9:39
And we talked a lot about the nature of Reiki, about the nature of the practice, about the things we wanted to preserve, about the things that we…excuse me…. that for us were not included in the practice and so on. We had really wonderful sharings and ….these two meetings were very important for me as … I felt…. recognized by people in a way that was very different. So some people who were familiar with being a devotee of a guru, an Indian guru, they wanted to wash my feet and kiss my feet, which I just… was really hard for me. Other people wanted me to get dressed up, have really nice fingernails and so on, which I didn’t ..(laugh).. and other people wanted me somehow to be holy or wise or, I don’t know why but I was just myself. And at that point I was a pretty naïve… ja, pretty naïve person, in a lot of different ways.
11:09
After the Reiki Alliance was formed that year, then the next year…. then the next year we decided to go to California. And I have no idea why I did this, but I end up….ended up renting a couple of big houses up on Donnner’s path in California near Lake Tahoe and that’s where we had the masters’ meeting. And it was out of that meeting that a little book was borne. People wanted to preserve the oral tradition but somehow be able to give their students something for the class. So I totally opposed writing this or putting this book together. So at one point one of the masters, who was very clever actually, came to me and said: “Well, if there was such a book, what would it be like?” I can remember her question to this day. And I said: “Well it would be very small, like pamphlet thing, it could have the story of Reiki in it, the pictures of the lineage and the precepts and maybe something else and it would not be for sale at the open market, it would just sold by the Reiki Alliance as a Reiki Alliance Publication”. So that’s how this little, what we call the “Blue Book” got formed and eventually Paul Mitchell was the one that put it together.
12:57

12:57
This phrase “the spiritual lineage” came in the second meeting at Barbara Brown’s house when we were trying to put together statements of identity for this Reiki Alliance. And I still believe that these statements have great foresight and also a great challenge. I can’t say them right off hand but one of them says something like… “we recognize all masters as equal in the oneness of Reiki” and the Reiki Alliance members today still argue about this phrase. But I believe that all masters of Reiki are equal in the oneness of Reiki. It doesn’t mean we are the same and it’s very important for me…it was very important for me that this thought was a founding stone, a corner stone of the Reiki Alliance because I didn’t want anyone to feel that this Reiki Alliance was a like an exclusive club. But actually my fear became realized and when the new form started to appear in the mid 1980ies or actually in the late 1980ies the Reiki Alliance rally closed it’s door and became very specific to the practice that was passed on from Hawayo Takata to her masters. And that was fine for me but I also wanted them to realize that “they weren’t better than” and this is something that is still in discussion in the Reiki Alliance today.
14:53

0:00
Well…again I… this is totally my theory, it’s not based on facts at all, but a theory and my theory is that in the Japanese tradition there are ways for people to recognize successors and one of the ways that Hawayo Takata was recognized as Chujiro Hayashi’s successor is that she was left with his house.. with everything with all his material possessions, with everything. And it was understood of course, that she could have kicked the Hayashis out of their house and taken it for her own. But she didn’t, she wanted to go back to Hawaii. So she of course allowed the Hayashis to stay in their home and to run the clinic and so on.
1:00
When my grandmother died everything went to my mother. And she, I believe, actually whether she was a Reiki master or not, handed the lineage in some way these inheritance piece to me. And…
1:26
And at that time the phrase was the Grand Master, so the master of masters. Now… I don’t know where this phrase came from. There were a group of my… of masters that my grandmother initiated both in California and in the Chicago area, who were older women, who probably had… knowledge of the Masons or some group like that and so for them… instead of using the word Sensei or another word to indicate an honour in Japanese.. (0222) (burping)… excuse me, (0224) they would call her the Grand Master.
2:30

01:45:
…and if we would take one thing, like recycling, to heart and the whole reiki community would actually recycle everything to the best of their ability we can make a huge difference in our communities because it would mean that not just our families would recycle but then we would affect our neighbours, our friends, our colleagues – it could be a kind of world movement. But I could never get anybody interested in this particular project. (Laughs)
2:26
So, I invited a friend of mine out who was … whose job is Resource Development. He is a person who does reconciliation with the earth and also with communities and with the nature of their relationship to the planet and so on. So, his history and telling of how the land was before I came to Arizona was amazing. These lands were grass lands and the grass was about this high (points) and when the cowboys, the settlers came through these valleys they realised this was great pasture for cattle. And as in the late 1800s as California started to raise cattle they started to do cattle-drives that went across the Southern part of the United States and into St. Louise and other places where they could ship the meat back to the East coast.
3:43
So when they came through here the cattle grazed on the grass, they trampled it, they were in such numbers that very quickly the grass died because they didn’t have time to regenerate. And their …they also brought seeds from other places. So we got Mesquites trees everywhere and the land became defensive because it needed to be. So, cactus started to grow, there was less water feeding the top soil. So, it got drier and drier so the cactus came more and more. Now it is a very prickly landscape…
04:21:

04:21:
…but in those days it was a very soft landscape. So, the secret is to gain water… to have water stay on the top of the surface of the land instead of running off so fast. So, a lot of ranchers here, who have taken this to heart, have gone up into their foothills and they take the material, that’s natural material like rocks and twigs or branches or dead trees or whatever is lying around, and they build these little dams every so many feet down a water shed and in doing that it just stops the water for maybe 30 minutes. But that water soaking in to the land changes the whole landscape.
0511:
And they have changed their ranches, which have been full of Mesquite and prickly cactus and so on, into grass lands again. Just by doing this. So, I had this idea or this image of a hundred Reiki people out there for a couple of summers doing these kinds of projects and restoring the land around the ranch and of course for the ranch into grass land again and to be able to show people that it is so easily done, it just takes manpower … or, excuse me, people power (laughs).
05:53:

0:00
Not really. For me what’s revolutionary and new maybe for you is just confirmation for me of what happened. So we went through and what has been really great with the Archive-Team is that we’ve been able to stitch together a history of her practice and so on that confirms and helps me remember all the kind of little points that I remember but putting them all together and connecting them. And that’s been really great.
0:42
We are pretty much finished with digitalizing all the archives, all the material. So we are now looking for a place to house the archives and we are really leaning more toward a university setting where the academics, all the people now and in the future who want to do research on Reiki and want to do research on how we would maybe call it the movement of Reiki, started and how it progressed through Hawayo Takata and also my time. So I think we are going with the university archive more than a museum archive. So that’s the last place we left it and one of our members is researching and connecting with the person who is going to accept the archive and we have all the boxes ready to go and they are all labelled and the contents are put on the box, so we have everything. All we need to do is to load them upon a truck and take them to California. So I’m hoping to do that this summer.
2:02

2:46
And so it becomes, you know, she never said that. Well I can totally accept that for many of the masters that she initiated because she taught to the student and to the class. And her classes were not structured in way that’s an outline. I mean she mostly always did the hand positions but in California she told them to start on the abdomen for some reason and in British Colombia she told them to start on the head. Why? I don’t know. But I actually have to just accept her wisdom in her teaching style. The hand positions are the same basically, but where to start is really different. And it was a kind of place of argument for a while. And I said, well, it doesn’t really matter. I mean what we know is that she taught each class individually, she taught each student individually, she taught each master how they needed to be taught. I saw that because I saw her prepare many masters and it really depended on their personality, right?
4:04