0:00
ähm (2 knocks in the background) (pauses) 0008 I think in the beginning I was naive enough to think that my contribution to the world really was about creating «new Reiki lights», there are lots of expressions in different languages that Reiki masters use for their new students. And I believe that that’s true in the sense that, you know, we have the opportunity to be with people and to allow them to remember who they really are. At the same time..it is… we are students as well. And so for me, every initiation I give, every class that I give, allows me to reach into the part of myself that becomes more and more authentically human.
01:11.
And for me that’s really on some level the most profound change that happens in a Reiki class …it is my change as a human being. And that so many people have been initiated as a Master for ‘personal growth’ but what they don’t really understand is the most profound personal growth is when you teach. I don’t, you know, I don’t support people being initiated as masters for personal growth without teaching because for me it’s like that is the sacred tool of a master for themselves is to be able to stand in this place where you are at one time, it’s very paradoxical, at one time (0202) «THE Master» and «THE Teacher» of Reiki and you get to touch these people not just physically, energetically and perhaps spiritually in very profound way and in an intimate way and at the same time you open yourself up totally in surrender to the energy. So you are both the top, as you are.. and then you are a student.
02:37
And this blend of a kind of paradoxical situation is the key to who we are as human beings. I believe that we of course can be masters of the universe but we also have to be part of the universe. So these paradoxical situations are very important and we learn that every time we teach. So 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!
3:45

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

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

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

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

0:00
You know titles that are transferred from culture to culture are often very problematic. And it’s the same for this from the Japanese culture into Western culture in English. They referred to me as a Grand Master, it was a term that was coined and has been used in other Japanese art forms, the Grand Master, to say the Sensei, the head Sensei, teacher of teachers so to speak. But it means more than teacher.
0:46
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.
1:28

00:00
As I mentioned before, I have recognized five aspects or roles of master, Reiki master. And in the condition where a student comes to me and says “I want to be a Reiki Master”, then all these five roles have a part to play in the preparation of that student. And a part of the tradition keeper piece is to honour our ancestors. So honouring our ancestors means, if I don’t know the answer to a question, I go back and ask. And it could be a person, sometimes it’s sending a treatment to myself and asking Reiki to help me. I also ask the master student to do the same because they must begin to take this responsibility on for themselves.
1:14
I would…. In the beginning when people said, or now when there are new masters and they have people come to say “I want to be a master candidate”, I recommend that the masters, the new masters have at least 10 years of experience teaching before they take on master candidates. If they have a student who wants to be a master before this time, then it is appropriate that they refer that student to me. So sometimes this works and sometimes it really doesn’t.
2:00

2:00
I have a master in Uruguay and she had a student who in her third year of mastery wanted to become a master. And she didn’t speak English, she definitely had a connection, an energetic connection with this master in Uruguay and I just… I didn’t refuse this student my participation but I said “I just feel like you need to have a master who speaks Spanish”. So I had her mentored with a master in Argentina, which was not the same. And now that the years have passed and this never really worked, of course the student has now gone to the master in Uruguay, Patricia. And I believe that they have started their master-candidate/master-relationship now.
2:58 So. (räusper)
Though I’ve tried to intervene some times in these, sometimes it just is that people … students have to wait for the masters to mature in order to start their own journey of mastery 0311….0313 0314 Yah
0316 So I don’t know that I ended up in the same place, but I feel like I answered your question. Is that true for you?
3:23

3:24
(René: It is very much true for me personally, ähm…Let me just think about this… ähm)

0334 Okay, I’ll add something. (OK)….
0340 When.. so when I accept a master candidate….what I am doing, is I’m opening up a part of me to share that is my most profound and secret place inside of me. I’m sharing the part of me that’s a master. Sometimes people refer to this as a huge responsibility, for me it is not a huge responsibility… and I don’t know what is being referred to as a lesser responsibility, so I don’t know where the comparison goes… comes from. But the responsibility for me is to be true to myself, to be true to the practice that I teach and pass on and to be true to the path of the master candidate and it demands of me more presence, more willingness to not be the only person in that master’s life, that Reiki is the ultimate teacher, not me and that the ancestors or the lineage that I come from serve as a part of the teaching of the student.
5:19
So if I can and could go back to my initiating master Hawayo Takata and say “what would you do in this case?”, I would have loved it, but I never got that opportunity. I did actually do it by just in treatment and sometimes I got an answer and sometimes I didn’t. Sometimes… the time when I didn’t get an answer was actually more profound than when I did (laugh).
5:53

0:00
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. And teacher has a very limited scope because even in our academic world, you know, you have a teacher and it’s for a certain course, for a certain time, for a certain number of classes. And then if you take the same class but 2.1, you get another teacher. So teacher is something who delivers something to the student.
1:20

1:20
The initiator on the other hand is a person for me who has energetic responsibility for the student. They initiate them, in that they become energetically connected with that student and they have responsibility for that student energetically for the rest of their lives. Now this is not something that many masters adhere to or even believe. And that’s fine with me. It’s something that for me in my practice I adhere to and I expect the masters who teach in this practice to hold that. 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!
2:26

2:26
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. Now what some people think is that they also have to become their initiator. But in my book, in my understanding you don’t have to become their initiator, you can take them on as a student and be their mentor and you can have the same kind of relationship. You don’t need to initiate them again because they are already initiated into Reiki, they’ve had their experiences and you’re there to be a mentor.
3:21

3:21
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. And there are some masters who feel that once they become a master, that’s it, they know everything. And they don’t need to go back to their initiating master for advice or for further understanding of the practice or for support. You know, they tend to really be an island, which for me is something that is…. not accurate as a human being. In high school we always sang the song “no man is an island” and that thought has been underlined several times for me in my Reiki practice where 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)
4:58

4:58
The aspect of tradition keeper is one that’s new and I’m offering two weekends for masters and 2nd degree students who.. to come and talk about what they feel like tradition keeper is for them, how they feel like this role has been developed within our system and in our community. 0522 (räusper) …. (pauses)
5:35
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”. And basically we haven’t, it’s basically the same former practice as I said earlier she taught to different classes and to different students a little bit differently but you can take the basis of that in the way that we teach today. So this is part of tradition keeper and there are some aspects of our tradition that are being challenged these days, oral tradition for instance. 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.
6:53

6:53
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 It’s like: I had a privilege to accompany very good friends of mi.. (hiccup) excuse me (pause)
7:24
I had the honour to ‚ve … 0725 (rolls her eyes) 0727 I’ve had the honour to know a couple who I feel like really personified teaching their children through the oral tradition. The mother put together immediately a scrapbook of family and of this child’s upbringing, how she grew and grew and grew as a child. And so she would take out this scrapbook like every week at least and they would go through the stories of where her grandparents came from, you know how they met, how their parents met, this is the parents when they were younger, before she was born, you know, this is her when she was born and how they changed their life and how they built their house. And all these oral tradition stories really enriched these children.
08:24

8:24
And I believe that this is part of the breakdown, in America anyway, of our family structure, is that we count on computers and televisions instead of living oral tradition. And I don’t feel like there’s any replacement for oral tradition, and it is the way that we as human beings learn. So if we’re horrified by the way children relay to each other in the school ground, it’s because they relayed how they have been taught, by television, by video games and by computers and by movies. And we can’t blame the children. 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.
09:40

0:00
Perhaps another part of tradition keeper is simply noticing that there is …. a human aspect to the student/teacher relationship that
0021 (räusper)
is always a challenge for both. And that is when the student “grows up” and becomes a master of their own or even a 2nd degree student on their own, they have their own experience, they have their own understanding of what they’re doing and sometimes it doesn’t agree with their masters. And that’s okay. One of the things that was very clear in Hawayo Takata’s teaching was that everybody has the right to their own relationship with Reiki, the energy. 0056-0057 (räusper)
0:59