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

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

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

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

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

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

0:00
I don’t know their systems, I don’t know what the differences are, so I haven’t a clue so I don’t see the disparity personally and… because…. Yeah because I would have to ask him what does he really mean by Usui Reiki and by Takata Reiki because (0030) for me there is no Takata Reiki, (0033) there is Usui Shiki Ryoho and….
0:39
For me there is just Usui Shiki Ryoho and under this lineage. So it’s a very specific practice. And it’s ok for me that our practice is different than other practices. This is what was given to us and this is what we’re are practicing and it develops through the next lineage bearer, which is me. And you know trying to …. figure out how the term “Reiki Master” came so that he can kind of use it against people is just so like what’s the point?
1:23
Again for me I heard my grandmother refer to herself as a Reiki Master, I heard her to refer to other people as Reiki Masters, I heard her refer to Chujiro Hayashi as a Reiki Master, so I don’t see what the point is. (0140) äh.. (räusper)
1:44

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

0:00
I have this idea that this practice is like a heritage seed. It isn’t the practice that has the most members or students anymore but it is a practice that is seminal that is of the essence in the whole circle of Reiki forms and practices that we have today, because it was the seed
0041 (Geräusch) from which many of these came. So whatever happens to this system is going to affect the other systems of practice, the other forms of practice. And that’s okay because we are all interdependent anyway, I mean it’s obvious that we are. 0103 And ähm …
1:05
whether or not they recognize me as their lineage bearer, which of course they don’t or they would be in this practice, then… well that’s not quite true, so I have to go back.
1:21

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

8:01
Now with all this energy moving forward, moving into the future we need to have
0811 (cough)
0814 With all this momentum and moving into the future it is clear to me that Reiki is saying “Ok, now you are ready for the big picture”. You know the world is not about Mommy and Daddy, my Reiki Master, my lineage, it’s about our Reiki and it’s about our gift to humanity. And once we have this over-arching understanding of what we have to offer the world, then we can develop our individual selves and our local communities to meet and to serve in that way…..

9:28
I’d like to be known as the person who saw that and fanned the flames.

ca 09:33

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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