1:51
As I grew to have more relationship with Reiki and to start teaching it and to recount the story myself, what I realized was that there was a transmission of energy that was happening through the story, that I had no control over, like it just happened and I wasn’t consciously making it happen, it just happened. So, one of the odd things about the story of course is that (0225) Hayashi.. no, Haw.. ähm.. (0227) Usui’s story and Hayashi’s story pretty much remain the same as my grandmother told it. But when I came to my grandmother I knew like way too much information. So I had to start sorting out which information I actually told in classes, which became a part of the story and then what about me? (0251) Right? …
2:53 coughs
(0257) So, then Paul and I started to do these Masters intensives together in 1993. And when we came to telling the story, I would tell the first part of the story and then he would tell the last part of the story. And so it was interesting to listen to him and see what he left out and what he said and so on. And what we realized was that information does not carry energy as well as story. So we left out the date she was born and we left out you know, all this stuff and just talked about “when she met Reiki”. (0340)
3:42
So then (cough) god.. (0347) so then I had this insight that, (0350) ähm (pauses) (0358) it was not the story of four people but it was a story of Reiki and how it emerged through these people’s lives. Which was a good perspective for me because it really helped me when people started to add birthdays and you know, when people died and all this factual stuff… but it’s not about people. It’s about Reiki. So that helped some people.
4:26
And then…when the memorial stone was found was a really big thing, because that was the first real kind of substantial body of information, and lo and behold, what was on the stone collaborated my grandmother’s story. Well that was like «shuuu» relieve!
4:59

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)

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

00:00
Well, I’m a little distracted by another question. (René… tell us first what the question is) (laughs and pauses
00:26
I’m.. I believe .. and this pertains to both, so I’ll see I can wrap both o’them into it. (0033) I feel that the calling to be a Reiki Master is an individual’s calling to mastery and that they’re choosing Reiki to be the form though which they gain mastery. I don’t feel it’s appropriate to set criteria for the certification of masters. I don’t know how you would do that and I don’t know how you could be fair, in the sense of, there were masters that I initiated especially in the early days that I might have known for three months and I initiated them as a Master because in those days I didn’t know better and the really amazing thing is that a lot of those Masters still are practicing as Masters. And have.. ya, have proven to be very sincere students.
01:41
But if their criteria is that they have to have been trained by…  for a year, for instance, as a Master, then they wouldn’t qualify and I think that’s kind of strange. On the other hand there are Masters who took the first, second degree and Master’s training all at the same weekend. But after ten years, they’ve worked their way through the whole process so that now, as Reiki Masters, they’re actually quite stable in what they’re doing. But that depends on the individuals. So it’s very hard to set criteria in this and I would be interested, not in having a part in the decision, but being… but seeing what’s happening before a decision is made.
02:41

02:41
And, this may or may not happen. So, in light of that … I’ve gone through many stages of … preparing masters, that’s what I call it, actually, and now what happens if someone comes to me, they ask me if they could be prepared for Mastery by me. And I’d say Yes. And I’d say, well, you know, Reiki actually prepares you. You can… we can have a conversation. And basically it’s you living your life as though you were a master. And at some point in that time, Mastery will fill your body. Will change you, will… you will embody this energetic we call Mastery. And that will be the time that I will initiate you, recognizing this fulfillment.
03:48
And then your job really begins. Because then you start having experiences as a Master and you grow from that. So this is a part of your studentship. I definitely have a list of things to do and I use the four aspects and nine elements for people to kind of write their own program of preparation. The average time between somebody coming to me and declaring themselves a Master candidate and the initiation is from 5 to 10 years now. And…
04:41
it was interesting when I realized that I had breast cancer, I was going to chemotherapy and so on, some of the Master candidates just lost it. I mean, they were so concerned that I was going to die before initiating them. And tha… those were interesting conversations! And they said, «can’t you speed this process up?» and I said, «no», I said, «you know, if your path as a Master is to be prepared by me and I die before I initiate you, then that’s a part of your path. And I’m not changing this program for you or for anybody.» That was interesting… those were interesting conversations, yah.
05:38

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
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

5:08
In, I think, 1983 or maybe 84 I had many, many requests from students who wanted to become Reiki Masters. Finally one of the masters that I initiated, Barbara West, who was a experienced group facilitator at that time, said “You should do a group, you know, just do a group”, instead of seeing all these people singly. Because I invited them to our home, our whole family life was disrupted, I wasn’t present for actually the master candidate nor for my family, so it was just a mess. I thought “oh, a group sounds interesting but what can I do in a group?”. Well, the answer was: nothing, I thought. Early Master Training (how was it in early days?)
6:00

6.00
and… I invited Paul, and I really wanted him to do some of this Aikido-work. I hadn’t experienced it but from what I understood from his sharing I knew that it would benefit the students, which it did, totally and still does to this day.
0620
I invited Barbara because she was facilitator of groups and we did kind of pseudo-therapeutic exercises together. I invited a friend of mine who was a Sufisheka who was initiated to lead Sufi-dances and walks which were also very beautiful and very provocative. I invited a friends of mine who was a trained psychic and she helped lead the group in… because we were all having these interesting psychic phenomenas, but we didn’t know what they were and it was through the gift of Reiki that these things kind of popped out and so she helped us to understand and how to hold them and how to use them and so on and then another couple of Reiki Masters who were therapists, Gestalt-therapists mostly.
7:22

7:22
So this was a wild group and there… sometimes one person couldn’t come and there might be 3 facilitators up to 5 or 6 actually. But all through this Paul was there with his Aikido-work. And this work really was very important for me on a physical level because I really got the experience of being centered and understanding about my own physical energy and my energetic body together. It was just as beneficial for all the other students who were there as well. We closed down that program after 5 or 6 years and went on to do master candidate retreats together, masters workshops together and so on ….
08:29