2:19
So I invited Justin Stein and Robert Fueston who is another researcher in Kentucky I believe that’s where he lives, and Paul and Susan Mitchell and Joyce, my partner. And we have formed a kind of archive team. And the good news is that Robert is actually a trained a librarian, with his focus in archival material, and Justin is a very good researcher… And then Paul and Susan and I just know a lot about the history of Reiki from Hawayo Takata’s time.
3:01
So it’s been a really interesting process to go through it and of course the researchers, Justin and Robert, want everything to be public instantly which freaks me out… So my questions is alway: «is this the right context in which to present this to the public?». And it’s been… we’ve had wonderful discussions, because we have very different points of view and very different ideas about what should happen. So Justin and Robert together have been privy to seeing some documents and so on that we’ve started to archive and digitalize, scanning into computers and so on. But I don’t intend for it to be exclusive necessarily, it’s just at this time it’s exclusive, because I don’t really know how to allow the public to be able to access these. So my next step is to find a place where actually scholars can access them in a way that feels appropriate to the material.
4:24

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

0:00
Well, Hawayo Takata had a very interesting way of working with this. She was very mindful of this thing about how to … how to initiated masters who would actually surrender to Reiki on all these different levels. So she this group of masters who reached almost retirement age 0032-0:36 (cough)
who had made their money and they had grown children and they were kind of ready to … ready to be in the world to be themselves. And then there were the young people, only a few of us, who hadn’t had families yet and who were willing to just say «ok, I be Reiki master and this is what I’m doing with my life». And the interesting thing is that that’s what we did, I mean… my colleagues who are my age, Paul Mitchell and Rick Bockner, who I’ve been together with all these years in our path of mastery, we always, you know, surrendered to the will of Reiki so to speak. And it didn’t mean that we didn’t do other things sometimes but it’s been a really wonderful opportunity to see that we could live our lives for 35 years in this way and come out of it feeling very rich. We’re not rich on an American level of «success» but we are rich in the way our lives are and what our priorities are and the wonderful people that we have in our lives and the profound experiences that we have almost every day.
2:06

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

4:01
So it was hard for me, this phrase “the Grand Master”. Now I don’t care, people can call me the Grand Master, that’s fine. But then in…2000… no in… 1992 Paul Mitchell and I actually formed a business entity, called “The Office of the Grand Master”
(0429-0431) (cough)
And at that time I was not so interested in the form of the practice. He as a person who was a catholic brother, was used to a lot of ritual and organization of the church, the catholic church. He also had taken many, many years of Aikido, so for him this emphasis on form was really important. And I was not so much into form as I was into essence.
5:09
So our partnership started out that way. Now I feel like we are both very balanced in this form/essence thing. And sometimes I’m much more strict than he is on the form. But that’s ok… The thing of it is, that at that point…. In martial arts, because I had to have something to compare it with, there’s often the founder or the founder’s successor that holds the essence of the practice. But the Dojo master holds the form-practice and teaches. So Paul and I saw us, ourselves, as him being the Dojo master, so to speak, and my being the essence person. So that point, to make it much clearer… I don’t know who came up with the phrase personally, but then I introduced this phrase “lineage bearer” because I knew that I was that. That I was the successor and that in this lineage I was the bearer of this lineage. And that I didn’t feel like was disputable, that’s what I was recognized as.
6:40

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

14:56
And it doesn’t mean that I am wiser or have a better viewpoint of the system or anything, what it means is that I have a more global view. And one of the things that really separates Paul and I from all the other masters that Hawayo Takata initiated or recognized, was this global view, this idea that we were much more than Reiki masters to our own students, that we were actually growing into this mast… universal mastery path and that in this as a group of Reiki masters we really could have influence on the outcome of humanity. And….
15:46
It was amazing to me that the masters who were initiated by Hawayo Takata did not understand the influence and the impact that they had on the entire Reiki community. You know, they would say stuff like: well, you know… you know the members of the Reiki Alliance, like all their students, I don’t care about them. I was going: “how can you.. how can you not care about them?”… (laugh)… “How can you not care about the system… that we’re practicing?”
16:22-16:27 (cough)
They really took it as a linear kind of progression, where, you know, Hawayo Takata was master and their teacher, they taught exactly as she taught them, in theory, which I truly believe was from their heart. And so it didn’t matter to me and it still doesn’t matter to me that these masters could be members of the Alliance, their form could be really different than most of the Alliance members but they still for me practice the same system, because that blood line, so to speak, the energetic blood line of Hawayo Takata still ran through them.
17:15

00:00
My membership of this circle of 22 masters initiated and recognized by Hawayo Takata was very important to me. I felt that this circle held the energy of Reiki and the practice of Usui Shiki Ryoho up until now… And now there are four members of that circle still alive, that we know of. And Wanja has been not teaching for a couple of years. So now its Rick Bockner, Paul Mitchell and myself. We were the youngest when she initiated us all. And … I felt that as the Grandmaster, as the recognized lineage bearer that I was the spokesman for this circle. That in truth I couldn’t do anything to «change» the system or to alter the message without actually going back to the circle and somehow having agreement among us.
01:28-0130 (rülps) Excuse me.
 I think that from their point of view I was doing a lot of things they didn’t like but most of the things they didn’t like I didn’t like either. But it was happening, and so what can I do? y‘ know, like all the change… all the different kinds of forms of practice. There was no way for me to control that. And… I learnt that very early on that, y’know, my job was not about control, because it was impossible to control people. I didn’t have the personality of a police person. So, there was kind of a joke about having Reiki-police
02:13

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

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

4:53
Even from the very beginning, every once in a while, there was this something happened and this stream of energy came through me and that’s what people recognized. They didn’t recognize me because I was some holy wonderful person. As a joke I can say “Okay, I’ve taken 35 years to get there”. But… they recognized me because something extraordinary happened to me every once in a while. As Paul Mitchell said “It’s like a little pilot flame inside of Phyllis and every once in a while somebody turns it on and it becomes like this and then it goes back to the pilot flame”. And I believe that.
5:50
Now, after all these years, it’s more controllable by me. I can just open myself up and it happens. And sometimes it doesn’t happen when I want it to because my personality supersedes it. And that’s too bad actually. When I get tired, when I get… when I haven’t eaten properly and … when I’m distracted by something that’s happening in my life. Like, I get distracted and then I don’t have consciousness around it.
6:38

0:00
The succession question for me had been one that has been foremost in my mind since 1983. And … of course back then I was so young, that I was gonna live forever, and we didn’t really have to think about it. But I did think about it because my grandmother’s death created so much havoc for all of us and at that time of course we were still in this conversation with Barbara Weber and I thought my grandmother could have been more clear and so on. And at the same time realizing how advantageous it was to have a restraining force, you know, this activating/restraining, it was fabulous. So…
0:57
And then in the late 1980s Paul Mitchell and I started to travel in … to other continents, we came to Europe first. And we often flew on the same airplane. And finally somebody, I’m pretty sure it was a German master said to me “you know, you guys shouldn’t fly on the same plane”. And I just laughed and I said “You got to be kidding me”. And she said “no, actually I’m not. I’m saying to you that you two have a responsibility that you’re not taking care of”. And I thought to myself, well that’s actually true, I guess accidents can happen. And at this point the Reiki community was so fragile that if Paul and I had died in the same time it would have shattered the community. I’m not saying that to feel like … you’re replaceable or anything, I just feel like if I was living responsibly as a leader, you know, I had to take care of that.
2:08

2:08
So we ended up not flying together, except for one time to Australia where we both forgot to ask each other when and where we were flying from and we ended up on the same plane. We came from totally different cities and ended up in Los Angeles on the same plane to go to Australia. So that was pretty funny. And…
2:33
Then about maybe 10 years ago or so… oh no before that, maybe 15 years ago I really thought, if I … my ideal situation about my successor is that they would appear now so that I could.. they could be with me and they would learn from me and so on. And I had in mind a young woman to do this and … basically it’s clear that she has her own path, that it’s not this. So I gave that up and I thought well, okay, if that’s not it then what?
3:20

1:28
So then as Grand Master I believe that there are several different aspects of Grand Master which we are starting to articulate now which is very interesting. And one of those aspects is bearing the lineage, is actually the lineage bearer. And it was a decision on my part to use both simultaneously because in 1993 Paul Mitchell and I formed the Office of the Grand Master, which meant that he also had a role that I would say is an aspect of the Grand Master called Head of Discipline.
2:11
So both of us together envisioned that this office would actually contain many people by now, but it hasn’t. We haven’t… we haven’t matured to the point of adding another person or two. But it wouldn’t surprise me, we just don’t… we just haven’t had those people emerge. And so Head of Discipline is one aspect of being Grand Master, that’s the person who holds the form and who holds the discipline of the practice, exactly what it means. And usually in the martial art they’ll have a Dojo Master and the person who is the philosophic head of the martial art and that’s who I am, I’m the lineage bearer. So I’m the energetic head of this practice and he took on the role of being responsible for a Head of Discipline.
3:16

3:16
Now, when I die it’s very possible that his role will be subsumed or assumed by a circle of people who will come in and have collective lineage bearing. So it will be like a kind of a committee or circle of lineage
0339
but what I’ve, we’ve been talking about is that every 0344 ….OK, let me see where I was … 
3:52
So when Paul and I formed the Office of the Grand Master I thought it would be clearer if I were also be referred to as a lineage bearer. So this means that I carry the essence or the energetic essence of this system. And he does not replace me, he is taking on one of the aspects of the Grand Master position that I felt I couldn’t do at the time. Now whether or not one person will be able to be the Grand Master of this practice Usui Shiki Ryoho in this lineage … I don’t know.
4:39

4:39
You know, years ago somebody asked me this question and I said “well, if you’re so sure that there is going to be a successor for me then I’m equally sure that the possibility that there won’t be is equal”….
5:03
So, Paul didn’t like this at all because he said “well you have to have a successor”. I said “Paul, I don’t have to have a successor”. Like the Dalai Lama right now, and I’m not acquainting myself with the wisdom of the Dalai Lama, but in lineage he’s got a problem, because he has no idea, because the traditional way of finding the Dalai Lama 0529 (räusper) is gone. So how are they going to do it? And this is something that’s a huge question in the … in this Tibetan tradition and the same for other spiritual practices on the planet because of the globalisation that has happened.
5:51

8:19
And in the middle of all this I asked for the Reiki Alliance to become the association of licence … of licence masters, who would out of this trademark be able to set standards that were already set anyway for membership and that they would hold the membership of all licensed masters. And they refused to do it because they didn’t feel like this was a “Reiki way” of being. So at that point I felt so unsupported and so misunderstood and so fed up with this whole thing that I just dropped it, just like that, because the last nail in this whole thing was driving down from Breitenbush one August afternoon with Paul Mitchell and we were speaking about this trademark thing and about how the Reiki Alliance could be an association of licensed masters and so on. And he said “Well, you know, I never supported this, ever… the whole trademarking thing, the licensure and any.. everything”. And I said “Well, it would have been good to know, because I wouldn’t have done this without your support”. Because at that point he and I were like partners in holding the OGM, because this was in 1996 or 7. We were partners and I said “You know, if I don’t have my partners’ support, then … We could have had this discussion and maybe something could have been gleaned and I would have been more aware of people who weren’t in agreement with me.”
10:39

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

00:06 I met Paul Mitchell in the summer of 1980 and it was a pretty funny experience because I was just… I was just a women of 30 years old, having no what I consider to be “esoteric experience and although I had had them.. as I look back on them and but I didn’t recognize them then… and I was living with my grandmother in Quisaqua/Iowa ?? where my parents lived and where my grandmother moved in her last years
0:53
Paul was a recent student of hers in San Francisco and he was driving across country to help a friends move a car from San Francisco to Washington DC. And he thought “oh, I could stop and get second degree from Hawayo Takata in her own home… So he called Hawayo Takata my grandmother and he said “I’m passing by” well I figured his speech “could I come and get second degree” and she said “Yes, when are you arriving?” an he said “tomorrow” or something like that…
1:32 (räusper)
So he came and because I was there as my grandmother’s assistant at the time,
0141 (räusper)
I was supposed to be travelling with her and helping her but because she became ill I came back home and gave her Reiki every day and helped her cook and so on… I thought that I was there to.. so that she can sit with Paul while he ate and I would cook dinner for both of them and then leave 0205 (Cough) 0210
2:11

2:11
I opened the door and there was recognition between us. It was like “oh, hello” and my grandmother felt the intensity so she showed Paul in to the living room, dining room area, sat him on the chair, said “We’ll be right out”. Then she came to the kitchen, closed the door and went “You go home, you go home right now” and I went “But I haven’t cooked you dinner?”. She said “I’ll cook”, I said “No, let me just stay, I’ll help you cook dinner”. But she wanted me gone like that.
2:54
And… So I was, despite all of my projects and I never saw Paul again that week. A few months later a couple of months later we ended up in San Francisco at Paul’s house because that’s where she was staying in September or October, I don’t remember which month, to do some classes. And it was the end of my time with her during that year. So I flew back from San Francisco to Denver and then to Winner Park and resumed my duties in the ski area. But that night, we went out for dinner the three of us, Paul, Hawayo Takata and myself and we came home and she instantly fell asleep. So Paul and I finally got to talk to one another “alone”, so to speek. And it wasn’t a kind of sexual man/woman-thing, it was something like we’ve done something together before, I mean it was very kind of spooky for me, because I never really had this happen. So then I didn’t see him for a couple of years after that.
4:13

4:13
By that time we were both initiated as masters, he had been initiated later and my grandmother, our master, had died and he had moved to Idaho and I was living in Southern British Colombia. So we were living about 4 hours apart, kind of as a miracle. And so we ended up along with a couple of the other masters from that area that my grandmother had initiated as a little group of new Reiki Masters who were lost. Because our master had died and we just needed to comfort each other and to compare notes and so we did this a lot.
5:08

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

08:29
In 1992 we came together because he had had a feeling that he should step in and help me as the lineage bearer, as the Grand Master actually at that point. And I also had the same feeling. And we had not had a very friendly relationship for the last 2 years before this. So it was really reconciliation immediate that we came together and it was recognized by the Reiki Alliance as a community and so he became known as head of discipline and our office together was the office of the Grand Master. 0912 So.. (räusper) 0915
09:16

09:16
So since 1992 and 3, we started this relationship until now, he’s been a peer and this particular relationship of peer has been very important for me. He’s a very different person from me, personality-wise, we have very different approaches to money, to travelling, to ….lots of different details like that, but our approach and what we are called to do in Reiki is the same. So we have had just amazing experiences working together.
10:09
He is really clear that he is not a lineage bearer, anyway now, he’s 2 years older than I am. We don’t know if his position will be filled if he dies. He is very clear that he wants my position filled by one person when I die. And I don’t know really if that’s gonna happen. I would like to think that I’m open to any.. whatever comes up, with the energy of Reiki with the Master Body and with the community.
10:47

10:47
He has played a significant role of kind of anchor in all these years and has provided either the activating force or the restraining force in our discussions and vice versa. About 10 years ago we got kind of tired of the polarisation that this was creating. So after 2 or 3 years of actually going to counselling together and trying to work out our differences, we came to this conclusion that we were just very different personalities and that we didn’t really want to change each other. His reticence to talking, his way with money, his ideas of what Reiki was and what Reiki wasn’t stimulated me to really research my own ideas and vice versa….
11:51

11:51
But we realized that what we really needed were more people in the circle, like we were a circle of 2, so we kept going like this… and what we need to do was go like this…. So we opened up the first OGM-Retreat in August an whoever came, 1st degree, 2nd degree and master students are invited to this who practice the system, they sit in the circle and we discusse issues that are up in the community. And we get to have other voices in our circle and this is proven to be wildly successful as far as I’m concerned. It allows Paul and I to have the freedom to find our own place in that circle, to… so that we’re not.. we don’t force ourselves into a polarized conversation. But sometimes we find ourselves liter … kind of … literally sitting together and other times opposite. And it’s a great freedom for us to have .. and be able to have our own opinion and see it in the relative universe of a circle. That’s wonderful.
13:13

13:13
So we continue these OGM-reatreats and the next one will be in October of 2016 in Almaty, Kazakhstan and it’s the first time it’s in the Russian speaking eastern part of our world of Europe and I’m very excited by this, very excited. So, who is Paul: Well …. I have lots of levels of answers to that but for the most part he’s been my partner in the OGM… in the office of the OGM of… no, he’s been my partner in the Office of the Grand Master, he’s been in his.. from his own perspective supportive of everything that I’m doing and in his own way he has supported the lineage by not being the lineage bearer.
14:25