0:00
..insults and painful situations and so on
0:08
But very early on, in my Reiki life, I realised that part of my path was to….. really be able to go into very painful places and come out of it intact, which…. I don’t know I have done a lot of therapy over the years. I started going to a therapist when I was… when…3 or 4 years in Reiki, about 1983/1984 and I still have a therapist. I see her every month or two, but she’s there and I know that when I really need.. when I get confused or I need to work something out. I try to do it myself, I find this to be the most responsible to do in light of what I am doing for a living, so to speak…
1:13
The first 10 years of my life as a Reiki Master was exceedingly painful in the sense that I was working out some very old, very primary issues in my personality. And I now, when I look back on it, don’t really remember the pain. I think that that’s pretty usual for people but I do have a lot of gratitude for those people around me who stuck by me, who supported me, and who were there at times when I really needed strength or honesty or … individual attention.
2:07
I know that there are a lot of my colleagues who… their life-plan is to avoid conflict at all costs. And I don’t…that’s not my plan. So maybe I’m lucky in that way 0221 that I didn’t see it 0223 (räusper) as being an adversarial or a…. 0231 that I didn’t see it as adversarial path, but I saw it as a path that was very appropriate to someone who really had blinders on and walking through a dark forest and not being able to see what’s coming from the side and often not being able to see the little twig that I would stumble over and you know, I fall down and pick myself up.
3:01 (räusper)

3:01
Sometime in the mid 80ies I remember realizing that I had lived a lot of my life at the mercy of other people and what they thought and my mother kept pointing this out to me but I had no idea what she meant at the time (laugh) what she was talking to me. But I realized that as a master and as a lineage bearer, as grand master if I didn’t feel a complete Yes in everything that I did, then I wouldn’t do it. That was my motto. And I still use that to this day. I don’t have to have reasons for it to be a Yes, because often there are no reasons. Because it looks like on the outside that I shouldn’t do it, but on the inside, if I say Yes, then I just do it. And my thinking is that.. if I make a decision for a Yes then I can always make another decision later because I didn’t… I can’t blame anybody else, because I can’t say “oh well, that René he told me do this and then, you know, well he shouldn’t have told me that and now so I am in this hot water “. And if you do it yourself , then you can always make another decision. And it’s really OK for me to go: “Whoops, I thought this was the road I wanted to take, and it isn’t”. So I’m backing up, I’m turning around … or I’m taking a detour or something else.
4:50 (räusper)
I also learned that what people bring to me as a reflection of who I am at the time … and I see that I am also a very reflective person back. So if somebody comes to me with a kind of attitude , then watch out, because I can just turn into that attitude so fast, it’s a little scary for me actually.
5:25
I have a few relationships in my life, where … it will always be a contrary kind of relationship but in that contrariness there is … there is a deep and abiding faith of care in that relationship, and that the safety is there to be contrary and to be aggressive sometimes, to be myself if I need to be and to reflect back to the other person who they are. Not.. I don’t do this consciously, I don’t think “oh, I’m.. now I’m gonna be reflective” . But it’s just something that happens inside of me. 0610 And ähm .. So (räusper)
6:15

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

2:24
It’s interesting for me that although sometime we had little differences in hand positions, at the end what we would say is “and that is what we were taught”…(laugh)… So…
that particular phrase joined us together in a way that really nothing else did. It was really like having a common mother, if you want to use that analogy.
3:10
To back away from this a little bit, in my opinion all human beings are on this planet and they all have a path and for some reason Reiki has become an expression or a… an accessible expression for people to enact their path of mastery. Because I believe that everyone who is born on this planet is on a path of mastery at some… of some kind. And it is… it depends on what their path is, what their destiny is if you will, whether that path shows up in parenting or in being a doctor or being a teacher or being a farmer or being … you know, whatever.
4:08

4:08
And that there is this… time frame now where Reiki has appeared and allowed us to develop into masters, like it’s kind of a self-taught masters’ course… in some way, with the help of Reiki, the energy. So… in that sense I don’t see… well, in that sense I believe that if we are truly masters, we’ll be able to understand that particular statement and actually support it, because I believe that it’s true. It’s a piece of wisdom that we came up with that was way beyond actually our mental consciousness at the time. (0501) That’s what I feel….
(René: beyond the individual’s comprehension?)
Yah, but (0508) we all agreed to it so somehow I think we were wise beyond our years, so to speak.
5:15

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

05:57
Or they have a dream about another symbol, so they add that symbol to the practice. So, you know, I just see that it’s all these people making Reiki their own. I can.. I don’t even now I want to control them, because they’re not actually threatening my practice. I’m the only one who can threaten my practice. Because I’m the only one who can change it. I… no one else can force me to change my practice. So, a lot of people don’t get this! They feel that if they’re surrounded by people who don’t eat rice and they do, that eventually they’re gonna have to succumb to not eating rice. But that’s totally your own choice.
06:53
And this is the part about mastery that is really important to understand. There is only one person who can change or corrode your practice, and that’s you. And … and I feel that it’s really easy to blame somebody else for your own frustration. But this is how … and this is how I worked this whole thing out, is that, I just thought, well, I can’t be angry at these people because I see that they’re just doing something very human. And so, I let it go after a while. That’s my only surmising. Actually.
07:42

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
Well, in 1982 when the masters, mostly the masters of Hawayo Takata met, in Hawaii, it was decided that I was the only one who would initiate masters. And I don’t know really where this decision came from, but it was a wise decision on the parts of other masters. Not because I was the best person to do it but because in tradition the Grand Master is the person to perpetuate the system. So they would be the only person to initiate masters. At the same time it meant that… the masters who came out of this system would get the same “training” or preparation and they would have something in common and hopefully that training would be… thorough and the best, you know, that somebody could offer….
1:24
Then.. and I felt honoured by this because I felt that all the masters knew that they could initiate a master and they were.. some of them were told before you die it’s important for you to initiate at least one master because then Reiki won’t die. And so…
1:53
I don’t think any of us realized what an amazing journey this would take us on. At one point I had certificates printed shortly after Hawaii and I got 1st degree, 2nd degree and I got master certificates done and I wanted to print 50 and the guy said “I’m not printing 50”, because it was the old kind of printing, where it was really a printing press. And he said: “forget it, you know, I’m gonna print you 2 or 300 and if you don’t use them, that’s fine but I can’t print 50”. And I thought “well, I’ll never use them”, of course I did….but not in the short time to 1988.
2:45

2:45
So… in 1986 or so other masters started to talk to me about initiating masters..(0254-0256) (cough).. Barbara Weber of course was already initiating masters, a master by the name of Barbara McCollough was already initiating masters.. I don’t know about Virginia Samdahl and Ethel Lombardi but by that time Ethel Lombardi had broken off from Reiki and started her own… workshops called… MarilEl, called MariEl. And so she did… she did that to honour her master, so it wouldn’t be called Reiki.
3:41
And what I received from their sort of …abdicating their own power and energy to initiate masters to me, is that I felt supported and I felt that that support went through the system. And it was probably the best thing that could have happened to the system for those 6 years.
4:06

4:06
However, as newer masters began to come out and as other Reiki students could see it from the outside, their idea was that I was the only one that had the power to initiate masters. And there was nothing I could do, and I tried, there was nothing I could do to dissuade them from this thought. So a friend of mine and I were travelling actually through Germany and we did a number of workshops before this conference in 1988 in Friedrichsdorf. And I just told John, I said: “I have to do something about this because it’s a lie and if it’s out into people who say that this is what I say about this, then.. you know, it’s gonna totally destroy me”…0505-0510 (cough)..
5:11
I stood up and gave a speech in Friedrichsdorf and this is what I think I said, which is.. everybody has their own version, so far I’ve now heard 4 or 5. But what I thought I said was: “The masters of Hawayo Takata abdicated their right and their… yah, their right to initiate masters, given to them because they are masters of this system, to me. I don’t know why but they did and I feel like it’s been beneficial for this system.”
5:52

5:52
But I saw, even then at that time, that Wanja Twan wanted to initiate masters, Paul Mitchell should initiate masters because he was growing in his own maturity. There were other masters, Mary McFayden, Beth Gray, John Gray, all of these people were ready to initiate masters and I just said: “I’m going to give this back to you, you know, I’m going to say to you every master has the right to initiate masters, because this is not about the system. We as masters are initiated to initiate 1st and 2nd degrees students. If you pass this on to a master student this is something that is in relationship with you and the system that you practice. It has nothing to do with me, it has nothing to do with your initiating master giving you the power. We all have the power to do this. But do we all have the means of responsibility that it takes to do the step?”
7:08
Because it’s not like, you know, 1st degree, 2nd degree, masters (marks equally split parts). It’s like 1st degree, 2nd degree and the master (marks one small part, then an immense part and master far away). And I said: “You know, it’s a really different thing. And I’m not going to be involved in it because there is now way as a master that you should ask anybody’s permission to initiate a master. Because this is not right, then you are not a master enough to do this on your own, you shouldn’t be doing it.”
7:40

7:40
So, I didn’t say it exactly like that, but that was for me my message. And I expected Paul Mitchell for instance to go “oh, thank you, you know, I’m so happy because I could see this coming and I really wanted to initiate masters”. But no, he was angry with me and didn’t talk to me for 2 years. And that was true for many masters that they were really angry with me. They felt like I was giving away my power. And I just told them, I said: “This is not giving away my power, yet I didn’t ever have the power at the first place. So I can’t really give it away. I can just tell the truth of what I see about power. And that is the… if you have the trust of somebody to give them the initiation and the safety of the students who will come to them to initiate them as masters, then, you know, that’s your business, not mine”.
8:42
So they wanted me to have a training program to do this. Well I could hardly train my own masters much less train masters, I mean forget it. I said: “I have nothing to offer, absolutely nothing”. And up until this day when I initiate and in the training part I do it in a week, and that’s the part about how to teach classes, going over the finer points what I do, what I’m thinking inside and all of that. The preparation is the bigger part.
9:17
I just tell them: “You’re being trained to initiate 1st and 2nd degree. If you want to initiate a master, I want you to wait 10 years. If you can’t, then that’s how it is, but I want you to know that this is something you take on for yourself. So I’m not going to be here to tell you how to do it”. And I don’t, I don’t do anything about masters initiations.
9:42

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

08:17:
and you know, it would just be a Reiki space and that would be one way where we can actually share reiki with people in a general way. So I’m really excited by that and then as we started to really look at our plan what we realised is that this was going to affect our own practice and our own ideas about our practice. So we went to this marketing guy who I really still very much like and feel that he has a lot to give to us and we were talking about the mission statement and talking about masters and he took out the words … he took out some words where it was like all Reiki Masters and I went (pauses, looking right, left, frowning) “all Reiki Masters?” like I don’t think that’s our mission. And he said “well, why not?” “Isn’t your job to, as masters, to promote mastery? Like not just an individual coming to their fruition and fulfillment as a human-being but mastery, like this concept of mastery?” and I went (pauses) “well, that’s a thought” (laughs).
9:55
And out of that came the realisation that actually this whole calling, and I believe that it came from Reiki itself, this calling really is about us, all of us, seeing that the life we are living and our connection to Reiki has a much larger purpose. And that it’s important for us to have a place where we all can call home. And that we feel safe there. And that we feel like we can be generous there. And we feel like that we are contributing to people
10:32:

1:56
So, gee, it was too bad that they latched on to this and called that the Master Symbol because it was a misnomer because nobody understood that it was part of the Japanese language and that it was a part of a very common part of Buddhist writing, sacred writing. So it’s not only for Reiki, it’s not.. it’s to.. evoke a certain connection to energy, just like this phrase that we are very much… well lot of us are very familiar with: “The Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost”… and if there were a symbol for masters, for me it would be the initiation itself, because mastery in any trade or in any human endeavour has to do with the human being becoming….(let me just put this correctly or accurately in my view point)…
3:18
It is when a human being…becomes a part of a creative, transformational process, that’s mastery. So, for instance, when you have somebody paint a picture and they are a student or they are what is called the craftsman, somebody who copies the master paintings, but they are copying, right, and they are very good copiers, but they are craftsmen, they are not master painters, because the master painter puts him or herself into that painting so that it becomes greater than the painting itself. The Mona Lisa is just a picture of a not so beautiful woman, as far as I am concerned. I mean and she has got this kind of funny smile… ok.. so you know people love to interpret these you know enigmatic smiles. And I look at this painting and I think, well big deal. The big deal though that you get when you stand in front of the Mona Lisa, which I’ve done, is that somehow she is luminescent, she is energetically dimensional and that doesn’t happen unless the artist somehow transfers this energetic presence of himself or maybe of humanity or maybe I don’t know what, into the painting. So the painting becomes more than just, you know, colour on canvass.
5:19

5:19
And it’s really a fascinating process for me. And that’s the same with any kind of mastery in like martial art or flower arrangements, I’m using Japanese based things because we can kind of relate to them in our lifetime sometimes. But these people take on the practice, so that their flower arrangement or their tea ceremony or their demonstration of their art, you know with another person as the martial art, becomes luminescent, it becomes more than just flowers in a pot or tea in a cup.
6:16
I believe that Reiki mastership is about us being able to join with this universal life energy called Reiki and become not just a channel for it and not just have the ability to open somebody else’s channel (they are terrible words but they are not accurate, but ok, that’s what I have). But we need to be able to actually bring forth Reiki energy in a way that becomes luminescent, that becomes greater than who we are as people. And the one act that we have to practice this melding is the initiation, because the initiation is just a series of, you know motions that we do with our body, but what makes it different, what makes…I mean you know, if somebody else who wasn’t initiated, didn’t know Reiki at all, did the same thing, would the result be the same? Well, I don’t know, I have not had this experiment, so I don’t know.
7:32

7:32
My guess is “no”, because this masterful part of who we are as human beings, is recognized by our student, and that is why masters have to have students, because without the student recognizing the master, seeing this luminescence in you and saying “okay, I’m willing to be a student, I surrendered everything to you. Because when students sit in that chair with their eyes closed, they are totally vulnerable. You could take a sword and cut off their head. Seriously. But you could do that energetically as well and they would never know it until a few days later. But they trust us to be trustworthy and they trust us to connect with that masterful part of ourselves and share that with them.
8:34
And for me that’s why the initiation is the Master Symbol, if there is one. And I feel that this proving you’re a master because you have the right symbol is ridiculous. I look at the way they live their life, I look at the way they live Reiki, I look at their understanding, you know, of live principals and of the principals of Reiki and I think, well, you know, is this person on the path of mastery? Well, at some level we all are, all human being are on the path of mastery, but as Reiki masters we have declared ourselves, we put ourselves in the spotlight, mainly so that we don’t have a place to hide. You know, it’s kind of an interesting process….
9:38

11:05
They are trying to get ähm.. like a traceable same image, but you are not gonna do it, because it’s handwriting. And the other thing is that she didn’t give the written Kanji to all of her masters, and she didn’t need to because…ähm.. it wasn’t necessary. It is not necessary for me to know the Kanji, I don’t use it in the practice and you can look it up on the internet now. (1140) So……(is there any other thing I would like to say?)…
11:51
So I just would like to take people back to the real, what I would say would be the authentic understanding of mastery, what the step really means to all us because I know that the people who are concerned about the master symbol, actually, most of them that I have met, live and are dedicated to their practice of Reiki and it is unfortunate that their focus of their mastery is on this Kanji and not on the way that they live.
12:38-1244 (René mumbles)

3:50
you know they have other options so they have like 10 options and women have 3, see, so of course Reiki is gonna get a lot of them, a lot of women to come. And at the same time … you know… when I also remember our innocent days of the 1980s we didn’t know what we were doing, we had no idea what we were dealing with. So
(0425) (räusper)
what happened in like 1986, 1987, and this is something that I haven’t talked about publicly, but I think it’s very important to acknowledge, is that during that time the Reiki Master community was really in some way…testing their powers. They would do Reiki classes, their students would come, lots of really wonderful, magical things happened during that time.
4:52
But the other thing was that we didn’t know what we were doing, we didn’t have any personal boundaries. We all had been given this gift of this connection to Reiki universal life energy and we found that we could do anything we wanted, literally. And you know, women and men would come to these classes, fall In love with their Reiki Master and the Reiki Master would say, well this is where Reiki is guiding me, right? So, you know, people would have affairs with their students, they would create very dysfunctional relationships with students, they….. and in some way in France this was called out because of their sensitivity to cults, C U L T S, cults and they termed Reiki as a cult. Well actually the Reiki Masters, most of the Reiki Masters who were French in that moment and you know the 1990s they actually acted like cult leaders because they didn’t understand how to be Reiki Masters, because the culture didn’t support mastery in the way that the Japanese culture does.
6:16

7:53
But it was a development of process of mastery. You know and I now believe, that in the classes now even with young masters, this is not an issue like it was then. I mean of course it happens. And you know, there are lots of long term relationships now, that started as a student came in to a masters class, they fell in love and they took their time, they were mature, they allowed their relationship to mature and now there are long term relationships and people are happy with them. But… it takes time to kind of sort that thing out..and… I just ….feel like we are in a different place now.
8:49
So.. that’s one way to use our power is through our sexual expression. Another way to use power is power over… this is an expression where, you know, it’s kind of the cult leader thing, you know, like I know the truth and I’m giving you the truth and if you want to know the truth I am the only person that’s the source of the truth, right… and what the original , what I got in my Reiki class was you have access to your truth and no one else does. I don’t know where I got this message, she never said it like that, but that’s definitely what I got and what all of us got. So when we would have discussions it wasn’t like “I’m right, you’re wrong”, it was like.. the end-sentence was “and this is what she taught me”. This is what I glean from her teaching. Well, how could you argue with that? You couldn’t, so you had to like open yourself and just allow that all these little differences were also a part of her teaching and that you could keep your own without being threatened by everybody else and welcome and embrace your brothers and sisters Reiki Masters you know equally even though we weren’t the same. It was a tremendous opportunity.
10:26

10:26
And… I think it’s very human to want to find the real story of creation you know, it’s like… native tribes all over the world, you know indigenous groups of people have a creation story and when I listen to some of their creation stories I think well that’s total fantasy, but what I have learned over the last 30 years in listening with different ears to these stories is that they are based on truth, they are based on the truth of the tribe. And that truth lives on through the tribe and keeps the tribe nourished, you know on these energetic-physical-spiritual levels.
11:23
And…. The Reiki story as is told by Hawayo Takata in truth… you know like in factual truth, I have no idea you know how factual it is and I never cared. But what I do get when I tell the story, not because I believe it, because I tell you in the first ten years I told that story because that’s what I needed to do as a Reiki Master. And when I saw what it did to the people who were listening to the story, I thought well there is something more going on here than I can perceive because it’s not like I told the story so well or I told the story so accurately or I told, you know, I’m such a big person that the story made a difference in people’s lifes. I mean as a young master I was just astonished by the effect the story had on people by the energetic transmission that came through that story.
12:31

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

0:59
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

3:11
So I went… I finished the summer with my grandmother, I went back to the ski-area and worked, but it was mixed with Reiki already. And the next summer I decided to take a journey by myself and my one job during this summer was to introduce myself as a Reiki master, because in the US and Canada when you meet someone, the first thing they say is “What do you do?”, meaning what do you do for living. And I would always say “A Reiki master”. And then they would ask the question “Well, what’s that?”. But this is a little bit like saying hello in a foreign language and not knowing any other word in a foreign language. You know, you go “Bonjour” and then they start rattling off in French and you’re going “Wait, wait, wait, I can’t understand you” (laugh). Well, that’s kind of what I felt like when they asked me “well what’s that? What’s a Reiki master?”.
4:17
And that winter, when I came back, I knew that I had to follow the path of Reiki. So… and it wasn’t winter, it was fall. So, I’m sorry. So I ended up back in British Colombia with my grandmother in October, in November, and just before she died in 1980. And then, when she did die and I was a Reiki master and I had figured out that I was going to live the rest of my life as a Reiki master, I had no grounding as an individual, as a personality or even as a Reiki student. I hadn’t practiced that long. So I took it on, as a good Japanese woman would do, as family duty. And….
5:17

5:17
It’s hard to describe in words what that means, family duty. But it meant that I couldn’t quit because if I did I would let my family down. I mean, I so wanted to quit every week for the first ten years, because I would be challenged, I would be given things that I didn’t want to do, that I didn’t think I could do, put myself in places where it was… for me really, above my head, in every way. And finally, in the late 1980s or early 1990s, I can’t remember when, I just woke up one morning and thought “Okay, this is it. This is my life, I’m accepting it and forget about family duty because I can’t live this life as family duty. I have to live it as my own life.”
6:30
And this particular realization helped me in coming to this place that I referred to as the “Yes-place”, as the time, when I realized that I had to make all the decisions myself and that they couldn’t be somebody else’s decisions, that they had to be my decisions, and that if I did that and I didn’t like what was happening, I could make another decision. I mean it was fine for me to change my mind. And…
7:07

7:07
That transition period was really important for me because I realized how much of the time in my former life, I call it kind of a past life, that I had listened to other people and really relied on their direction of where to go. And that wasn’t so much so in Reiki and for sure at this moment, from then on, whatever I’ve done had been my decisions and I…. have reaped benefit and the consequences both of those decisions….
7:53

0:00
.. but my peacefulness around this has come and lately, what’s really funny is that I actually found my notes for this speech… as I was going through these papers… I don’t know where they… I can’t lay my hands on them today, but it was really interesting to read it and to see how progressive I was but at the same time people were not able to listen to this language. They wanted to have kind of a physical “You can initiate masters and you can not!”, you know “You are not ready!” and “You are!” and I couldn’t have done that because it really, really for me was not my place to bless anybody to initiate masters nor to prevent them from initiating masters. So of course what happened, was.. is that … the masters that I thought were ready to initiate masters were angry with me and they didn’t initiate masters for years. And the people who were kind of young, upstart masters, who ‘thought they knew everything’ and so on, they began to initiate masters right away and they soon learned what initiating masters was about. I couldn’t have taught them that.
1:33
And in the end it was really right. You know, it wasn’t something that was “pretty” in the beginning and we all had judgements. But… and I opened Pandora’s box, I admit.. but I feel like it was now a good thing. I wish I would not had used the sledge hammer but perhaps the key (laugh). But I didn’t have the key then.
2:07

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

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

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

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