0:00
… So in the beginning one of the things that I got into for a while was this idea that if people knew everything about me then they would not dislike me or they would understand me even more. That was … it’s one of my big things: to be understood. And so… I did these… for several years I did these workshops for master candidates, called self-assessment workshops. And they were sort of like group therapy … encounter groups… And we were really lucky because we didn’t really get in trouble with these but we sure were creative and it was really fun and really confrontive for everybody, including the facilitators..
1:15
And out of that I realized that I was my own worst enemy: that, you know, people would come and say: “Oh Phyllis, I hear that you’re doing this and this and this” and I’m going “well, where did you hear that?” and they said: “from you” and I said: “really? And in my trying to explain all my thoughts and everything, they took it a couple of steps further and begin to have assumptions about who I was. And finally in one of my therapy-sessions I realized that I had to become selective in the sense that… There is this wonderful illustration called “Johari’s window”, it was from a psychologist and his name was Johari and he had his clients make this diagram like a window and then you put 4 boxes in the window: your private self, your public self, your potential and your blind side. So of course the blind side is things that you don’t know about yourself but everybody else knows. And your private self is what you know but nobody else knows. And these two were kind of switched for me: my public self was really, really big and my private self was very, very small. And you know, I realized that I as a human being have a right to privacy, and that I needed to really change that. So it took me a few years, but I managed to do it.
3:16

03:34
So that was at the time the Vietnam Vets were really having a hard time. And there were a lot of amputations and so on. So they found out how they could ski and (cough), I mean he just took off. So somehow he had a really amazing gift for this. I mean, he was very irreverent. So, he would just say “come on, you gimp, let’s go skiing!” And they would go skiing and he treated them not special! But just like everybody else. He would just say, “ are you gonna be a gimp all your life or are you gonna be a skier?” Right, and it was just this amazing place where he had the way with people to just be there for them.
04:31
So, he told me, «you’re perceptually handicapped.» And I said, «well, what does that mean?» Here I am 28 or something and he goes, «well, you know, unfortunately because you’re perceptually handicapped, even if I told you what it was you wouldn’t get it.» And I went, “well, thanks Hal, good friend!” y’know.  ‚Cause he and I became very, very close. So, after I left skiing at Winner Park, for Reiki, about… I, I brought back people after a couple o‘ years I started to bring pepple to Winner Park to participate in the handicapped ski program, the same old ski program, and to practice Reiki there. I wanted them – my Master candidates especially – to have this experience of learning how to ski and being on a mountain where they saw blind skiers and amputated… amputees skiing and little kids skiing. And, so they couldn’t say: I can’t do it.
05:40

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

2:48
So my experience of the US$ 10’000 is that people receive the US$ 10’000 through.. when they are ready through the universe by totally miraculous ways. I mean even the people who have the money in the bank, really don’t have the money in the bank. I mean people have more money in the bank but for some people because they inherited or they worked hard for it or they won the lottery, but most people don’t spend US$ 10’000 on a whim. And you know Reiki Master candidates are asked to give these 10’000 saying this is all that I have, this is what represents my life commitment to Reiki. And it means something to them. It’s not a matter of bucks in the bank, definitely not…..
3:54
It’s part of our spiritual practice. So if we were talking about a technique this is the thing that I keep hammering away, if we talk about a technique of course you can shop and say “ok, I want to learn Swedish massage and in this school I go for, you know, 6 months, you know 2 hours a day and I pay this amount of money. For somebody.. for another school I go for a year but I go all day but it costs me 5 times more. So I can choose which one I want, what kind of technique building I want to get. But here you are talking about a spiritual practice. And everybody, as far as I’m concerned, has the capability to hand me US$ 10’000 when they’re ready. And it has proven to be so time after time after time. And most of these people, this is the most money they’ve ever accumulated in their lifetime and probably never will again.
5:01

5:01
So it doesn’t matter how many loaves of bread a Dollar buys in your country, this is not the point. The point is: are you willing to really give yourself? So if you think about other spiritual practices, like
0515 (räuspern)
as an American if I went to Japan and said “Well I didn’t learn to sit seiza” you know when I was a little kid I could only sit seiza for this is with your legs folded up but you know under you… I can only sit seiza for 6 hours so how about you know give me a break and as an American I only have to sit seiza for 6 hours while all the Japanese people have to sit seiza for 12. Well forget it! You know, the Sensei would just look at you and laugh. You know, because that’s not the point, the point is not how much you can actually do or how much you think you can do. The point is how willing are you to discipline yourself and get into that space so you can sit seiza for 24 hours and not blink an eye or perhaps at the end of that 24 hours you just kind of roll over an lie on the floor. They don’t care. They don’t care what happens after the 24 hours let me tell you. The 24 hours that’s important.
6:27

9;25
And we get to laugh at ourselves and say “ridiculous!”. So she didn’t laugh at herself then, but a few months later she did and she said “you know, this woman is practicing, she’s doing great work, now what do I do if she wants to be a master?” And I said “Well, don’t even go there, I mean, go there when it happens and count yourself lucky that you have such a dedicated student”.
10;00
You know, I love the story because it so identifies a lot of my own prejudices and my own believe systems that I had from the very beginning and a lot of these were broken when I, the first time I went to Russia because not only did I go to Russia .. I was really broke at the time, I hardly… I didn’t have any money to pay my employees in my office and here I was spending, you know, a thousand Dollars to go to this country and maybe not come back with any money because of course Russia had no money, that was my believe system and that they wouldn’t…if they did have that they wouldn’t pay for Reiki…
10;48

10:48
So when I got to Russia I was told that I would have one day with people who wanted to be master candidates and at that time there were 2 or 3 Russian speaking masters and they had just be initiated but all the other masters initiating in Russia were from other countries and flew in and did classes and flew back out. And they were not able to ask for US$ 150 for first degree, they just couldn’t bring themselves to do that. So I was to address these master candidates and of course one of the big questions was about the money, US$ 10’000. So I tell you I did a lot of Reiki treatment on myself, I did a lot of nashing of teeth and I knew that I had to walk in there and say “you pay your initiating master US$ 10’000, I don’t care what they ask you, you pay it!”
12:03
So.. I went in and I was like trembling and there were 130 people in this room, wanting to be Reiki Masters. And I have to say, that was in 1992 or 3 or something like this and today I still know most of those people, like 85% and 90% of them were initiated. And they paid US$ 10’000. They got it instantly which was amazing for me because if I had addressed 130 Americans and said this to them, I would have gotten a lot of resistance. So here’s the deal:
1250-51 (räusper)
I went in and I said “you know, this system is like a recipe and I want you to know that I paid US$ 10’000 to my grandmother for my commitment to Reiki, for being a Reiki Master and at the time I had no idea why I was doing this, because I didn’t even know what that meant. And I said “over the years I’ve initiated many masters and I want you to know that whether you know it or not, you will be a Reiki Master in this system and you will be a Reiki Master in a world community and though you cannot imagine travelling outside of Russia, now, you will! And when you go outside of Russia, I want you to be the same, I want you to have the same commitment to the system, I want you to have paid the same money and I want you to be able to hold your head up and say I’m a Master of Usui Shiki Ryoho, just like you!
14:15

14;15
… They stood up and gave me a standing ovation and I nearly fell to the floor. And some years after that I was in a master seminar with a man who was there and he said “you know, you came on the eve of the USSR breaking up because that was the only way legally I could go to Russia actually. And he said “here was this giant that had been brought to it’s knees and split apart and we had no dignity left and when you said that to us you gave us back our dignity and our desire to be a Reiki Master in the world.” And he said “we never even imagined that”. And he said “you gave us something to work for”.
15;20

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

2:00
I have a master in Uruguay and she had a student who in her third year of mastery wanted to become a master. And she didn’t speak English, she definitely had a connection, an energetic connection with this master in Uruguay and I just… I didn’t refuse this student my participation but I said “I just feel like you need to have a master who speaks Spanish”. So I had her mentored with a master in Argentina, which was not the same. And now that the years have passed and this never really worked, of course the student has now gone to the master in Uruguay, Patricia. And I believe that they have started their master-candidate/master-relationship now.
2:58 So. (räusper)
Though I’ve tried to intervene some times in these, sometimes it just is that people … students have to wait for the masters to mature in order to start their own journey of mastery 0311….0313 0314 Yah
0316 So I don’t know that I ended up in the same place, but I feel like I answered your question. Is that true for you?
3:23

3:24
(René: It is very much true for me personally, ähm…Let me just think about this… ähm)

0334 Okay, I’ll add something. (OK)….
0340 When.. so when I accept a master candidate….what I am doing, is I’m opening up a part of me to share that is my most profound and secret place inside of me. I’m sharing the part of me that’s a master. Sometimes people refer to this as a huge responsibility, for me it is not a huge responsibility… and I don’t know what is being referred to as a lesser responsibility, so I don’t know where the comparison goes… comes from. But the responsibility for me is to be true to myself, to be true to the practice that I teach and pass on and to be true to the path of the master candidate and it demands of me more presence, more willingness to not be the only person in that master’s life, that Reiki is the ultimate teacher, not me and that the ancestors or the lineage that I come from serve as a part of the teaching of the student.
5:19
So if I can and could go back to my initiating master Hawayo Takata and say “what would you do in this case?”, I would have loved it, but I never got that opportunity. I did actually do it by just in treatment and sometimes I got an answer and sometimes I didn’t. Sometimes… the time when I didn’t get an answer was actually more profound than when I did (laugh).
5:53

0:00
The aspects of mastery or the roles of mastery, as I have spoken about earlier, are specifically for the practice that I teach and hold, Usui Shiki Ryoho under the lineage that I carry. If to generalize this to all Reiki masters, what I would offer is that these are aspects of mastery as I see them. And everyone has a choice of whether or not they’re willing to take on these roles. So I see that a teacher is one that’s very obvious. And teacher has a very limited scope because even in our academic world, you know, you have a teacher and it’s for a certain course, for a certain time, for a certain number of classes. And then if you take the same class but 2.1, you get another teacher. So teacher is something who delivers something to the student.
1:20

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

2:26
A mentor is something that as a quality and an aspect of mastery that from the very beginning we are asked to be mentors, for instance somebody else’s student comes to you and says “I’m lost, I just moved here, I need to have a Reiki master. Could I come and sit in on your classes or whatever?” And so you become their mentor. Now what some people think is that they also have to become their initiator. But in my book, in my understanding you don’t have to become their initiator, you can take them on as a student and be their mentor and you can have the same kind of relationship. You don’t need to initiate them again because they are already initiated into Reiki, they’ve had their experiences and you’re there to be a mentor.
3:21

3:21
And none of these roles have a hierarchy, there’s not one that’s more important than the other. Then there is the student, so we are all students of Reiki. And there are some masters who feel that once they become a master, that’s it, they know everything. And they don’t need to go back to their initiating master for advice or for further understanding of the practice or for support. You know, they tend to really be an island, which for me is something that is…. not accurate as a human being. In high school we always sang the song “no man is an island” and that thought has been underlined several times for me in my Reiki practice where I really understand that we are all interconnected, that we are connected on many, many different levels and that as a student of this practice we get to further our own studentship while teaching, that’s part of the dynamic of being a master, is that we are a student and we teach at the same time. So we become.. this dynamic works in us all the time in a very beautiful way. 0455 (räusper)
4:58

4:58
The aspect of tradition keeper is one that’s new and I’m offering two weekends for masters and 2nd degree students who.. to come and talk about what they feel like tradition keeper is for them, how they feel like this role has been developed within our system and in our community. 0522 (räusper) …. (pauses)
5:35
In my mind tradition keeper begins with this understanding that I have had from my master and that is “you don’t change what I’ve given you”. And basically we haven’t, it’s basically the same former practice as I said earlier she taught to different classes and to different students a little bit differently but you can take the basis of that in the way that we teach today. So this is part of tradition keeper and there are some aspects of our tradition that are being challenged these days, oral tradition for instance. I find that all folk-art is taught by oral tradition, acupuncture, Chinese herbs, Shiatsu, Reiki. These.. all these martial arts all these are oral tradition teachings, you have a master, you have somebody you go to in person and that’s how you learn and you learn through doing.
6:53

6:53
The master gives you a few simple steps, you practice, practice, practice and then through your own practice and mentoring of your master you become a developed student. This part of the tradition is for me a human tradition. 0712 It’s like: I had a privilege to accompany very good friends of mi.. (hiccup) excuse me (pause)
7:24
I had the honour to ‚ve … 0725 (rolls her eyes) 0727 I’ve had the honour to know a couple who I feel like really personified teaching their children through the oral tradition. The mother put together immediately a scrapbook of family and of this child’s upbringing, how she grew and grew and grew as a child. And so she would take out this scrapbook like every week at least and they would go through the stories of where her grandparents came from, you know how they met, how their parents met, this is the parents when they were younger, before she was born, you know, this is her when she was born and how they changed their life and how they built their house. And all these oral tradition stories really enriched these children.
08:24

8:24
And I believe that this is part of the breakdown, in America anyway, of our family structure, is that we count on computers and televisions instead of living oral tradition. And I don’t feel like there’s any replacement for oral tradition, and it is the way that we as human beings learn. So if we’re horrified by the way children relay to each other in the school ground, it’s because they relayed how they have been taught, by television, by video games and by computers and by movies. And we can’t blame the children. So I believe that in our folk-art tradition that it is very important for the good of our society to maintain these traditions. So that’s one example that I can give you and in another year, after contemplating this with other masters and other beings, I assume that I would be able to be more articulate about other aspects of tradition keeper.
09:40