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
… So in the beginning one of the things that I got into for a while was this idea that if people knew everything about me then they would not dislike me or they would understand me even more. That was … it’s one of my big things: to be understood. And so… I did these… for several years I did these workshops for master candidates, called self-assessment workshops. And they were sort of like group therapy … encounter groups… And we were really lucky because we didn’t really get in trouble with these but we sure were creative and it was really fun and really confrontive for everybody, including the facilitators..
1:15
And out of that I realized that I was my own worst enemy: that, you know, people would come and say: “Oh Phyllis, I hear that you’re doing this and this and this” and I’m going “well, where did you hear that?” and they said: “from you” and I said: “really? And in my trying to explain all my thoughts and everything, they took it a couple of steps further and begin to have assumptions about who I was. And finally in one of my therapy-sessions I realized that I had to become selective in the sense that… There is this wonderful illustration called “Johari’s window”, it was from a psychologist and his name was Johari and he had his clients make this diagram like a window and then you put 4 boxes in the window: your private self, your public self, your potential and your blind side. So of course the blind side is things that you don’t know about yourself but everybody else knows. And your private self is what you know but nobody else knows. And these two were kind of switched for me: my public self was really, really big and my private self was very, very small. And you know, I realized that I as a human being have a right to privacy, and that I needed to really change that. So it took me a few years, but I managed to do it.
3:16

0:00
Well, it took me a while to 0010 (räusper) it took me a while to come to an understanding of forgiveness. Because what I did instead, was I just took the responsibility on myself. And so my hardest thing was to learn how to forgive myself. And it was one of the things that we… I believe inadvertently touched upon in our self-assessment workshops. And there was some amazing times when people would … we would do roleplay or we would do communication exercises and somehow it would touch somebody so deeply that they would be catapulted into the process of forgiveness, much to their surprise I think and ours as well.
1:12
And for me …I found that forgiveness was a kind of miracle that happened when a certain set of circumstances occurred all at the same moment. And then somehow there was this revelationary occurrence and then forgiveness began to work….
1:44
So I have spent a lot of time in my therapy sessions trying to divest myself from the responsibility for everything that happened in the world, in my world especially. And to be able to forgive myself for being human, I mean that was one of my first things, is to know well you’ve made mistakes. Well, no I haven’t! I haven’t made mistakes and I am responsible for this and I’m in fault and …. So that was my line. And to get over that line
0216 (räusper)
and to come to a place of being able to forgive was really a major piece of work for me.
2:28

2:28
I have been in some family constellation work through students of Bert Hellinger . I’ve been very taken by depth of forgiveness that happens as a result of simply , in my book, understanding circumstances. So
0251 (räusper)
2:56
I haven’t done my own personal familywork, with family constellation work, which I would like to, but the situation has never come up. But I have done work within the lineage, so we had a constellation where there was a person standing in for Mikao Usui, standing in for Chujiro Haysashi, standing in for Hawayo Takata and standing in for me, Phyllis Furumoto. And then… for the successor of the lineage. Fascinating, really fascinating. And what happened was, is that in all of our imagination we found out that we had never connected like Mikao Usui with Chujiro Hayashi and imagined them having conversation, which is exactly what happened in the constellation. And for Hawayo Takata to have conversation with Chujiro Hayashi, which of course she did many, many times, for hours, I’m sure.
4:06

4:06
But I never imagined that, so to hear these people converse together and to say “Well, I always wanted this from you.” And the other person saying “But I couldn’t have given you that, that you had to find for yourself.” And then the energy of forgiveness and reconciliation coming in that same moment was astonishing, it was very moving for me and allowed me… I think they came at a time when it allowed me to divest myself of last ideas that as a lineage bearer I had to be perfect.
5:00
I knew my grandmother wasn’t perfect, for sure. And ..it was always my big paradox or my big….dilemma of how to hold my grandmother as the woman that I knew she was and my experience of her as a granddaughter as another person of the planet and as a Reiki Master 0526 knowing she was not hum… ähm 0528 knowing she was not perfect and yet hearing how.. she was so perfect for everybody else. So that was an interesting play in itself in this constellation. So I found it to be… I find it to be very interesting and it’s something actually that I’m still working on…0550 to get clear about
5:52

0:00
So the first thing that happened… well, so my mind goes to “Who would be on this list of forgiveness or making amend, coming to reconciliation actually, the best that I know. And when I go there, I think well.. is this really necessary?… And so there are two answers to this question “is it really necessary?”
0:46 (räusper)
On one end.. one level I feel that the gift of accepting who we were as human beings at that time and being able to understand both sides of the coin… both sides of the situation, is a kind of reconciliation of itself and doesn’t need to involve the other person.. necessarily.
1:15
On the other hand, for some time and in some instances I can when that would be really beneficial and be able to happen… by simply going out to dinner and talking about what happened and then come into a realization that both of us were in circumstances where we really just had to do what we did….
1:50
But what happenes in that instance is that… I believe it doesn’t build the ability to accept what’s so. And that for me is a kind of a foundation principle. It’s like … I met, I met this man at the beginning of when I was Reiki master in 19.., no, yah, in 1980. And I fell in love with him and we got married and we were married for about 7 years. And there were parts of our life which were ecstatic and they were incredibly creative, because we’re both very creative people. And in that creativity, we were undisciplined. So… (laugh)… we also created very painful situations for each other. So a sort of like the very best of ourselves and the very worst of ourselves kind of got brought out in this situation.
2:58

2:58
And when I talked about irrevocable damage, it’s like I feel that in our relationship unconsciously, unfortunately for the first few years, we did irrevocable damage to each other in the sense that we knew where our… because we were so intimate and so close, that we knew exactly where that sacred wound was in each of us. And that, you know, somehow we kept pounding on this sacred wound until it became so painful that the blissful parts and the creative parts of our relationship didn’t actually match this other part and that the pain just got too much for us to deal with being together.
3:56
It’s been a very interesting thing because we’ve stayed “friends” so to speak, very close friends, and he entered into a relationship almost immediately after we’ve separated. But she always felt like the second wife, for years until I actually had to go home at some point to kind of clean up this relationship. Burn has letters and burn… everything that we had that I felt like had attachment, and really release this relationship back to neutral, almost, so that she could actually take her place as his wife. And I…
4:44

4:44
I feel that still there is this place that we never go to anymore because we know that we’re vulnerable with each other and we don’t really trust each other and actually I feel like both of us, not just him, which I’d like to think, but…( laugh).. also myself. I feel like in that sense we are untrustworthy with each other, that there is this kernel of some piece of our relationship which is untrustworthy and that we recognize that and in that recognition I think it’s just realistic to accept it and do the best we can of what we have and be able to enjoy that piece and enjoy each other and not go to the places that would again put us in this place of irrevocable damage. And so..
5:50
I think that’s a good example of that and I feel like that there are people in my life, I could make a list of those people, and what it’s taught me about myself has been invaluable. So in my next relationships I was very careful when I went there and in my present relationship, 0614 you know, there’s a…  I won’t say it because it’s really nasty, but
06:19
there is this phrase that as a sort of a wild Hippie person, which just flung around like … you know, we just used it for every situation and so it became part of my vocabulary and in Reiki of course part of my private vocabulary, but this is a phrase that really goes to the sacred wound part of my present partner and I got it after a few instances that it would be better if I could not say this phrase, you know, in our conversations. And…
7:05
In this situation she was conscious enough being able to say „You know, if you say this again, I’m out of here, no matter how much I love you, I can’t stay here“. And I was conscious enough to say „Well, I don’t wanted to do that. So, you know, I’m not gonna do this anymore“. And I have, sometimes when I feel really hurt and upset, but it’s gotten.. she’s gotten less sensitive but I’ve also gotten much more sensitive. So in the sense that we learn from these places where we’ve created this irrevocable damage… I just hope that, you know, there is something better that comes out of that, you know for myself and for people who come to.. come into my life afterwards. And then I can honour my realtionship with this man that I was… that I’m still very much in love with, but I still… I can’t live with him for sure, that is not possible. So .. interesting..
8:18

00:00
My parents met at the university of Hawaii after my father was discharged from the army. He was a part of the very famous 442^nd Japanese Amercian Battalion and ended up in Italy and he ended up loving Italy. And it was sort of an interesting thread through his live. And he was in pre.med at the time and my mother who really was an artist from her soul out … got pushed into be a pre-med student by her mother, my maternal grandmother who was Hawayo Takata.
00:57
And I am sure that my grandmother had in her head, that her daughter would go to pre-med, be a doctor and also be a Reiki Master she becomes a doctor and also a RM. My mother was with my grandmother at the time she met Chujiro Hayashi in Japan and received first degree from him. She never went on in Reiki because her idea was that she was going to raise a family and she didn’t want to have a career so to speak of Reiki. So … you know, times were spontaneous and who knows what it was like back then after the war in Hawaii but they ended up eloping because grandmother thought that my father would never make anything of himself.
01:51
And, so they eloped and they got married. And they eventually.. he ended up going to medical school in University Dallas, Texas. So they moved to Dallas, Texas and he went to med school there and then that’s where I was born, so I was born in Dallas. In ‘48.  And there is this rumour in my family that said that my grandmother, who was very into auspicious names, wanted to name me Dallas because it was a booming town then and … would become a very big city and she thought that would be a great name for me but luckily, anyway in my own story, I got saved from this by my mother who said «No». … So I ended up to be Phyllis. And I have no idea why.
02:53
I was born with a cleft pallet and I had a speech impediment from when I was very small, obviously when I started talking. My first 7 or 8 years of schooling I went to a speech therapist.. I just hated my name because the sounds that were hardest for me were f, s, t and r …it’s all through my name, right. So I just thought that his was very cruel. (laughs) And eventually I asked my mother «why did you do this?» like «why were you so set on my being able to speak clearly?» And she said  “because you are going to grow up and speak to a lot of people” And I went (shakes head), well, she is crazy
03:54

03:54
You know, that was about the time I started to take voice lessons, from this German opera want-to-be in a neighbouring town. Her name was Misses Stolz. For those of you who don’t know Stolz is the German word for proud. She was very proud. And very, you know like typical, big bust and short y’know with crazy hair all piled up and everything who’ll just wack us with a stick, y’know, if we didn’t do something right. And I just couldn’t understand why I had to put up with this. And not only that, I didn’t really know if I had a good voice or not. Because I was going there for enunciation.
04:43
It was kind of a crazy time. At the age of 4 my parents moved to Iowa City in Iowa. Because they had a very, very good medical school there and that was the internship for my father. While he was there he was asked to continue his residency into neuro surgery where in that time it was just a very baby specialty. But my mum got pregnant again with my brother. And he decided he hat to go work. So he went around and interviewed for jobs because they decided to stay in Iowa. My dad was a  great gardener, I mean, my mother and father came from plantation workers in Hawaii and they were were farmers back in Japan who were .. immigrated to Hawaii.
05:46
And … so I assumed that was one thing. The other thing was they didn’t want to go back to Hawaii. Because they wanted to be kind of free of the Hawaiian immigration culture at the time. And then he in his interviews he met up with this man named Jim… James Warrol who was about 10 years older than he was and had a pract… a medical practice. And was looking for a partner and when they met, my dad said, «well, we just felt they we knew each other and that we were brothers». Which was very interesting cause my father was not at all esoteric or, y’know, I mean I… we, we never talked about emotions with him. But for him to say this, must have been … the experience must have been very profound.
06:46

06:46
So we ended up in this very small town in the south-east corner of Iowa. That’s where I went to school all my years of … in the United States Grade School, so from 5-18. And basically I saw my life as being really terrible. My Brother was born almost 5 years after I was, so I was almost 5. I had been an only child, very pampered and very dotted on for 5 years and then, all of a sudden, the son comes. In Japanese families, sons are very important. And he was also a premature baby. So he got lots of attention. And I felt totally not cared for at all.  And then a couple of years later my sister came, so very close together. Actually, they’re.. I think they are an year and a half apart.
07:54
So, it was kind of .. one thing over another thing. And then in school – because this was right after the war – people were not happy with having a Japanese child in school. And the teachers were extremely weird. Mostly, the prejudice and they kind of hateful experience I had in school were from teachers. They would… the kids would tease me about being Japanese and I would, of course, fight for my self. And … I was the one that got her mouth washed out with soap. Or, y’know, got to stand in a corner. Or.. and the other kids never had any kind of retribution from the teachers.
08:49
It was only when I was 64, if you can imagine, and found out that I had a metastasis from my breast cancer.And so that my girl friends from this time, I’ve met them when I was 4 when I moved to Keosauqua, three of them came and we talked about my relationship with my mother which was very fraught and my family life back in those days and who they saw I was during that time. And it was a revelation, really, I mean, this was really true reconciliation. 0934 OK, I’m gonna take a little brake here..0937
09:42

00:00
As I was enjoying my skiing and my wonderful life as a ski bum, I turned 30 and … when I was having my birthday party I realized that I needed to find something to do with my life, a  vocation. And I went through all the jobs that I could think of and nothing actually fit. Little did I know that my mother calling me later on that fall and asking me to travel with my grandmother next summer, the summer of 1979, did I know that that would be the answer to my question, you know, about my own vocation and what I would do with the rest of my life.
01:04
And after I was starting practicing Reiki I would bring students back to Winner Park to the ski hill and experience what it was like to ski, or learn how to ski, with all these people who were not «able bodied» we said at the time. And the other intriguing question that happened for me was this question of when we gave them Reiki, what were we expecting? What was healing? That was the big question back in those days because it was like 1985, 86, 87 and I had had, you know, 6 or 7 years to think about what is healing.
01:54-01:57 (coughing)

0:00
ähm.. 0007 It took a few years for me to understand that my mother had been with my grandmother during the time that she met Chujiro Hayashi and began to practice Reiki. And what I understood from her was that she had been initiated in 1st degree with Chujiro Hayashi. And then that was it. She didn’t do 2nd degree. And for most of the time in our relationship from 1980 when I became… understanding about being a Reiki master, she was not happy with the way that Reiki was being taught, that it had been changed through the culture and that we didn’t respect it.
1:08
It was a kind… it was something like.. in polite society you don’t talk about religion, politics and then I had to add Reiki, because her political ideas were very different than mine, so we never talked about politics and we didn’t talk about Reiki because in the end, you know, when I got older and more mature in my Reiki understanding… for her, Reiki was something private, it was not a series of phenomenas, it was… it was something that was practiced without.. being surprised in some by how it worked.
2:09
What she saw in the students of my grandmother and me included, 0216 was that we.. we shared a lot, we shared a lot about… (repositioning herself)
2:32

2:33
We shared a lot about what we were doing with each other and that wasn’t something that she liked, that we were constantly trying to figure out the psychology of what was happening, that we were always astonished that it worked… things like this. So for her this was kind of sacroligious, anti-Reiki so to speak.
3:04
As she grew older, she grew very possessive of her mother because… I feel that she understood my grandmother’s passion for Reiki and that is was sort of her destiny to be this person in Reiki and at the same time, I don’t know if my gandmother would have been a different kind of mother, but as a mother she was… well, they didn’t have an easy relationship. So it was an interesting process to see them, those two and then me, because the three of us felt like if I backed up as an observer, felt like we were the three women in the household sometimes and everybody else faded into the background. And that was interesting and a lot of it had to do with……I feel that a lot of it had to do with my mother’s perception how Reiki should be practiced.
4:30

4:30
So in the end when I had cancer and I started… and I was living in the same town as her, I was receiving hands-on-Reiki like from 7 to 5 times a week, almost every day, not from my mother but from friends of mine and people would come in and stay for a couple of weeks and treat me and so on. So, she would never let me treat her but she offered to treat me a couple of times and that was very special…
5:11
She said that she wanted to be a mother and that she didn’t want to take Reiki on as a career, so to speak. And I used to think that this was a kind of sacrifice, but I realized it was a choice of hers and that she made that consciously and I appreciated that.
5:39
Now that she had passed, I feel much freer in what I can do in the public and what is… what I can open up to the public because I feel that I have… I have taken on some of her understanding of what’s private with my grandmother, the line between grandmother as a private grandmother and Hawayo Takata as the Reiki master.
6:15
One of the things that has been exciting for me in … now I go back to the archives and what I’ve said about going through my grandmother’s things, my mother actually gave me in 1980…something when my grandmother … after my grandmother died… that they will be, I hope, will be housed in the Japanese-American-National Museum in Los Angeles because it… she will be held as a whole person, not just a Reiki person, but as a Japanese-American woman who did this amazing thing and dedicated her life and has touched the lives of people all over the world. So for me that’s an amazing story.
7:07

00:00
Yes, it was my understanding that my mother really pushed my grandmother to see me. You know, she would… my grandmother and she  would talk about Reiki and about the different people who had come to Keosauqua to visit my grandmother because at that point she had moved closer to my mother. Because she was supposed to be retired but I can’t imagine being retired from Reiki and that was true for grandmother. So my mother, even when I was there she would just say, “It’s Phyllis look at Phyllis, she is your perfect person!”And I would go: «No! I’m not your perfect person.» But in the end it seemed as though my mother saw something in me and in my connection, future connection with Reiki that I din’t see, for sure. And neither did my grandmother.
01.12

0000
Ähm… I think she objected to some of the ways Hawayo Takata had been …(pauses)  start again.
00:23
I feel that she had reservations about the way that people treated my grandmother, Hawayo Takata, as their master. A couple of  people in California used to buy her clothes, and sort of dress her up. And she wore a wig for a while because they wanted her to. So she kind of became this like dress-up doll that … it wasn’t really her and eventually all of us including my siblings and my mother convinced her not to wear a wig because it looked so weird. And, she had beautiful white hair and to just wear her hair, her natural hair.
01:23
So in the last 2 or 3 years that’s what she did. But there was this place where people put her on a pedestal and treated her in a way that was not very … actually not very respectful. Because they were using her for their own means. And my mother was very sensitive to that. I don’t know if she had issues with the way that Hawayo Takata was teaching Reiki, I don’t think so. But more how her students treated her and what they wanted out of her. You know as a Master. Because there were other masters that Hawayo Takata had initiated who were good students. You know, they didn’t do that and they would call every month and give my grandmother a report about their practice and about their classes and talk to her about their Reiki and so on. And those were the people that my mother really approved of.
02:37

00:00
Hawayo Takata’s importance in the practice of Reiki covers, I think, different … different facets. One is that she took this practice and became a practitioner. And she treated thousands of people with all kinds of ailments and all ages and some for one treatment and some for treatments over years. So what she did was she really proved the aspect of healing of Reiki. And that it was combined also with obvious 0053 sort of ähm  … what would she call it? … 0058 common sense, practices of diets, not smoking for instance.
01:06 (räusper)
So, sometimes she would tell her clients, or her patients, «you can come for Reiki but you have to quite smoking.» Like this. Or, «you wanna lose weight, I put you on a diet and you come and get Reiki.» You know. So, she took this practice and from her two hands really gave the practice of Reiki this depth and understanding that it can be used for anything. She totally trusted whatever happened in the treatment. She would say, “not sick – reaction!”  Ohhkay! (laughs)
01:55-02:03 (cough)

02:03
The other thing that she did for Reiki was she literally brought Reiki from Ja.. Japan and from the Japanese Culture into the Hawaiian islands at a time when Japan was going to go through a major demolition of their culture and of their values and also just of their country.
02:33-0235 (cough)
So, I don’t know if the researchers have discovered how many of the Masters, for instance, had died during World War 2? What had happened to the clinic? But Reiki was definitely pushed underground in Japan and for Hawayo Takata it was a flowering time. It was a time to build up her practice and to become well known.
03:03 (Pause) 03:09
And then what she did in the years that followed the war was trans… translate Reiki as a practice from one culture to another culture to from the Japanese culture, which was quite specific, to a world-wide culture. And that she did this … well, I don’t know how conscious she was of doing it. But I would’ve .. I would  loved to have asked her some questions about what her process was of doing it. But I also know that the system itself as an ent… as an energetic entity has its own momentum in development. So she was not necessarily doing it out of her own conscious will but following the energy of Reiki and following where it was going and seeing that there were some things had to be either emphasized or brought forth in order for the practice of Reiki to flourish.
04:25
And I find this to be an amazing feat. I’ve just come to this understanding in the last 10 years how… what a magnificent job she did. And I feel that if she hadn’t done it, that it wouldn’t have been so accessible to people.
04:51

0:00
After Hawayo Takata died in December of 1980 the master community was slowly informed about this.. about her death by my mother. And what I mean by slowly is that at first she didn’t call anyone, I don’t know for how many months. And then she was starting to go through my grandmother’s papers and compiled a list of people, because some of the masters who my grandmother had initiated she was not acquainted with and didn’t know. Others she knew from the conversations with my grandmother and because they came to visit my grandmother, in Iowa.
0:59
As the masters began to be informed, many of them called me and recognized me over the phone in the sense that they said “well you’re your grandmothers successor, now what are you going to do?”. And it was a questions that I couldn’t really answer.
1:19
So 1981 passed by very rapidly because of course I stayed with my family through X-mas 1980 and then into 1981 (0133) (cough) ähm
01:42

1:42
And during this time I didn’t really know what to do. And then it was evident at some point that Barbara Weber wanted to be recognized as the successor. And I believe that it was somewhere in the late summer or early fall, but again I don’t really know for sure, of 1981 that I went to visit Barbara Weber and asked her if we could do this together. And she said no.
2:22
There was another big question mark about a couple of master who had been initiated and I was surprised because it seemed like the had been initiated before my grandmother’s death which I was a little bit shocked about. But nobody would give me a straight answer. So I flew into Chicago to visit the Chicago masters and talked to them and I believe that I met everyone that year except for a woman named Iris Ishikuro, who was from San José and I never did get to visit her.
3:07
Eventually I realized that the masters had not been able to mourn their teacher of pay some kind of ceremony, you know do a ceremony about her, so I organized this meeting in Habi Hawaii in 1982 and I believe then it was in the spring, sometime like May or June. And this was the first time that a group of masters had come together and we stayed for a week together there. (0347) …(cough) (drinks)
4:01

4:01
some of the masters brought their spouses, some of them brought their adult children and we had a couple of little children I believe there too. And we had such a lovely time together that we decided to meet again the next year at Barbara Brown’s house.

04:28 ..(cough)….

I really do feel better (laughter, Andi in the background.) OK. Well, try my Ricola (RICOLA, René singing) I mean, the best thing Switzerland ever produced. (laughter, Thassos: except us, of course!) Yes! (René: dont forget we’re really Italians, Thassos) … (René: you know why Toblerone is called Toblerone?) … (actually the company is called Tobler and the first one for export, was Tobler One..) Is that really true? (René: well, the legend says so). OK, so… Try not to have a very strange protrusion of my mouth…. ähm
5:46
In this meeting in Hawaii we spent quite a lot of time talking about the succession and about Barbara Weber and her kind of threats to the rest of us. And we also spoke together about her way of teaching because when we started to exchange treatments, it was evident that we had different hand positions, we started in different places
6:23 (cough)..6:28
and a couple of the masters had, what I would call, special gifts that came up
0635-0640 (cough)..
and so their treatments looked quite different than the rest of us. So we spent some time having a demonstration. Ethel Lombardi, I believe, was a gifted healer herself and when she received Reiki this brought out this gift and the gift was, in her own words, to pull out energy out of the body and so that’s what her Reiki treatments looked like. So she kind of did a little class or something for us all and some people didn’t like it at all, some people could relate to it and some people thought “well that’s interesting but it’s not Reiki”.
7:31

7:31
Everyone there basically acknowledged me as a spiritual lineage, as my grandmother’s successor. And.. I remember the daughter of Virginia Samdahl was there and we had a talk. And she said “Well Barbara Weber is my master and I have great affection for her and great loyalty to her, but you carry something different and I can acknowledge you as a spiritual lineage”… well actually that … that wasn’t really coin, so I have to say “I can acknowledge you as your grandmother’s successor but I also acknowledge Barbara Weber as my Reiki master”. So in some way she was the first one that articulated this difference between – what I would call – the initiation lineage and the spiritual lineage, although that wasn’t actually named as such at that point…. Yeah, I think that’s true…
8:44
The next year when we met, there were more masters that had been initiated by me by this time and other masters that had been initiated by some of the other masters of Hawayo Takata and… a few masters initiated by Barbara Weber…. It was there that we didn’t really mean to come together and find a name for this group but it just arose out of kind of an organic process. And I think that that’s true that in… if you have a group of people that meet with a certain aim, then you end up naming yourself. So this group founded the Reiki Alliance.
9:39

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

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

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

00:00-00:13 Well, my real answer is, «I don’t know.» But I’ll back that up by saying other things (René: you don’t need to mention her name…) No, no, its fine.
00:20
This is a question that has arose again, interestingly enough, in the last few months, about Wanja Twan, for instance, who… because… I know that she recognizes me as my grand-mother’s successor but she is a very stro.. and she is a very strong master. She has influenced her teaching according to what she remembers Hawayo Takata teaching. But also her own very strong personality which is Scandinavian
00:57
which has again a whole other color. I find the Scandinavians to be really interesting people. Very esoteric and very … esoteric isn’t really quite the right word… Well, I’ll come up with word… but anyway. So, what Wanja has done is that she’s declared her successor as her daughter Anneli. And this has caused some confusion in the Reiki community, for instance, in the UK where Wanja has a very strong following. And as does Anneli now. And the students are getting confused about whether or not they acknowledge me as lineage bearer
01:55-02:00 (cough)
So, some of the masters and students of Wanja do not recognize me as the successor of this practice. They recognize Wanja in some way as their initiating master and as the person who carries the lineage of that practice. They don’t acknowledge a spiritual lineage. And Wanja does. So, even though Wanja is very subtle about her recognition of me, on some level, she doesn’t communicate that to her students. And so this creates a schism or can create a schism within the UK community because people don’t understand o’… the students don’t understand why the spiritual lineage is important.
03:06

03:06
So, it’s an interesting paradox, that Wanja… I feel really recognized by Wanja as my grand-mother’s successor. But I also see how strong her initiation-lineage is. So, for me, I… there are two things that I carry: I carry my initiation-lineage as a Reiki Master and then I carry the spiritual lineage as the successor to my grand-mother, Hawayo Takata. The two lineages for me are the same. But for Paul Mitchell – for instance – they are not the same: his spiritual lineage comes to me and my successor. His initiation lineage goes from Hawayo Takata to him and then to his masters.
03:57
So in Beth Gray… the issue with Beth is that she … I don’t know whether she was initiated by my grandmother, I know that she was recognized by my grandmother as a master, I believe that John Gray initiated her as a master. And I have kept this kind of «secret» for many… well, since 1980. And.. I believe it created confusion in her. Because she wasn’t clear about her own lineage and so she couldn’t be clear about the lineage that she passed on. She was also very careful about the people that she initiated as masters.
04:53
I don’t know how many master she she did initiate, maybe 3. One gal who was in Queen… no, one gal who was in New South Wales has died. She was a young woman, she was like 40 something and she died very suddenly; (0513) I should know her name, because I’ve met her, several times.
05:20 Barbara McGregor  (René interrupts with a name proposal)
05:29

05:29
Barbara McGregor and then there is another woman who was from Sydney area that she initiated. And Barbara McGregor in my viewpoint, sort of took took Beth’s tendency to dramatize and sort of expanded that. So, a lot of her material anyway when I first was in Australia in the early 1990ies then that Beth was the first occidental Reiki Master. Well I don’t even know what that means.  She certainly wasn’t the first “white” Reiki Master, for sure. She definitely wasn’t the first Master, so, I don’t really know what that means.
06:26
And then they sort of put titles on her to make her to make her special. The really sad part for me about that is that Beth Gray was an incredibly special person. She didn’t need a title, y’know, to indicate her specialness. This is the part that really bother me a bit. Because people would ask me, «well, what does that mean and is this true?» and it put me in a place, of either lying or being evasive, which I am not very good at. Or trying to explain this very strange claim that really meant nothing to me.
07:09
Because I didn’t know what they were using “occidental” as. Y’know. So…  The woman in Sydney and her partner came very often to visited Beth. And it was kind of sad for me because her reluctance her reluctance to initiate Masters in Australia, which may have been wise, actually, forced all of her very loyal students out to be initiated by masters they didn’t care about. They were masters who had been initiated for maybe 2 months as a Master and just wanted to, y’known, reproduce themselves or whatever. And they had no relationship with the Master that initiated them. They were really Beth Gray’s students and continued to be Beth Gray’s students
08:07

08:07
and continued that teaching without her blessing as a master. And there is something about that that was really sad for me. So, our… our and I will say “Our” consciously, our understanding of recognition of mastery and lineage was so slim at the time that we were doing all this that I have to say, that we were really lucky we didn’t get into more of a muddle. (0841) And that now it feels like
08:45-08:47 (coughing in the background)
on some level because I don’t know anything about real lineage I can kind of invent what I want to about lineage and its OK but I also feel like it also is very inclusive… for instance … there are masters that I have initiated who don’t practice the system I do, their form is very, very different, so I don’t recognize them as Usui Shiki Ryoho Masters. At the same time there are other Masters who started out definitely not in this form of practice but have come through taking the intensives from Paul and I, but also through their own willingness to just connect with the energy of this practice
09:34
that they become practitioners though they were initiated into another practice of Reiki before which is fine for me. Some of them don’… can’t trace their lineage because they wer… they went to some kind of a music festival and in the middle of the music festival somebody said, «I’m going to initiate you as a Reiki Master.» and they do. And they don’t even know their name. But y’know, somehow they… that initiation was sincere enough that they actually followed the path of mastery and ended on my doorstep. And I said, «Well, Okaay..if you want to do this and are committed and you are sincere, then why not?»
10:18

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 )

2:46
So he didn’t… he actually …(0250) Joop actually settled out of court eventually, but it took about 2 years and a lot of money. And.. I..when I went to… so what happened was: I was awarded the right to trademark these things. However, I needed to … they erased his trademarks, they took them away from him. And then it was up to me to establish trademarks again. So immediately we applied for a trademark of these things. But in those years, I think there is about 3 or 4 years in there that Reiki went from not being known at all to actually being publically known. So then it was not possible to trademark because they had become “words in common use”, which are not trademarkable. Interesting
3:53
And that was true for UK and true in the United States. So I ended up without any trademarks, which is actually good. But in the rest of the world, some of the countries that were able to trademark Reiki and so on, still hold these trademarks. (coughing)
4:21

4:21
Once I got into the trademark thing, I found it fascinating, by the way. There was a way that we could have established an industry trademark so that everyone who passed a certain, very minimal criteria for Reiki could use it. And it wouldn’t have cost us very much money, because there would have been a lot of people to maintain this trademark, but…
5:02
Even if I had been able to trademark Reiki and keep it for this practice, I wouldn’t have made much money, because …the money you make in trademarks depends on how much people can actually pay for the trademark…(laugh)… and you know this is not much. So people though I was gonna become a billionaire or something having trademarked Reiki and I kept saying to people: “You know, Reiki is not Coca Cola”.. I mean…
5:36
So that was really interesting, but what happened is that some of the other Reiki forms of practice did go and trademark their own name, which was wonderful because that started then to separate out of Reiki as a big heading or the Usui System of Natural healing, it kind of took away some of the entities that were using Reiki. I ended up doing.. it’s going back to the original Japanese phrase which was Usui Shiki Ryoho… and then some other people started to use that also and then I just added the lineage so that it could be… the practice could be identified.
6:30

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)

0:00
The Reiki alliance to become the organisation of licenced Reiki Masters, so Reiki Masters that were really clearly Usui Shiki Ryoho. It would have left the other practices open for anybody else, they could have applied for their own trademark, their own name and then everybody would be clear about who’s doing what.
0:36
And I wouldn’t have asked for money, I mean, they actually to apply for a trademark is not, if nobody is contesting it, is not that expensive. And if you want to maintain a trademark in that way, its not so expensive. The industrial trademark much different because you have to really adhere to a criteria. Because, if you ever bought a garment that was supposed to be pure wool and it had this little wool emblem on it, and it ended up to be rayon then you would be really disappointed and that trademark wouldn’t have any designated identifying power anymore and the same would have happend with Reiki.
1:26
So it’s very interesting, so people just assume that if you have a trademark you’re gonna earn money, which is really crazy. Mostly, as one of my business… my master who was in business and he sold medical equipment, like these new innovative medical equipment things to hospitals and medical centers and stuff, he said trademark are terrible, he said you don’t want to get involved with them, they cost lots of money and they are just a headache
2:01

00:00
Well, it’s very hard to generalize why people are angry and specially around this. And as I said a lot of it has to do with peoples‘ misunderstanding about the use of trademarks and what the bring you. The other thing is that, you know, when we adapt a practice like Reiki that touches us in this kind of essence place of our humanness, then we want to protect it, to control it in the sense of, you know, making sure it’s not harmed, to be sure that other people don’t harm it themselves. We don’t want it taken away from us. We don’t like betrayal. And so … depending on your own attitude about what those controls must be
01:02
or how want’em protected or how … I should have done my job to protect it then of course there … I can understand why there would be a lot of anam… anger and animosity because I just didn’t do my job. I mean, that was Joop’s .. as far as I received from his communication at the time, his bottom line, was that I wasn’t doing my job so that he had to do it for me. And now that he was doing my job I ended up appearing taking it away from him. And.. you know, I can see that. However, people assume that there was a way to control the proliferation of the different of the different forms of practice. And I believe there was absolutely no way to control that.
02:02
I mean, this started happening from the moment Hawayo Takata died or before. And I liken it to our human need to make things our own. So as a kin.. as an example which seems kind of flip
02:24-02:30 (coughing)
it seems kind of flip but actually, I think we all can relate to it, as we go into a hotel room that is made to be neutral and immediately we open our bag, we take out our stuff. I used to have a whole hotel room thing. I’d always have a pareo or a beach shawl, Sarong kind of thing, I put it over the TV. And then I’d have the pictures of the masters, I’d put them up. Have a little candle, put my stuff in the bathroom, scatter it around, take the towels down and fold them the way I want it. You know, I’d undo the bed because I hate having the bed tucked in at the bottom.
03:16

03:16
You know, those kind of things, bit I’m making the room mine. And it’s the same thing for the people that I know who created different forms of practice. Now, whether or not that motivation was because they were naive and they thought, «that this was OK because after all Reiki is Universal Life Energy. So anything that I do to Reiki and to the form of practice is fine because its universal.» That’s one part. The other idea was that, «well, I don’t like this part of the practice and I don’t see any necessity for it, so I’m just going to leave it out. Because, why should i… why should it make a difference?»
04:08
But in my, in my own defense, if I may say so, or in my own theory, Hawayo Takata gave us a recipe and it produced a kind of kind that I really like. If I still want to have this kind of cake, I am not changing the recipe. And my … and this is where the analogy actually ends. I want this cake to become even better. So, the more I practice the recipe, the more of my energy goes into that cake and then it becomes my cake, not the recipe’s cake. So this is my, my feeling. But for a lot of people, you know, they didn’t like the thought that people had to pay money for Reiki,
05:08
so they dropped money. Or they said, «you can pay by donation.» That was one of the first things that changed. People didn’t want to have a guru, they didn’t like the spiritual lineage they couldn’t relate to it, so they dropped that. Some people didn’t like the precepts. They dropped that. Some people didn’t like the formal hand positions, so they dropped that. Some people didn’t like touching the body, it was too invasive. So then they had Reiki working over the body. So, there are just all these different things that ended up getting taken away or added. «ohh, gosh I had such a wonderful experience of this kind of, you know, crystal practice. I’m going to put this into my Reiki practice.» So that gets added.
05:57

05:57
Or they have a dream about another symbol, so they add that symbol to the practice. So, you know, I just see that it’s all these people making Reiki their own. I can.. I don’t even now I want to control them, because they’re not actually threatening my practice. I’m the only one who can threaten my practice. Because I’m the only one who can change it. I… no one else can force me to change my practice. So, a lot of people don’t get this! They feel that if they’re surrounded by people who don’t eat rice and they do, that eventually they’re gonna have to succumb to not eating rice. But that’s totally your own choice.
06:53
And this is the part about mastery that is really important to understand. There is only one person who can change or corrode your practice, and that’s you. And … and I feel that it’s really easy to blame somebody else for your own frustration. But this is how … and this is how I worked this whole thing out, is that, I just thought, well, I can’t be angry at these people because I see that they’re just doing something very human. And so, I let it go after a while. That’s my only surmising. Actually.
07:42

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

0:00
Nine years ago now, there was a woman by the name of Luellen Garrett, who is a master I initiated and… in the 1980ies and this was in 2004, 5.. yah, maybe 10 years ago, 2005. And she said: “Look, I have two masters in Florida who want to initiate their first masters. They’ve been masters for 12 and 14 years and they’re saying to me: ‘Phyllis is doing the Usui-1 and Usui-2 on how to teach 1st and 2nd degree and we’ve done that.
So the most important thing is the initiation of masters. And why isn’t she supporting us in doing this most important thing?’” (cough)..So
1:07
I talked to both of them on the phone, I talked to Luellen 3 or 4 times and finally she said: “Well, are you gonna really do it or what?” and I decided that I had to, that the voice of the master body was coming through these women and I needed to somehow do it. So I had the first one in Oregon where Luellen lived and she organized it and these two masters from Florida came.
1:40
I now offer this every once in a while, like maybe once every 18 months or something for masters in the system and I send them an application and they have to fill it out and I have to go back and forth. And mostly they’re people that I know.
2:01

2:01
And I have found this very good to do but it’s not about… giving them permission, it’s about giving them support. So I go through the training process how I… how I assess master candidates, some of my techniques on what I (0727) (hiccup) do and I show the master initiation, we don’t practice or anything, I just show it to them. (0234) (hiccup) And it’s proven to be successful in the sense that half the people who have come have decided not to initiate masters … (laugh)..
2:48
So I felt like it was especially successful because they actually got that it was much more responsibility than they wanted to take on at that time and several of them had initiated a master or two really early in their mastery and they were ready in theory to do another one and then they just said: “No, I’m not gonna do this, I’m gonna wait and prepare myself”. So….
3:19
The initiation of masters I feel, has followed a track of maturity of the master body along with my maturity of understanding that we are doing something that’s not just fun and it’s not just for somebody’s personal growth. It’s really something that we need to be conscious of and there is a level of consciousness that’s very important to have and though we can’t articulate it, we feel it and that’s what I believe, these masters have felt is that say: “Well, you know, I’m just not there yet”. And that’s ok.
4:00

4:00
I tell people: “You know, mastery is about knowing who you are not. That’s the most important. When we all know who we are and we have, you know, grandiose ideas about who we are quite often. But when you know who you are not then you know that you’re a master because you know what your boundaries are.
4:20
I think that it’s… it’s something that we’re developing as a master community, these boundaries of who we are and who we are not and that as we grow clearer about that, the people who come to us to be masters are also clearer.
4:42
So… in the 19… late 1990ies I stopped initiating masters because I was totally confused about why anybody would want to become a Reiki master. So because, you know, the bottom had dropped out, so to speak, of the vocation of Reiki masters, people were not able to support themselves…. So I didn’t initiate for 2 years but also to the master candidates who kept coming to me, I said: “Well, you know, why do you want to become a Reiki master?” and the answer was always: “Because it’s my calling and this is my next step. Whether I suffer or not is totally beside the point”. I went: “Wow”. And other people said: “It’s my spiritual path and this is the next step on my spiritual path”. So I couldn’t refuse them and now, …. almost.. well 15 years.. afterwards I just see that the motivation for people to come to Reiki mastership has really changed. And in that change shows for me the maturity of our practice.
6:01
And I kind of long for the old days when it was just like ‘you just do whatever seems right’, I mean whatever that was and it’s just kind of shocking on one hand and on the other hand it was so much fun and it turned out so well by some miracle of chance and at the same timed to go through this adolescent kind of testing thing and now we’re out the other end and just can’t wait to see what the next stage is of learning about mastery, not just for myself but how I prepare other students to become… to step into that place of mastery.
6:42

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

2:02
And that would relieve me a lot because I feel that this has to…. this material has to be made available but I can’t deal with people arriving, you know here and looking through the boxes, and having to supervise them and ahh…just kind of gives me the willies. So I’m just really excited by this. And now this winter I’m starting to develop my own archives. So sorting things out, throwing away, you know, cancelled checks and stuff which I don’t really need in the archives and doing things that I need to do, because some of the stuff is in my head like I want to take all the files that I have, both computer- and E-mail-files of the masters that I’ve initiated and be able to match them to a photograph that I might have and digitalize this, like scan this into a digitalized record.
3:17
So there would be as thorough record as I could have of all the masters that I have initiated and their history with me and with the system. So that’s really exciting and I have lots of manuscripts of people’s research and their papers that they have written and I’d like to digitalize them and make the available in a kind of library online and there are lots and lots of things that I could do to help speed up the process of my archive, because my Reiki archive is going to be massive compared to my grandmother’s. So like instead of four boxes of pictures, it’s twelve.
4:13

0:00
Well, for me the Master Symbol came up when people… when people began to initiate masters who were not Hawayo Takata (if that makes sense). And then they wanted to validate or prove that they were masters. So how could they do this? And a natural answer to this question is: Do you have the right symbol? But for me there is no Master Symbol.
0:43
What is called the Master Symbol, number one: It is not a symbol, it’s a phrase in Japanese. So you know there are two ways to look at this: All language is symbol. So we can say “Father, Son and Holy Ghost” and it’s a symbol, I mean it has more meaning than just the words themselves in Christianity and it has become a holy phrase that evokes, if a priest says these words, a certain kind of energy, which I myself have experienced. So when people say this phrase in Japanese, it’s a phrase that comes from.… it’s like a holy phrase in Buddhism, so it’s not a symbol like the second degree symbols, it’s a phrase, it’s a part of the initiation and that’s it.
1:56

1:56
So, gee, it was too bad that they latched on to this and called that the Master Symbol because it was a misnomer because nobody understood that it was part of the Japanese language and that it was a part of a very common part of Buddhist writing, sacred writing. So it’s not only for Reiki, it’s not.. it’s to.. evoke a certain connection to energy, just like this phrase that we are very much… well lot of us are very familiar with: “The Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost”… and if there were a symbol for masters, for me it would be the initiation itself, because mastery in any trade or in any human endeavour has to do with the human being becoming….(let me just put this correctly or accurately in my view point)…
3:18
It is when a human being…becomes a part of a creative, transformational process, that’s mastery. So, for instance, when you have somebody paint a picture and they are a student or they are what is called the craftsman, somebody who copies the master paintings, but they are copying, right, and they are very good copiers, but they are craftsmen, they are not master painters, because the master painter puts him or herself into that painting so that it becomes greater than the painting itself. The Mona Lisa is just a picture of a not so beautiful woman, as far as I am concerned. I mean and she has got this kind of funny smile… ok.. so you know people love to interpret these you know enigmatic smiles. And I look at this painting and I think, well big deal. The big deal though that you get when you stand in front of the Mona Lisa, which I’ve done, is that somehow she is luminescent, she is energetically dimensional and that doesn’t happen unless the artist somehow transfers this energetic presence of himself or maybe of humanity or maybe I don’t know what, into the painting. So the painting becomes more than just, you know, colour on canvass.
5:19

5:19
And it’s really a fascinating process for me. And that’s the same with any kind of mastery in like martial art or flower arrangements, I’m using Japanese based things because we can kind of relate to them in our lifetime sometimes. But these people take on the practice, so that their flower arrangement or their tea ceremony or their demonstration of their art, you know with another person as the martial art, becomes luminescent, it becomes more than just flowers in a pot or tea in a cup.
6:16
I believe that Reiki mastership is about us being able to join with this universal life energy called Reiki and become not just a channel for it and not just have the ability to open somebody else’s channel (they are terrible words but they are not accurate, but ok, that’s what I have). But we need to be able to actually bring forth Reiki energy in a way that becomes luminescent, that becomes greater than who we are as people. And the one act that we have to practice this melding is the initiation, because the initiation is just a series of, you know motions that we do with our body, but what makes it different, what makes…I mean you know, if somebody else who wasn’t initiated, didn’t know Reiki at all, did the same thing, would the result be the same? Well, I don’t know, I have not had this experiment, so I don’t know.
7:32

7:32
My guess is “no”, because this masterful part of who we are as human beings, is recognized by our student, and that is why masters have to have students, because without the student recognizing the master, seeing this luminescence in you and saying “okay, I’m willing to be a student, I surrendered everything to you. Because when students sit in that chair with their eyes closed, they are totally vulnerable. You could take a sword and cut off their head. Seriously. But you could do that energetically as well and they would never know it until a few days later. But they trust us to be trustworthy and they trust us to connect with that masterful part of ourselves and share that with them.
8:34
And for me that’s why the initiation is the Master Symbol, if there is one. And I feel that this proving you’re a master because you have the right symbol is ridiculous. I look at the way they live their life, I look at the way they live Reiki, I look at their understanding, you know, of live principals and of the principals of Reiki and I think, well, you know, is this person on the path of mastery? Well, at some level we all are, all human being are on the path of mastery, but as Reiki masters we have declared ourselves, we put ourselves in the spotlight, mainly so that we don’t have a place to hide. You know, it’s kind of an interesting process….
9:38

9:38
And oh just to answer the question about different symbols: Well there are no different symbols. The problem again is ignorance and I will use the word ignorance, it’s kind of an ugly word but it carries for me an emotional impact that I actually mean to communicate. It’s about ignorance of the Japanese language. Like 99% of us, including myself, do not read and write Japanese, (1017) so…. (cough)
10:23
99% of us don’t read and write Japanese, (1028) so of course it looks just like a series of lines that means whatever our master says. But in truth it’s actually the written Kanji for Japanese. So there are so many different ways to write the Kanji, so many different styles and so many different… handwriting styles that of course it looks like there are different symbols being given to different people, but it was just simply the way that Hawayo Takata wrote the Kanji in that moment.
11:05

11:05
They are trying to get ähm.. like a traceable same image, but you are not gonna do it, because it’s handwriting. And the other thing is that she didn’t give the written Kanji to all of her masters, and she didn’t need to because…ähm.. it wasn’t necessary. It is not necessary for me to know the Kanji, I don’t use it in the practice and you can look it up on the internet now. (1140) So……(is there any other thing I would like to say?)…
11:51
So I just would like to take people back to the real, what I would say would be the authentic understanding of mastery, what the step really means to all us because I know that the people who are concerned about the master symbol, actually, most of them that I have met, live and are dedicated to their practice of Reiki and it is unfortunate that their focus of their mastery is on this Kanji and not on the way that they live.
12:38-1244 (René mumbles)

0:00 … (ooo5) (Renés voice)
Well this idea of the master symbol didn’t come from Hawayo Takata’s students. It came after she died, a few years after she died when there were many, many masters who already had a couple of generations away from (0030) (René: yea) Hawayo Takata. So this didn’t come from this circle, (0034) I’m really …. (René: this circle you mean the 22 Masters) Yeah!
0:41
So I don’t want to report on an understanding that the circle had of the differences of how she wrote it. I mean, they kept to the practice, for the most part (0056) the way that she impar… you know, the way she, (hicup) excuse me…. (räusper)
1:03
They practiced and taught the way that she gave them the system. (0107) (hicup, turns her eyes up) ..So…
1:14
I never… in all my years of, you know, talking with them I never heard anybody question what she did because at the very beginning it was clear that it was Kanji and that there were several different ways to write the Kanji just like in Reiki there is a book that my mother produced called inevitably “the grey book” because it has a grey cover and the Kanji on that is a very, very old Kanji, it’s almost Chinese, it’s so old. And the Kanji written today would have many less strokes and would almost not be recognizable.
2:02

2:02
So there are lots of different Kanji fonds or ways to write the Kanji and then on top of that there’s handwriting. So that’s all I’m saying is that to try to make it a symbol where it absolutely has to be, one line has to be this long and the other line has to be this long and it has to be … you can’t do it because it’s not possible, it’s …..
2:30
You have to know the Japanese language. My … my test of whether my Kanji is correct if somebody could read Japanese would be able to read what I wrote, and that’s not likely. I can to an approximate but my guess is that even my Kanji the way that I draw it isn’t really natural because I have no knowledge of the Japanese written language.
3:02

0:00
Well I have no knowledge of this. You know, for me I received the initiation the way that my master taught me. I assume that it was the way that she received it from Chujiro Hayashi.. I don’t believe that… It was not in Hawayo Takata’s nature to make Reiki more palatable to the western mind. She wanted to make it, she wanted to transfer the power of Reiki and its connection to the Japanese culture to the western mind because that was essential to how it worked., not to involve other people and to make it better. You know this is really for me… a huge difference in the… interpretation of her movement.
1:08
So I have no idea I don’t know how Jikiden Reiki is practiced, I don’t care because it’s not my practice. It doesn’t mean that they are the genuine one or the original one. I don’t believe that any of the practices that are practiced today are the genuine one or the real one because it just depends on where you are. Like the association that is in Japan that is supposed to come from Mikao Usui’s one teaching and the association whose mission was to keep that teaching as accurate as possible, then I can say ok if in their practice somehow this didn’t appear then
(0207) (räusper)
it’s an anomaly. But we have no idea why and to speculate on that to fill in the blank is really dangerous. Because I have seen people do that with Hawayo Takata’s practice, and I know a lot about her practice, but say in one class she doesn’t mention this and so you know for that whole thing and that one master who eventually, you know the first degree student, who eventually becomes a master this particular one thing is not in their practice because in the first degree class she happened not to say this.
2:46

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

4:04
So Wanja Twan, who is very esoteric and has no shyness about asking questions about past lifes and all these others things. I mean she asked a lot of questions of my grandmother, I mean I wouldn’t have the nerve to even think about. So she ended up with an interesting group of …you know a knowledge from Hawayo Takata that I didn’t have because I wasn’t brave enough to ask the questions. And then there are other people who asked other kinds of questions or who took a part of the practice that they could relate to in their own personality and develop that part of it.
5:00
And it’s just really wonderful because when I could imagine sitting around the circle of masters that Hawayo Takata initiated that her practice was not embedded in one of us, it was embedded in all 22 of us. And it was only if you could take the big picture of the 22 of us, then you would get her practice. And that’s what was so magical for me. So I’m… I don’t like this kind of saying about when did this appear and when did this disappear because it’s calling for a lot of surmising that feel like is… I mean what is the point?
5:55

1:24
So they are trying to find the answers to a technique but they don’t understand that they are dealing with a spiritual practice. So there are going to be unknowns and there are going to be little black holes in our information, but I believe if we hold those black holes as black holes, they actually will be filled one day because some piece of information, something will come up and then we’ll go “wow, we get it”, right?
2:00
I feel that one of our great lessons in our society is to be able to hold uncertainty and to be able to hold the unknown until it becomes known. And it’s not this particular practice of a master is not supported by our culture, which is.. you know in the information age, which is if you have the information then you are the man or you are the woman that’s, you know, the go to person. I don’t want to be the go to person, you know, this is not me. I am a student of this practice and I can encourage other students of this practice but I am not an expert, no one is an expert and you only get experts in technique…
3:03

0:00
Well it’s an interesting observation this whole male/female thing. And one of the questions that has been asked of me, I mean for years, is “why are there so many women in Reiki?” And at the beginning it was actually pretty male-dominated, it was men or it was even in the Japanese community.… it is also true in other cultures that quite often it was the men who began, initiators and the guys who were the pioneers and then the female and then the women followed (female is a bit too technical), so the women followed.
.. I saw that in the Netherlands, the first few masters in the Netherlands were men and then it got to be half and half and then it got to be more women….
1:11
There are different levels of understanding for me about this… and they kind of intertwine, so I’m gonna try to answer this on at least on a couple of levels.
1:30

1:30
One is that I feel that Reiki appealed to men in the very beginning because it was something new and something different and they could take this and run with it and it also called to a number of people who really deeply needed healing….. And it wasn’t in the 1980’s so intellectual, I mean, we did everything according to what we called our heart, which was actually just whatever we wanted to do, that seemed like the right thing to do. And I have to say that there was something about that time that was innocent and was authentic. Then our heads in the end of the 1980s and into the 1990s people started asking “well, why are you doing this and why four initiations, and..” You know, questions that would never even conjure in my mind…
2:28
and by that time of course there were women who started to come into Reiki and many women who started to become Reiki Masters and in the last 30 years what I realize is that men have had a lot of avenues in which they can express and flower in their energetic power, in their beingness and women have been very contained. And Reiki is a place where they can … their natural gifts can be touched and just let to bloom for as big and as long as they bloom. You know and women have been able to break out of…. their kind of energetic identity boxes and find their own identity. And men have the same possibility but because they have other options like their work or their profession, I feel that… that……
3:50

3:50
you know they have other options so they have like 10 options and women have 3, see, so of course Reiki is gonna get a lot of them, a lot of women to come. And at the same time … you know… when I also remember our innocent days of the 1980s we didn’t know what we were doing, we had no idea what we were dealing with. So
(0425) (räusper)
what happened in like 1986, 1987, and this is something that I haven’t talked about publicly, but I think it’s very important to acknowledge, is that during that time the Reiki Master community was really in some way…testing their powers. They would do Reiki classes, their students would come, lots of really wonderful, magical things happened during that time.
4:52
But the other thing was that we didn’t know what we were doing, we didn’t have any personal boundaries. We all had been given this gift of this connection to Reiki universal life energy and we found that we could do anything we wanted, literally. And you know, women and men would come to these classes, fall In love with their Reiki Master and the Reiki Master would say, well this is where Reiki is guiding me, right? So, you know, people would have affairs with their students, they would create very dysfunctional relationships with students, they….. and in some way in France this was called out because of their sensitivity to cults, C U L T S, cults and they termed Reiki as a cult. Well actually the Reiki Masters, most of the Reiki Masters who were French in that moment and you know the 1990s they actually acted like cult leaders because they didn’t understand how to be Reiki Masters, because the culture didn’t support mastery in the way that the Japanese culture does.
6:16

6:16
I mean kids are raised in the Japanese culture to respect one another and to learn to work with their… energetic being in a really different way than in France or in the U.S. I mean Americans are just all over the map as we would say colloquially. So we had no boundaries, you know, and we got called on the carpet, we were really lucky actually in.. I say “we” as a huge community going into this that something really terrible didn’t happen, but it didn’t.
7:01
We figured out, in 1990 the Reiki Alliance figured out that they needed to have a code of ethics, because things were getting so bad. And it was not just between students and masters but between masters themselves like people would have gatherings and people would have affairs and then, you know, we ended up having to hide affairs from the spouses of these people who were also acquantancies and good friends of… I mean, it was… as a social wreck… you know then the ethics, the code of ethics started to come in and people started to say “ok, let’s… you know… get some…. you know handle on this you know… let’s be mature about this”.
7:53

7:53
But it was a development of process of mastery. You know and I now believe, that in the classes now even with young masters, this is not an issue like it was then. I mean of course it happens. And you know, there are lots of long term relationships now, that started as a student came in to a masters class, they fell in love and they took their time, they were mature, they allowed their relationship to mature and now there are long term relationships and people are happy with them. But… it takes time to kind of sort that thing out..and… I just ….feel like we are in a different place now.
8:49
So.. that’s one way to use our power is through our sexual expression. Another way to use power is power over… this is an expression where, you know, it’s kind of the cult leader thing, you know, like I know the truth and I’m giving you the truth and if you want to know the truth I am the only person that’s the source of the truth, right… and what the original , what I got in my Reiki class was you have access to your truth and no one else does. I don’t know where I got this message, she never said it like that, but that’s definitely what I got and what all of us got. So when we would have discussions it wasn’t like “I’m right, you’re wrong”, it was like.. the end-sentence was “and this is what she taught me”. This is what I glean from her teaching. Well, how could you argue with that? You couldn’t, so you had to like open yourself and just allow that all these little differences were also a part of her teaching and that you could keep your own without being threatened by everybody else and welcome and embrace your brothers and sisters Reiki Masters you know equally even though we weren’t the same. It was a tremendous opportunity.
10:26

10:26
And… I think it’s very human to want to find the real story of creation you know, it’s like… native tribes all over the world, you know indigenous groups of people have a creation story and when I listen to some of their creation stories I think well that’s total fantasy, but what I have learned over the last 30 years in listening with different ears to these stories is that they are based on truth, they are based on the truth of the tribe. And that truth lives on through the tribe and keeps the tribe nourished, you know on these energetic-physical-spiritual levels.
11:23
And…. The Reiki story as is told by Hawayo Takata in truth… you know like in factual truth, I have no idea you know how factual it is and I never cared. But what I do get when I tell the story, not because I believe it, because I tell you in the first ten years I told that story because that’s what I needed to do as a Reiki Master. And when I saw what it did to the people who were listening to the story, I thought well there is something more going on here than I can perceive because it’s not like I told the story so well or I told the story so accurately or I told, you know, I’m such a big person that the story made a difference in people’s lifes. I mean as a young master I was just astonished by the effect the story had on people by the energetic transmission that came through that story.
12:31

12:31
And I believe that there is truth in that story, a kind of bigger truth that no fact can destroy. And that .. this concentration on fact has been a little misused, not.. I don’t think.. not consciously but through the motivation of saving people from the untruth, whatever that is… which I can’t go there myself… And the other things is that … I feel like there is a drive in some people and perhaps it’s more male than female, for having really solid foundation, really like mental truth, like I know this to be true (1338) (cough) …. and 
13:48
.. my basis of truth of the story is the way that I feel when I tell the story and the effect that is has on my students. So these are two really different measures of truth and I would say generally species-wise that intellectual is more masculine and feeling is more feminine.
(1413)
However it is my… it’s one of my bucket-list-things to do is to bring these two together and to be able to have peace with this because I have to say…
14:32

0:00
So, if we could generalize and say that this informational truth was sort of masculine and the feminine truth was from feeling then there would be a wish for me to bring these two together and it’t kind on my bucket list of things to do before I die that somehow these two will come together peacefully, not in competition but in understanding that they actually complement one another. And this the thing that again is… always.. a little irritates me, because.. people write books or they want to save the Reiki community from another lie or whatever their motivation is and I think it’s too bad that… we don’t really want to serve the community and what I mean by that is not to be so egoistic about it, you know to feel like I’m going to save the world or I’m going to write the best so and so or whatever and all the research basically that has been done, where I ‘ve been able to see the actual facts have supported the story as I have gotten it, received it from Hawayo Takata.
1:44 ähm (räusper)
There are not very many… there have been one or two little things, where I’ve had to really think about “what did she really say?” and “did I use different words?” and “did I misunderstand this part?” and so on but for the most part it’s been totally supportive. …The publication of having the existence of the memorial stone in Tokyo..outside of Tokyo .. totally supports the story as it was told to me by Hawayo Takata.
2:25

2:25
So I’m fascinated (0229) by the times around Mik.. where, when, sorry …. (0234) I’m fascinated by the time and by the culture of Japan when Makao Usui lived, when he was borne, when he grew up and the cultural influences that he had on himself. (0249) (räusper) And I believe… that understanding these were really help researchers understand the context in which a lot of this was placed. And… one of the things that is really too bad, as far as I’m concerned, is that I don’t see the depth of understanding of the Japanese culture in many of the books. They write a book according to their mind, according to the year 2015 in Great Britain or you know 2014 in Denmark or someplace. And…. So what I try to do is to turn that around and to say to my students: “Just know that this is somebody’s theory, this is somebody else’s experience of Reiki. It is not the truth. The only truth that you need to be concerned about is the truth of your own experience. And don’t ever give that up!”
4:04

0:00
And what happens in activating and restraining forces is that there is a reconciling force. And always the reconciling force is something that’s greater than these two positions. Right? Like there’s this physics theory that… I try to remember how to say… which is that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. And that’s also true about this activating/restraining thing is that the reconciling force, which we might call Reiki, brings something to creation and there is something new that evolves because of this.
0:55
So in our human endeavour we always will have somebody saying “Yea” and somebody saying “Nay” and there will be a reconciling force and then something new will be created. So in the story of Mikao Usui, he had an activating force, what I call a burning question. Now whether or not that question was exactly the question that I say in my class, I don’t know. But he did have a question, he had something that motivated him to go to different countries, to search for an answer and to come back and be disappointed. Which for Japanese people to say disappointed it’s not disappointed like “oh, I didn’t have chocolate ice cream”. No! This was like crushed, you know disappointed.
1:51

1:51
And so what he did was he went inside of himself to keep the search going and the resistance, the restraining force was the outer world not giving him this answer. So he had to go deeper and deeper and deeper inside of himself. And until he was ready …when he was ready, I would say, he went to the mountain, got in touch with the reconciling force and what was new created was the beginning of this practice.
2:28
His moment of energy where he was touched by Reiki, what we now call Reiki, which he didn’t have the word for at that time, I assume….
2:46

0:00
Many people ask about the reason why Chujiro Hayashi didn’t accept Hawayo Takata as a student in the beginning. And there are some rumours that is was because she was a woman, which I have never actually thought about because
0031/0032 (räusper)
the person who took her to the clinic in the first place was a woman who was a student of Chujiro Hayashi. She was the dietician in the hospital where Hawayo Takata was going to have an operation….
0048-0:56 (räusper, Augenverdreher) So, äh..
I actually have this question and it was kind of unanswered for a few years and then there was some understanding that came to me that in Japan…. during this time there was a lot of confusion and some of that confusion was about nationalistic ideas of Japan’s culture being exported to other countries and in the same way other countries’ cultures being imported into Japan, which was not actually welcomed because for the most part the Japanese considered everyone else on the planet barbarians. One of the things is that of course who they saw in the beginning were sailors and they never bathed and the Japanese bathed almost every day. So just that little physical difference was one thing.
2:04

2:04
The other thing is that the sailors of course being who they were, sailors, and kind of pirates, you know, were not very sensitive to walking on Tatami mat floors with their muddy boots and so on. And the Japanese were like very refined, very sensitive to new ones and the sailors new ones was like “Get me another drink” you know. So they had these very strong ideas about what the rest of the world was like.
2:38
So they didn’t want their refined culture … represented by flower arrangement, tea ceremony, martial arts and those kind of things, they didn’t want them to be taken out into the barbarian world and destroyed, basically. So when I found this out I thought “well maybe that was one of the reasons why he refused her”, I don’t know. Even though she spoke Japanese as her first language, she was fully Japanese in parentage but she was born in Hawaii and was going to go back to Hawaii, that was very clear.
2:24

2:24
So it seems like that might have been the appropriate or obvious reason why he refused her and why when the surgeon wrote the letter of recommendation, which was very important and is still very important in the Japanese culture today, …. he reconsidered and after consulting the other members of the association, he was willing to take her on as a student. And she became of course the most diligent, the most disciplined and the most passionate of students.
4:09
This happened in 1930s, in the middle of 1930s, so when the war was coming, when the … when Japan got into participating in the world war scene, the global war scene and everybody realized that Japan and the US were obvious enemies. She went back to Japan and after having a dream of her master in white taffeta robes, Kimono, which meant that he had died, she was afraid that he had already died
0450 (räusper)
and she had missed his funeral. So the story goes that she knocked on his door and he said “Oh, you’ve come too early”. So he set her off for more training. She told me that she went to a place that taught her … therapy using hot springs, so how to increase your circulation and heal yourself by soaking in hot springs. But there was a system. So she … I can’t remember what it was now, but it was like first you put the left leg into the hot water and then your right leg and then your left arm, your right arm and… you know, she had this whole system down.
5:38

5:38
And then she did other, she studied other things. So I don’t know how long she went somewhere… but she came back on an appointed day and Chujiro Hayashi kind of made a speech, a farewell speech to his students about what his predictions were, about Japan attacking the US and how they would be in war and what, you know, Hawayo Takata could do to save her family and herself and so on. And also he recognized Hawayo Takata as his successor by giving her all of his worldly possessions, that’s a very usual thing to do in Japan for succession. And then he laid down and in a little while stopped breathing and went into transition. This is what Hawayo Takata would say in her story.
6:46
I won’t get into this but I believe that this… she said that this was the most … spiritual moment of my life. And when she said that you just had this feeling of this man, knowing that this was his time to die and knowing that he could actually choose it and that he did it. And I don’t believe it was through a suicide. Maybe some historian researcher will tell me otherwise but even so he still chose this moment. And in Japan that’s a very honourable death.
7:35

7:35
So then Hawayo Takata eventually went back to Hawaii and during the war many of the people in Hawaii were put into internment camp  or (0745) they were contained in their plantation … (räusper), exuse me. (0754) They were contained in the plantation housing areas. So Hawayo Takata somehow and it is said that she followed Chujiro Hayashi’s instructions, she was able to travel from island to island freely. And she gave Reiki treatments, she taught Reiki, she did a lot of things but that was very, very unusual for a Japanese person, either man or woman, to be able to leave their island of residence and travel freely, that was unheard of. Her family never were put into internment camps and my mother tells stories of taking cookies and treats to her friends who were in the camps. So there were camps in Hawaii. And this some people don’t believe and some people say it didn’t happen but I believe my mother. (laughs) (0856) (räusper) 
8:58

8:58
So at the end of the war Hawayo Takata was still teaching and practicing in Hawaii but like everywhere else, everywhere else on the planet Wolrd War II changed social habits enormously. Because this is one big factor in Hawaii, so there were all these young men who had been born on the plantations, were from the age of 18 to 30, they enlisted in the US Army the 442 battalion, which were only Japanese-American men, they were sent to Italy because of course they couldn’t be sent to the Far East theater because nobody would know who they were shooting at. And my father was one of these people, one of these men. And when they came back they all got the GI-Bill, so they were able to go to university, which in their lifetime they never would have been able to do. And they became doctors, lawyers, professors, you know scientists. I mean they just changed the face of Hawaii totally.
10:25
So in one generation they went from basically being slaves to running the state of Hawaii and to healing the people in the state of Hawaii through their professionalism. And this particular change, you know, was really interesting because my grandmother Hawayo Takata at the time she was, I don’t know, I mean how much money do you think she collected for Reiki treatment then, I have no idea, you know, a few Dollars. But some she’s a very frugal person, somehow she saved all her money, would buy a little plot of land, which is very Japanese, you know, land is it. So you buy a little plot of land and then you buy another little plot of land and pretty soon she moved to Honolulu in the 1950’s and was able to buy a piece of land on McCauley Avenue and it was on this land that the first condominium unit in Honolulu was built, amazing. For a Japanese woman who was born on a plantation to have done this through Reiki.
11:48

11:48
I find that this juxtaposition, you know, of here Chujiro Hayashi didn’t really want to teach her Reiki because she was, you know, going to take it to Hawaii and then it ended up that he named her his successor, knowing full well that this would take Reiki out of Japan and perhaps save it in some way. And this for me is a very good example of a Japanese person not worrying about what the social norm was, or what would put him into prison or what was the best for himself. No, he followed the energy of Reiki and said “this is your successor and so it goes out and whatever happens to Reiki will happen”. And actually what happened to Reiki fulfilled Mikao Usui’s dream that Reiki would touch the world.
1301-1302 (lets her hands drop)
13:00

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

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

7:56
You know, it’s weird for me that people think that these people, that migratory people, people who are running for their lives literally are doing this out of choice. Well of course they would stay at home if they had food. Of course they would stay at home if they thought their children would grow up. You know, of course they would stay at home if thought that they would live to see another day. But they’re literally running for their lives and that the call to humanity for me is we’re getting an “F” right now, which in American grading system means “we’re failing”. We’re failing our test of humanity.
8:49
There is a wonderful saying that says “if you have enough build a longer table rather than a wall”. And it’s like this is what we need to do. The world needs to respond and I’m amazed that you know, an earthquake in Africa or in India or Bangladesh can just inspire all these musicians and all these people to give millions of Dollars to rebuild.. because they’re in their own place and they are not migrating. But these people, not just Syrians but other people are migrating because they have to and we’re not willing to spend this money in our own countries to take them in and to say “you can live here until your country is ready to take you back”.
9:56

9:56
I just … it’s for me a big test, it’s a global test like we’ve had global world wars, now this is a global test for humanity to say “our we really being human”. I mean it’s no mistake that… wow, am I really getting opinionated?… okay… It’s a big mistake for me to think that .. to have the question “why is … why is fascism on the rise? Why is extreme prejudice on the rise?” It’s because people are afraid for their existence. But here in America we could all lower our existence level by just a little percentage and give people who really are… really are starving food. And we wouldn’t have to give up much. In fact, we live in luxury for the most part. And if we can’t be humane enough to give a little of that so that other people can actually live. I feel like we’re not doing a very good job in being human beings.
11:26
Now I’ve always said to people, especially in the US, you know, if you want to make a difference in the world, do your self-treatment, because this will change the atmosphere of your life, make it more peaceful and that will make your community more peaceful and so on, which I still agree with. And now we have to put a little bit of our .. we have the saying
… where our money where a mouth is. We have to actually give. And I’m surprised that there aren’t some kind of way that we can all give money and create a way for these people to be supported. And I just think that we are being so uncreative with the solution and that spending on top of that millions of Dollars to erect more walls, just seems like totally crazy to me.
12:36

0:00
When my grandmother died in 1980 and Barbara Weber Ray, well then Barbara Weber said that she had been told that she would be the successor, I… my reaction was it was totally possible.
0028 (räusper)
And the process of succession is more than telling someone that you will be the successor. There has to be recognition. And of the 22 masters that were initiated by Hawayo Takata, most of them recognized me. Sometimes because just before her death Hawayo Takata had said “Phyllis is my successor”.
1003 (räusper)
But because there is another factor which is that the energy came to me and this Hawayo Takata had no control over. I believe that this was also true about Chujiro Hayashi. He might not have wanted Takata, Hawayo Takata, to have been the successor but he got where the energy was going and he surrendered to it. It wasn’t that I was the favourite of my grandmother, let me tell you. She wanted me to be very different. And she was not happy with me but she also recognized something inside of me, that I didn’t even recognize myself in truth. And….
1:56

1:56
As a juxtaposition, during the time when I started to travel with her and take my training with her, she and Barbara had a falling out and she wouldn’t even speak Barbara’s name. She was so angry. And because she had a heart condition my mother said “don’t even ask her what’s happening!”. But she wouldn’t have said anything anyway, it was so painful for her to talk about it. So there was a split between those two and there was a resignation almost that I might be her successor. And I’m not playing myself down, I mean…
2:44 (Schnäuzgeräusch)
I did things that she didn’t like, I went out on dates with men and she felt like “Reiki is the only thing that you should be paying attention to”. You know, this is it. And… I had very long hair, she wanted me to cut it short. I enjoyed life to the fullest, she thought I should work more. I mean, you know, I just wasn’t her ideal candidate, let’s put is that way. Barbara was actually much more the ideal candidate. But this falling out that they had, I have no idea what is was about.
3:28

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

6:38
Barbara took the stands of being the only one who had better training than us, that had received a… more symbols and so on and eventually said that she was the only Reiki Master that my grandmother, Hawayo Takata, had ever actually initiated, that all. the rest of us were not really Reiki Masters. So that put me and all of us into this question “Are we really Reiki Masters?” And that was the best thing that could have happened to all of us, including me, because I had to go inside myself and find this truth. You know, am I a Reiki Master or not? Do I feel like I’ve gotten what I need from my Master? And eventually the answer was yes. So…
7:44
She pushed me in a lot of ways, some not nice. But I have to say and I said this at the time in the 1980s, she was the gift that my grandmother left me. She made me, forced me to go inside and find the strength that I needed to have this position. And to be able to nourish and have the community nourish this part of me because I believe that all of us initiated by Hawayo Takata had the possibility of being her successor. I mean, I don’t feel like I was special in the sense of I had more education or I had the right education or I had her bloodline or anything… that… that actually I don’t think had anything bearing on the case at all.
8:41

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

0:00
The succession question for me had been one that has been foremost in my mind since 1983. And … of course back then I was so young, that I was gonna live forever, and we didn’t really have to think about it. But I did think about it because my grandmother’s death created so much havoc for all of us and at that time of course we were still in this conversation with Barbara Weber and I thought my grandmother could have been more clear and so on. And at the same time realizing how advantageous it was to have a restraining force, you know, this activating/restraining, it was fabulous. So…
0:57
And then in the late 1980s Paul Mitchell and I started to travel in … to other continents, we came to Europe first. And we often flew on the same airplane. And finally somebody, I’m pretty sure it was a German master said to me “you know, you guys shouldn’t fly on the same plane”. And I just laughed and I said “You got to be kidding me”. And she said “no, actually I’m not. I’m saying to you that you two have a responsibility that you’re not taking care of”. And I thought to myself, well that’s actually true, I guess accidents can happen. And at this point the Reiki community was so fragile that if Paul and I had died in the same time it would have shattered the community. I’m not saying that to feel like … you’re replaceable or anything, I just feel like if I was living responsibly as a leader, you know, I had to take care of that.
2:08

2:08
So we ended up not flying together, except for one time to Australia where we both forgot to ask each other when and where we were flying from and we ended up on the same plane. We came from totally different cities and ended up in Los Angeles on the same plane to go to Australia. So that was pretty funny. And…
2:33
Then about maybe 10 years ago or so… oh no before that, maybe 15 years ago I really thought, if I … my ideal situation about my successor is that they would appear now so that I could.. they could be with me and they would learn from me and so on. And I had in mind a young woman to do this and … basically it’s clear that she has her own path, that it’s not this. So I gave that up and I thought well, okay, if that’s not it then what?
3:20

3:20
Ten years ago I started to do work with this regenerative development thinking and in that I realized that … I didn’t know how the succession would work and that I needed to study it and I needed to really get the master community involved. I always thought that the successor would come from the body of masters that I had initiated, which kind of makes sense and it might actually be so. I have no idea. I don’t have a person in mind at all. There have been people who have come to me and said “I feel like I’m going to be your successor”. And I just have studied them over the years and I don’t have this feeling, right now anyway.
4:17

4:17
So when I .. found out that I had cancer and the treatment for it was so effective and so quick actually, I feel like the Reiki community was alerted but we didn’t do anything about it.
I went back to my old, you know, not
0443 (räusper)
as intensive travel schedule but I went back to my old ways and travelled and did my thing and so on. And then my metastasis happened, three years ago. And then the Reiki communities .. the master community sat up and said “okay, this is not over”.
0504 (räusper)
And I believe my body really has served me because three years ago we started on these… having these weekends called succession weekends. And they were not about voting to see who the best candidate was, which actually people did come thinking that.
5:28

5:28
But we are working on … investigating what are the functions of the spiritual lineage? Is there an energetic essence called the Master Body? Which I have spoken about from 1985 or 6. I believe there is a Master Body. There is an energetic Body that includes all Reiki Masters and especially all masters in the system and that they carry responsibility for the system because they’re masters. And we investigate what is the process of succession? What actually happens energetically? You know, where will this succession go? And what I’ve realized personally for myself is that of course somebody is not going to apprentice with me and be the next me. Somebody is going to appear at the time that’s very close to my death and they’re going to be recognized as the lineage bearer. And this person will take Reiki a whole other step that I cannot even imagine.
6:43
Just like when Hawayo Takata died at first I was really upset that she died so soon after my consenting to be a Reiki Master, not her successor, but a Reiki Master. And what I realized some years later is that in her dying then she gave me the gift of her wisdom and of her presence, because I’ve always felt her presence, but we didn’t have to struggle personality wise. And we would have had major, major struggles on the personality level.
7:25

7:25
So I believe that the same thing, it might be true for me. And if so, I still have my little antenna out seeing when this person will arrive. But what I’m now looking for is not almost like who they got initiated by or whatever, it’s how their mind works. Because what I realize is that what was perhaps different from me that I was different from many other people who could have been the successor is the way my mind works, was inclusive, was universal, could see patterns, could make sense of what seemed to be conflicts and appreciate that they actually were necessary in order to go to the next step and things like that.
8:30
So I’m looking for someone who naturally has that, not someone who is like me, because you don’t want another me. You know this is not the way forward in any practice. The next lineage bearer really has to take it, the next step that I can’t see, like my .. Hawayo Takata would never have been comfortable with all these different languages and all these different cultures. I mean she was not able to see the benefit of, you know, this global spread of Reiki, even though that’s what she wanted.
9:11

9:11
You know, she had… I had this very strange experience with her which really was difficult for me because we went to Puerto Rico. The first time I ever heard about Reiki, ever knew what Reiki was or anything. And she had a Spanish interpreter and she could not get that Spanish was a language that needed to be interpreted so that people could understand her. So she would just talk and never make space for interpretation, she would talk right over the interpreter. I mean, it was really embarrassing for me. And I had a talk with her and she said: “They just have to deal with it”. And I thought “this is not respectful!”. I’m sorry, but you know I just don’t get this. And I just think about this situation when I’m sitting in Poland or Russia or Italy or Spain or the Netherlands or even in England sometimes, you know, or Australia. Australia was really bad because there’s this old saying about thinking that you speak the same language but you really don’t.
10:38
Anyway, it was just really, really interesting for me to see that I had the personality and also my physical body was strong enough to do the travelling and do the global movement that I’ve been able to do with such ease. I really appreciate my body. And I really appreciate the difference between Hawayo Takata and myself. I didn’t make this global community, I didn’t spread Reiki, definitely not, but I kept up with it. And that for me has been a real amazing feed. I think..
11:17

11:17
So, whoever comes now, they have have what we call a millennial brain. They have to…. they have to be able to really see you know the globe and our world community as one. And all these young people do. I mean they get it by you know, being born with computers in their hand. I mean… I don’t know…. I don’t get it. But I really get how different their perception is and how oecumenical their view point is.
11:53

touching …really touching

0:00
It’s specifically called…. (sighs) OK lets start again
0:14
When I refer to this system or the system or the system as I teach it or the system that Hawayo Takata passed on I’m speaking about a system called “Usui Shiki Ryoho” which was the original name of the system as Hawayo Takata taught it, however she just called it Reiki because it was easier. I guess. And… Usui Shiki Ryoho translated roughly into English is “The Usui System of Natural Healing”. So we used that phrase in English for many years up until about 1994 or 5 and then I reverted back to Usui Shiki Ryoho because many people took on Usui’s system of natural healing, but it was not really the Usui system of natural healing, it was something else.
1:19
But they didn’t understand that the naming the system actually named a certain form of practice. So when that became more clear then I also in the late 1990s decided to add the lineage because that really identified it as a specific practice. So for me its Usui Shiki Ryoho honouring the lineage of Mikao Usui, Chujiro Hayashi, Hawayo Takata and Phyllis Furumoto.
2:00

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

3:57
So that’s when I went back to the Japanese words Usui Shiki Ryoho. Still many people call their system of practice “the Usui system” or Usui Shiki Ryoho but that’s why I’ve added the lineage eventually because that really specifies it.
4:18
You asked about the Reiki Alliance and the Reiki Alliance is an organization that was founded by… partly by me and a group of masters initiated by Hawayo Takata, in 0432 ähm (räusper) 1983. And now of course the membership of the Reiki Alliance includes members from all over the world and from many, many different masters. The Reiki Alliance is a kind of … association for masters who practice this specific system. So they have a membership system where you have to be able to demonstrate that you practice this system in a similar way. And that feels fine for me. 0520 ähm (räusper) excuse me 0523
5:26

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

3:16
Now, when I die it’s very possible that his role will be subsumed or assumed by a circle of people who will come in and have collective lineage bearing. So it will be like a kind of a committee or circle of lineage
0339
but what I’ve, we’ve been talking about is that every 0344 ….OK, let me see where I was … 
3:52
So when Paul and I formed the Office of the Grand Master I thought it would be clearer if I were also be referred to as a lineage bearer. So this means that I carry the essence or the energetic essence of this system. And he does not replace me, he is taking on one of the aspects of the Grand Master position that I felt I couldn’t do at the time. Now whether or not one person will be able to be the Grand Master of this practice Usui Shiki Ryoho in this lineage … I don’t know.
4:39

4:39
You know, years ago somebody asked me this question and I said “well, if you’re so sure that there is going to be a successor for me then I’m equally sure that the possibility that there won’t be is equal”….
5:03
So, Paul didn’t like this at all because he said “well you have to have a successor”. I said “Paul, I don’t have to have a successor”. Like the Dalai Lama right now, and I’m not acquainting myself with the wisdom of the Dalai Lama, but in lineage he’s got a problem, because he has no idea, because the traditional way of finding the Dalai Lama 0529 (räusper) is gone. So how are they going to do it? And this is something that’s a huge question in the … in this Tibetan tradition and the same for other spiritual practices on the planet because of the globalisation that has happened.
5:51

5:51
So, you know, in this particular practice, say we have a million students and … 9000 masters, I don’t know, these are numbers I am just picking out of my hat. 0604 (Schneuzgeräusche) But how is the succession going to be carried smoothly, well somewhat smoothly and clearly into the future, and this is something that we are studying now. So it is possible that when I die that one person will take this on and be supported a group. And it isn’t a group of “in-people”, it’s a group of people who are willing to be committed to this part of their practice.
6:44
I realized very early on that any of the masters that Hawayo Takata initiated could have become her successor. And I believe that as masters, when we are initiated and recognized as masters we have the potential to be a lineage bearer. It’s obvious because if we, if you or anybody else initiate a master then we are actually starting a lineage.
0716 (räusper)
But the masters who applicate in some way this part of them as masters to me as lineage bearers, I want them to awaken this part of themselves not so that they can be lineage bearers but that I believe that it is this part that will recognize my successor. Does that make sense?
7:45
So I’m very excited by this process and… excited because it expands my awareness of my own life and what I’ve been doing all these years.
8:04

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

3:01
So anything out of that should have been renamed and I’m not attached to this at all. I’m just saying to sort it out. This is for me what would have sorted it out much better. I did try actually to find a name for this system to separate it .. not separate it, but to differentiate it from other practices but I couldn’t do it and probably that’s true for them too. So okay. But in Japan this is very common, they change the name a little bit, they use a different character and it changes the name of the practice. So people are very clear about honouring each other and their own practice.
3:52
And one of the things, this is little digression, but one of the things that are sad for me that in Japan what happened because of the way Reiki “returned” to Japan, it returned in a sense of resistance against me and resist… and also in competition. And you know that’s totally for me not the Japanese way. And so people felt like they had to be defensive. But I… they didn’t have to be defensive about me, I mean, I’m not claiming the right way or the best way or the only way. I’m just claiming that I have a way.
4:43

4:43
So I feel sad that the practices coming out of Japan feel like what they have to offer is somehow they have to offer something that is from Japan and therefore it’s more valuable. And what they actually have to offer, that I think is incredibly valuable, is that they come from the original culture. And that their way of being, their way of being with Reiki, no matter what the form is, could demonstrate this incredible cultural heritage that they’re carrying naturally.
5:28
And that I am taking tours now of students back to Japan to try and touch this culture so that they understand more about why this practice and why I’m so strict about some things. Because I see that if I westernize or fall pray to giving students what they want then I’m not being a tradition keeper. And I really feel that this role of tradition keeper is very important in this day and age of computers and 0606 ähm…. and ähm… 0612 …
6:20

6:20
In this day on confusion and fusion, confusion and fusion of different cultures. You know like you go into restaurants now and if it says Asian Fusion you have no idea of what kind of food you gonna get but it’s somebody’s idea of Chinese/Japanese/Thai/Korean whatever, all mixed together, right. And this is very confusing to me, I just want you to know. So fusion sometimes results in confusion. And I believe that one of the gifts of having clear different practices is that students get to choose which practice they can come to, that’s right for them in the moment. I’m not a proponent of putting all the practices together and having one universal practice, that is not going to save the day. What’s going to save the day is for us is to be respectful with each other no matter what.
7:33

0:00
This phrase “agreeing to disagree” puts me in mind one of the very first principles that I learned in practicing Reiki and that is “there’s no right or wrong way to be”. So I would like to say that this statement “agreeing to disagree” puts me in a place of being against somebody or disagreeing with their opinion. I would like to say, maybe people think this is a little too slippery, that we simply have different opinions. And I honour their opinion as much as I honour mine. If I don’t do that, then how could I ask others to honour my opinion or my practice without me honouring theirs?
1:11
There was a period of time in the early 1900… 1990s, excuse me, 1990s where many of the colleagues that I was involved in and had workshops with and we were in community together, they made very snide remarks about some of the “new” forms of practice. And it didn’t sit very well with me but I didn’t know why until I finally figured out that they also reported to me conversations they’ve had had with students or members of the public where there was a kind of not so nice remark made of our practice and I said to them… well I said “If you don’t change your attitude toward the other practices, then how do you expect to be respected?” You know, it’s like “Do onto others as you would have them do onto you”, you know, it’s a very old, wise axiom. ….
2:31

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

3:03
Beth Gray went to Australia and she was a charismatic healer herself. And Reiki, I feel, gave her an opportunity to have a form for that healing along with a few other of the Reiki masters that Hawayo Takata initiated. And when she went to Australia, she found a waiting community. And who knows why these things happen, as in the story of Mary McFayden or Inger Droog who went to the Netherlands or Wanja Twan who taught in Scandinavia again.
0346-0348 ähm (cough)
The Australians welcomed Beth Gray, she had somehow the right personality, which was very forward, extremely charismatic and extremely opinionated, I will use that word. Which was great, because somehow it fit into their society and they’re very strong in their opinions, the Australians. And they need to be, you know, they are in a very harsh environment, given, everything. And when they were… when Australia was first settled they needed to be tough. And that toughness still is there in the Australian culture. And it is part of their charm, actually these days.
4:41

4:41
So Beth went over to Australia and she taught for some years, I don’t even know now, because time is a little bit strange for me, everything flows together. But say it was like … 10 years, 12 years and then she was ready to immigrate to Australia. And she was, you know, starting to put all of her things in order in the US and she had her own church in San Francisco Bay area. She was wrapping that up and ready to become an Australian, which was very exciting for her. I remember having wonderful animated conversations with her about this, because by that time I had been asked to go to Australia and met a lot of her students. They were extremely dedicated to Reiki. They would go and take… sit in her classes over and over and over again. They would…. They begged her to initiate them as Reiki masters because they did have so much on-the-ground experience, treating every day, going to classes that she gave, going to other workshops that she gave. It was amazing.
6:05

6:05
And it wasn’t something that Beth felt called to do, readily. So I believe that she initiated 3 or 4 masters in this last period of her life, before she had her stroke. So just as she was preparing to leave for Australia she had a massive stroke and the whole immigration to Australia of course was … let go. And part of her recovery from her stroke was that she couldn’t actually speak in sentences. She could express herself with one or two words and she was very expressive. I just learned how expressive you could be with one or two words.
6:58
And that whole phase of her life was so dramatically changed. It was… I was always sad about that because she was so happy thinking about being an Australian. What she passed on to her students, still lives in Australia. I still have contact with many of her… well with some of her students. I won’t say many because she taught hundreds and hundreds and hundreds, maybe thousands of people there. So I would say that I’m in touch with a few hundred.
7:40

7:40
You know her masters have taken her personality and her way of being with Reiki and taken in upon themselves to further that. And as a master who initiates other masters, there are masters that I’ve initiated, that I feel very much affinity to and somehow our personalities are very much the same and so it feels like they carry a part of my legacy without knowing it. And I believe that the masters that Beth Gray initiated there, do the same thing. That she was looking for someone specifically to carry this piece of her legacy, which she has done. And it’s a gift and a challenge in and of itself.
08:39

0:00
Well the deal is that one of the masters died, her first master… I believe it was her first master. She was from Melbourne? Her name was …. I can’t remember. And she and her husband had a Reiki center, but she died, she died very suddenly of a massive stroke, I believe, at the age of like 52. I mean, it was really weird. And she died like in 2000..… when was the last time I was in Australia? It was in 2009. So maybe she died in 2005, 2004 or something like that. She was more quiet than Barbara (McGregor) of course. But she had a huge, huge following in the south-east part of Australia. This woman… and I really wish I could remember her name…
1:05

1:05
And then there is Beverly Bultitude, who is in a part of Sydney. 0111 She’s ähm 0114 (räusper) She has a woman partner and she’s still alive but she is very quiet with her Reiki. So Barbara being kind of a chip-off the old block of Beth Gray, but even more Australian just took it and ran. So, you know, that’s true. And that’s true in Australia. I think that the Australians would say that she is really carrying Beth Gray’s … a lot of Beth Grays’ idiosyncracies as well as her gift of Reiki. But she’s very unapproachable and very uncooperative, which Beth was as well.
2:02
You know, Beth didn’t want to… Marta Getty and she was also a master I initiated in the early 80s. And both of them taught in Australia extensively. But 0215 (räusper) Beth, you know Beth practiced with Beth’s practice, Martha’s students couldn’t go to Beth’s classes and Beth’s students could not even speak to Martha. So it’s this thing that happens sometimes. 0231 (Background voice) Yes, it does, absolutely. (OK) 0236

2:36

00:00
As I mentioned before, I have recognized five aspects or roles of master, Reiki master. And in the condition where a student comes to me and says “I want to be a Reiki Master”, then all these five roles have a part to play in the preparation of that student. And a part of the tradition keeper piece is to honour our ancestors. So honouring our ancestors means, if I don’t know the answer to a question, I go back and ask. And it could be a person, sometimes it’s sending a treatment to myself and asking Reiki to help me. I also ask the master student to do the same because they must begin to take this responsibility on for themselves.
1:14
I would…. In the beginning when people said, or now when there are new masters and they have people come to say “I want to be a master candidate”, I recommend that the masters, the new masters have at least 10 years of experience teaching before they take on master candidates. If they have a student who wants to be a master before this time, then it is appropriate that they refer that student to me. So sometimes this works and sometimes it really doesn’t.
2:00

0:00
Perhaps another part of tradition keeper is simply noticing that there is …. a human aspect to the student/teacher relationship that
0021 (räusper)
is always a challenge for both. And that is when the student “grows up” and becomes a master of their own or even a 2nd degree student on their own, they have their own experience, they have their own understanding of what they’re doing and sometimes it doesn’t agree with their masters. And that’s okay. One of the things that was very clear in Hawayo Takata’s teaching was that everybody has the right to their own relationship with Reiki, the energy. 0056-0057 (räusper)
0:59

2:18
So, people often see Chujiro Hayashi as… or it’s assumed…. It’s assumed that Chujiro Hayashi was Mikao Usui’s best student. Well, I don’t actually know whether that’s true, it was never my assumption. All I know is that he was a student of Mikao Usui. It’s very possible that he was the rebel of Mikao Usui and went off and did his clinic because he followed his heart. I mean obviously the man was a clinician. And in this being a clinician, he needed to have a clinic, he needed to make notes and he needed to make a system of some sort. Whether or not Mikao Usui thought that this was a good thing, we’ll never know, I mean, excuse me but no amount of researchers is going to figure this out.
3:21

3:21
So whether Mikao … Chijuiro Hayashi was a dissonant or was a rebel in Mikao Usui’s day or whether he was his best student or simply a student that went off and founded a clinic, we’ll never know. But found a clinic he did, he met Hawayo Takata and …. in response to Reiki showing him that Hawayo Takata was his successor he also sat in contemplation with the other masters that were in his circle and did something very unique at that time for him by giving the succession and following the energy of Reiki, which led Reiki out of Japan and into Hawaii and then into the rest of the world.
4:27

4:27
Was this an act of dissonance or an act of surrender? You know… I mean… I think it’s a bit of both actually myself. And I have to say that I never… I never said, or if I … if people understood that I said, I just want you to know that this is misunderstood, but I never said that Barbara Weber was not ever…. introduced as the successor to Hawayo Takata. Because I believe that it was totally possible. Before I came into Reiki, Barbara Weber was her pride student. She was educated, she was a great organizer, she doted on my grandmother, she wanted to further all of my grandmother’s wishes, which she did, totally. She helped her record a book that she wanted to write, she made it possible for Reiki to become a household word
5:39

5:39
I don’t believe that she actually changed the teaching that she received from Hawayo Takata. She might have added to it, but I don’t feel like she changed the actual teaching, because she was a really dedicated student. She did what her heart and her education and her being really needed to do for Reiki. And I will never call this dissonance. It wasn’t comfortable for me for sure. I didn’t like some of the things she said about me but about what she did, she followed her path and I did the same thing. And so did all the other masters that Hawayo Takata taught and initiated.
6:30

6:30
And that most of us were able to come together in the Reiki Alliance and to talk and to be a part of a similar energetic field was terrific. But it didn’t mean that we agreed, NO (laugh), definitely not. John Gray and I had many differences of opinion, but I totally respected him as a master. And I didn’t impinge upon his expression of Reiki or how he prepared his Reiki masters, I mean, he demanded a lot from them on a practitioner level, you know, so many hours of public practice… definitely a lot of years of apprenticeship and so on and I know that the masters that he initiated are carrying that on as a tradition. And it makes a part of a profession… professional kind of practitioner very possible within the teaching that he did.
7:47

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

7:53
Very early on, like maybe 1982 or 3, somebody came to me and said 0802 “You should tra….. you should trans…no… 0807 you should trademark Reiki. 0809 You should write down the whole system and trademark it, now!”. If I had done that, what would have happened in the future? Where would we have been today? And I just couldn’t see the benefit of doing this. I thought that trademarks were something very different than they are. So in the middle of 1990s I learned through my own experience of having to “fight” a trademark, a registration, that trademarks are simply the business way of saying “This is who I am”
0902 (räusper)
and that you don’t make a lot of money, they do cost a lot of money. And you’re able to … if done with integrity, actually maintain integrity.
9:22
So what I really wanted to do in the mid 1990s, which was by that time too late,
0928 (räusper)
was to have what is called an industry trademark. And so the ones that we might be very familiar with are for cotton, the little symbol for cotton, or wool, which is a woven kind of symbol but these are trademarked by the industry. So all the manufacturers of cotton material can use this trademark. And that’s what we could have done with Reiki. It would have maintained a certain boundary around practices, not controlling practices but being able to identify them. But at that point there was one practice, I didn’t see that the future would hold that there are many and this was a decision that I took, doing my best. I certainly didn’t have any assumptions to make because if I didn’t make them and my big assumption, the critical assumption was that the world was not going to change, (laugh) but it did.
10:45

10:45
So in keeping to this feeling of doing my best at the time, I think that when I was… in the mid 1990s when I was going through this trademark thing, I had some regrets but I couldn’t have made a different decision, at the time, in 1983. I just couldn’t have, it was not to be done.
11:18
Another decision that I made, that people… that seemed to be a very big deal in the Reiki community, was in 1988 during the first Reiki Alliance conference in Europe in Friedrichsdorf. I made a very important speech. And unfortunately… I wasn’t…. I wasn’t able to be articulate and to be accurate in my word. So people misunder….. people misunderstood me, they interpreted this speech really differently and … than I had imagined they would and … I did my best. So basically this … the whole thing that it came to was that I … that I had listened with growing dismay about people saying “Well you’re the only one who has the power to initiate masters”. And I would tell them “You’re wrong. This is not about power”.
12:55

12:55
And finally what I realized was in order to dissipate this rumour, this misunderstanding, I needed to just open the doors. Because the doors were already been pride open by other masters who were initiating masters already, Barbara Weber being one of them. And people saying “Well, are they really masters? Does she have the power to initiate masters?”. And I kept saying “It’s not about that. It’s not about that!”. So… and I also, one of the other motivations for me was that I saw that some of the masters of Hawayo Takata, who had been practicing and teaching and doing their path, were really ready to initiate masters, they had master… they had students coming to them, wanting to be initiated as masters. And those students were given to me to prepare and initiate. But I was starting to get students who weren’t my students, they were the students of the masters who sent them. And I couldn’t, in all integrity, take them on. I wanted to say “You study with Paul.. you study with Beth… you study with somebody…” you know, whoever has sent them, because it just wasn’t right.
14:24

14:24
So in this speech I tried to say (laugh) that the circle of masters who had actually given me their power to initiate, like there’s a word in English called “abdicate”, they gave this power to me and I believe it was the good thing to do at that moment, 1983… ah 1982 because this would have split the Reiki community I think maybe irrevocably, if so many masters had started to initiate masters for even the first 5 years.
15:09
So I did it, everybody saw how I did it. A lot of people didn’t like what I was doing but they couldn’t say anything ‘cause they had given me and said “you are the person to initiate masters in this system”. And that would have worked, if the system had stayed small, had stayed local but it didn’t… it just… in 1988 people were being initiated all over Europe, in India, in Canada, in Australia. You know, it’s like “Really? I’m going to initiate all these masters? Forget it!”
15:47
And the other thing that I said to my friends, was “I am not going to be an initiation machine, where people just send me their students, I initiate them and that’s it. I mean that’s too weird for me. So…
16:07

16:07
I made the speech and I said “you know, it is a master’s right to share their information and their calling as a master to any student that they feel is worthy. And it is up to you to prepare yourself for this step”. And I don’t know if any of the other messages have gotten through but the response was I had given away my power, I had… and I said “I haven’t given away anything. I had nothing to give away”, because this whole power thing was a misconception, you know, it’s not about giving away your power, it’s about sharing sacred tools so that a worthy student can step on the path of mastery and have their own experience of this. It’s not a… it’s a gift but in a kind of funny way. Because you know they are going to have hardship, challenges, confrontations… it’s going to take their life and totally change it. And… that’s a kind of funny gift I have to say.
17:28

17:28
So, anyway… I spent a lot of guilty feelings around this because it was so misunderstood at the time. I felt like I hadn’t been able to really articulate what I wanted to and, you know, at some point I just had to say “I did my best and it opened up the space and it was a little ungraceful but in the end it accomplished what I wanted. And that was to dispel this idea that it was only me who had the power to initiate masters. That was really important for me. 1807… So
18:21

0:00
.. but my peacefulness around this has come and lately, what’s really funny is that I actually found my notes for this speech… as I was going through these papers… I don’t know where they… I can’t lay my hands on them today, but it was really interesting to read it and to see how progressive I was but at the same time people were not able to listen to this language. They wanted to have kind of a physical “You can initiate masters and you can not!”, you know “You are not ready!” and “You are!” and I couldn’t have done that because it really, really for me was not my place to bless anybody to initiate masters nor to prevent them from initiating masters. So of course what happened, was.. is that … the masters that I thought were ready to initiate masters were angry with me and they didn’t initiate masters for years. And the people who were kind of young, upstart masters, who ‘thought they knew everything’ and so on, they began to initiate masters right away and they soon learned what initiating masters was about. I couldn’t have taught them that.
1:33
And in the end it was really right. You know, it wasn’t something that was “pretty” in the beginning and we all had judgements. But… and I opened Pandora’s box, I admit.. but I feel like it was now a good thing. I wish I would not had used the sledge hammer but perhaps the key (laugh). But I didn’t have the key then.
2:07

2:07
Then all these new forms of practice started to pop up, some from my own students. And … people wanted me to control them. They wanted somehow from me to do a good job so that people wouldn’t feel like they could just go off and do their own Reiki. And I took it upon myself to really study the situation and decide if there was anything that I could do, anything at all. And in the midst of all this kind of contemplation time …. Shunjan Joop Hilger … I found out that he had trademarked
0301 these ähm Usui Shiki Ryo … no, 0304
the Usui System of natural healing as a phrase, Reiki as a phrase, the Kanji in Germany. And he had been awarded the trademarks. And I thought “oh… now what?”.
3:22
So in this whole process I had a partner, the Reiki Alliance, because many of their members were threatened by Joop’s use of these trademarks. And what was so, is that even though I wasn’t able at the time inside myself to trademark these things, I also didn’t feel like it was appropriate for another master outside the lineage to hold these trademarks. So we got into kind of out-of-court discussion about who own the trademarks, which cost both of us a lot of money and time and energy and … I’m sure agro… aggravation, sorry, it’s a slang (laugh).
4:14

4:14
And… you know, during this time I had a lot of education about what trademarks really were, what they were used for in the business world, what I could do with them, what were my alternatives and what it would take to actually trademark something like Reiki in the world, because by that time, Reiki had spread all over the world. So I went to the Reiki Alliance and I asked the Alliance members to file for trademarking and local communities in the areas did trademark Reiki and the Kanji and some other… and a couple of other things and they paid for them. And they did a beautiful job, I really, I … was so touched by their willingness to do this for Reiki and for their practice.
5:21
And I was overwhelmed. I was trying to do my own schedule, I was in the middle of learning about trademarks, I had to keep earning money because this whole process was taking tens of thousands of Dollars. And also I was really… though I didn’t admit it at the time, I was really sad and wounded, Nr. 1 by Joop who was a master that I initiated, why didn’t he come to me and said “Look, you know, you’re not doing your job and if you don’t do your job properly…” and maybe he did and I didn’t hear it, I don’t know. You know, “I’m going to, you know, … get these trademarks and so on …”. I would have liked to think that we could have worked together on this, but I don’t think so now.
6:19

6:19
And the other thing was that in Germany there were many masters who were threatened by Joop’s holding these trademarks but they weren’t able to financially help me or weren’t willing to help me financially, because they felt like it was my fault anyway that I hadn’t taken care of this in the first place. So that was really horrible for me.
6:46
There were a lot of different things going on and I … in my personality I was so unable to imagine or take in … solutions, because for me this was for me a major crisis within the Reiki community. I still have boxes of documents from this era (laugh). I have had boxes of documents scanned for prosperity in this whole process. Still, especially in South America and in Spain, Reiki master communities are holding trademarks but not knowing what to do with them and not knowing how to pay for them. I didn’t keep track of the legal entities that needed to be held so that so that trademarks could be brought in and I realise now that I needed a whole organization to do this, not just me. But I needed to have been able to hire a trademark attorney, to be able to hire an office person who just dealt with trademarks and to keep up with all the licencing and so on.
8:19

8:19
And in the middle of all this I asked for the Reiki Alliance to become the association of licence … of licence masters, who would out of this trademark be able to set standards that were already set anyway for membership and that they would hold the membership of all licensed masters. And they refused to do it because they didn’t feel like this was a “Reiki way” of being. So at that point I felt so unsupported and so misunderstood and so fed up with this whole thing that I just dropped it, just like that, because the last nail in this whole thing was driving down from Breitenbush one August afternoon with Paul Mitchell and we were speaking about this trademark thing and about how the Reiki Alliance could be an association of licensed masters and so on. And he said “Well, you know, I never supported this, ever… the whole trademarking thing, the licensure and any.. everything”. And I said “Well, it would have been good to know, because I wouldn’t have done this without your support”. Because at that point he and I were like partners in holding the OGM, because this was in 1996 or 7. We were partners and I said “You know, if I don’t have my partners’ support, then … We could have had this discussion and maybe something could have been gleaned and I would have been more aware of people who weren’t in agreement with me.”
10:39

10:39
So I just, you know, at that point between my personality and my lineage bearer self I was crushed. And I just dropped it, just like that. And I left a lot of people high and dry in my own community. Some masters actually left Reiki because of this situation. My relationship with the Reiki Alliance has never.. I don’t think healed from this particular process, on my part, because I felt not supported, not recognized and not heard….
11:37
There has been tremendous misunderstanding that has come out of this particular four year period…. And… there is nothing I can say to … convince people otherwise. You know, there is an idea that I was doing this just to make money. Well, you don’t make money on a trade mark unless the people who are able… unless the people who want to use a trademark actually pay you money. And I knew that Reiki masters wouldn’t be able to pay me US$ 5’000 a year, so that was not what I was gonna ask. It was just assumption, after assumption, after assumption, that for me, especially with the Alliance members felt very painful because I realized, they didn’t know who I was, they didn’t know how much I thought for them and they didn’t know that I could see them and that I would be compassionate. So this was just a heartbreaker.
13:03

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

15:20
So… Can I forgive myself? Well, yes. I feel like I have. Because I couldn’t go on if I hadn’t. And I don’t know what I could have done differently. And I don’t even know who to write now to say “Thank you for all that you did to support myself, your local communities and the vision of Reiki that we all had. And that vision now, where I am now, was so limited, I realised, that …. If I knew then what I know now, it would have been a very different scene, and I didn’t.”
16:24
Speaking about it helps, because I feel that I’m able to speak about it in a way that I don’t bring up my guilt and I don’t bring up feeling small and inadequate but I just bring up this overwhelming feeling of sadness that….. it couldn’t have been different. If that makes any sense. That I would have liked for it to have been different for everyone…. And it wasn’t.
17:13

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

7:00
So I feel that… it’s not something that I made up, because I just see that the steps even through the lineage bearers of discovery and establishment of creating system perhaps and being able to pass that on to a woman who was the ultimate practitioner, who tested the system in all different ways including taking it from one culture to another and finding that she gave something to the world that actually could go around the world and come back to Japan and serve as a provocateur for the Reiki that was left in Japan to rise up again.

8:01

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

00:06 I met Paul Mitchell in the summer of 1980 and it was a pretty funny experience because I was just… I was just a women of 30 years old, having no what I consider to be “esoteric experience and although I had had them.. as I look back on them and but I didn’t recognize them then… and I was living with my grandmother in Quisaqua/Iowa ?? where my parents lived and where my grandmother moved in her last years
0:53
Paul was a recent student of hers in San Francisco and he was driving across country to help a friends move a car from San Francisco to Washington DC. And he thought “oh, I could stop and get second degree from Hawayo Takata in her own home… So he called Hawayo Takata my grandmother and he said “I’m passing by” well I figured his speech “could I come and get second degree” and she said “Yes, when are you arriving?” an he said “tomorrow” or something like that…
1:32 (räusper)
So he came and because I was there as my grandmother’s assistant at the time,
0141 (räusper)
I was supposed to be travelling with her and helping her but because she became ill I came back home and gave her Reiki every day and helped her cook and so on… I thought that I was there to.. so that she can sit with Paul while he ate and I would cook dinner for both of them and then leave 0205 (Cough) 0210
2:11

2:11
I opened the door and there was recognition between us. It was like “oh, hello” and my grandmother felt the intensity so she showed Paul in to the living room, dining room area, sat him on the chair, said “We’ll be right out”. Then she came to the kitchen, closed the door and went “You go home, you go home right now” and I went “But I haven’t cooked you dinner?”. She said “I’ll cook”, I said “No, let me just stay, I’ll help you cook dinner”. But she wanted me gone like that.
2:54
And… So I was, despite all of my projects and I never saw Paul again that week. A few months later a couple of months later we ended up in San Francisco at Paul’s house because that’s where she was staying in September or October, I don’t remember which month, to do some classes. And it was the end of my time with her during that year. So I flew back from San Francisco to Denver and then to Winner Park and resumed my duties in the ski area. But that night, we went out for dinner the three of us, Paul, Hawayo Takata and myself and we came home and she instantly fell asleep. So Paul and I finally got to talk to one another “alone”, so to speek. And it wasn’t a kind of sexual man/woman-thing, it was something like we’ve done something together before, I mean it was very kind of spooky for me, because I never really had this happen. So then I didn’t see him for a couple of years after that.
4:13

4:13
By that time we were both initiated as masters, he had been initiated later and my grandmother, our master, had died and he had moved to Idaho and I was living in Southern British Colombia. So we were living about 4 hours apart, kind of as a miracle. And so we ended up along with a couple of the other masters from that area that my grandmother had initiated as a little group of new Reiki Masters who were lost. Because our master had died and we just needed to comfort each other and to compare notes and so we did this a lot.
5:08

5:08
In, I think, 1983 or maybe 84 I had many, many requests from students who wanted to become Reiki Masters. Finally one of the masters that I initiated, Barbara West, who was a experienced group facilitator at that time, said “You should do a group, you know, just do a group”, instead of seeing all these people singly. Because I invited them to our home, our whole family life was disrupted, I wasn’t present for actually the master candidate nor for my family, so it was just a mess. I thought “oh, a group sounds interesting but what can I do in a group?”. Well, the answer was: nothing, I thought. Early Master Training (how was it in early days?)
6:00

6.00
and… I invited Paul, and I really wanted him to do some of this Aikido-work. I hadn’t experienced it but from what I understood from his sharing I knew that it would benefit the students, which it did, totally and still does to this day.
0620
I invited Barbara because she was facilitator of groups and we did kind of pseudo-therapeutic exercises together. I invited a friend of mine who was a Sufisheka who was initiated to lead Sufi-dances and walks which were also very beautiful and very provocative. I invited a friends of mine who was a trained psychic and she helped lead the group in… because we were all having these interesting psychic phenomenas, but we didn’t know what they were and it was through the gift of Reiki that these things kind of popped out and so she helped us to understand and how to hold them and how to use them and so on and then another couple of Reiki Masters who were therapists, Gestalt-therapists mostly.
7:22

7:22
So this was a wild group and there… sometimes one person couldn’t come and there might be 3 facilitators up to 5 or 6 actually. But all through this Paul was there with his Aikido-work. And this work really was very important for me on a physical level because I really got the experience of being centered and understanding about my own physical energy and my energetic body together. It was just as beneficial for all the other students who were there as well. We closed down that program after 5 or 6 years and went on to do master candidate retreats together, masters workshops together and so on ….
08:29

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

09:16
So since 1992 and 3, we started this relationship until now, he’s been a peer and this particular relationship of peer has been very important for me. He’s a very different person from me, personality-wise, we have very different approaches to money, to travelling, to ….lots of different details like that, but our approach and what we are called to do in Reiki is the same. So we have had just amazing experiences working together.
10:09
He is really clear that he is not a lineage bearer, anyway now, he’s 2 years older than I am. We don’t know if his position will be filled if he dies. He is very clear that he wants my position filled by one person when I die. And I don’t know really if that’s gonna happen. I would like to think that I’m open to any.. whatever comes up, with the energy of Reiki with the Master Body and with the community.
10:47

10:47
He has played a significant role of kind of anchor in all these years and has provided either the activating force or the restraining force in our discussions and vice versa. About 10 years ago we got kind of tired of the polarisation that this was creating. So after 2 or 3 years of actually going to counselling together and trying to work out our differences, we came to this conclusion that we were just very different personalities and that we didn’t really want to change each other. His reticence to talking, his way with money, his ideas of what Reiki was and what Reiki wasn’t stimulated me to really research my own ideas and vice versa….
11:51

11:51
But we realized that what we really needed were more people in the circle, like we were a circle of 2, so we kept going like this… and what we need to do was go like this…. So we opened up the first OGM-Retreat in August an whoever came, 1st degree, 2nd degree and master students are invited to this who practice the system, they sit in the circle and we discusse issues that are up in the community. And we get to have other voices in our circle and this is proven to be wildly successful as far as I’m concerned. It allows Paul and I to have the freedom to find our own place in that circle, to… so that we’re not.. we don’t force ourselves into a polarized conversation. But sometimes we find ourselves liter … kind of … literally sitting together and other times opposite. And it’s a great freedom for us to have .. and be able to have our own opinion and see it in the relative universe of a circle. That’s wonderful.
13:13

13:13
So we continue these OGM-reatreats and the next one will be in October of 2016 in Almaty, Kazakhstan and it’s the first time it’s in the Russian speaking eastern part of our world of Europe and I’m very excited by this, very excited. So, who is Paul: Well …. I have lots of levels of answers to that but for the most part he’s been my partner in the OGM… in the office of the OGM of… no, he’s been my partner in the Office of the Grand Master, he’s been in his.. from his own perspective supportive of everything that I’m doing and in his own way he has supported the lineage by not being the lineage bearer.
14:25

2:31
The one about “don’t take things personally”, that’s tough. Because in the beginning, especially in the early 1990’s I thought that the changes that were happening in different practices and the formation of new forms of Reiki were an affront to Hawayo Takata and of course I wanted to defend her. And so I definitely took things personally, if not personally also for Hawayo Takata. So I was a bit strict and a bit strong in those days and really confused because at the same time I really do believe that every person has a right to their own opinion and who they are. So even though my students differ in opinion and in theory from me I want to also say that I would defend their right to have their space, have their opinion and have their theory.

3:47