0:00
When I first started to teach Reiki and then started to travel around to meet groups of Reiki people, we were very much involved in personal healing, like how did Reiki affect people and how did Reiki affect the individual. When I first came to Germany however, I was really struck by the profundity of what happened in Reiki classes here. Brigitte Müller was the woman that I initiated and she was the first Reiki master who practiced here in Germany… And when I went to her class, which was about 17 to 20 people (1:07) (coughing) I found people weeping and going through some kind of cathartic experiences. And I didn’t understand German at the time. So I didn’t know what they were saying. But afterwards Brigitte said, well this happens all the time in classes, and it happened immediately when Mary McFayden came and started to teach. She was the master from Hawayo Takata, who came and taught in Germany and… was the mother of Reiki here in Germany, as far as I’m concerned.
1:58
And what was happening with people, is that they would say «Oh, I haven’t cried for 40 years» or «I haven’t thought of the war 20 years», and… or «I haven’t..», you know they were taken back to a time when their emotions were sort of stopped and held.. you know, kind of hold. And it seemed that Reiki pressed the hold button or the pause button and then they could feel their emotions again. And in doing that, it really felt that they were healing individually their own confusion and fear and shame and guilt about whatever happened around them during World War II. If a significant number of individuals have this experience in one part of the earth that I feel like there is an energy shift, you know, in that country.
3:08

3:08
And then what was also happening is that when I came to Germany a couple of years later, I met a woman near Hamburg, who was a very excited Reiki student and she decided to buy a house in the country and have a Reiki center, where we could do workshops. So I was really in the middle of doing workshops and decided to have one at her house. And I really liked being there. So I decided to make a kind of my place to land and then I would just teach from there and do these different master candidate classes and so on. And I was having people come from the Netherlands and France and Belgium and the Scandinavian countries and so on to this place near Hamburg. And almost immediately what I heard form them was «well, it was really difficult for me to come here”. And I went, being an American: «why?». And they would say: «Well, I swore I would never come to Germany again in my life after the war». And this happened so many times and so many different memories and painful experiences came up with their being here in Germany, but… and then there was the other side of it: So there is this guy who came to my workshops, and he really, I mean, looked like a Gestapo officer, you know the stereo-type kind of guy, and I just.. his name is Hans. And then he said «Well, I’m a citizen of the world, I’m not German». And I said «Hans, you’re really German and if you don’t own this Germaneness then you’ll never be able to use it in a way that heals people”. So he found that was pretty weird. I actually thought it was a pretty weird thing to say, but I didn’t know what else to say, it was true. And after a few years of this, people started to come back and one of these Dutch guys who really touched me, he was big truck-driver kind of guy, you know, not very well educated and he had been driving all through Europe all these years. He said «You know, every time I came through Germany he just said ‚okay, don’t stop, don’t break down, I don’t wanna speak the German language, you know, I’m not into Germany». And he said: «You know what happened? … When I came this time I thought I’m coming home”…
5:58

5:58
..and it just so touched me because there was obviously a healing, you know, that went far beyond the individual to this society that just had so much pain that they didn’t know what to do with it and that reiki was coming in and it could be expressed and it could be dissipated. I mean, you know, the memories will never go away and you know, if you think about it the pain comes back but there is some understanding also of the humanity of everybody that was involved. And I found that to be really profound. And it’s happened in many other places in the world… And I also believe that in every country where Reiki has profoundly been practiced, which is now pretty much every country in the world, even Africa, that there is something shifting in the society. And the people in the east, in East Berlin, who took Reiki, found that it was kind of a 100th monkey-thing that happened that the amount of Reiki that was started to be practiced in East Berlin and in East Germany rose to a level and actually contributed in opening the wall. And I have no idea if that’s true and at the time I just went «oh, forget it». But now that I see the profundity, you know, in the past of these kinds of experiences, I realize that it’s really very possible, that something shifted in the holding of this society that really allowed the Wall to come down and didn’t need to be there to demonstrate the separateness of people. So there’s that part of how Reiki has affected societies and cultures where it’s gone into.
8:13
And now I need a Kleenex…

0:00
One of the confusing things about grandmother’s teaching is that she called what she taught “Reiki” and she called the energy “Reiki”. However, the practice of Reiki was like a shortcut for Usui Shiki Ryoho and maybe Usui Shiki Ryoho Reiki. So… we all called it Reiki until like the beginning of the 1990ies. And then there were so many other Reiki forms of practice emerging that it was very difficult to know who we are talking about, it was very confusing.
0:52
Then in about 1993 or 94 there is this gentleman who was a master from Germany, Shunjan Joop Hilger. And he decided to take care of business because he knew that I wasn’t doing this, which I… appreciated his motivation, I didn’t appreciate what he did, but I appreciated his motivation. And he trademarked in Germany… the words Usui Shiki Ryoho and the Usui System of Natural Healing and the Kanji of Reiki. And so… I challenged him because he was starting to threaten people, that if they didn’t comply with his idea about what the practice was, then they couldn’t use the words.
1:55
So I went into a 2 year trademark…. what’s it called.. challenge I guess or something like that (background voice) … and I challenged him to the right to trademark these. And the attorney that I used in Köln..in Cologne said, when I told him my whole story, said: “well, if you are the recognized lineage bearer, the Grand Master, then they are yours.”
02:29-2:45 So … (talks to herself ….pause )

0:00
I think for the most part, and this is my judgement, that people who were angry with me about Trademark had no idea what was happening and they still don’t understand it and they still hold onto ideas about trademarking that are actually not accurate and they didn’t trust me. So there are these kind of different aspects of it. So I was not…
0:39
Joop was the one who wanted to control how people practice Reiki, that was why some German masters said: “You know, I want you to do something about this”. So I was the only one who could have taken the trademark away from Joop because they were actually, essentially mine. And he… he applied for them not in my name, but in his name. And he wasn’t willing to just give them to me because obviously I wasn’t doing my job as the Grand Master, so why would I all of a sudden do it? Right? That made sense, I mean I totally understood him. And I didn’t want to control people, this was my thing.
1:23
But what I learned about trademarks is this: That in the business world you get to choose your own name and this name is what people know you by and your reputation and your, now we call it: branding. And all of that becomes a part of this name, there is an energe…. they recognize that a name can engender this energetic field and can actually inform people what they’re actually getting into. So….
2:01

2:01
You know one of the things that’s been interesting is names that were made up like Xerox. What an interesting thing a word that was made up for a copy machine and a whole line of business products, business machine products. And now if we want to make a copy of something printed, we say: “could you go Xerox this for me?” and it may be not a Xerox-machine but a machine made by Sony or some other company, right? (0234) So we don’t use… can you go, ya, so…
2:42
So the thing of it is, is that Reiki was becoming so well known and there was some question mark about what this word really meant. So it was a way for the Reiki community to come together to actually define what Reiki was and to allow those, that what I would call, “sincere” who really had Reiki to come together and to create what I called earlier an industry trademark. And the examples for this are in the US, and I believe this is true in Germany especially, is that when you get something that’s wool, by pure wool, there’s a little trademark that you find that looks like a skein of yarn, it’s like threads going this way and this way and this way and that’s an international industrial trademark. So everything that is really true wool can use this trademark.
3:51
And that’s what could have happened with Reiki. So there would have been simple criteria that people would have, you know, met like you were initiated by a person in person as a student, for instance that could be one of the criteria. So then, everybody, you know, all these people who would have liked to have used the trademark could have, you know, given some money to support the trademark. Because in order to use a trademark you have to (0435) have  somebody every month ohh, (0437) have somebody every month go through the trademark magazines to make sure that nobody is registering trademark that is close to yours (0446). ..(cough) and so on … (0451)

4:52
And that could have really cleaned up the… what I would call the “fringe” element of Reiki where people are really combining Reiki with different things and calling it Reiki but there … it’s not really Reiki and most Reiki people would agree with that. they would have had to use another word, which would have been fine.
5:23
So.. that was one instance where I felt really misused by the German Reiki Master community because they were the ones that came to me, a lot of them, and said: “Joop is sending us threatening letters, could you do something about this?”. So then when I asked them to support what I was doing, they couldn’t do it, they wouldn’t send me money or anything. So I did it anyway. Cost me about 60’000 Dollars.
5:56
And you know, it was for their benefit, it wasn’t mine. I wasn’t practicing in Europe and in fact I wouldn’t have cared. Should Joop have taken me to court it wouldn’t have stood up, he could have sued me for use of the trademark. But actually, since I was the original owner of the trademark, it would have been really a crazy situation.
6:24
I don’t know what would have happened if I had just let it go. I mean, I think that he might have tried to take somebody to court or shut them down as a Reiki Master and I don’t really think he could have. I mean that could have maybe been nasty but I don’t think he would have been able to do it because he had no authority, recognized authority in the community at that point. And at that point, I was still recognised by most people as the Grand Master. So it was a very interesting juxtaposition in the mid 1990ies. Now that is not so true because the proliferation of different kinds of Reiki and how many Reiki students they’re just in numbers in the world.
7:13

5:36
And then I started looking around and by that time I was in Germany, I lived in Germany for five years and I lived in Hamburg, which is very close to Berlin and I had initiated a master who lived in Berlin, West Berlin, who was going to the East to teach classes, illegally. And so the Berlin wall was very real for me and I was there when it opened. I mean “opened” is a very accurate word, because it just opened.
6:23
I thought to myself “I hope the world learns a lesson from this”. That you can put up an artificial wall but it doesn’t keep families from loving each other or wanting to be with each other, it doesn’t keep people separated. It just is an artificial structure that brings pain. And it seemed at that moment, because of the way that the wall opened that maybe we had come to another order of relationship in… between nations and between people in the world. And I have to say that after this there has been a kind of… in my opinion, a kind of back-stepping that.. and maybe it’s going forward and we’ve met another impasse. But somehow today, in 2016, you know we’re looking at countries in Europe building walls, literally building walls again, because they want to keep out their brother and sister who are starving to death, who fear for their life so much that they’re leaving their beloved homeland.
7:56

2:00
This particular system of Reiki practice has a specific form and a specific set of fundamental principals and values that is unique to this system. One of the things that happened in the mid 1990s is that there was a gentleman in Germany who 0221 trademarked  0223 äh Usui Shiki… no …. trademarked 0226 Usui system of natural healing, trademarked the Reiki Kanji and a number of other things and felt that he was doing this in service to this system because he felt that I wasn’t doing my job, which he might have been right, I have no idea. But I certainly didn’t want him to own the copyright in Germany, because he was sending threatening letters to masters and so on.
2:55
So I got into a very interesting conversation with him, we’ll call it a conversation between our attorneys and eventually they awarded these – trademarked phrases and the symbols, like the Kanji being a symbol at that point to me, because I was the rightful owner. Well by the time they did this, which was I think in 1998, Reiki was so common in Germany that it had become a household word and therefore could not be trademarked. Which on one hand I was very relieved because it just saved me from a really …. difficult process of trying to defend the trademarks while at the same time it opened it to a lot of people.
3:57

7:20
…obviously anatomy and physiology, some courses on disease recog…. disease and condition recognition according to allopathic medicine. And in Germany, which is the first program that I tried to organize to accompany the Heilpraktiker-Programm there, I really loved it that a lot of the Heilpraktiker-Progamm were… was devoted to practitioners’ learning characteristics of a certain disease so that they wouldn’t treat it. I thought this was wonderful, very German and very brilliant actually. Because on the other hand Heilpraktikers and Reiki practitioners weren’t given the authority to diagnose, only the allopathic can diagnose. And this was great because it just gave people this understanding in kind of a backward way, I like that actually a lot.
8:32
And psychological training, lots of hours of hands on treatment, not only given but received. For me, what I would want the practitioner to have is at least an equal number of hours of treatments given and received, both. Because I feel like as a practitioner, if you haven’t experienced the receiving of Reiki treatments and you haven’t paid for those treatments, there’s no way that you can ask or be confident about asking other people to pay for Reiki treatments and, you know, coming to you.
9:17

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

1:33
Mary was in London during World War II, she lived through the bombing of London by the Germans and Germany was THE last place she ever wanted to go. So immediately after she was initiated as a master she meets this German woman, starts going to Germany to teach and that’s where she did most of her teaching in her career. And she changed and transformed for me a whole generation of German people who were holding on to their own wounds, inflicted by World War II and by the whole process of the Nazis and fascism and so on, and by their own German culture of being very strong and not very emotional. So Brigitte said that one of the things that she was always astonished, is how much people could cry. That they would come to a Reiki class and in Germany people just sat and wept for these days because they needed to because it was a part of their healing that needed to happen.
3:03

3:46
And being articulate with my word, I think that for all of us, we try to express ourselves verbally and one of the things that is so clear for me now is that our verbal language has gaps and it definitely has places that cannot express what we really want to express. I spent some time in the 1980s and 90s learning German. It was a very interesting endeavour for me because language is not one of my better skills and though I love the German language I also didn’t have time to dedicate to the learning of it. Though I did take a 3 or 4 months course in Hamburg and that helped pave the way for more coherent German sentences (laugh)
4:45
Although I missed the week about pronouns, which turned out to be definitely significant (laugh) So I’m not very good in German pronouns. So anyway, I realized though when I was taking this language and trying to speak it that I really had to get into the mind set of German, you know and of being German. And it was really fun for me because at that point I was liv… I had an apartment in Hamburg and I really loved North Germany as a part of the country. And I was feeling very at home there. So it was easy for me to kind of slip into this German part of myself, I would call it.
5:37