0:00
Yes, Oh Yah, the thing is that … our relationship, 0016 my relationship with this student was very complicated and I was a very young master. So, for me what happened is that I opened these different parts of myself to her that was not wise and it wasn’t because she wasn’t capable, it was just that I wasn’t being a Reiki Master. She became best friend I revealed things to her that I would not have done if she were only …only (hand-movement: inverted comma), sorry, if she had been my Reiki student and that was the only relationship that we had. So I said things to her that … were taken out of the context of a friendship and put into a Reiki context.
01:14
And in doing that the message that was assumed in the Reiki context was not accurate for me. So… And there were things that we shared in our personal lives that I felt really influenced and sort of overtook the Reiki relationship that we had. And that was my naivety as a Master to think I could do everything with everybody. And that wasn’t true.
02:01
I felt betrayed as a person, as a friend but I don’t feel betrayed as a Master. So, and it’s hard to separate the two because obviously I’m, it is all the same person. So, I learnt not not that I couldn’t be friends with some of my students but that I have to be very, very thoughtful about the boundaries of different relationships and what actually I depend on and so on and so on; it’s been an interesting dynamic.
02:40

02:40
Because eventually if you surrender to Reiki it’s like your whole world becomes Reiki. So like all your social acquaintances and so on end up becoming Reiki. And even if you don’t want them to become Reiki they end up taking Reiki because their drawn to it because they are friends with you. So, it’s .. (gestures).. You know, sometimes I just say “oh please don’t’ take Reiki” …. I just want some friends without Reiki. And that’s really true for me.
03:11
But my friends… most of them have finally said “OK, I’m taking Reiki, I don’t care what you say. When I say, “OK, go do it with somebody else…” (laughs) So it’s really important to maintain boundaries in all these different relationships that we have. So it’s very interesting as a side-note to this ..to.. is the question of initiating your own family. And initiating first degree, well, that’s not so mu.., that’s not such a big deal, but 2^nd degree is really on the path to mastery. And then when you get to initiating a part of your family, blood-family as a master then there needs to be some really … thoughtfulness that goes into that. It isn’t that it can’t be done  …it is just not the easiest decision to make.
04:10

00:00
I don’t know if she has understood that this is the part of the pain for me … and I had to have a number of years before I actually realised that even though ähm….yah and … I have to say that within me there is some resistance to exploring this further even though we’re getting older and older. It might be kind of sad if we don’t do this before one of us dies. I know that she is doing well as a Reiki Master and I can take comfort in that and I realise that being her friend was just not a functional situation. And so maybe it is fine to just leave that alone. And .. You can’t … I think that I’ve come to also to a place of saying to myself, well, if the circumstances arises that we are able to talk, then of course I would.
01:29

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

1:48
So… I’m a human being and I need to be able to work things out myself as well as for my students to work out their issues with their parents or their teachers or their children, they need to work things out for themselves. And as a master I place myself in the position of being a reflector to them and also being reflected on, a lot of people call this projection. And I denied this for a long time, then obviously, it got to be so obvious that I couldn’t deny it anymore. And then.. because I was in therapy it was really easy for me to see it is a responsible thing for Reiki masters to process their own projections and their own issues without involving their students, because when the do, and I’ve seen this happen in my life and I’ve seen it happen in other masters’ lives, it’s so messy.
2:59
Well, the only good thing that comes out of that is, you learn how to apologise and you learn how to clean up your mess, but it’s not a skill that (laugh).. you really really want to use so often. And.. as I grow older of course, there are less and less opportunities for messes, because my own physiology, my own understanding of who I am as a person has changed, so I don’t end up getting into unconscious messes so much now….thank goodness.
3:38

3:38
But when you’re 30/40 and… when you’re 30 or 40 years old you’re in your prime, you are high on this … living this life as RM and your ego and your sense of who you are kind of goes…gets inflated sometimes. And you end up.. you know, just not being very kind or very human or very thoughtful and… So those are the times when therapy really helps, because… whether we like it or not our lives are really a product of oral tradition and that oral tradition starts back when …through the family constellation. So from, you know, generations ago how those people raised their children and how the family grew and matured and who you are in that particular process of your family…
4:51
I find this form of a therapy, which is kind of a misnomer, actually I think … revolutionary because it takes into account all of who you are: past, present and into the future. So…. having somebody to talk to, paying someone to talk to for an hour and having their undivided attention for an hours a week, is something that I feel RM really need in their life. Some masters don’t do it, because they don’t feel that’s necessary, other masters go to other things that provide the same place like meditation, sometimes it’s sort of extreme exercise, I would call it, like, ähm
0547 (räusper)
riding your bicycle for four or five hours every week at one time or something like that. I mean there are these ways to work out your issues without talking. I am a talker, ok, so therapy works for me. But my parter is a bike-rider, bicycle rider, so you know, she works stuff out in her head by going on these long bike-rides, which would not work for me at all..laughs…
6:15

6:15
And some people walk and so on. So it’s… it’s an interesting process, but it’s important that this particular activity be conscious because if its not conscious and you have your own process remain in an unconscious state, then…. you will for sure involve your students and people around you into your drama and then to extract yourself is really difficult. I know because I have been there.
6:51
The woman that I was talking about … in my early Reiki life was part of a drama that I have created and that my husband and I have created. And I could totally understand her feeling so unsafe, that she just couldn’t be with me at all. And … and jet I really trust her teaching of Reiki, I trust … I know that she is dedicated to Reiki and dedicated the rest of her life to Reiki. So in that way, you know, it comes to this kind of question about success. It’s like…. was I successful as a Master? Well, yes, I was, but I wasn’t very successful as a friend and I wasn’t very successful in my own inner family relationships where she got swept up into it. And then…there.. at this point there is really no way to go back and extract ourselves from that and it happened. And sometimes there irrevocable… there is irrevocable damage that happened. And it’s good to accept that so and not have to… you know..lessen your own guilt by making it OK for you. But I think for her it will never be OK. And that is sad but it is true. And I hope that there are not very many people in my Reiki life where I have created that kind of situation.
8:38

9:39
And we talked a lot about the nature of Reiki, about the nature of the practice, about the things we wanted to preserve, about the things that we…excuse me…. that for us were not included in the practice and so on. We had really wonderful sharings and ….these two meetings were very important for me as … I felt…. recognized by people in a way that was very different. So some people who were familiar with being a devotee of a guru, an Indian guru, they wanted to wash my feet and kiss my feet, which I just… was really hard for me. Other people wanted me to get dressed up, have really nice fingernails and so on, which I didn’t ..(laugh).. and other people wanted me somehow to be holy or wise or, I don’t know why but I was just myself. And at that point I was a pretty naïve… ja, pretty naïve person, in a lot of different ways.
11:09
After the Reiki Alliance was formed that year, then the next year…. then the next year we decided to go to California. And I have no idea why I did this, but I end up….ended up renting a couple of big houses up on Donnner’s path in California near Lake Tahoe and that’s where we had the masters’ meeting. And it was out of that meeting that a little book was borne. People wanted to preserve the oral tradition but somehow be able to give their students something for the class. So I totally opposed writing this or putting this book together. So at one point one of the masters, who was very clever actually, came to me and said: “Well, if there was such a book, what would it be like?” I can remember her question to this day. And I said: “Well it would be very small, like pamphlet thing, it could have the story of Reiki in it, the pictures of the lineage and the precepts and maybe something else and it would not be for sale at the open market, it would just sold by the Reiki Alliance as a Reiki Alliance Publication”. So that’s how this little, what we call the “Blue Book” got formed and eventually Paul Mitchell was the one that put it together.
12:57

2:30
Now, I’ve thought and talked a lot about this, and someone once wrote as a rebuttal somewhere about the spiritual lineage: “well Mikao Usui never talked about himself as being a member of the lineage”. And I thought: “Well, hello?! Of course not, he didn’t know there was going to be a lineage”. You know…. There’s master and student, but I feel lineage doesn’t come till you have the third person, because then you have a line that is drawn and then the fourth person really becomes a lineage. So a lineage doesn’t start with one person or even two, it has to contain at least 3 people.
3:16
So my grandmother and in some of their innocence or wanting to make her feel important or whatever their motivation was, I believed they used the phrase Grand Master, which is used a lot. It’s also used now to translate some of the martial art terms of the person who is in charge of the Dojo in martial arts and so on, as the Grand Master, but it’s not something that I relate to …sort of in this lineage base.
4:01

8:44
So you know, we all do … well most masters, although not the ones that don’t teach, are initiators but we know very little about the responsibility of being an initiator. What we are all familiar with is the role of teacher, so we can teach, instruct, you know, and give people advice and so on. So that seems pretty easy. But when you put this with the role of mentor, then it gets a little complicated. So what I realized at some point is that if I’m a Reiki master, then that means I’m a master to every student of Reiki. I am not just a master to those I teach. So this for me as a mentor enlarges that. So any Reiki student can come to me and say: “Well I have a question” or “I’m confused” or “How can I renew my practice” or whatever. And I can answer them and we can either have a very short relationship or for some people I enter into a kind of conscious official.. relationship called mentoring. So teacher and mentoring for me are very close but are very meaningful.
10:14
And then there is, you know, the role of being a student. We are always students of the system and if we don’t remember that then we get caught up in a kind of unnatural hierarchy that often results in ownership of students, so they’re “my” students and you can’t have anything to do with them and you know, they try to protect their students against the influences of the outer world, but in truth, what’s happening is they’re not open to really being students themselves. So they need to preserve this kind of relationship in which they are always the master.
11:02

00:00-00:13 Well, my real answer is, «I don’t know.» But I’ll back that up by saying other things (René: you don’t need to mention her name…) No, no, its fine.
00:20
This is a question that has arose again, interestingly enough, in the last few months, about Wanja Twan, for instance, who… because… I know that she recognizes me as my grand-mother’s successor but she is a very stro.. and she is a very strong master. She has influenced her teaching according to what she remembers Hawayo Takata teaching. But also her own very strong personality which is Scandinavian
00:57
which has again a whole other color. I find the Scandinavians to be really interesting people. Very esoteric and very … esoteric isn’t really quite the right word… Well, I’ll come up with word… but anyway. So, what Wanja has done is that she’s declared her successor as her daughter Anneli. And this has caused some confusion in the Reiki community, for instance, in the UK where Wanja has a very strong following. And as does Anneli now. And the students are getting confused about whether or not they acknowledge me as lineage bearer
01:55-02:00 (cough)
So, some of the masters and students of Wanja do not recognize me as the successor of this practice. They recognize Wanja in some way as their initiating master and as the person who carries the lineage of that practice. They don’t acknowledge a spiritual lineage. And Wanja does. So, even though Wanja is very subtle about her recognition of me, on some level, she doesn’t communicate that to her students. And so this creates a schism or can create a schism within the UK community because people don’t understand o’… the students don’t understand why the spiritual lineage is important.
03:06

03:06
So, it’s an interesting paradox, that Wanja… I feel really recognized by Wanja as my grand-mother’s successor. But I also see how strong her initiation-lineage is. So, for me, I… there are two things that I carry: I carry my initiation-lineage as a Reiki Master and then I carry the spiritual lineage as the successor to my grand-mother, Hawayo Takata. The two lineages for me are the same. But for Paul Mitchell – for instance – they are not the same: his spiritual lineage comes to me and my successor. His initiation lineage goes from Hawayo Takata to him and then to his masters.
03:57
So in Beth Gray… the issue with Beth is that she … I don’t know whether she was initiated by my grandmother, I know that she was recognized by my grandmother as a master, I believe that John Gray initiated her as a master. And I have kept this kind of «secret» for many… well, since 1980. And.. I believe it created confusion in her. Because she wasn’t clear about her own lineage and so she couldn’t be clear about the lineage that she passed on. She was also very careful about the people that she initiated as masters.
04:53
I don’t know how many master she she did initiate, maybe 3. One gal who was in Queen… no, one gal who was in New South Wales has died. She was a young woman, she was like 40 something and she died very suddenly; (0513) I should know her name, because I’ve met her, several times.
05:20 Barbara McGregor  (René interrupts with a name proposal)
05:29

05:29
Barbara McGregor and then there is another woman who was from Sydney area that she initiated. And Barbara McGregor in my viewpoint, sort of took took Beth’s tendency to dramatize and sort of expanded that. So, a lot of her material anyway when I first was in Australia in the early 1990ies then that Beth was the first occidental Reiki Master. Well I don’t even know what that means.  She certainly wasn’t the first “white” Reiki Master, for sure. She definitely wasn’t the first Master, so, I don’t really know what that means.
06:26
And then they sort of put titles on her to make her to make her special. The really sad part for me about that is that Beth Gray was an incredibly special person. She didn’t need a title, y’know, to indicate her specialness. This is the part that really bother me a bit. Because people would ask me, «well, what does that mean and is this true?» and it put me in a place, of either lying or being evasive, which I am not very good at. Or trying to explain this very strange claim that really meant nothing to me.
07:09
Because I didn’t know what they were using “occidental” as. Y’know. So…  The woman in Sydney and her partner came very often to visited Beth. And it was kind of sad for me because her reluctance her reluctance to initiate Masters in Australia, which may have been wise, actually, forced all of her very loyal students out to be initiated by masters they didn’t care about. They were masters who had been initiated for maybe 2 months as a Master and just wanted to, y’known, reproduce themselves or whatever. And they had no relationship with the Master that initiated them. They were really Beth Gray’s students and continued to be Beth Gray’s students
08:07

08:07
and continued that teaching without her blessing as a master. And there is something about that that was really sad for me. So, our… our and I will say “Our” consciously, our understanding of recognition of mastery and lineage was so slim at the time that we were doing all this that I have to say, that we were really lucky we didn’t get into more of a muddle. (0841) And that now it feels like
08:45-08:47 (coughing in the background)
on some level because I don’t know anything about real lineage I can kind of invent what I want to about lineage and its OK but I also feel like it also is very inclusive… for instance … there are masters that I have initiated who don’t practice the system I do, their form is very, very different, so I don’t recognize them as Usui Shiki Ryoho Masters. At the same time there are other Masters who started out definitely not in this form of practice but have come through taking the intensives from Paul and I, but also through their own willingness to just connect with the energy of this practice
09:34
that they become practitioners though they were initiated into another practice of Reiki before which is fine for me. Some of them don’… can’t trace their lineage because they wer… they went to some kind of a music festival and in the middle of the music festival somebody said, «I’m going to initiate you as a Reiki Master.» and they do. And they don’t even know their name. But y’know, somehow they… that initiation was sincere enough that they actually followed the path of mastery and ended on my doorstep. And I said, «Well, Okaay..if you want to do this and are committed and you are sincere, then why not?»
10:18

10:18
So, there is a really large mix of form and essence. And for me there is…  it’s important for us to have a common practice, which is the form, and there is also this important factor to recognize that all Masters are equal in the oneness of Reiki. And that we can change form to suit our incongruity of our own practice
10:58
So, when I’ve read about Japanese Buddhist practice, I think there is like 12 main sects,  S E C T S and you can sit in a Zen temple for 20 years and then all of a sudden decide, «no, I need to go out in the world» and then «oh, I see I need go sit in this other sect for a while and do… and explore Buddhism through that way.»  There doesn’t seem to be any animosity … or (1138)  ähm… what’s the word (1143)  … competition. It just is so. It’s like you follow the path of Buddhism, you can follow the path of Buddhism in these different expressions. That’s how I would like to think about Reiki.
11:58

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

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

0:00
Perhaps another part of tradition keeper is simply noticing that there is …. a human aspect to the student/teacher relationship that
0021 (räusper)
is always a challenge for both. And that is when the student “grows up” and becomes a master of their own or even a 2nd degree student on their own, they have their own experience, they have their own understanding of what they’re doing and sometimes it doesn’t agree with their masters. And that’s okay. One of the things that was very clear in Hawayo Takata’s teaching was that everybody has the right to their own relationship with Reiki, the energy. 0056-0057 (räusper)
0:59

0:59
What that relationship is, is up to them, each student nourishes that relationship in their own way. And it’s not really for the master to interfere in one sense to go run after them and try and convince them otherwise. And I’ve tried to do this actually myself and it doesn’t work, so you might as well forget it. 0124
0125-0127 ähm (räusper)
So, you know, there is a kind of attention put on this particular human development, where kids grow up and the need to either rebel against what they’ve been taught or their parents, or they just disagree and they go on their own way. And I feel as a student we need search for ourselves, we always… I feel like we all have our own burning question inside, whether we are cognizant of it or not. It’s important for us as students to be able to follow that path.
2:18

2:18
So, people often see Chujiro Hayashi as… or it’s assumed…. It’s assumed that Chujiro Hayashi was Mikao Usui’s best student. Well, I don’t actually know whether that’s true, it was never my assumption. All I know is that he was a student of Mikao Usui. It’s very possible that he was the rebel of Mikao Usui and went off and did his clinic because he followed his heart. I mean obviously the man was a clinician. And in this being a clinician, he needed to have a clinic, he needed to make notes and he needed to make a system of some sort. Whether or not Mikao Usui thought that this was a good thing, we’ll never know, I mean, excuse me but no amount of researchers is going to figure this out.
3:21

3:21
So whether Mikao … Chijuiro Hayashi was a dissonant or was a rebel in Mikao Usui’s day or whether he was his best student or simply a student that went off and founded a clinic, we’ll never know. But found a clinic he did, he met Hawayo Takata and …. in response to Reiki showing him that Hawayo Takata was his successor he also sat in contemplation with the other masters that were in his circle and did something very unique at that time for him by giving the succession and following the energy of Reiki, which led Reiki out of Japan and into Hawaii and then into the rest of the world.
4:27

4:27
Was this an act of dissonance or an act of surrender? You know… I mean… I think it’s a bit of both actually myself. And I have to say that I never… I never said, or if I … if people understood that I said, I just want you to know that this is misunderstood, but I never said that Barbara Weber was not ever…. introduced as the successor to Hawayo Takata. Because I believe that it was totally possible. Before I came into Reiki, Barbara Weber was her pride student. She was educated, she was a great organizer, she doted on my grandmother, she wanted to further all of my grandmother’s wishes, which she did, totally. She helped her record a book that she wanted to write, she made it possible for Reiki to become a household word
5:39

5:39
I don’t believe that she actually changed the teaching that she received from Hawayo Takata. She might have added to it, but I don’t feel like she changed the actual teaching, because she was a really dedicated student. She did what her heart and her education and her being really needed to do for Reiki. And I will never call this dissonance. It wasn’t comfortable for me for sure. I didn’t like some of the things she said about me but about what she did, she followed her path and I did the same thing. And so did all the other masters that Hawayo Takata taught and initiated.
6:30

6:30
And that most of us were able to come together in the Reiki Alliance and to talk and to be a part of a similar energetic field was terrific. But it didn’t mean that we agreed, NO (laugh), definitely not. John Gray and I had many differences of opinion, but I totally respected him as a master. And I didn’t impinge upon his expression of Reiki or how he prepared his Reiki masters, I mean, he demanded a lot from them on a practitioner level, you know, so many hours of public practice… definitely a lot of years of apprenticeship and so on and I know that the masters that he initiated are carrying that on as a tradition. And it makes a part of a profession… professional kind of practitioner very possible within the teaching that he did.
7:47

7:47
So… I think that one of the things that doesn’t really serve Reiki is that people come to Reiki and all of a sudden their being is filled with this.. what they call unconditional love. This is a condition of human beings that I don’t actually believe in. So I just… (laugh)… but I get the state of being that they are talking about, unconditional love. It means that I can put my hands on a stranger and give them a treatment and at the end of that treatment I’m connected with that person. And I would serve him and fight for him and fight for his right to exist, because I know I’m connected to him.
8:42
But the point is, we are all connected together like this, Reiki just gives us the possibility to experience it. And this is the key gift of Reiki, is that we experience these kind of profound connections. So, if we have that, then what’s a little difference of opinion?
9:09