1:42
And during this time I didn’t really know what to do. 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.
2:22
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.
3:07
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 and I believe then it was in the spring, sometime like May or June. And this was the first time that a group of masters had come together and we stayed for a week together there. (0347) …(cough) (drinks)
4:01

4:01
some of the masters brought their spouses, some of them brought their adult children and we had a couple of little children I believe there too. And we had such a lovely time together that we decided to meet again the next year at Barbara Brown’s house.

04:28 ..(cough)….

I really do feel better (laughter, Andi in the background.) OK. Well, try my Ricola (RICOLA, René singing) I mean, the best thing Switzerland ever produced. (laughter, Thassos: except us, of course!) Yes! (René: dont forget we’re really Italians, Thassos) … (René: you know why Toblerone is called Toblerone?) … (actually the company is called Tobler and the first one for export, was Tobler One..) Is that really true? (René: well, the legend says so). OK, so… Try not to have a very strange protrusion of my mouth…. ähm
5:46
In this meeting in Hawaii we spent quite a lot of time talking about the succession and about Barbara Weber and her kind of threats to the rest of us. And we also spoke together about her way of teaching because when we started to exchange treatments, it was evident that we had different hand positions, we started in different places
6:23 (cough)..6:28
and a couple of the masters had, what I would call, special gifts that came up
0635-0640 (cough)..
and so their treatments looked quite different than the rest of us. So we spent some time having a demonstration. Ethel Lombardi, I believe, was a gifted healer herself and when she received Reiki this brought out this gift and the gift was, in her own words, to pull out energy out of the body and so that’s what her Reiki treatments looked like. So she kind of did a little class or something for us all and some people didn’t like it at all, some people could relate to it and some people thought “well that’s interesting but it’s not Reiki”.
7:31

7:31
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…
8:44
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.
9:39

0:00
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….
1:09
..that maybe 85% of the masters were initiated by Hawayo Takata was a member of the Reiki Alliance at some point. 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”. And for me it means the same thing as in the US constitution, that all men are created equal. And I.. I feel that that’s true still today and is our challenge not to go into our human ego and decide that we or our lineage or whatever is the best. It’s just so, this is the practice that I have. I cannot say this is the best practice. I can only say that this is what I’ve received from my grandmother and in my way of honouring her I want to be as and practice as close to what she taught me as possible and that’s true for all of the masters that were initiated by her.
2:24

2:03
There are a couple of other interesting points: nr. 1 I wanted to create another name for the Reiki that I do like … .. well like Barbara Weber came up with «Radiance Technique», she trademarked it, it was totally clearly hers, nobody fought her for it and it was really clean. You know, and that’s what everybody could have done in that moment, is to just have been clean. But it wasn’t, we weren’t there, we weren’t mature enough at that time and I am including myself and I couldn’t think of another name, so I went back to Usui Shiki Ryoho, which was not trademarkable because it was in common use and also… because it contained a man’s name and the man was not alive to ok it.
3:05
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.
3:49
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) .. So we get back to that again.
4:21

2:45
So… in 1986 or so other masters started to talk to me about initiating masters..(0254-0256) (cough).. Barbara Weber of course was already initiating masters, a master by the name of Barbara McCollough was already initiating masters.. I don’t know about Virginia Samdahl and Ethel Lombardi but by that time Ethel Lombardi had broken off from Reiki and started her own… workshops called… MarilEl, called MariEl. And so she did… she did that to honour her master, so it wouldn’t be called Reiki.
3:41
And what I received from their sort of …abdicating their own power and energy to initiate masters to me, is that I felt supported and I felt that that support went through the system. And it was probably the best thing that could have happened to the system for those 6 years.
4:06

1:38
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.
2:59
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.
3:48

0:00
When my grandmother died in 1980 and Barbara Weber Ray, well then Barbara Weber said that she had been told that she would be the successor, I… my reaction was it was totally possible.
0028 (räusper)
And the process of succession is more than telling someone that you will be the successor. There has to be recognition. And of the 22 masters that were initiated by Hawayo Takata, most of them recognized me. Sometimes because just before her death Hawayo Takata had said “Phyllis is my successor”.
1003 (räusper)
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….
1:56

1:56
As a juxtaposition, during the time when I started to travel with her and take my training with her, she and Barbara had a falling out and she wouldn’t even speak Barbara’s name. She was so angry. And because she had a heart condition my mother said “don’t even ask her what’s happening!”. But she wouldn’t have said anything anyway, it was so painful for her to talk about it. So there was a split between those two and there was a resignation almost that I might be her successor. And I’m not playing myself down, I mean…
2:44 (Schnäuzgeräusch)
I did things that she didn’t like, I went out on dates with men and she felt like “Reiki is the only thing that you should be paying attention to”. You know, this is it. And… I had very long hair, she wanted me to cut it short. I enjoyed life to the fullest, she thought I should work more. I mean, you know, I just wasn’t her ideal candidate, let’s put is that way. Barbara was actually much more the ideal candidate. But this falling out that they had, I have no idea what is was about.
3:28

3:28
So on top of that, that the energy came to me and the masters recognized me that was something that there was no controlling. I couldn’t control it and at the time I didn’t even know if I wanted it. But it only took me a few years to recognize that I didn’t have a choice either. That even if I wanted to have denied it that that would have been… very disruptive to my life and very disruptive to the life of Reiki. That it wouldn’t have automatically gone to Barbara Weber. They would have had to have found somebody else.
4:10
This was all very interesting, you know, because I hardly knew what Reiki was, much less try to work out all these nuances on an energetic level and on a personal level and you know here I was asking .. asked to be the Grand Master and all the people were older than I was, including the people that were around my age, they were still one or two years older than I was, they had mostly all… had years more of experience in Reiki and I was supposed to be their Grand Master.. I mean… you know, I didn’t really seem appropriate at the time.
4:53

6:38
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…
7:44
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.
8:41

0:00
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. So…
0:57
And then in the late 1980s Paul Mitchell and I started to travel in … to other continents, we came to Europe first. And we often flew on the same airplane. And finally somebody, I’m pretty sure it was a German master said to me “you know, you guys shouldn’t fly on the same plane”. And I just laughed and I said “You got to be kidding me”. And she said “no, actually I’m not. I’m saying to you that you two have a responsibility that you’re not taking care of”. And I thought to myself, well that’s actually true, I guess accidents can happen. And at this point the Reiki community was so fragile that if Paul and I had died in the same time it would have shattered the community. I’m not saying that to feel like … you’re replaceable or anything, I just feel like if I was living responsibly as a leader, you know, I had to take care of that.
2:08

4:27
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
5:39

5:39
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.
6:30

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