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
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

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

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