0:00
ähm (2 knocks in the background) (pauses) 0008 I think in the beginning I was naive enough to think that my contribution to the world really was about creating «new Reiki lights», there are lots of expressions in different languages that Reiki masters use for their new students. And I believe that that’s true in the sense that, you know, we have the opportunity to be with people and to allow them to remember who they really are. At the same time..it is… we are students as well. And so for me, every initiation I give, every class that I give, allows me to reach into the part of myself that becomes more and more authentically human.
01:11.
And for me that’s really on some level the most profound change that happens in a Reiki class …it is my change as a human being. And that so many people have been initiated as a Master for ‘personal growth’ but what they don’t really understand is the most profound personal growth is when you teach. I don’t, you know, I don’t support people being initiated as masters for personal growth without teaching because for me it’s like that is the sacred tool of a master for themselves is to be able to stand in this place where you are at one time, it’s very paradoxical, at one time (0202) «THE Master» and «THE Teacher» of Reiki and you get to touch these people not just physically, energetically and perhaps spiritually in very profound way and in an intimate way and at the same time you open yourself up totally in surrender to the energy. So you are both the top, as you are.. and then you are a student.
02:37
And this blend of a kind of paradoxical situation is the key to who we are as human beings. I believe that we of course can be masters of the universe but we also have to be part of the universe. So these paradoxical situations are very important and we learn that every time we teach. So I went from a place of just getting that this ‘task’ of mine was to first fulfil a family duty 03:09 (to carry on Reiki) and then to initate new reiki students, because that was my job, so to speak, and then this other piece where it became this wonderful practice of standing in as much presence as possible while surrendering all of myself. And this to me is the path of the master and really the contribution to the world. Yah!
3:45

0:00
Well, I would estimate, and this is very rough, I would estimate probably around 10’000 first degree students in the last 30 some years. And of course I usually don’t initiate 2nd degree students who were not my students, so they come along with that. And I would say out of those 1st degree students there is 037-0045 (pauses because of street noise) there is probably maybe 5% go on to 2nd degree, I don’t encourage 2nd degree. I don’t encourage 2nd degree, I tell people to just wait until you cant stand not to have 2nd degree and then you come to me.
1:00
And for masters, I’ve initiated probably 360 masters, something like that. And out of those perhaps half are not practicing Reiki at all anymore and practice and out of those some percentage like maybe 10% or so have broken off from me and are teaching their own system of Reiki, you know, whatever that is.
1:32
So the interesting part for me is that in my history of initiating masters, in the beginning I initiated people who were my grandmother’s students and I had a feeling even though sometimes I didn’t talk to my grandmother expressly about somebody, I could feel that they… that she had this connection with them and was preparing them as a master student. I only had 1 of my own students during that time come to mastery. And now it’s not a very…that’s not been a very successful relationship in the sense that she separated from me immediately after the initiation and we’ve had a very difficult relationship and a very separate relationship after that. 
2:29- 2.33 (cough)

5:15
And so by the time of like 1997 I quit initiating masters for about 2 years, because I really wanted to understand, number 1) how I… what was happening, the phenomenon that was happening and I was just really stunned by it, because these were people who were totally into Reiki and then all of a sudden they just turned it off and I..I… I couldn’t relate to that in myself at all.
5:55
There are many, many masters who do, you know «earn their living through Reiki» and I feel that it is.. a voice when you become a master to surrender your financial self to Reiki because in doing that then you really give Reiki a chance to develop you. And is doesn’t mean that you only earn your money through teaching 1st and 2nd degree classes but that you.. that you put your energy into the universe and the universe (if it’s not too esoteric a term) supports you. And sometimes it means that they give you your ideal «job» in the world so that you can learn something in order to bring that back into your Reiki practice. So it really, really depends on an individual level but I always encourage and it used to be a requirement, now I encourage masters that I initiate, to quit jobs and to just rely on Reiki and see what happens and it’s pretty miraculous.
7:10

0:00
Well, Hawayo Takata had a very interesting way of working with this. She was very mindful of this thing about how to … how to initiated masters who would actually surrender to Reiki on all these different levels. So she this group of masters who reached almost retirement age 0032-0:36 (cough)
who had made their money and they had grown children and they were kind of ready to … ready to be in the world to be themselves. And then there were the young people, only a few of us, who hadn’t had families yet and who were willing to just say «ok, I be Reiki master and this is what I’m doing with my life». And the interesting thing is that that’s what we did, I mean… my colleagues who are my age, Paul Mitchell and Rick Bockner, who I’ve been together with all these years in our path of mastery, we always, you know, surrendered to the will of Reiki so to speak. And it didn’t mean that we didn’t do other things sometimes but it’s been a really wonderful opportunity to see that we could live our lives for 35 years in this way and come out of it feeling very rich. We’re not rich on an American level of «success» but we are rich in the way our lives are and what our priorities are and the wonderful people that we have in our lives and the profound experiences that we have almost every day.
2:06

0:00
(René: ..you agree with that?) Yes, I do… 0007 I feel that we are in a very interesting position as Reiki masters. I don’t know the daily things about people very often. I don’t know if they are married or if they have a relationship, I don’t know if they have children, I certainly don’t know the names of most of their children, I don’t know where they live, I don’t know what their daytime job is if they happen to have one. I only know a few little details that come up in coversation and I don’t hold on to them very much because it would be impossible.
0:52
But, eg. for my 1st degree students when they sit in the chair for initiation, they open themselves to me totally energetically. And that is a truly amazing intimate moment that will never ever be shared by anybody else. So that responsibility, that moment of initiation brings me to, I believe, to an energetic and spiritual connection with this person for a life time and perhaps we’re renewing something from other lifetimes, I have no idea, I have my own theories about that.
1:48

0:00
Another application of form and essence is this piece about what… and the answer to the question “what practice is it that I follow”. So there is one, is initiations, that’s essence for me and the other is the form of practice, that’s the form, obviously. And there are many masters that I have initiated, who don’t practice this form but they have the initiations. So… and then as I said before, there are other people who have been initiated into another practice, who adopt this form. So for me both of them are equal. I don’t find that form is more important than essence or the other way around, they create a kind of partnership….
1:07
Those people are very.. in some way in a kind of bloodline, as you said, people who can trace their initiation through from Hawayo Takata or me or from Chujiro Hayashi. Then the… evaluation is on the form, because if the form is in alignment with this practice, then they’re practicing this system. If their form is somewhat out of alignment, but their intention is to practice this system, then they are.. they just have alignment issues.
1:58

1:58
If they are not intending to practice this system but are very close to the actual form of this system, then their intention is that they are not practicing this form – they are practicing another form. But then there are people who don’t practice this form and they are, you know, some percentage outside of the alignment and their initiation is from another form, then it seems that they are really practicing another form. So… I hope that was really clear?.. It seems not clear. Anyway…
2:49
If you want to speak about Barbara McGregor, I actually don’t know what her practice is, so I couldn’t make any kind of judgement. I do know that her…the way she teaches and her attitude toward other masters and so on is not in alignment with this system. She is very much of a woman on her own. And her students are her students… and I have known other Reiki masters who are like that as well. That they won’t teach or mentor anybody else’s students. And I have found that always to be disconcerting but I also accept it..
3:52
RV: when you say: ‘this sytem’, that’s equivalent to Usui Shiki Ryoho?
4:03
Yes, but now to be specific: it’s Usui Shiki Ryoho honouring the lineage of Mikao Usui, Chujiro Hayashi, Hawayo Takata and Phyllis Furumoto. Because without the lineage you can’t differentiate from all the other practices that practice but don’t honour this lineage.
4:27

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

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

1:20
The initiator on the other hand is a person for me who has energetic responsibility for the student. They initiate them, in that they become energetically connected with that student and they have responsibility for that student energetically for the rest of their lives. Now this is not something that many masters adhere to or even believe. And that’s fine with me. It’s something that for me in my practice I adhere to and I expect the masters who teach in this practice to hold that. And there are many other aspects to initiator that we don’t even know because we haven’t actually sat down and talked about it or shared experience about it, but this is something that I really long to do. Soon!
2:26

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

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