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
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

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

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

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

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

4:11
Reiki has a very unique kind of leadership to offer. So this means that we have, we need as far as I’m concerned, to grow into that leadership ourselves, which means that it’s not a hierarchy it’s a circle. The power is in the circle. And I have always said to people “I am not the top of the line, I’m not the world expert, I am a student of Reiki that has a specific duty to this system”. But everybody has as their own gift, their own understanding that they bring to the system. But their sharing of this gift is not so imperative as mine. That’s the difference.
5:12
I have always seen myself as sitting in a circle of masters, first the masters that Takata initiated and now that that circle has grown so small I can count on one hand the number of masters now alive, I think…. I look to another circle, the circle that I call the Master Body…
5:46
Are we able to sit together in a circle either virtually or physically and talk from our heart-mind (touches third eye), and to share our truth and to listen to the truth of others equally? Are we able to take the leadership when it’s important and then to give it to another person when it’s their turn to lead? 0618These are all 0620 (räusper) poss… all..in our, this..
06:25

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