0:00
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.
0:43
Some years ago I was introduced to a little book called “The four agreements” by Don Miguel Ruiz and he’s a Mexican…. He’s a Mexican … sorry I’ll start again…
1:06
Some years ago I was introduced to a little book called “The four agreements” by Don Miguel Ruiz and it’s been translated into many, many languages. And basically he is asking people to start on a spiritual path having these four agreements with themselves. One is to do your best, another one is to not take things personally, to be articulate with your word and ….. okay, what’s the fourth one? Do not take things personally, do your best and be articulate with your word and … oh ja, don’t make assumptions. Okay, I’ll start again…
2:11

2:11
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.
2:59
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).
3:46

3:46
And being articulate with my word, I think that for all of us, we try to express ourselves verbally and one of the things that is so clear for me now is that our verbal language has gaps and it definitely has places that cannot express what we really want to express. I spent some time in the 1980s and 90s learning German. It was a very interesting endeavour for me because language is not one of my better skills and though I love the German language I also didn’t have time to dedicate to the learning of it. Though I did take a 3 or 4 months course in Hamburg and that helped pave the way for more coherent German sentences (laugh)
4:45
Although I missed the week about pronouns, which turned out to be definitely significant (laugh) So I’m not very good in German pronouns. 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. And it was really fun for me because at that point I was liv… 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.
5:37

5:37
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.
6:10
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.
7:02

7:02
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.
7:33
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.
9:09

0:00
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?” (laugh).
0:51
And I really got that he wasn’t talking about working like… working to make a living and to put bread on the table, it was about really contributing. So I wondered about this and in my wondering my mother called, who was usually the provocateur in my life. And she said “Your grandmother is going on a Reiki tour in the summer” and this was in like October or November. And she said “You’re going with her because she needs a companion”. And I said “Why me?”. And she said “Because you don’t really have a job”. I said “Mom, I really have a job. I mean, you know, I can’t just take off for four months”. And she said “Well, you can and you will”.
1:42

1:42
So it took me about four months to figure out if I was willing to do what she said and in the end I said yes. And this started a journey of myself that ended up, I thought I could go back and just be myself again. But in truth when I was introduced to Reiki and I started on the path of Reiki, not consciously, not choosing it but having it handed to me through my family, I realized that I could really never go back to what I call now an unconscious life, that somehow just this trip and this initiation into mastery and this push of my grandmother to begin to teach and begin to relay to people through Reiki the energy and through Reiki the practice, has started a process inside of me that was unstoppable.
3:11

3:11
So I went… I finished the summer with my grandmother, I went back to the ski-area and worked, but it was mixed with Reiki already. And the next summer I decided to take a journey by myself and my one job during this summer was to introduce myself as a Reiki master, because in the US and Canada when you meet someone, the first thing they say is “What do you do?”, meaning what do you do for living. And I would always say “A Reiki master”. And then they would ask the question “Well, what’s that?”. But this is a little bit like saying hello in a foreign language and not knowing any other word in a foreign language. You know, you go “Bonjour” and then they start rattling off in French and you’re going “Wait, wait, wait, I can’t understand you” (laugh). Well, that’s kind of what I felt like when they asked me “well what’s that? What’s a Reiki master?”.
4:17
And that winter, when I came back, I knew that I had to follow the path of Reiki. So… and it wasn’t winter, it was fall. So, I’m sorry. So I ended up back in British Colombia with my grandmother in October, in November, and just before she died in 1980. And then, when she did die and I was a Reiki master and I had figured out that I was going to live the rest of my life as a Reiki master, I had no grounding as an individual, as a personality or even as a Reiki student. I hadn’t practiced that long. So I took it on, as a good Japanese woman would do, as family duty. And….
5:17

5:17
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…
7:07

7:07
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….
7:53

7:53
Very early on, like maybe 1982 or 3, somebody came to me and said 0802 “You should tra….. you should trans…no… 0807 you should trademark Reiki. 0809 You should write down the whole system and trademark it, now!”. If I had done that, what would have happened in the future? Where would we have been today? And I just couldn’t see the benefit of doing this. I thought that trademarks were something very different than they are. So in the middle of 1990s I learned through my own experience of having to “fight” a trademark, a registration, that trademarks are simply the business way of saying “This is who I am”
0902 (räusper)
and that you don’t make a lot of money, they do cost a lot of money. And you’re able to … if done with integrity, actually maintain integrity.
9:22
So what I really wanted to do in the mid 1990s, which was by that time too late,
0928 (räusper)
was to have what is called an industry trademark. And so the ones that we might be very familiar with are for cotton, the little symbol for cotton, or wool, which is a woven kind of symbol but these are trademarked by the industry. So all the manufacturers of cotton material can use this trademark. And that’s what we could have done with Reiki. It would have maintained a certain boundary around practices, not controlling practices but being able to identify them. But at that point there was one practice, I didn’t see that the future would hold that there are many and this was a decision that I took, doing my best. I certainly didn’t have any assumptions to make because if I didn’t make them and my big assumption, the critical assumption was that the world was not going to change, (laugh) but it did.
10:45

10:45
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.
11:18
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”.
12:55

12:55
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, Barbara Weber being one of them. And people saying “Well, are they really masters? Does she have the power to initiate masters?”. And I kept saying “It’s not about that. It’s not about that!”. So… and I also, one of the other motivations for me was that I saw that some of the masters of Hawayo Takata, who had been practicing and teaching and doing their path, were really ready to initiate masters, they had master… they had students coming to them, wanting to be initiated as masters. And those students were given to me to prepare and initiate. But I was starting to get students who weren’t my students, they were the students of the masters who sent them. And I couldn’t, in all integrity, take them on. I wanted to say “You study with Paul.. you study with Beth… you study with somebody…” you know, whoever has sent them, because it just wasn’t right.
14:24

14:24
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.
15:09
So I did it, everybody saw how I did it. 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!”
15:47
And the other thing that I said to my friends, was “I am not going to be an initiation machine, where people just send me their students, I initiate them and that’s it. I mean that’s too weird for me. So…
16:07

16:07
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.
17:28

17:28
So, anyway… 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
18:21

0:00
.. but my peacefulness around this has come and lately, what’s really funny is that I actually found my notes for this speech… as I was going through these papers… I don’t know where they… I can’t lay my hands on them today, but it was really interesting to read it and to see how progressive I was but at the same time people were not able to listen to this language. 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. So of course what happened, was.. is that … the masters that I thought were ready to initiate masters were angry with me and they didn’t initiate masters for years. And the people who were kind of young, upstart masters, who ‘thought they knew everything’ and so on, they began to initiate masters right away and they soon learned what initiating masters was about. I couldn’t have taught them that.
1:33
And in the end it was really right. You know, it wasn’t something that was “pretty” in the beginning and we all had judgements. 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.
2:07

2:07
Then all these new forms of practice started to pop up, some from my own students. And … people wanted me to control them. They wanted somehow from me to do a good job so that people wouldn’t feel like they could just go off and do their own Reiki. And I took it upon myself to really study the situation and decide if there was anything that I could do, anything at all. And in the midst of all this kind of contemplation time …. Shunjan Joop Hilger … I found out that he had trademarked
0301 these ähm Usui Shiki Ryo … no, 0304
the Usui System of natural healing as a phrase, Reiki as a phrase, the Kanji in Germany. And he had been awarded the trademarks. And I thought “oh… now what?”.
3:22
So in this whole process I had a partner, the Reiki Alliance, because many of their members were threatened by Joop’s use of these trademarks. And what was so, is that even though I wasn’t able at the time inside myself to trademark these things, I also didn’t feel like it was appropriate for another master outside the lineage to hold these trademarks. 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).
4:14

4:14
And… you know, during this time I had a lot of education about what trademarks really were, what they were used for in the business world, what I could do with them, what were my alternatives and what it would take to actually trademark something like Reiki in the world, because by that time, Reiki had spread all over the world. 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.
5:21
And I was overwhelmed. I was trying to do my own schedule, I was in the middle of learning about trademarks, I had to keep earning money because this whole process was taking tens of thousands of Dollars. 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. You know, “I’m going to, you know, … get these trademarks and so on …”. I would have liked to think that we could have worked together on this, but I don’t think so now.
6:19

6:19
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.
6:46
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). I have had boxes of documents scanned for prosperity in this whole process. Still, especially in South America and in Spain, Reiki master communities are holding trademarks but not knowing what to do with them and not knowing how to pay for them. I didn’t keep track of the legal entities that needed to be held so that so that trademarks could be brought in and I realise now that I needed a whole organization to do this, not just me. But I needed to have been able to hire a trademark attorney, to be able to hire an office person who just dealt with trademarks and to keep up with all the licencing and so on.
8:19

8:19
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, because the last nail in this whole thing was driving down from Breitenbush one August afternoon with Paul Mitchell and we were speaking about this trademark thing and about how the Reiki Alliance could be an association of licensed masters and so on. And he said “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.”
10:39

10:39
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….
11:37
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. You know, there is an idea that I was doing this just to make money. Well, you don’t make money on a trade mark unless the people who are able… unless the people who want to use a trademark actually pay you money. And I knew that Reiki masters wouldn’t be able to pay me US$ 5’000 a year, so that was not what I was gonna ask. 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.
13:03

13:03
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. I had no one in the community that would step up and be there for me. I had business men come and tell me … who were Reiki masters… come and tell me “Don’t get into this, you’ll regret it” and then walk away. They didn’t come and say “Listen, you need help. You need to know what you are getting into, I can help you with this” and eventually show me that this was not where I wanted to go. But nobody was willing to do that and that kind of unwillingness, I don’t blame them, I blame mys… I don’t blame myself, I just feel like I wasn’t open to it. And they didn’t feel the opening to come and support me.
14:05
So … I don’t know where that came from, but … It’s been my … 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. I mean that’s where our relationship ended, so to speak. And that’s where it’s going to stay, because as human beings we can’t progress until we actually progress in real life. And that’s really sad.
15:20

15:20
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. And I don’t even know who to write now to say “Thank you for all that you did to support myself, your local communities and the vision of Reiki that we all had. And that vision now, where I am now, was so limited, I realised, that …. If I knew then what I know now, it would have been a very different scene, and I didn’t.”
16:24
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.
17:13

17:13
Since then (laugh)… since then my life as Grand Master has been pretty mellow (laugh), and I feel that…. I changed in a way through this process and I’ve become much more clear about what I’m willing to do and what I’m not willing to do, who my audience is and who my audience is not and so on. 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.
18:28

3:47
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.
4:50