I was taught” “Well, how can you say that? That was 30 years ago, you know, don’t you like move on?” And, you know, part of my job not only as the Grand Master and lineage bearer, but part of my job as a Reiki master and a Reiki student is to take what I was given and to practice that PERIOD 

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Video 75 Question 28, Day 3, Arizona, 0600-0705

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Video 75 Question 28, Day 3, Arizona, 0705-1013
So I am very conservative, I am very, maybe even rigid, about the practice that I hold and keep but it’s because this practice has given me the richness of life that I could never ever hope to have had before my practice. And I know that if I’ve received this much in the last 30 years, then in the next 30 years I will receive even more. So why change it? You know, why change it? And I honour the other practices, they have emerged because of people’s need to have it changed and it’s served other people or a different priority like instead of my feeling where a few students who practice deeply is what I go for. Other people go for the more students on the planet that have Reiki, the better. And I don’t … subscribe to more is better. 8:19  So that’s okay, because what I found in the last years is that these two philosophies, if you will, of how to teach Reiki and how to “spread” Reiki, have come together to provide in the world an incredible Reiki community and it couldn’t have been done one without the other. So, yes, I hold my practice to be very clear, very strict and not without movement. 

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Video 76 Question 29, Day 3, Arizona, 0000-0133
Topic: Australia: Beth Gray / Barbara McGregor

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Video 76 Question 29, Day 3, Arizona, 0133-0303
Mary was in London during World War II, she lived through the bombing of London by the Germans and Germany was THE last place she ever wanted to go. So immediately after she was initiated as a master she meets this German woman, starts going to Germany to teach and that’s where she did most of her teaching in her career. And she changed and transformed for me a whole generation of German people who were holding on to their own wounds, inflicted by World War II and by the whole process of the Nazis and fascism and so on, and by their own German culture of being very strong and not very emotional. So Brigitte said that one of the things that she was always astonished, is how much people could cry. That they would come to a Reiki class and in Germany people just sat and wept for these days because they needed to because it was a part of their healing that needed to happen. 

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Video 76 Question 29, Day 3, Arizona, 0303-0441

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Video 76 Question 29, Day 3, Arizona, 0441-0605

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Video 76 Question 29, Day 3, Arizona, 0605-0740

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Video 76 Question 29, Day 3, Arizona, 0740-0839
You know her masters have taken her personality and her way of being with Reiki and taken in upon themselves to further that. And as a master who initiates other masters, there are masters that I’ve initiated, that I feel very much affinity to and somehow our personalities are very much the same and so it feels like they carry a part of my legacy without knowing it. And I believe that the masters that Beth Gray initiated there, do the same thing. That she was looking for someone specifically to carry this piece of her legacy, which she has done. And it’s a gift and a challenge in and of itself. 

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Video 77 Question 30, Day 3, Arizona, 0000-0105
Topic: Australia: Beth Gray / Barbara McGregor - Continuation of Video 76

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Video 77 Question 30, Day 3, Arizona, 0105-0236

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Video 78 Question 31, Day 3, Arizona, 0000-0200
Topic: Master-Student relationship ... AIRA

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Video 78 Question 31, Day 3, Arizona, 0200-0323

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Video 78 Question 31, Day 3, Arizona, 0324-0553
Video 79 Question 32, Day 3, Arizona, 0000-0120
Topic: 5 roles, Tradition Keepers of their own styles
The aspects of mastery or the roles of mastery, as I have spoken about earlier, are specifically for the practice that I teach and hold, Usui Shiki Ryoho under the lineage that I carry. If to generalize this to all Reiki masters, what I would offer is that these are aspects of mastery as I see them. And everyone has a choice of whether or not they’re willing to take on these roles. So I see that a teacher is one that’s very obvious.  
Video 79 Question 32, Day 3, Arizona, 0120-0226
And there are many other aspects to initiator that we don’t even know because we haven’t actually sat down and talked about it or shared experience about it, but this is something that I really long to do. Soon! 
Video 79 Question 32, Day 3, Arizona, 0226-0321
A mentor is something that as a quality and an aspect of mastery that from the very beginning we are asked to be mentors, for instance somebody else’s student comes to you and says “I’m lost, I just moved here, I need to have a Reiki master. Could I come and sit in on your classes or whatever?” And so you become their mentor.  
Video 79 Question 32, Day 3, Arizona, 0321-0458
And none of these roles have a hierarchy, there’s not one that’s more important than the other. Then there is the student, so we are all students of Reiki.   I really understand that we are all interconnected, that we are connected on many, many different levels and that as a student of this practice we get to further our own studentship while teaching, that’s part of the dynamic of being a master, is that we are a student and we teach at the same time. So we become.. this dynamic works in us all the time in a very beautiful way. 0455 (räusper) 
Video 79 Question 32, Day 3, Arizona, 0458-0653
In my mind tradition keeper begins with this understanding that I have had from my master and that is “you don’t change what I’ve given you”.  I find that all folk-art is taught by oral tradition, acupuncture, Chinese herbs, Shiatsu, Reiki. These.. all these martial arts all these are oral tradition teachings, you have a master, you have somebody you go to in person and that’s how you learn and you learn through doing. 
Video 79 Question 32, Day 3, Arizona, 0653-0824
The master gives you a few simple steps, you practice, practice, practice and then through your own practice and mentoring of your master you become a developed student. This part of the tradition is for me a human tradition. 0712  
Video 79 Question 32, Day 3, Arizona, 0824-0940
So I believe that in our folk-art tradition that it is very important for the good of our society to maintain these traditions. So that’s one example that I can give you and in another year, after contemplating this with other masters and other beings, I assume that I would be able to be more articulate about other aspects of tradition keeper. 
Video 80 Question 33, Day 3, Arizona, 0000-0059
Topic: Inherited dissonance?
Video 80 Question 33, Day 3, Arizona, 0059-0218
Video 80 Question 33, Day 3, Arizona, 0218-0321
So, people often see Chujiro Hayashi as… or it’s assumed…. It’s assumed that Chujiro Hayashi was Mikao Usui’s best student. Well, I don’t actually know whether that’s true, it was never my assumption. All I know is that he was a student of Mikao Usui. It’s very possible that he was the rebel of Mikao Usui and went off and did his clinic because he followed his heart. Whether or not Mikao Usui thought that this was a good thing, we’ll never know, I mean, excuse me but no amount of researchers is going to figure this out. 
Video 80 Question 33, Day 3, Arizona, 0321-0427
But found a clinic he did, he met Hawayo Takata and …. in response to Reiki showing him that Hawayo Takata was his successor he also sat in contemplation with the other masters that were in his circle and did something very unique at that time for him by giving the succession and following the energy of Reiki, which led Reiki out of Japan and into Hawaii and then into the rest of the world. 
Video 80 Question 33, Day 3, Arizona, 0427-0539
Was this an act of dissonance or an act of surrender? You know… I mean… I think it’s a bit of both actually myself. And I have to say that I never… I never said, or if I … if people understood that I said, I just want you to know that this is misunderstood, but I never said that Barbara Weber was not ever…. introduced as the successor to Hawayo Takata. Because I believe that it was totally possible. Before I came into Reiki, Barbara Weber was her pride student. She was educated, she was a great organizer, she doted on my grandmother, she wanted to further all of my grandmother’s wishes, which she did, totally. She helped her record a book that she wanted to write, she made it possible for Reiki to become a household word 
Video 80 Question 33, Day 3, Arizona, 0539-0630
I don’t believe that she actually changed the teaching that she received from Hawayo Takata. She might have added to it, but I don’t feel like she changed the actual teaching, because she was a really dedicated student. She did what her heart and her education and her being really needed to do for Reiki. And I will never call this dissonance. It wasn’t comfortable for me for sure. I didn’t like some of the things she said about me but about what she did, she followed her path and I did the same thing. And so did all the other masters that Hawayo Takata taught and initiated. 
Video 80 Question 33, Day 3, Arizona, 0630-0747
And that most of us were able to come together in the Reiki Alliance and to talk and to be a part of a similar energetic field was terrific. But it didn’t mean that we agreed, NO (laugh), definitely not. John Gray and I had many differences of opinion, but I totally respected him as a master.  
Video 80 Question 33, Day 3, Arizona, 0747-0909
It means that I can put my hands on a stranger and give them a treatment and at the end of that treatment I’m connected with that person. And I would serve him and fight for him and fight for his right to exist, because I know I’m connected to him.  8:42  But the point is, we are all connected together like this, Reiki just gives us the possibility to experience it. And this is the key gift of Reiki, is that we experience these kind of profound connections. So, if we have that, then what’s a little difference of opinion? 
Video 81 Question 34, Day 3, Arizona, 0000-0211
Topic: Reconciliation, Forgiveness, Apology, Rand?
Again, this is a… my problem because I know the question isn’t going to be asked, it’s just so weird for me to just say “I’m sorry”, you know, like where does that come from and what am I sorry for and you know there is that whole thing. So I’m just trying to formulate a starting point and then where to get to from there. 
Video 81 Question 34, Day 3, Arizona, 0211-0346
So a few years ago I was introduced in this little book called “The four agreements” by Don Miguel Ruiz and I really recommend it to all of us who practice Reiki because it’s a really great way to … measure and to take assessment of our own humanness in human relationships and in the relationships with the planet and everything else as well. And I …. these four little phrases run through my mind, always do your best, don’t take it personally, do not make assumptions and be articulate with your word.  I try to do that in my own mind. And of course, being a human being, when I do my best I often don’t do what other people want or expect. When I don’t take it personally, sometimes people think that I’m cold or I don’t care. When I don’t make assumptions, it means that I don’t assume that somebody is hurt, I don’t assume that this is being taken the wrong way or I don’t assume that it actually affects people, which is actually not usually accurate (laugh). 
Video 81 Question 34, Day 3, Arizona, 0346-0537
So anyway, I realized though when I was taking this language and trying to speak it that I really had to get into the mind set of German, you know and of being German.  I had an apartment in Hamburg and I really loved North Germany as a part of the country. And I was feeling very at home there. So it was easy for me to kind of slip into this German part of myself, I would call it. 
Video 81 Question 34, Day 3, Arizona, 0537-0702
But when I went to other countries and I didn’t have knowledge of their language, I didn’t really understand their culture and their cultural priorities, I realized that I often offended people or as they say here in America “was kind of like a bull in a China shop”. I just, you know, blundered my way through being an American, not really understanding that I might be offending people.  So there’s that part of me, being human. And then there’s the other part of me, which just is shy and sometimes not wanting to put myself on the firing line, which I think all of you can understand. So I have more courage these days and I also have more understanding about where other people come from, that I feel like everyone is doing their best. Everyone follows their path of Reiki and even though I may not like it or I don’t agree with it, I will fight to the death for your right to have your own path, because for me that is the gift of Reiki and the gift of this path. 
Video 81 Question 34, Day 3, Arizona, 0702-0909
And I have told my students this as well, that if we differ in opinion it’s okay for me on one hand, I may not like it, I may not like you for a few days but I will fight to the death to make sure that you’re right to disagree, or to have your own opinion more accurately. It’s preserved because that’s our inalienable right as a human being.  I also feel that, whether or not I like it, I’ve made assumptions and whether or not I like it, I not always said what I really needed to, because of my shyness or because I feel like I won’t be taken seriously. So there are many different relationships that I have that I don’t even know I have, out in the Reiki world and also relationships where I know that I’ve transgressed. And for all these times when you feel that I’ve transgressed, that I’ve entered your space unwillingly and uninvited, where I’ve offended you in some way, where my … where my loyalty to my master has caused you pain because it’s different from what you have learned is Reiki, and that has given you pain, for all these things I want to ask your forgiveness because it wasn’t my intention, it’s not the way I hold you and everyone has been a great teacher for me. And without you I wouldn’t be who I am today. 
Video 82 Question 35, Day 3, Arizona, 0000-0142
Topic: Forgiving yourself?
My burning question at the age of 30 was “What am I going to do with the rest of my life?”. I knew that I couldn’t continue to do what I did for the rest of my life, which was to work in a ski-area and basically have fun. It didn’t feel like this was my contribution to the world. Although I didn’t have very lofty ideas at that time, I just wanted to have the best ski-run ever. So I don’t know where this thought came from, except my father, who said “Phyllis, you really know how to have fun, now what about working?” 
Video 82 Question 35, Day 3, Arizona, 0142-0311
Video 82 Question 35, Day 3, Arizona, 0311-0517
Video 82 Question 35, Day 3, Arizona, 0517-0707
It’s hard to describe in words what that means, family duty. But it meant that I couldn’t quit because if I did I would let my family down. I mean, I so wanted to quit every week for the first ten years, because I would be challenged, I would be given things that I didn’t want to do, that I didn’t think I could do, put myself in places where it was… for me really, above my head, in every way. And finally, in the late 1980s or early 1990s, I can’t remember when, I just woke up one morning and thought “Okay, this is it. This is my life, I’m accepting it and forget about family duty because I can’t live this life as family duty. I have to live it as my own life.”  6:30  And this particular realization helped me in coming to this place that I referred to as the “Yes-place”, as the time, when I realized that I had to make all the decisions myself and that they couldn’t be somebody else’s decisions, that they had to be my decisions, and that if I did that and I didn’t like what was happening, I could make another decision. I mean it was fine for me to change my mind. And… 
Video 82 Question 35, Day 3, Arizona, 0707-0753
That transition period was really important for me because I realized how much of the time in my former life, I call it kind of a past life, that I had listened to other people and really relied on their direction of where to go. And that wasn’t so much so in Reiki and for sure at this moment, from then on, whatever I’ve done had been my decisions and I…. have reaped benefit and the consequences both of those decisions…. 
Video 82 Question 35, Day 3, Arizona, 0753-1045
Video 82 Question 35, Day 3, Arizona, 1045-1255
So in keeping to this feeling of doing my best at the time, I think that when I was… in the mid 1990s when I was going through this trademark thing, I had some regrets but I couldn’t have made a different decision, at the time, in 1983. I just couldn’t have, it was not to be done.  Another decision that I made, that people… that seemed to be a very big deal in the Reiki community, was in 1988 during the first Reiki Alliance conference in Europe in Friedrichsdorf. I made a very important speech. And unfortunately… I wasn’t…. I wasn’t able to be articulate and to be accurate in my word. So people misunder….. people misunderstood me, they interpreted this speech really differently and … than I had imagined they would and … I did my best. So basically this … the whole thing that it came to was that I … that I had listened with growing dismay about people saying “Well you’re the only one who has the power to initiate masters”. And I would tell them “You’re wrong. This is not about power”. 
Video 82 Question 35, Day 3, Arizona, 1255-1424
And finally what I realized was in order to dissipate this rumour, this misunderstanding, I needed to just open the doors. Because the doors were already been pride open by other masters who were initiating masters already, 
Video 82 Question 35, Day 3, Arizona, 1424-1607
So in this speech I tried to say (laugh) that the circle of masters who had actually given me their power to initiate, like there’s a word in English called “abdicate”, they gave this power to me and I believe it was the good thing to do at that moment, 1983… ah 1982 because this would have split the Reiki community I think maybe irrevocably, if so many masters had started to initiate masters for even the first 5 years.  A lot of people didn’t like what I was doing but they couldn’t say anything ‘cause they had given me and said “you are the person to initiate masters in this system”. And that would have worked, if the system had stayed small, had stayed local but it didn’t… it just… in 1988 people were being initiated all over Europe, in India, in Canada, in Australia. You know, it’s like “Really? I’m going to initiate all these masters? Forget it!”  “I am not going to be an initiation machine, where people just send me their students, I initiate them and that’s it.  
Video 82 Question 35, Day 3, Arizona, 1607-1728
I made the speech and I said “you know, it is a master’s right to share their information and their calling as a master to any student that they feel is worthy. And it is up to you to prepare yourself for this step”. And I don’t know if any of the other messages have gotten through but the response was I had given away my power, I had… and I said “I haven’t given away anything. I had nothing to give away”, because this whole power thing was a misconception, you know, it’s not about giving away your power, it’s about sharing sacred tools so that a worthy student can step on the path of mastery and have their own experience of this. It’s not a… it’s a gift but in a kind of funny way. Because you know they are going to have hardship, challenges, confrontations… it’s going to take their life and totally change it. And… that’s a kind of funny gift I have to say. 
Video 82 Question 35, Day 3, Arizona, 1728-1821
I spent a lot of guilty feelings around this because it was so misunderstood at the time. I felt like I hadn’t been able to really articulate what I wanted to and, you know, at some point I just had to say “I did my best and it opened up the space and it was a little ungraceful but in the end it accomplished what I wanted. And that was to dispel this idea that it was only me who had the power to initiate masters. That was really important for me. 1807… So 
Video 83 Question 36, Day 3, Arizona, 0000-0207
Topic: Forgiving yourself? - Continuation of Video 82
They wanted to have kind of a physical “You can initiate masters and you can not!”, you know “You are not ready!” and “You are!” and I couldn’t have done that because it really, really for me was not my place to bless anybody to initiate masters nor to prevent them from initiating masters.   But… and I opened Pandora’s box, I admit.. but I feel like it was now a good thing. I wish I would not had used the sledge hammer but perhaps the key (laugh). But I didn’t have the key then. 
Video 83 Question 36, Day 3, Arizona, 0207-0414
So we got into kind of out-of-court discussion about who own the trademarks, which cost both of us a lot of money and time and energy and … I’m sure agro… aggravation, sorry, it’s a slang (laugh). 
Video 83 Question 36, Day 3, Arizona, 0414-0619
So I went to the Reiki Alliance and I asked the Alliance members to file for trademarking and local communities in the areas did trademark Reiki and the Kanji and some other… and a couple of other things and they paid for them. And they did a beautiful job, I really, I … was so touched by their willingness to do this for Reiki and for their practice. And also I was really… though I didn’t admit it at the time, I was really sad and wounded, Nr. 1 by Joop who was a master that I initiated, why didn’t he come to me and said “Look, you know, you’re not doing your job and if you don’t do your job properly…” and maybe he did and I didn’t hear it, I don’t know. 
Video 83 Question 36, Day 3, Arizona, 0619-0819
And the other thing was that in Germany there were many masters who were threatened by Joop’s holding these trademarks but they weren’t able to financially help me or weren’t willing to help me financially, because they felt like it was my fault anyway that I hadn’t taken care of this in the first place. So that was really horrible for me. There were a lot of different things going on and I … in my personality I was so unable to imagine or take in … solutions, because for me this was for me a major crisis within the Reiki community. I still have boxes of documents from this era (laugh). 
Video 83 Question 36, Day 3, Arizona, 0819-1039
And in the middle of all this I asked for the Reiki Alliance to become the association of licence … of licence masters, who would out of this trademark be able to set standards that were already set anyway for membership and that they would hold the membership of all licensed masters. And they refused to do it because they didn’t feel like this was a “Reiki way” of being. So at that point I felt so unsupported and so misunderstood and so fed up with this whole thing that I just dropped it, just like that, Paul Mitchell “Well, you know, I never supported this, ever… the whole trademarking thing, the licensure and any.. everything”. And I said “Well, it would have been good to know, because I wouldn’t have done this without your support”. Because at that point he and I were like partners in holding the OGM, because this was in 1996 or 7. We were partners and I said “You know, if I don’t have my partners’ support, then … We could have had this discussion and maybe something could have been gleaned and I would have been more aware of people who weren’t in agreement with me.” 
Video 83 Question 36, Day 3, Arizona, 1039-1303
So I just, you know, at that point between my personality and my lineage bearer self I was crushed. And I just dropped it, just like that. And I left a lot of people high and dry in my own community. Some masters actually left Reiki because of this situation. My relationship with the Reiki Alliance has never.. I don’t think healed from this particular process, on my part, because I felt not supported, not recognized and not heard….  There has been tremendous misunderstanding that has come out of this particular four year period…. And… there is nothing I can say to … convince people otherwise.  It was just assumption, after assumption, after assumption, that for me, especially with the Alliance members felt very painful because I realized, they didn’t know who I was, they didn’t know how much I thought for them and they didn’t know that I could see them and that I would be compassionate. So this was just a heartbreaker. 
Video 83 Question 36, Day 3, Arizona, 1303-1520
Could I have done something different? No, I felt like I did my best. Unfortunately … (laugh) unfortunately my best was not nearly good enough. Ahhh… I was not prepared for this.  If I have any regret in my whole time being recognized as the Grand Master, that’s the one. I never met Joop in person. I would…. Now I realize I should have several times met him in person. We only talked through attorneys. We never talked face to face. We didn’t go to court, it was settled out of court, so I didn’t even see him in court…. And I feel badly about that, because I feel like we only have the projection of who we think he or she or I was at the moment and it’s probably still present.  
Video 83 Question 36, Day 3, Arizona, 1520-1713
So… Can I forgive myself? Well, yes. I feel like I have. Because I couldn’t go on if I hadn’t. And I don’t know what I could have done differently.   If I knew then what I know now, it would have been a very different scene, and I didn’t.” Speaking about it helps, because I feel that I’m able to speak about it in a way that I don’t bring up my guilt and I don’t bring up feeling small and inadequate but I just bring up this overwhelming feeling of sadness that….. it couldn’t have been different. If that makes any sense. That I would have liked for it to have been different for everyone…. And it wasn’t. 
Video 83 Question 36, Day 3, Arizona, 1713-1828
Since then (laugh)… since then my life as Grand Master has been pretty mellow (laugh),   So these are the three places when you asked me about forgiving myself that come up for me and that there’s obviously energy still there, and I think rightfully so. It’s…. these were times where in our…. in my community anyway.. in this practice that there were significant changes of development that happened. 
Video 84 Question 37, Day 3, Arizona, 0000-0121
Topic: Has anyone ever suggested to let go of GM/lineage bearer?
As a part of this system, there is a lineage and this lineage is like our ancestry and to just deny it or to say it doesn’t exist anymore is a lie. So in this system, there will be a lineage. What that lineage looks like, I don’t know. Is it one person that will succeed me? Is it a group of people that will try and do the work together?   Is it possible for me to step back into a not so public role? Of course, I need to take care of myself, I feel that if I’m predominant, then… in visualness, then other masters will not have the opportunity to step into that place. 
Video 84 Question 37, Day 3, Arizona, 0121-0245
Is it possible to have a spiritual practice without some kind of a still point for the spiritual practice, a lineage, an ancestry? If, as I said, if everyone stopped recognizing me as the lineage bearer, as a Grand Master, then I wouldn’t be it anymore and I would still be a Reiki master. And I would still continue my life as a Reiki master. 
Video 84 Question 37, Day 3, Arizona, 0245-0414
I believe that if one of the elements is missing from this practice, like spiritual lineage, then it changes the dynamic of the nine elements and then the system breaks down. 
Video 84 Question 37, Day 3, Arizona, 0414-0522
And….. so there needs to be somebody. 
Video 84 Question 37, Day 3, Arizona, 0522-0613
The activating force is the preservation of this system. The restraining force is about personality. If people were able to think about me not as a personality but as a part of this system that they practice, I am just as essential as the symbols, as the hand positions, as the initiation, as themselves as masters. We don’t understand what the dynamic is but I know that the dynamic is there. 0603 (nods her head) 0605 So …. ähm… Ya! 0611  
Video 85 Question 38, Day 3, Arizona, 0000-0106
Topic: Has anyone ever suggested to let go of GM/lineage bearer? - Continuation of Video 84
Video 85 Question 38, Day 3, Arizona, 0106-0222
I mean, anything, anything really is possible. I don’t feel like I’m …. being …. I don’t feel like I’m being pessimistic about this, but realistic. And, you know, in order for this to work in a systematic way, you know … systemic way, where the master body holds this energy of lineage, we all need to rise to a much, much higher level of consciousness than we are now. You know, right now we are not even at consciousness. We have no idea about the responsibility, nor the energetic understanding of what we do in initiations. I mean, people have their theories but we really don’t understand it, we really don’t know it. 
Video 85 Question 38, Day 3, Arizona, 0222-0328
Video 85 Question 38, Day 3, Arizona, 0328-0517
5:02-5:16 (silence)  Yo! 5:17 
Video 86 Question 39, Day 3, Arizona, 0000-0125
Topic: What does Reiki want? What is Reikis global imperative today… ? Is reconciliation a part of it?
Video 86 Question 39, Day 3, Arizona, 0125-0234
prepare the system and perhaps the global community to serve our world, our global community of human beings and our global society 
Video 86 Question 39, Day 3, Arizona, 0234-0411
Video 86 Question 39, Day 3, Arizona, 0411-0512
Reiki has a very unique kind of leadership to offer. So this means that we have, we need as far as I’m concerned, to grow into that leadership ourselves, which means that it’s not a hierarchy it’s a circle. The power is in the circle. And I have always said to people “I am not the top of the line, I’m not the world expert, I am a student of Reiki that has a specific duty to this system”. But everybody has as their own gift, their own understanding that they bring to the system. But their sharing of this gift is not so imperative as mine. That’s the difference.  5:12  I have always seen myself as sitting in a circle of masters, first the masters that Takata initiated and now that that circle has grown so small I can count on one hand the number of masters now alive, I think…. I look to another circle, the circle that I call the Master Body…  5:46  Are we able to sit together in a circle either virtually or physically and talk from our heart-mind (touches third eye), and to share our truth and to listen to the truth of others equally? Are we able to take the leadership when it’s important and then to give it to another person when it’s their turn to lead?  
Video 86 Question 39, Day 3, Arizona, 0625-0857
08:11  Right now we hide this by good/bad, right/wrong, better than. Those are tricks of our human mind so that we don’t feel the pain of others, so that we don’t feel the pain of separation, so that we don’t experience this incredible vibrant joy of being connected. We have to reduce it so that we as an individual can live content to know that we are in control. 
Video 87 Question 40, Day 3, Arizona, 0000-0036
Topic: What does Reiki want? global imperative - Contiuation of Video 86 (global imperative) - possible end of Video
Reiki has taught me that all of this is not our human birthright and that we have the capacity to meet and to take in whatever comes to us….  Just recently there were a group of people who were speaking of this very thing “what is Reiki calling us to do?” … and what touched us all was this “Reiki is calling us to serve life”… 
Video 88 Question 41, Day 3, Arizona, 0006-0117
Topic: How would you like to be remembered / your legacy?
It is my hope that my legacy will be that I not only invited the Reiki community to move to a higher expression but to have guided it so that it became a higher expression of itself. And what I mean by this, and I don’t mean to be critical of where we are because every level of expression is necessary and needs to be lived thoroughly,   And what we’re moving into as a community for me is a maturity, but it needs to what I feel like Reiki is asking of all of us is… 
Video 88 Question 41, Day 3, Arizona, 0117-0229
Is to do this reconciliation not for reconciliation’s sake but as a stepping stone to the next stage of development of this practice, and I mean practice globally. That is to be able to … develop into a practice that serves humanity and serves life. That’s very, very clear from the self-treatment of those individuals to associations and groups of people who do specific projects to the global community that actually votes and informs the government leaders of our times and that actually make a difference on a political and on a spiritual and on a mental level and the only way we can do that is to act together. 
Video 88 Question 41, Day 3, Arizona, 0229-0315
Video 88 Question 41, Day 3, Arizona, 0315-0435
Video 88 Question 41, Day 3, Arizona, 0435-0604
Video 88 Question 41, Day 3, Arizona, 0604-0700
Video 88 Question 41, Day 3, Arizona, 0700-0801
Video 88 Question 41, Day 3, Arizona, 0801-0933
I’d like to be known as the person who saw that and fanned the flames. 
Video 89 Question 42, Day 3, Arizona, 0000-0057
Topic: "absolute and relative world" - Contradictions
Video 89 Question 42, Day 3, Arizona, 0057-0152
Video 89 Question 42, Day 3, Arizona, 0152-0323
Video 89 Question 42, Day 3, Arizona, 0323-0424
Video 89 Question 42, Day 3, Arizona, 0424-0607
Video 89 Question 42, Day 3, Arizona, 0607-0654
Video 89 Question 42, Day 3, Arizona, 0654-0717
Video 89 Question 42, Day 3, Arizona, 0717-0818
Video 89 Question 42, Day 3, Arizona, 0818-0925
So I offer this to all of you who just don’t like me, which I totally understand. You know you don’t need to like me, you don’t even need to love me and you don’t need to recognize me. You just have to allow that I’m a human being who has a path and this path ended up to have this absolute … encouragement of lineage bearer. And I’ve done my best and I know that maybe I’ve could have done better if I’d have been a different person, but I wasn’t a different person. And I am lucky to have a family that is my … that has become my anchor in my relative world and at the same time have people around me to support me being my absolute best. So that’s a little pun a play on words, in English “absolute best”. 
Video 89 Question 42, Day 3, Arizona, 0925-1000
this concept will help you maybe and will help each other in being able to hold our personalities and to hold our gifts in the same hands. Thank you…. 
Video 90 Question 43, Day 3, Arizona, 0006-0211
Topic: Paul Mitchell - your relationship with Paul Mitchell / his role?
Video 90 Question 43, Day 3, Arizona, 0211-0413
Video 90 Question 43, Day 3, Arizona, 0413-0508
Video 90 Question 43, Day 3, Arizona, 0508-0600
Video 90 Question 43, Day 3, Arizona, 0600-0722
Video 90 Question 43, Day 3, Arizona, 0722-0829
Video 90 Question 43, Day 3, Arizona, 0829-0916
In 1992 we came together because he had had a feeling that he should step in and help me as the lineage bearer, as the Grand Master actually at that point. And I also had the same feeling. And we had not had a very friendly relationship for the last 2 years before this. So it was really reconciliation immediate that we came together and it was recognized by the Reiki Alliance as a community and so he became known as head of discipline and our office together was the office of the Grand Master. 0912 So.. (räusper) 0915 
Video 90 Question 43, Day 3, Arizona, 0916-1047
So since 1992 and 3, we started this relationship until now, he’s been a peer and this particular relationship of peer has been very important for me. He’s a very different person from me, personality-wise, we have very different approaches to money, to travelling, to ….lots of different details like that, but our approach and what we are called to do in Reiki is the same. So we have had just amazing experiences working together.  He is really clear that he is not a lineage bearer, anyway now, he’s 2 years older than I am. We don’t know if his position will be filled if he dies. He is very clear that he wants my position filled by one person when I die. And I don’t know really if that’s gonna happen. I would like to think that I’m open to any.. whatever comes up, with the energy of Reiki with the Master Body and with the community. 
Video 90 Question 43, Day 3, Arizona, 1047-1151
He has played a significant role of kind of anchor in all these years and has provided either the activating force or the restraining force in our discussions and vice versa. About 10 years ago we got kind of tired of the polarisation that this was creating. So after 2 or 3 years of actually going to counselling together and trying to work out our differences, we came to this conclusion that we were just very different personalities and that we didn’t really want to change each other. His reticence to talking, his way with money,  his ideas of what Reiki was and what Reiki wasn’t stimulated me to really research my own ideas and vice versa…. 
Video 90 Question 43, Day 3, Arizona, 1151-1313
Video 90 Question 43, Day 3, Arizona, 1313-1425
So, who is Paul: Well …. I have lots of levels of answers to that but for the most part he’s been my partner in the OGM… in the office of the OGM of… no, he’s been my partner in the Office of the Grand Master, he’s been in his.. from his own perspective supportive of everything that I’m doing and in his own way he has supported the lineage by not being the lineage bearer. 
Video 91 Question 44, Day 4, Arizona, 0000-0048
Topic: dreaming of picknick-bench - off camera
Video 92 Question 45, Day 4, Arizona, 0000-0033
Topic: fiddling with scarf
Video 93 Question 46, Day 4, Arizona, 0000-0153
Topic: four agreements - correction
A few years ago I ran across a little book, it was the rage back then, called “The four agreements” by Don Miguel Ruiz and I at first thought, well this is just like the precepts of Reiki and but just spoken in a different way. But then I started to realize that these four little phrases affected me in a different way, more directly maybe and with less questioning. So I’d like to share them with you because they have really made an impact in my life. The first agreement is “Be impeccable with your word”  The second agreement is “Don’t take anything personally”  The third one is “Don’t make assumptions”  And the fourth one is “Always do your best”  I feel as a human being that I’ve been able to use these in order to not only do my best and be sure that my communication is as best as I could be, but also to own my own humanness, my own understanding of situations and then realize afterwards that my best could have been better if I had known what I know now. So… 
Video 93 Question 46, Day 4, Arizona, 0153-0231
Topic: correction material
I’d like to start with “Always do your best”: I feel as Reiki Masters all of us do our best in every given moment. Often times it’s easy for outsiders to say “Well, why didn’t they… why didn’t she do this or why didn’t she do that?”. But it’s easy when you’re outside of the situation to see other options. Personally I believe that you and all Reiki Masters and myself included, always do our best in any given moment. 
Video 93 Question 46, Day 4, Arizona, 0231-0347
Topic: correction material
The one about “don’t take things personally”, that’s tough. Because in the beginning, especially in the early 1990’s I thought that the changes that were happening in different practices and the formation of new forms of Reiki were an affront to Hawayo Takata and of course I wanted to defend her. And so I definitely took things personally, if not personally also for Hawayo Takata. So I was a bit strict and a bit strong in those days and really confused because at the same time I really do believe that every person has a right to their own opinion and who they are. So even though my students differ in opinion and in theory from me I want to also say that I would defend their right to have their space, have their opinion and have their theory. 
Video 93 Question 46, Day 4, Arizona, 0347-0450
When we make assumptions, often times what we are doing is filling in the gap of the unknown. And I believe that as Reiki Masters and I wanted to train myself to do this, that if there is something that I don’t know, I try not to make an assumption in order to fill in the unknown, but to just allow it to be and to see what happens. Well, of course in the early days I wasn’t very good at this and I made lots of assumptions. And now I trust that the number of assumptions that I’m making to fill in the blanks have lessened and in making those assumptions I feel like I have put other people in boxes or put on to people certain attitudes that maybe weren’t correct. 
Video 93 Question 46, Day 4, Arizona, 0450-0630
Topic: correction material; Be impeccable with word
Be impeccable with your word, this one is really important for me. I really try to be impeccable, which means to say my truth as best I can in any given moment. And the most important part of this is the “in any given moment”, because the minute that I have a conversation with somebody, that idea or that word could change (0525) (cough) These five… these ….0540 These four agreements with myself have allowed me to look back and to… 
Video 94 Question 47, Day 4, Arizona, 0000-0047
Topic: Be impeccable with word - correction
And so: be impeccable with your word, be impeccable with your word, be impeccable…. Being impeccable with my word Being impeccable with my words Being impeccable with my words