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

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

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

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

0:00
Why would I have to make a sacrifice? If you ask me “what would I have to give?” that’s a totally different question (0016) (René: let me rephrase the question..laughter…Thank you … and the answer would be?) (0028)
0:29
Well… first of all I feel like I have to stay alive long enough for this to happen, because one can not push these things, these kinds of coming together. So I believe that this filming, I believe your conversations with all these Reiki Masters around world
(0058).
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?”.
01:30
And this has happened over and over and over in my lifetime with Reiki. And so I don’t know why it can’t happen now. 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.
02.10

2:08
So we ended up not flying together, except for one time to Australia where we both forgot to ask each other when and where we were flying from and we ended up on the same plane. We came from totally different cities and ended up in Los Angeles on the same plane to go to Australia. So that was pretty funny. And…
2:33
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?
3:20

9:11
You know, she had… I had this very strange experience with her which really was difficult for me because we went to Puerto Rico. The first time I ever heard about Reiki, ever knew what Reiki was or anything. And she had a Spanish interpreter and she could not get that Spanish was a language that needed to be interpreted so that people could understand her. So she would just talk and never make space for interpretation, she would talk right over the interpreter. I mean, it was really embarrassing for me. And I had a talk with her and she said: “They just have to deal with it”. And I thought “this is not respectful!”. I’m sorry, but you know I just don’t get this. And I just think about this situation when I’m sitting in Poland or Russia or Italy or Spain or the Netherlands or even in England sometimes, you know, or Australia. Australia was really bad because there’s this old saying about thinking that you speak the same language but you really don’t.
10:38
Anyway, it was just really, really interesting for me to see that I had the personality and also my physical body was strong enough to do the travelling and do the global movement that I’ve been able to do with such ease. I really appreciate my body. And I really appreciate the difference between Hawayo Takata and myself. I didn’t make this global community, I didn’t spread Reiki, definitely not, but I kept up with it. And that for me has been a real amazing feed. I think..
11:17

0:00
0006 (sigh)
In some countries like Australia for instance Reiki has entered into the academic scene and in the US also and Reiki masters have gone to adult education courses and given 1st degree, 2nd degree and I believe sometimes even the master level. And they have had to fit into an academic kind of course structures, so 3 hours once a week for several weeks, so they have tried to change the form of teaching to match the academia and they also…. The students don’t come because they’re called to come, they come because they want to have credits in whatever field they are given credits for a Reiki class.
1:10
So it really changes the motivation of the student, what the student receives and for a lot of people it seems to authenticate or validate Reiki as a recognized therapy of sorts, I don’t know how to say this. But when I think about globalisation, this term that I learned and how the effective globalisation actually usually distills and sometimes dilutes the very essence of the practice that is being globalized then I would say that this is at the edge of benefit for the system itself.
2:10

00:00, 0008 (sigh)
After Hawayo Takata died 1980, in the end of 1980, sorry….
00:17
After Hawayo Takta died in December of 1980 some of her masters began to be asked to go teach in other countries. Wanja Twan, who came from Sweden originally and immigrated into Canada, went back to Sweden and initiated a Dutch master, a woman who was Dutch, excuse me, who immediately, literally went to the Netherlands and began to teach. Beth Gray was asked to go to Australia, Fran Brown was asked to go to France. I mean, it was an amazing process and Mary McFayden one of the very first students that she initiated was Brigitte Müller, who was a… whom she met in an ashram in California. Brigitte went back to Germany, took Reiki back as a 1st degree student and invited Mary immediately to come and teach and that’s such a beautiful story.
1:33

3:03
Beth Gray went to Australia and she was a charismatic healer herself. And Reiki, I feel, gave her an opportunity to have a form for that healing along with a few other of the Reiki masters that Hawayo Takata initiated. And when she went to Australia, she found a waiting community. And who knows why these things happen, as in the story of Mary McFayden or Inger Droog who went to the Netherlands or Wanja Twan who taught in Scandinavia again.
0346-0348 ähm (cough)
The Australians welcomed Beth Gray, she had somehow the right personality, which was very forward, extremely charismatic and extremely opinionated, I will use that word. Which was great, because somehow it fit into their society and they’re very strong in their opinions, the Australians. And they need to be, you know, they are in a very harsh environment, given, everything. And when they were… when Australia was first settled they needed to be tough. And that toughness still is there in the Australian culture. And it is part of their charm, actually these days.
4:41

4:41
So Beth went over to Australia and she taught for some years, I don’t even know now, because time is a little bit strange for me, everything flows together. But say it was like … 10 years, 12 years and then she was ready to immigrate to Australia. And she was, you know, starting to put all of her things in order in the US and she had her own church in San Francisco Bay area. She was wrapping that up and ready to become an Australian, which was very exciting for her. I remember having wonderful animated conversations with her about this, because by that time I had been asked to go to Australia and met a lot of her students. They were extremely dedicated to Reiki. They would go and take… sit in her classes over and over and over again. They would…. They begged her to initiate them as Reiki masters because they did have so much on-the-ground experience, treating every day, going to classes that she gave, going to other workshops that she gave. It was amazing.
6:05

6:05
And it wasn’t something that Beth felt called to do, readily. So I believe that she initiated 3 or 4 masters in this last period of her life, before she had her stroke. So just as she was preparing to leave for Australia she had a massive stroke and the whole immigration to Australia of course was … let go. And part of her recovery from her stroke was that she couldn’t actually speak in sentences. She could express herself with one or two words and she was very expressive. I just learned how expressive you could be with one or two words.
6:58
And that whole phase of her life was so dramatically changed. It was… I was always sad about that because she was so happy thinking about being an Australian. What she passed on to her students, still lives in Australia. I still have contact with many of her… well with some of her students. I won’t say many because she taught hundreds and hundreds and hundreds, maybe thousands of people there. So I would say that I’m in touch with a few hundred.
7:40

7:40
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.
08:39

0:00
Well the deal is that one of the masters died, her first master… I believe it was her first master. She was from Melbourne? Her name was …. I can’t remember. And she and her husband had a Reiki center, but she died, she died very suddenly of a massive stroke, I believe, at the age of like 52. I mean, it was really weird. And she died like in 2000..… when was the last time I was in Australia? It was in 2009. So maybe she died in 2005, 2004 or something like that. She was more quiet than Barbara (McGregor) of course. But she had a huge, huge following in the south-east part of Australia. This woman… and I really wish I could remember her name…
1:05

1:05
And then there is Beverly Bultitude, who is in a part of Sydney. 0111 She’s ähm 0114 (räusper) She has a woman partner and she’s still alive but she is very quiet with her Reiki. So Barbara being kind of a chip-off the old block of Beth Gray, but even more Australian just took it and ran. So, you know, that’s true. And that’s true in Australia. I think that the Australians would say that she is really carrying Beth Gray’s … a lot of Beth Grays’ idiosyncracies as well as her gift of Reiki. But she’s very unapproachable and very uncooperative, which Beth was as well.
2:02
You know, Beth didn’t want to… Marta Getty and she was also a master I initiated in the early 80s. And both of them taught in Australia extensively. But 0215 (räusper) Beth, you know Beth practiced with Beth’s practice, Martha’s students couldn’t go to Beth’s classes and Beth’s students could not even speak to Martha. So it’s this thing that happens sometimes. 0231 (Background voice) Yes, it does, absolutely. (OK) 0236

2:36