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
0:00
So as well during this time is when I was just finding my legs as a master, so to speak, and working out my own personal issues, as I said before. And the skiing process really helped me to manage some of these processes in a way that was very humanistic. That I… that I found out then what Hal had meant by being perceptually handicapped. And that was that my perception of myself was so skewed, so distorted that it distorted the rest of the world. And it was a handicap because it was so distorted that it.. it actually didn’t match the real world very much at all.
1:10
As I came into this realization I understood that my practice of Reiki had brought me back into myself and given me the gift of knowing… my strength, my chara.. part of my character, understanding beauty and understanding that we make our own world, really, and my world was pretty tortured and …. really painful. And I have come out the other side, I don’t fell like I’m really much different but my viewpoint on the world is that it’s a friendly place, which is very different than when I started out….
2:13
1:39
So it was interesting for me, even in that moment, like… it’s almost 10 years now that I’ve been there at this reunion, that as kids, some of the kids didn’t notice that I was Japanese and didn’t notice the difference. And yet from my point of view I was always different, always on the outside. So all of these different things, I say “well Reiki has given me the possibility to rewrite my life, to have it be more accurate, to have it make more sense and to understand the degree of distortion that I lived in for a long time.”
2:26
So at this point I feel pretty congruent. It’s a work in progress but the …. Experiences that I had in growing up allowed me to become a stronger person and to be able to handle adversity without feeling a victim and that for me has been a really valuable lesson in my life.
3:00