Cluster: Original 22 and Master Body

 René's Highlights  Edith's Highlights
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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2. Cluster: Original 22 and Master Body

this passage here is interrupted ... but she crecounts the same episode and comments on Barbra Weber in Video 32, 33 and 67, 68, 80, 82
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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2. Cluster: OGM and LB
3. Cluster: Original 22 ...

RVediting: 15-2
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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Hier, wieder, sieht man den Einfluss von Mutter, die Phyllis zur Nachfolgerin von positioniert. Neu für die Reiki-Gemeinde.

RV Editing: 18-2
in Video 15 there is part about Barbara Weber missing but here (and later in Arizona) she talks about the same.
Mother's influence: she had favorite Masters (Video 30) and here she chooses who gets informed about death....
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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wichtige Info für die Reiki-Welt: Phyllis wollte mit Weber zusammen arbeiten...

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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Wichtige Passage.

this could be a new Video? Alliance's "equal in Oneness" ... continued in Video 33.
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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RV-Editing: 19-2
This entire video has a lot of potential. Also of controversy (Hayashi left house... Mother inherited from Takata...) Phyllis points towards origin of GM, lineage, etc. Many things have been said elsewhere though.
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 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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hier gibt es einen Blick in die Zukunft mit Platz für mehrere...

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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RV editing: 24-2
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 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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2. Cluster: ... Master Body
3. Cluster OGM...

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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2. Cluster: ... Master Body
Auch die Dissonanz begann schon vor Takata, Barbara Weber und deshalb Cluster Reconciliation.

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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2. Cluster: ...Master Body

as a continuation of the Question about male/female (patriarchy)...
This will not be a video on its own ... only for the reconciliation Video.
Cannon MVI 5127
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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Hier erwähnt sie wieder, dass sie Weber mit einbeziehen wollte.

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 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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Phyllis does not know of the Video claimed by Sikmonsohn.
Cannon MVI 5151: RV… Barbara Simonsohn
eos MVI 2953 …RV; Barbara Webber Ray… simonshon… grandmother on stage: webber ray-successor…
Cannon MVI 5152
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 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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Cannon MVI 5153: RV: succession one person? Cannon MVI 5154
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, 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 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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Cannon MVI 5163
make one Video with the previos 70+71? or one on itself: USR styles and styles coming from Japan (Jikiden)?
refers to Reiki "returning" to Japan as a reaction to USR/Takata...
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, 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 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) 
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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 
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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. 
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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”. 
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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.  
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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. 
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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. 
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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… 
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