3:01
Sometime in the mid 80ies I remember realizing that I had lived a lot of my life at the mercy of other people and what they thought and my mother kept pointing this out to me but I had no idea what she meant at the time (laugh) what she was talking to me. But I realized that as a master and as a lineage bearer, as grand master if I didn’t feel a complete Yes in everything that I did, then I wouldn’t do it. That was my motto. And I still use that to this day. I don’t have to have reasons for it to be a Yes, because often there are no reasons. Because it looks like on the outside that I shouldn’t do it, but on the inside, if I say Yes, then I just do it. And my thinking is that.. if I make a decision for a Yes then I can always make another decision later because I didn’t… I can’t blame anybody else, because I can’t say “oh well, that René he told me do this and then, you know, well he shouldn’t have told me that and now so I am in this hot water “. And if you do it yourself , then you can always make another decision. And it’s really OK for me to go: “Whoops, I thought this was the road I wanted to take, and it isn’t”. So I’m backing up, I’m turning around … or I’m taking a detour or something else.
4:50 (räusper)
I also learned that what people bring to me as a reflection of who I am at the time … and I see that I am also a very reflective person back. So if somebody comes to me with a kind of attitude , then watch out, because I can just turn into that attitude so fast, it’s a little scary for me actually.
5:25
I have a few relationships in my life, where … it will always be a contrary kind of relationship but in that contrariness there is … there is a deep and abiding faith of care in that relationship, and that the safety is there to be contrary and to be aggressive sometimes, to be myself if I need to be and to reflect back to the other person who they are. Not.. I don’t do this consciously, I don’t think “oh, I’m.. now I’m gonna be reflective” . But it’s just something that happens inside of me. 0610 And ähm .. So (räusper)
6:15

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

2:30
Now, I’ve thought and talked a lot about this, and someone once wrote as a rebuttal somewhere about the spiritual lineage: “well Mikao Usui never talked about himself as being a member of the lineage”. And I thought: “Well, hello?! Of course not, he didn’t know there was going to be a lineage”. You know…. There’s master and student, but I feel lineage doesn’t come till you have the third person, because then you have a line that is drawn and then the fourth person really becomes a lineage. So a lineage doesn’t start with one person or even two, it has to contain at least 3 people.
3:16
So my grandmother and in some of their innocence or wanting to make her feel important or whatever their motivation was, I believed they used the phrase Grand Master, which is used a lot. It’s also used now to translate some of the martial art terms of the person who is in charge of the Dojo in martial arts and so on, as the Grand Master, but it’s not something that I relate to …sort of in this lineage base.
4:01

4:01
So it was hard for me, this phrase “the Grand Master”. Now I don’t care, people can call me the Grand Master, that’s fine. But then in…2000… no in… 1992 Paul Mitchell and I actually formed a business entity, called “The Office of the Grand Master”
(0429-0431) (cough)
And at that time I was not so interested in the form of the practice. He as a person who was a catholic brother, was used to a lot of ritual and organization of the church, the catholic church. He also had taken many, many years of Aikido, so for him this emphasis on form was really important. And I was not so much into form as I was into essence.
5:09
So our partnership started out that way. Now I feel like we are both very balanced in this form/essence thing. And sometimes I’m much more strict than he is on the form. But that’s ok… The thing of it is, that at that point…. In martial arts, because I had to have something to compare it with, there’s often the founder or the founder’s successor that holds the essence of the practice. But the Dojo master holds the form-practice and teaches. So Paul and I saw us, ourselves, as him being the Dojo master, so to speak, and my being the essence person. So that point, to make it much clearer… I don’t know who came up with the phrase personally, but then I introduced this phrase “lineage bearer” because I knew that I was that. That I was the successor and that in this lineage I was the bearer of this lineage. And that I didn’t feel like was disputable, that’s what I was recognized as.
6:40

6:40
Now, what does Grand Master really mean? Well, you know, I still to this day don’t really know and at the point where Paul and I were sort of giving each other duties, he knew that he would never be the lineage bearer and he still to this day is very clear about that. And so that allowed me to have, what I would call “an accurate title”. The further away I get from Hawayo Takata’s death the more easy I am with this term Grand Master, because I feel whether I like it or not, I’m growing into it.
7:38
During the … master intensives that Paul and I facilitate together we have identified 5 roles of masters. So it helps me in organizing myself when people say “I’m a Reiki teacher” (0758-0802) (cough)… and not go into a judgement that says “no, you are a Reiki master”. So the roles of a master are, that I feel, are identifiable, are: initiator, teacher, student, mentor and tradition keeper. So each of these 5 roles of the master have a different quality and mastery is really about being able to hold all of those and be active in all of those.
8:44

12:55
In the same light, to kind of get back to my topic again, I believe that the Grand Master has it’s own individuation with roles and that one of them is lineage bearer, one of them is the form keeper or something like that but we haven’t gotten to explore that and I think once we do, we will understand more about the essence of what is meant by this phrase. Whether or not that phrase actually communicates in, is totally … I don’t know, we may come up with something really different.
13:35
One of the things that is not understood at all, it seems, by the general public and by the Reiki community, is that a Grand Master is actually recognized. It is not taken. So in the process of my becoming recognized as a Grand Master, I could not say to people “I’m in, vote for me”. It needed to be.. come from the other side, it needed to be recognized. And in that recognition, I believe, that the Reiki community grew me as a Grand Master, that every master of Hawayo Takata did have the seed of lineage bearer or Grand Master in them. It was the recognition of me and my willingness, whether I knew it or not, to take it on and the energy of Reiki that came to me, whether my grandmother wanted that to be or not, that really grew somebody very different than the masters who were initiated by Hawayo Takata.
14:56

14:56
And it doesn’t mean that I am wiser or have a better viewpoint of the system or anything, what it means is that I have a more global view. And one of the things that really separates Paul and I from all the other masters that Hawayo Takata initiated or recognized, was this global view, this idea that we were much more than Reiki masters to our own students, that we were actually growing into this mast… universal mastery path and that in this as a group of Reiki masters we really could have influence on the outcome of humanity. And….
15:46
It was amazing to me that the masters who were initiated by Hawayo Takata did not understand the influence and the impact that they had on the entire Reiki community. You know, they would say stuff like: well, you know… you know the members of the Reiki Alliance, like all their students, I don’t care about them. I was going: “how can you.. how can you not care about them?”… (laugh)… “How can you not care about the system… that we’re practicing?”
16:22-16:27 (cough)
They really took it as a linear kind of progression, where, you know, Hawayo Takata was master and their teacher, they taught exactly as she taught them, in theory, which I truly believe was from their heart. And so it didn’t matter to me and it still doesn’t matter to me that these masters could be members of the Alliance, their form could be really different than most of the Alliance members but they still for me practice the same system, because that blood line, so to speak, the energetic blood line of Hawayo Takata still ran through them.
17:15

00:00
My membership of this circle of 22 masters initiated and recognized by Hawayo Takata was very important to me. I felt that this circle held the energy of Reiki and the practice of Usui Shiki Ryoho up until now… And now there are four members of that circle still alive, that we know of. And Wanja has been not teaching for a couple of years. So now its Rick Bockner, Paul Mitchell and myself. We were the youngest when she initiated us all. And … I felt that as the Grandmaster, as the recognized lineage bearer that I was the spokesman for this circle. That in truth I couldn’t do anything to «change» the system or to alter the message without actually going back to the circle and somehow having agreement among us.
01:28-0130 (rülps) Excuse me.
 I think that from their point of view I was doing a lot of things they didn’t like but most of the things they didn’t like I didn’t like either. But it was happening, and so what can I do? y‘ know, like all the change… all the different kinds of forms of practice. There was no way for me to control that. And… I learnt that very early on that, y’know, my job was not about control, because it was impossible to control people. I didn’t have the personality of a police person. So, there was kind of a joke about having Reiki-police
02:13

02:13
But it was important for me to be able to hold the totality of what Hawayo Takata passed on as practice and know that the totality really was about the 22 masters and in all the different ways and variations that we practice.
That the truth of the practice was in the whole, no’… was not in this person’s practice or that person’s practice but in the whole group’s voice of the practice. And right now, y’know, what’s sad for me is that that circle is now not alive. In the sense that most of them have died.
03:00
So, now what we’r… what I’m working on is creating something called, which is not just being created now, I mean, it’s already in existence but the… to create consciousness about something called the “Master-Body”. Which for me is this collective of all Reiki Masters and that whether or not you choose to be an active member of this body you add to the body energetically, just by being a master.
03:33

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

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

0:00
Well, in 1982 when the masters, mostly the masters of Hawayo Takata met, in Hawaii, it was decided that I was the only one who would initiate masters. And I don’t know really where this decision came from, but it was a wise decision on the parts of other masters. Not because I was the best person to do it but because in tradition the Grand Master is the person to perpetuate the system. So they would be the only person to initiate masters. At the same time it meant that… the masters who came out of this system would get the same “training” or preparation and they would have something in common and hopefully that training would be… thorough and the best, you know, that somebody could offer….
1:24
Then.. and I felt honoured by this because I felt that all the masters knew that they could initiate a master and they were.. some of them were told before you die it’s important for you to initiate at least one master because then Reiki won’t die. And so…
1:53
I don’t think any of us realized what an amazing journey this would take us on. At one point I had certificates printed shortly after Hawaii and I got 1st degree, 2nd degree and I got master certificates done and I wanted to print 50 and the guy said “I’m not printing 50”, because it was the old kind of printing, where it was really a printing press. And he said: “forget it, you know, I’m gonna print you 2 or 300 and if you don’t use them, that’s fine but I can’t print 50”. And I thought “well, I’ll never use them”, of course I did….but not in the short time to 1988.
2:45

2:45
So… in 1986 or so other masters started to talk to me about initiating masters..(0254-0256) (cough).. Barbara Weber of course was already initiating masters, a master by the name of Barbara McCollough was already initiating masters.. I don’t know about Virginia Samdahl and Ethel Lombardi but by that time Ethel Lombardi had broken off from Reiki and started her own… workshops called… MarilEl, called MariEl. And so she did… she did that to honour her master, so it wouldn’t be called Reiki.
3:41
And what I received from their sort of …abdicating their own power and energy to initiate masters to me, is that I felt supported and I felt that that support went through the system. And it was probably the best thing that could have happened to the system for those 6 years.
4:06

4:06
However, as newer masters began to come out and as other Reiki students could see it from the outside, their idea was that I was the only one that had the power to initiate masters. And there was nothing I could do, and I tried, there was nothing I could do to dissuade them from this thought. So a friend of mine and I were travelling actually through Germany and we did a number of workshops before this conference in 1988 in Friedrichsdorf. And I just told John, I said: “I have to do something about this because it’s a lie and if it’s out into people who say that this is what I say about this, then.. you know, it’s gonna totally destroy me”…0505-0510 (cough)..
5:11
I stood up and gave a speech in Friedrichsdorf and this is what I think I said, which is.. everybody has their own version, so far I’ve now heard 4 or 5. But what I thought I said was: “The masters of Hawayo Takata abdicated their right and their… yah, their right to initiate masters, given to them because they are masters of this system, to me. I don’t know why but they did and I feel like it’s been beneficial for this system.”
5:52

5:52
But I saw, even then at that time, that Wanja Twan wanted to initiate masters, Paul Mitchell should initiate masters because he was growing in his own maturity. There were other masters, Mary McFayden, Beth Gray, John Gray, all of these people were ready to initiate masters and I just said: “I’m going to give this back to you, you know, I’m going to say to you every master has the right to initiate masters, because this is not about the system. We as masters are initiated to initiate 1st and 2nd degrees students. If you pass this on to a master student this is something that is in relationship with you and the system that you practice. It has nothing to do with me, it has nothing to do with your initiating master giving you the power. We all have the power to do this. But do we all have the means of responsibility that it takes to do the step?”
7:08
Because it’s not like, you know, 1st degree, 2nd degree, masters (marks equally split parts). It’s like 1st degree, 2nd degree and the master (marks one small part, then an immense part and master far away). And I said: “You know, it’s a really different thing. And I’m not going to be involved in it because there is now way as a master that you should ask anybody’s permission to initiate a master. Because this is not right, then you are not a master enough to do this on your own, you shouldn’t be doing it.”
7:40

7:40
So, I didn’t say it exactly like that, but that was for me my message. And I expected Paul Mitchell for instance to go “oh, thank you, you know, I’m so happy because I could see this coming and I really wanted to initiate masters”. But no, he was angry with me and didn’t talk to me for 2 years. And that was true for many masters that they were really angry with me. They felt like I was giving away my power. And I just told them, I said: “This is not giving away my power, yet I didn’t ever have the power at the first place. So I can’t really give it away. I can just tell the truth of what I see about power. And that is the… if you have the trust of somebody to give them the initiation and the safety of the students who will come to them to initiate them as masters, then, you know, that’s your business, not mine”.
8:42
So they wanted me to have a training program to do this. Well I could hardly train my own masters much less train masters, I mean forget it. I said: “I have nothing to offer, absolutely nothing”. And up until this day when I initiate and in the training part I do it in a week, and that’s the part about how to teach classes, going over the finer points what I do, what I’m thinking inside and all of that. The preparation is the bigger part.
9:17
I just tell them: “You’re being trained to initiate 1st and 2nd degree. If you want to initiate a master, I want you to wait 10 years. If you can’t, then that’s how it is, but I want you to know that this is something you take on for yourself. So I’m not going to be here to tell you how to do it”. And I don’t, I don’t do anything about masters initiations.
9:42

1:44
Trying to translate Japanese into English or any other language is difficult and what he doesn’t really understand is that of course he can go to a generalized thing but she had full knowledge of Japanese and she had full knowledge of English and so her translation not just included the linguistic translation but included the cultural and the practice translation. So for me it’s like “well why not Reiki Master?”. And I agree with him on the point that in Japan you don’t declare yourself a Reiki Master and you don’t declare yourself a Grand Master. These are done through recognition. And I was not … I didn’t declare myself a Reiki Master nor did I declare myself a lineage bearer or a Grand Master. That was done through the recognition of my grandmother and of my colleagues and of students. So I’m fine with being Phyllis Furumoto and this other part for me really is important. That recognition has a lot to bear. So I agree with him on that point. (0306) … (räusper) And…
3:11
And as an aside to term these politics, for me it’s not politics because we are not talking about social behaviour. We are talking about the manifestation of spiritual practice which has a totally different meaning. So there are….
3:34

0:00
My mother called me a lost soul and I really hated this, because mostly I didn’t know what she meant, so that was really interesting. And it wasn’t until maybe 10 or 15 years later that I realized what she meant. Because whether I liked it or not, whether I knew it or not, whether I was conscious about it or not, the practice of Reiki gave me connection to my spiritual self, gave me connection to my soul and gave me means of finding out what I wanted to do, not what other people wanted me to do.
00:47
So it was true that in my early years after the time that I was 30 it seemed like, and I will say “seemed like”, I used a lot of other people’s opinions to make my own decisions. However there was a part of me that the really important decisions that I made, I didn’t care what anybody thought. You know, I married a man that I should have never married because my mother told me that I had to get married because I couldn’t live out of wedlock with a man. So that was about the last time I ever did really anything important in my life, let somebody else’s say so.
1:38

1:38
However, when I came to Reiki and then my grandmother died. It seemed instantly but it was a couple of years later. And then I was recognized as the lineage bearer or Grand Master of the system, her successor. I tried to listen to all the voices and somehow come to a compromise about what I should do and what should happen and what direction will we take and so on. But I started to find my own will and that was very important for me. One of the very first times that I had a difference of opinion with this group of masters was in 1983 when we were drawing up the foundation of the Reiki Alliance. And people really wanted to exclude Barbara Weber, because at that point she was saying really nasty things about us and ….being very righteous, I think that’s an accurate word.
2:59
I wanted to include her… I was… I did not found the Reiki Alliance in order to have my own organisation. I really want this on the record! I wanted to found an organisation that would lift everybody up to a higher purpose so that we can all sit in the same circle. So I kept inviting Barbara Weber Ray and her… the masters that were her students or her masters actually to please come to the Reiki Alliance, so that we could have a place to sit and talk.
3:48

3:48
But that wasn’t going to happen. And that’s okay. But I just felt that that was really important. And then as the years went by I just realized that if I could say YES, a full Yes to anything that I did, initiating a Reiki Master, having a first degree class at a certain place, getting married to my ex-husband… my husband then or moving to Canada or moving back to Santa Fe or wherever, whatever I was doing. If it were my decision then I could own it. And if I needed to make another decision, I could make that decision, but it would be all mine. And that’s what I have gone to since then.
4:44
There are lots of people who have said “please, please do this” you know “next year”. And I said “well, I’m not ready, I can’t do it, I can’t say yes”. And it’s frustrated a lot of people and it sometimes frustrates me but I feel like this YES is a very important piece and what it did for me was it broke down the walls inside of me. I felt like I had all these different personas inside of me and they were all fighting with each other. And when I needed to have congruency then I needed to break all these walls down and listen to all the voices inside of me and come to a place where is was really YES.
5:36

3:28
So on top of that, that the energy came to me and the masters recognized me that was something that there was no controlling. I couldn’t control it and at the time I didn’t even know if I wanted it. But it only took me a few years to recognize that I didn’t have a choice either. That even if I wanted to have denied it that that would have been… very disruptive to my life and very disruptive to the life of Reiki. That it wouldn’t have automatically gone to Barbara Weber. They would have had to have found somebody else.
4:10
This was all very interesting, you know, because I hardly knew what Reiki was, much less try to work out all these nuances on an energetic level and on a personal level and you know here I was asking .. asked to be the Grand Master and all the people were older than I was, including the people that were around my age, they were still one or two years older than I was, they had mostly all… had years more of experience in Reiki and I was supposed to be their Grand Master.. I mean… you know, I didn’t really seem appropriate at the time.
4:53

4:53
Even from the very beginning, every once in a while, there was this something happened and this stream of energy came through me and that’s what people recognized. They didn’t recognize me because I was some holy wonderful person. As a joke I can say “Okay, I’ve taken 35 years to get there”. But… they recognized me because something extraordinary happened to me every once in a while. As Paul Mitchell said “It’s like a little pilot flame inside of Phyllis and every once in a while somebody turns it on and it becomes like this and then it goes back to the pilot flame”. And I believe that.
5:50
Now, after all these years, it’s more controllable by me. I can just open myself up and it happens. And sometimes it doesn’t happen when I want it to because my personality supersedes it. And that’s too bad actually. When I get tired, when I get… when I haven’t eaten properly and … when I’m distracted by something that’s happening in my life. Like, I get distracted and then I don’t have consciousness around it.
6:38

8:41
And then when I was recognized then the community nourished this part of me and kept recognizing it and grew me. So the first 10 or 15 years was a gardening project, really, of the Reiki community and they did a great job because I came out of it whole, I feel like the community came out of it a better.. a better community. And I feel like I’ve grown into a .. I’ve grown into a Grand Master. And I’m… that’s not about recognizing myself or … what can I say … well, it’s not announcing myself as a Grand Master, like many people have. It’s about acknowledging the achievement of a community to grow it’s leader. And I think they’ve done a wonderful job. And in that process I’ve healed a lot of my personality quirks, well they don’t ever go away but I feel them to the point where I feel like I can be a good human being and that’s all what I can ask for really.
10:08

11:02
So the succession may of not be one person, I don’t know. It could end up being a group of people, but for sure the master body of this system needs to be able to open to another way of thinking and another way of being as masters, I would say a higher expression of mastery in order for the succession-process to be successful. And what I mean by successful is that it is done not without conflict because I don’t believe that there is a possibility of no conflict but I believe that we can see the conflict as a natural progression toward a creative resolution, reconciliation.
11:59
And if they don’t keep that in mind, if they vote… if they want to take a vote by personality, then I will have failed. Because this position is not about personality, I mean, I would have lost, hands down if they would have taken a vote on personality, because my personality was a wreck. Reiki healed me. This having to force myself out of my personality idiosyncrasies to think bigger and to think, you know, more humane, you know, it made me this way. You know, I might have had leaning sort of. But y’know it made me give up a lot of personality distortions. And it’s not about personality…..
13:00

13:00
At some point… (laughs)
1303 (Schneuzgeräusche)
… in my…. realisation I realized that I didn’t want to be liked, I wanted to be respected. I didn’t care about being loved, I wanted to be respected. And I’m still working on that, because in the first 10 years all I wanted to do is be loved. So finally people thought “okay, I’ve succeeded in giving her what she wants”. And when I got it I thought “well, actually this is not what I want”. I want respect and it’s coming, because I’m respecting myself… more.
13:45
So the succession process is a process and it is very exciting because last weekend… a weekend in February in Mexico a small group of us got together to speak about succession. And because my cancer is active again and I don’t know how many years I have of active duty so to speak, I feel time really pressing on me now. And so now we have a…. what is called, what we call a transformational succession process plan in place. And we are starting it… you know, the first steps of that are being started. There’s a letter of invitation that’s going to go out and there’ll be a small group of masters who will …. well my guess is small group of masters who will say yes to the invitation.
14:59

14:59
And this group of masters will accompany me through this process of succession and education and at the end our end-state in a year hopefully will be a collective lineage bearing… a collective lineage bearing is the name of the end-state of being. And that will open up a whole field of understanding that will go
1531 through another (schlägt etwas mit dem Arm)
1532 sorry
another process.
1537 (Hintergrundgeräusch)
And my instrument for doing this is going to be in a webinar-situation where the 16 or 20 people who have the small group of go through this process will sit and do this talking over the webinar. So nobody has to travel you only have to have a really good internet connection and willingness to spend time on your computer.
16:06

16:06
And then with the webinar, people who are interested can sit in as witnesses. So we could have hundreds of witnesses if we want, which will be really great. And it will be able to inform the master community in a kind of networking situation. And eventually in a year we might be able to have a collective in-person gathering, you know where we speak in person for once. But anyway, we’ll just see what happens. But this is being coached and facilitated by Ben Haggert, who was a … my go-to-person with this regenerative developmental thinking process. And it’s really changed the way that I think and the way that I see the process of life.
17:05
I’m very, very excited by this because … it gives me not hope but a way to carry this system forward into the future and I believe that not only the system but the whole of the global Reiki community.
17:36

5:26
But there are many, many masters who practice this system who are not members of the Alliance. So the Alliance is a volunteer organization for masters to support themselves as masters. 0545 Yah..
5:48
Question from René: OK, within…. .??… yourself as a Grand Master for those fractions?
0552
Well, I’m only a Grand Master to those who recognize me. So there are members of the Reiki Alliance who don’t recognize me… now…. which is interesting. And I … in some way my questions is how do they get to be members of the Reiki Alliance? But that’s true for me that they’ve come and told me “I don’t really recognize you as a Grand Master”. So I asked them “Why are you a member of the Alliance?” And then our conversation ends there. I’m only the Grand Master for those who recognize me, I’m.. it’s not a titular head that is so, if everybody tomorrow ceased to recognize me as the Grand Master then I wouldn’t be it anymore and that would be fine for me.
6:48

0:00
You know titles that are transferred from culture to culture are often very problematic. And it’s the same for this from the Japanese culture into Western culture in English. They referred to me as a Grand Master, it was a term that was coined and has been used in other Japanese art forms, the Grand Master, to say the Sensei, the head Sensei, teacher of teachers so to speak. But it means more than teacher.
0:46
So a master for me has a least five different aspects. There is the initiator, the teacher, the mentor, the student and the tradition keeper. So when people say “I’m a Reiki teacher” my response in my head is to say, “Oh, I see, so you’re not claiming responsibility for being an initiator, for being a mentor, for being a student or for being a tradition keeper”. And for most of the Reiki teachers that I know that’s true actually.
1:28

1:28
So then as Grand Master I believe that there are several different aspects of Grand Master which we are starting to articulate now which is very interesting. And one of those aspects is bearing the lineage, is actually the lineage bearer. And it was a decision on my part to use both simultaneously because in 1993 Paul Mitchell and I formed the Office of the Grand Master, which meant that he also had a role that I would say is an aspect of the Grand Master called Head of Discipline.
2:11
So both of us together envisioned that this office would actually contain many people by now, but it hasn’t. We haven’t… we haven’t matured to the point of adding another person or two. But it wouldn’t surprise me, we just don’t… we just haven’t had those people emerge. And so Head of Discipline is one aspect of being Grand Master, that’s the person who holds the form and who holds the discipline of the practice, exactly what it means. And usually in the martial art they’ll have a Dojo Master and the person who is the philosophic head of the martial art and that’s who I am, I’m the lineage bearer. So I’m the energetic head of this practice and he took on the role of being responsible for a Head of Discipline.
3:16

1:21
Whether or not those people in practices that are named Usui Shiki Ryoho recognize me as the Grand Master, my passing and the succession will affect their practice to a certain extent. Not because they want it to but because it just is so, I believe that and it will affect… as it will affect all the other practices that call themselves something else. Mainly because a lot of people have founded their practice in resistance to me. And if you found a practice in resistance to me then I hate to say it, but you are as connected to me as those who feel like they are connected to me.
2:12
One of the things that I have asked people over and over again if they want to start their own practice, please go ahead and do so but name it something else so that students have an understanding about what they are practicing. So all the people who have Usui Shiki Ryoho as their, you know, name of practice are holding that name in some way in resistance to change it. Because if they chose Usui Shiki Ryoho at the time, even in 1988 they would have recognized me as the lineage bearer. Because it was in fact the only system basically that existed.
3:01

4:53
Having said that (laugh) 0456-0501 (cough) ….
Having said that, I am very clear about the practice that I teach and hold and I have ended up, you know, thinking myself a total liberal in politics and the way that I live my life. And being called conservative by my own students, “well why don’t you even consider changing this part of the system?”, “Well because that’s not what I was taught” “Well, how can you say that? That was 30 years ago, you know, don’t you like move on?” And, you know, part of my job not only as the Grand Master and lineage bearer, but part of my job as a Reiki master and a Reiki student is to take what I was given and to practice that PERIOD
6:00

13:03
Could I have done something different? No, I felt like I did my best. Unfortunately … (laugh) unfortunately my best was not nearly good enough. Ahhh… I was not prepared for this. I had no one in the community that would step up and be there for me. I had business men come and tell me … who were Reiki masters… come and tell me “Don’t get into this, you’ll regret it” and then walk away. They didn’t come and say “Listen, you need help. You need to know what you are getting into, I can help you with this” and eventually show me that this was not where I wanted to go. But nobody was willing to do that and that kind of unwillingness, I don’t blame them, I blame mys… I don’t blame myself, I just feel like I wasn’t open to it. And they didn’t feel the opening to come and support me.
14:05
So … I don’t know where that came from, but … It’s been my … If I have any regret in my whole time being recognized as the Grand Master, that’s the one. I never met Joop in person. I would…. Now I realize I should have several times met him in person. We only talked through attorneys. We never talked face to face. We didn’t go to court, it was settled out of court, so I didn’t even see him in court…. And I feel badly about that, because I feel like we only have the projection of who we think he or she or I was at the moment and it’s probably still present. I mean that’s where our relationship ended, so to speak. And that’s where it’s going to stay, because as human beings we can’t progress until we actually progress in real life. And that’s really sad.
15:20

17:13
Since then (laugh)… since then my life as Grand Master has been pretty mellow (laugh), and I feel that…. I changed in a way through this process and I’ve become much more clear about what I’m willing to do and what I’m not willing to do, who my audience is and who my audience is not and so on. So these are the three places when you asked me about forgiving myself that come up for me and that there’s obviously energy still there, and I think rightfully so. It’s…. these were times where in our…. in my community anyway.. in this practice that there were significant changes of development that happened.
18:28

0:00
0006 (räusper)
As a part of this system, there is a lineage and this lineage is like our ancestry and to just deny it or to say it doesn’t exist anymore is a lie. So in this system, there will be a lineage. What that lineage looks like, I don’t know. Is it one person that will succeed me? Is it a group of people that will try and do the work together? If so, then we really need a lot of work before I die. Is it possible for me to step back into a not so public role? Of course, I need to take care of myself, I feel that if I’m predominant, then… in visualness, then other masters will not have the opportunity to step into that place.
1:21

1:21
And no one really knows what’s going to happen with this and … for me …. the question is: Is it possible to have a spiritual practice without some kind of a still point for the spiritual practice, a lineage, an ancestry? And I think this is a question that is really open to discussion. I know that I fulfil a role that lots of people don’t see … don’t see, period! It’s on an energetic level, it has nothing to do with how important I am or how … or what my personality is. If, as I said, if everyone stopped recognizing me as the lineage bearer, as a Grand Master, then I wouldn’t be it anymore and I would be… but I would still be a Reiki master. And I would still continue my life as a Reiki master. What I have done is for… is in service to the community and in service to the system that we practice.
2:45

2:45
I believe that if one of the elements is missing from this practice, like spiritual lineage, then it changes the dynamic of the nine elements and then the system breaks down. I’ve seen that over and over again in the practices that have happened in people meaning well. For instance …. Sometimes masters have gone into countries where they feel that they can’t charge money or very little money for 1st degree and that happened in Russia and luckily for the timing and everything for Russia I appeared at the right time and asked the masters candidates then to pay their US$ 10’000. And because they did that, they also together devised a program over three years to bring the 1st degree and the 2nd degree … commitment, monetary commitment to the same level as everywhere else in the world. And that was an amazing situation and it does make a difference.
4:14

4:14
What happened with the masters as well, these new masters, is that they made up the difference. So if they paid US$ 50 for 1st degree, then they went back to their initiating masters of 1st degree and gave them US$ 100, so that they would have had a US$ 150 commitment, the same as everyone else. And every one of them reported a difference. They didn’t know why, they didn’t expect it, many of them thought it would just be an exchange of money, but it wasn’t. It was something different. So it’s a phenomena that I have no idea about, I just know that there’s some energetic that we actually cannot perceive and that we are not able to articulate. So if there was no spiritual lineage in this practice, I believe that the practice would disintegrate. And….. so there needs to be somebody.
5:22

5:22
The activating force is the preservation of this system. The restraining force is about personality. If people were able to think about me not as a personality but as a part of this system that they practice, I am just as essential as the symbols, as the hand positions, as the initiation, as themselves as masters. We don’t understand what the dynamic is but I know that the dynamic is there. 0603 (nods her head) 0605 So …. ähm… Ya! 0611 
6:13

0:00
So, if people, if the masters cannot raise their thought process and their understanding to a higher expression, then …. then the system will just dissolve, like an adobe brick dissolves back into dirt. It’s … it will be disbursed into humanity, people will practice it in their own way for, you know, another two or three generations and my guess is, it will just dissipate and maybe will remain as kind of a memory and become just a part of human…..
0:52
… maybe we could say evolution, human evolution, that people still put their hands on themselves and remember why.
1:06

1:06
I mean, anything, anything really is possible. I don’t feel like I’m …. being …. I don’t feel like I’m being pessimistic about this, but realistic. I just see that so many Reiki masters, including myself on not rare occasions do dissolve into my personality. I get petty and I get judgemental and I get clinging and I get attached to my own ideas. And, you know, in order for this to work in a systematic way, you know … systemic way, where the master body holds this energy of lineage, we all need to rise to a much, much higher level of consciousness than we are now. You know, right now we are not even at consciousness. We have no idea about the responsibility, nor the energetic understanding of what we do in initiations. I mean, people have their theories but we really don’t understand it, we really don’t know it.
2:22

2:22
We have no idea what are…. human relationship is. We’re students and with each other, we…. we separate from each other because of petty judgements and misunderstandings that we don’t have the courage enough to just go and say “hey, you know, what about this?” I mean if people would come to me and just say “Phyllis, you know, I heard this story. What’s your side of it?” I would be so relieved. They wouldn’t need to agree with me or even need to understand me, just that I was asked for my own perspective would be such a relief. Because this is all done, mostly, and about 95% through assumption of who I am. And I find that really appalling. If I have
0316 (räusper)
something that’s going on with me, then I always ask the person directly.
3:28

3:28
I have been assumed to have had judgements through the comments of students of the system, but they do not represent me, they represent themselves. And I’m here to help hold the still point for them to come to and often times they are not there yet. And that’s okay.
4:00
Realistically speaking I feel that the community has a job to do
0407 after I’m dy…. 0408
after I die
0410 (räusper)
or I step back so far that they need to recognize another spiritual lineage bearer. And in that recognition I can see that there will be
0427 (räusper)
the possibility that Reiki will do it’s job and advance the view of people to recognize that person where the energy is going, to where the energy is going, because I feel that that’s what needs to happen, Yah….
5:02-5:16 (silence)
Yo! 5:17

0:00
In the early days I used to work a lot with Paul Mitchell, like we did master candidate intensives together, we did self-assessment work together, key training and Aikido work. And one of the things that I took away from this work was a concept that helped me so much in the early days like before 1995 of trying to hold this great paradox between my personality and this part of me that was recognized as lineage bearer. So I’d like to share this with you:
0053 ähm (Räusper) 0054
0:57

0:57
It also helped me understand the whole process of what happens in our Reiki practice, so I would like to just use myself as that example. So there is a relative world and there is an absolute world. And the relative world is our daily world everything is relative. We compare against each other everything is relational. And in the absolute world nothing is relational, it’s just so. So the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, that’s just so. We are birthed from our mothers, not our fathers, that’s just so….
1:52

1:52
So my personality is in the relative world and the lineage bearer comes from the absolute. So what happens for me and what happened for me is that Reiki gave me a bridge. Now the bridge is really important. It is difficult to go from the relative world to the absolute. So Reiki allows me this bridge to come here. But unfortunately when I’m here it’s very easy sort of by gravity to just go *flutsch* back to.. back to the relative world. And we see this. So in the beginning for instance, when I would teach classes my husband would say at the time, I need to come to your class because I need to see the best of you. I could take it and be hurt by that but I really understood what he meant. So he would come to class and he would see me leave my personality behind in some way and go to the absolute and become Reiki Master. And then after class we would walk home or drive home or something and *boom* we get inside the door and I’m screaming at the kids, right? So I’m back to the relative world just in you know ten minutes.
3:23

3:23
And we see this paradox in our lives especially at the beginning of our Reiki Mastership if we are Reiki Masters or we see this paradox between attending a Reiki class and then going home. The paradox also can be applied to money. So you know people say “well, this is very expensive, I could use this money to buy a new car, I could use this money to go on a holiday or whatever..” and the all of a sudden the amount of money just doesn’t matter, because this is what is next in our lives. And that bridging of the money is what is so important in the practice of Reiki. This is the gift that we can bring to rest of the world, that money is not locked in the relative world.
4:24

4:24
So… when people used to tell me “Well how can you be Grand Master because you’re not vegetarian, you eat meat?”
0436 ähm (räusper) 0437
“How can you be the Grand Master and wear glasses?”, “How can you be the Grand Master and have cancer?”, you know all these questions. “How can break the speed limit and drive really fast?” you know… because.. I’m here in the relative world and Reiki is not about leaving the relative world, it’s about having space in ourselves to hold both and to be balanced and using the bridge of Reiki so that it becomes easier and easier to come to this absolute space and be one, be compassionate, be present, be who we really are. And then, when we are ready to let that go “fffft” pour back (5:39)to the relative world. And this movement, this movement becomes easier and easier and easier. I’ve experienced that myself. It used to be very hard when I went from the absolute being the lineage bearer to relative I had to eat. At the end of every Reiki class I had to eat. It’s what brought me back around….
6:07

ab6:07
And I realized that because a friend of mine who’s a Sufi, who would, I would… she would attend or I would attend some of her sessions and we would chant and we would whirl like the whirling Dervishes after hours and hours of chanting and doing movement and so on. And after we whirled, she would say “ok, now time for coffee and cigarettes”. Because that was the way…. culturally .. that they came back to the relative world. And I didn’t drink coffee and I barely smoked back then but I did smoke a cigarette and drank black tea.
6:54

6:54
So it was …it was an interesting process to see that what I did with food was to use food to come back to the relative. Now people have their own strategies, some people go for walks, some people do other things, but I eat, which is a little unfortunate for my body…
7:17

7:17
Why do we need to have both? Why do we need to have the relative person and the absolute person? It’s because this is what we were born into. This paradox of being spirit in a human body, to experience being a human being and to relish this experience, to live it fully while at the same time not letting go of this understanding of this knowing that we are all one, that we have been here before or that we have had other relationships. I mean there’s lots of different dimensions to the absolute. And once we are able to accept all of those, then it’s so much easier to be relative.
8:18

8:18
So I offer this to all of you who just don’t like me, which I totally understand. You know you don’t need to like me, you don’t even need to love me and you don’t need to recognize me. You just have to allow that I’m a human being who has a path and this path ended up to have this absolute … encouragement of lineage bearer. And I’ve done my best and I know that maybe I’ve could have done better if I’d have been a different person, but I wasn’t a different person. And I am lucky to have a family that is my … that has become my anchor in my relative world and at the same time have people around me to support me being my absolute best. So that’s a little pun a play on words, in English “absolute best”.
9:25

9:25
And that’s where we go when we’re Reiki Masters, that’s where we go when we give Reiki treatments, that’s where we go when we treat ourselves, to our absolute best. So
0939 (räusper)
this concept will help you maybe and will help each other in being able to hold our personalities and to hold our gifts in the same hands. Thank you….
10:00

08:29
In 1992 we came together because he had had a feeling that he should step in and help me as the lineage bearer, as the Grand Master actually at that point. And I also had the same feeling. And we had not had a very friendly relationship for the last 2 years before this. So it was really reconciliation immediate that we came together and it was recognized by the Reiki Alliance as a community and so he became known as head of discipline and our office together was the office of the Grand Master. 0912 So.. (räusper) 0915
09:16