0:00
Yes, Oh Yah, the thing is that … our relationship, 0016 my relationship with this student was very complicated and I was a very young master. So, for me what happened is that I opened these different parts of myself to her that was not wise and it wasn’t because she wasn’t capable, it was just that I wasn’t being a Reiki Master. She became best friend I revealed things to her that I would not have done if she were only …only (hand-movement: inverted comma), sorry, if she had been my Reiki student and that was the only relationship that we had. So I said things to her that … were taken out of the context of a friendship and put into a Reiki context.
01:14
And in doing that the message that was assumed in the Reiki context was not accurate for me. So… And there were things that we shared in our personal lives that I felt really influenced and sort of overtook the Reiki relationship that we had. And that was my naivety as a Master to think I could do everything with everybody. And that wasn’t true.
02:01
I felt betrayed as a person, as a friend but I don’t feel betrayed as a Master. So, and it’s hard to separate the two because obviously I’m, it is all the same person. So, I learnt not not that I couldn’t be friends with some of my students but that I have to be very, very thoughtful about the boundaries of different relationships and what actually I depend on and so on and so on; it’s been an interesting dynamic.
02:40

02:40
Because eventually if you surrender to Reiki it’s like your whole world becomes Reiki. So like all your social acquaintances and so on end up becoming Reiki. And even if you don’t want them to become Reiki they end up taking Reiki because their drawn to it because they are friends with you. So, it’s .. (gestures).. You know, sometimes I just say “oh please don’t’ take Reiki” …. I just want some friends without Reiki. And that’s really true for me.
03:11
But my friends… most of them have finally said “OK, I’m taking Reiki, I don’t care what you say. When I say, “OK, go do it with somebody else…” (laughs) So it’s really important to maintain boundaries in all these different relationships that we have. So it’s very interesting as a side-note to this ..to.. is the question of initiating your own family. And initiating first degree, well, that’s not so mu.., that’s not such a big deal, but 2^nd degree is really on the path to mastery. And then when you get to initiating a part of your family, blood-family as a master then there needs to be some really … thoughtfulness that goes into that. It isn’t that it can’t be done  …it is just not the easiest decision to make.
04:10

00:00
I don’t know if she has understood that this is the part of the pain for me … and I had to have a number of years before I actually realised that even though ähm….yah and … I have to say that within me there is some resistance to exploring this further even though we’re getting older and older. It might be kind of sad if we don’t do this before one of us dies. I know that she is doing well as a Reiki Master and I can take comfort in that and I realise that being her friend was just not a functional situation. And so maybe it is fine to just leave that alone. And .. You can’t … I think that I’ve come to also to a place of saying to myself, well, if the circumstances arises that we are able to talk, then of course I would.
01:29

0:00
Well I think the first ….again
0:11
I feel that the largest sort of betrayal or injustice in my life was definitely not understanding the point of my going on this trip with my grandmother 1979. And that.. I mean people laugh and I think the think I’m joking, you know, the difference between, you know, a person who decided to quit everything and become a ski bum, because skiing really transformed my life on a physical level as well as lots of other levels . And then I went off in the summer to travel with my grandmother, a person that I didn’t really like, and I was really uncomfortable, we’ve had a really painful relationship with and at the same time I feel that somehow underneath it, Reiki was calling me, but I could only say that 20 years later, I couldn’t have said that at the time.
01:29
And I really did think that I was going with her to carry her suitcases, make sure she didn’t get robbed or carry the money anyway and make sure she ate well. So… much to my surprise it ended up to be the initiation as a master and my first teaching on how to teach classes and so on. And my first understanding about what Reiki was for her. So, I felt betrayed by my mother who encouraged me to go on this trip, never saying “Well you know, if you go, you’re going to, you know, working with your grandmother and so on”. And then, when my grandmother initiated me, you know, and I heard this kind of funny like clapping-hand-noise, and she says “And now you can work with me”, you know, I really did have this picture of carrying suitcases, counting money and I never.. I never imagined teaching Reiki, because up to that time I didn’t even know what Reiki was. So….
02:50

02:50
And it was really interesting, because… just a few months before I was invited on this trip I had my 30th birthday. And I thought “Oh, wow, I’m 30 years old, I’m so old.. I mean.. I surely might live to be 60 and if I do, I cant be a ski-bum for 30 more years”, you know, because this is not what’s happening. So, I thought to myself “well, what kind of job would I like?”. I thought “well, I don’t even know a job that I would take” because it was really important for me after working in the mental health field that people were treated as individuals, not as a diagnosis. So it was the early days of psychotropic drugs and when people came in and they were diagnosed as schizophrenic, they got these certain drugs and it was a certain amount of dosage. Even though for some it made them totally sleep all day an all night and for others it was.. it made them really weird, you know, much weirder than they were schizophrenic. (laugh)
4:09
So I didn’t like this and I really wanted to be able to assist people in realising their individual authenticity. And little did I know that Reiki would be that gift. But… I certainly did not know it at the time I took the trip. And… so once I kind of got through that, which was interesting, it took me… I think over a year, because I went on the trip with my grandmother, which is a whole series of stories, and then… she got sick in Puoerto Rico after a month. So I ended up at home in Iowa with her and my mother for 3 more moths, which was my kind of picture of hell at the time. 0509- (cough)..
5:15

5:15
But what I realized then, was that I… it was like a kind of apprenticeship. I really lived with my grandmother, I found out what Reiki was in daily life. And I met some students of hers, that I really liked. And I thought “well, these people are not so weird, so probably this is ok”. And then I spent the next months sort of trying to figure out who I was in all of this. And then the next thing was that… I just decided that I had to spend the next summer by myself and go on this trip.
6:00
And that trip was a series of minor and major miracles that really allowed me to have some perspective of what had happened with me. And on the drive back home to Colorado, I realized that the question was not “Am I going to commit my life?” because I realized I already had done that and that Reiki was dictating, I would say at that point, what I was doing with my life and that I had already been committed from the moment that I was initiated as a master. So that was a revelation to me (laugh) it was amazing!..
6:58
And then my grandmother died. That I felt was a betrayal, because she had told me that she would live until Christmas, that she would for sure be there for Christmas. And she died on December 11th I was really angry for a month or something because I felt that she had not kept her promise and that I would have done something really different if I had known that. But whenever I thought that I would always hear her words say “Reiki comes first” and then I would get even more angry because for me family duty was really the most important thing in my life at that point.
7:50

7:50
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 I went to visit Barbara Weber to see if she would do this in tandem with me, I felt like she was very organised person, which I was not at the time. She knew how to market Reiki. And I found it a little abhorrent to market Reiki, so I didn’t like it. But I thought well maybe that’s ok, maybe she can do that and I can do this other thing, called “essence” . But I had no idea what that was actually. 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.
9:20
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.
10:34