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