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

6:15
So, it’s been a rich path and I don’t see it as a path of faults and stumbling, I see it as a.. as a path where I’ve been able to confront myself on many different levels and many ways by many people. And these gifts that I’ve received have come to me and have allowed me to be a better person for it. 0647 And ähm.. you know the (räusper)
6:51
The last big test for me was when I found out I had breast cancer 5 or 6 years ago and all of a sudden it was my body betraying me. And then I thought “Yes, but you travelled around for 22 years, you didn’t take care of yourself, you didn’t drink enough water for sure, you didn’t have days off where you renew yourself…”. And I read this article by this man, who said that cancer was a response of the body to adverse conditions and so he listed all the adverse conditions and I had every one of them. (laugh) .. and I thought “well, ok, so this is an opportunity to change that”. And that was the attitude that I went into treatment with and I feel that it was the greatest gift that.. another great gift that I have received, you know, in this life. And I am better for it, for sure.
8:07

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

3:16
And then this whole kind of … mis… all these like misconceptions and so on… 03:26-03:30 (coughing)
3:31
that were following me around just disappeared in the sense that they were replaced by people’s personal experience with me of being hateful or loving/spiritual or eating meat and not being a vegetarian is one thing, but to have this be told through this kind of gossip chain is really different. So I feel that… that my .. that was a defence mechanism that really did not work for me because I was my own worst enemy as far as PR goes, public relations.
4:17
So I don’t know if that answers your question but it certainly is where I came from…
4:23

0:00
(René: ..you agree with that?) Yes, I do… 0007 I feel that we are in a very interesting position as Reiki masters. I don’t know the daily things about people very often. I don’t know if they are married or if they have a relationship, I don’t know if they have children, I certainly don’t know the names of most of their children, I don’t know where they live, I don’t know what their daytime job is if they happen to have one. I only know a few little details that come up in coversation and I don’t hold on to them very much because it would be impossible.
0:52
But, eg. for my 1st degree students when they sit in the chair for initiation, they open themselves to me totally energetically. And that is a truly amazing intimate moment that will never ever be shared by anybody else. So that responsibility, that moment of initiation brings me to, I believe, to an energetic and spiritual connection with this person for a life time and perhaps we’re renewing something from other lifetimes, I have no idea, I have my own theories about that.
1:48

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

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

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

0:00
Well, it took me a while to 0010 (räusper) it took me a while to come to an understanding of forgiveness. Because what I did instead, was I just took the responsibility on myself. And so my hardest thing was to learn how to forgive myself. And it was one of the things that we… I believe inadvertently touched upon in our self-assessment workshops. And there was some amazing times when people would … we would do roleplay or we would do communication exercises and somehow it would touch somebody so deeply that they would be catapulted into the process of forgiveness, much to their surprise I think and ours as well.
1:12
And for me …I found that forgiveness was a kind of miracle that happened when a certain set of circumstances occurred all at the same moment. And then somehow there was this revelationary occurrence and then forgiveness began to work….
1:44
So I have spent a lot of time in my therapy sessions trying to divest myself from the responsibility for everything that happened in the world, in my world especially. And to be able to forgive myself for being human, I mean that was one of my first things, is to know well you’ve made mistakes. Well, no I haven’t! I haven’t made mistakes and I am responsible for this and I’m in fault and …. So that was my line. And to get over that line
0216 (räusper)
and to come to a place of being able to forgive was really a major piece of work for me.
2:28

00:00
My parents met at the university of Hawaii after my father was discharged from the army. He was a part of the very famous 442^nd Japanese Amercian Battalion and ended up in Italy and he ended up loving Italy. And it was sort of an interesting thread through his live. And he was in pre.med at the time and my mother who really was an artist from her soul out … got pushed into be a pre-med student by her mother, my maternal grandmother who was Hawayo Takata.
00:57
And I am sure that my grandmother had in her head, that her daughter would go to pre-med, be a doctor and also be a Reiki Master she becomes a doctor and also a RM. My mother was with my grandmother at the time she met Chujiro Hayashi in Japan and received first degree from him. She never went on in Reiki because her idea was that she was going to raise a family and she didn’t want to have a career so to speak of Reiki. So … you know, times were spontaneous and who knows what it was like back then after the war in Hawaii but they ended up eloping because grandmother thought that my father would never make anything of himself.
01:51
And, so they eloped and they got married. And they eventually.. he ended up going to medical school in University Dallas, Texas. So they moved to Dallas, Texas and he went to med school there and then that’s where I was born, so I was born in Dallas. In ‘48.  And there is this rumour in my family that said that my grandmother, who was very into auspicious names, wanted to name me Dallas because it was a booming town then and … would become a very big city and she thought that would be a great name for me but luckily, anyway in my own story, I got saved from this by my mother who said «No». … So I ended up to be Phyllis. And I have no idea why.
02:53
I was born with a cleft pallet and I had a speech impediment from when I was very small, obviously when I started talking. My first 7 or 8 years of schooling I went to a speech therapist.. I just hated my name because the sounds that were hardest for me were f, s, t and r …it’s all through my name, right. So I just thought that his was very cruel. (laughs) And eventually I asked my mother «why did you do this?» like «why were you so set on my being able to speak clearly?» And she said  “because you are going to grow up and speak to a lot of people” And I went (shakes head), well, she is crazy
03:54

03:54
You know, that was about the time I started to take voice lessons, from this German opera want-to-be in a neighbouring town. Her name was Misses Stolz. For those of you who don’t know Stolz is the German word for proud. She was very proud. And very, you know like typical, big bust and short y’know with crazy hair all piled up and everything who’ll just wack us with a stick, y’know, if we didn’t do something right. And I just couldn’t understand why I had to put up with this. And not only that, I didn’t really know if I had a good voice or not. Because I was going there for enunciation.
04:43
It was kind of a crazy time. At the age of 4 my parents moved to Iowa City in Iowa. Because they had a very, very good medical school there and that was the internship for my father. While he was there he was asked to continue his residency into neuro surgery where in that time it was just a very baby specialty. But my mum got pregnant again with my brother. And he decided he hat to go work. So he went around and interviewed for jobs because they decided to stay in Iowa. My dad was a  great gardener, I mean, my mother and father came from plantation workers in Hawaii and they were were farmers back in Japan who were .. immigrated to Hawaii.
05:46
And … so I assumed that was one thing. The other thing was they didn’t want to go back to Hawaii. Because they wanted to be kind of free of the Hawaiian immigration culture at the time. And then he in his interviews he met up with this man named Jim… James Warrol who was about 10 years older than he was and had a pract… a medical practice. And was looking for a partner and when they met, my dad said, «well, we just felt they we knew each other and that we were brothers». Which was very interesting cause my father was not at all esoteric or, y’know, I mean I… we, we never talked about emotions with him. But for him to say this, must have been … the experience must have been very profound.
06:46

00:00
So one of my friends who is very, very small in stature, she is about 4-10 or 4-11 even now and probably weighs under 100 pounds. So you can imagine as a little girl of like 7 years old she was very small. And she said, «you know, I saw these things happening. And I would go home and talk to my mother and say, y’know, what can I do because the teachers are just so mean to her.“ And her mother said, «just come home and talk to me about it and I will go to do something but you can’t do anything because if you do something then you end up creating a schism in the class where it’s like kids for and kids against”. So she was a pretty wise woman.
00:57
When we spoke about this it was very emotional for me because at the time up to the time of being 64 I always thought I was just this lone person and I felt really alone. I couldn’t talk to my parents about this at all because the rule of the family was «to mind your family duty and never lower your fathers head». So whatever happened in school I had to take. I never went to my parents. I don’t know if they actually ever knew, tell you the truth.
01:38
And, when I was in high school I happened to belong to a class that for this little town was the largest class in its history. Till up to then in 1966 our graduating class was one hundred …(laughs)… And, since then there’s never been a class  that large since then. Out of that class there were like 20 people who became … in the United states we take this very special test for college entrance and there were about 20 people who scored so high in the test that they got offered scholarships from … everywhere, I mean it was an amazing class. So I was a pretty lazy student. I didn’t do that well, I mean I did well enough for my parents not to get too upset. But I was not a straight A student. So I had this reputation of being lazy. And I couldn’t get over it, I mean, now I have a kind of inkling about what my rebellion was, at the time y’know about studying and so on. But I couldn’t get it then.
03:06

03:06
When I was 16, the summer when I was going to turn 16, I was in a car accident with a friend of mine who.. whose birthday was earlier in the year, so she was already 16 and she had her licence. And we drove in a place where we weren’t supposed to drive because it was all gravel roads. (Cough) In this accident she got killed instantly, and I was in the middle seat and I was .. I had a concussion and a number of other small injuries. And I was in the hospital for I think a month. And then her brother, who was on the outside of the front seat, had a broken leg. He was quite young at the time. He was like maybe nine or something.
04:01
So, I had this relationship with Mary, my friend, who had died, all through High School and all through College. And she would come to me in the da… in the night when I was worried about tests. And she would say, «Phyllis if you had read the book you wouldn’t be in this state .. (laughs)
04:24  then when I got into Reiki and kind of esoteric situations and stuff I realized how amazing those conversations were with Mary during that time of my life. Pretty interesting.
04:42 But that accident changed my life because my grandmother became much more protective of me. My parents became very protective of me. And even though I had been somewhat protected before now it was really a lot. So, I wasn’t allowed to go out on dates and I was wearing these shoes that I had, I still have some congenital malformation of my hips or something. So I had to wear these special built-up shoes. They were really ugly, I just hated them.
05:24
And, I mean, I just felt like a very put upon child, I mean, y’know, I was not pretty, I certainly didn’t match the standards of beauty that all the other girls of my class did, blond, you know, straight legs, so on and so on. It’s like.. it was very strange. And then I went through College. My College career was pretty fraught, for the first two years. And then I had to take a year off. And I came back and I found out that if I actually went to class and read the books, that I could actually get very good grades, it was pretty amazing. So I had to thank Mary for that.
06:12

06:12
My father was a doctor. So, whenever we got sick., which was not often, I have to say, we… he came, he would look at us, kind of poke at us with his finger and say, “you’ll live, go to school!” I mean, I never missed a day of school. I was late a lot in school but I never missed a day in school. So when I graduated at the age of 18, from this school, the principle had to give me this certificate that said that I had never missed a day school in twelve years. He said, «but I don’t know why I’m giving you this certificate because you were late probably half of those days. (laughs) And I said, «well, that’s really lucky for me.» (laughs)
7:12
I felt not very well cared for by my father but my family was definitely raised in a way, where, you know, you got sick, you went to the doctor, he gave you a pill or a shot and you got better. I mean, that was our idea of healing. Which wasn’t really healing. It’s kind of curing. So that’s how I went out into the world with this idea that I was not, I was not worthy to be a friend of anybody, I saw myself as very ugly, as having very little to offer people. And that I had friends was kind of a miracle. I didn’t really understand why I had friends. And that they just happened to me and that when they happened my parents would take care of.. would be there and they would take care of whatever was going on. And because of this hip thing that I had, which I can’t really explain, because nobody ever explained it to me, 0837 when I was 24 or so, no 25 I foun.. I was taken up to the mountains by some friends of mine.*
08:51

00:00
ähm.. OK. 0006 When I was 25 or so I was taken up to the mountains of Colorado by some friends of mine who wanted to go skiing but it was a very bad snow year. So, we all decided to go cross country skiing. And I could do that, no problem. So I was really happy to go and so on. So we went up and we went to the condo and it started snowing and it snowed all night and the next morning all of my friends said «see you later, we’re going to go down-hill».  So, I went, well, crap, what am I doing here? So I had maybe 50 Dollars in my bank account and I decided that I was going to learn how to down-hill ski since I was stuck there by myself.
00:52
So I took lessons, private lessons because I didn’t want to be in a class full of little kids. And the instructor said, «I don’t wanna teach you today. It’s the worst time to learn how to ski because there is so much powder on the beginners slope that you’ll just always fall down.» I said, «listen, this is my only day, this is my last 50 Dollars, I’m going to learn how to ski!» And somehow, even though it was pretty upsetting sometimes, just falling and getting up and just falling and getting up, it kind of captured me. And luckily for me they had friends in other ski areas that could get us free tickets. So I started downhill skiing and it freed me, it freed my body so that I could actually move effortlessly and that freed my spirit somehow. It was really an amazing transformation. Very touching.
02:01
And I ran into this guy, Hall O’Leary, who had been presented with a challenge. He was a ski instructor at this place where I was going and… There is a huge children’s hospital in Denver and they were going to bring up like 30 kids to learn how to ski who were, this is not politically correct, who were mentally retarded (mumbles ‚kind of time‘?). And they asked this group of ski instructors, «who would like to take this on?» and nobody raised their hand. And Hal thought, «this is an opportunity to do something really different. I’d like to do this».  So, he started it and out of that started the, well, at first it was called «the handicapped ski program», now it is called «the disabled ski program». It’s the largest of its kind in the world and he went around the world during the time that .. in the 1980ies and 1990ies. And started a lot of the disabled ski programs all over the world. He is amazing and from the engineers who were parents of the kids and stuff, they invented all… a lot of the ski equipment, the special ski equipment for these kids and for the adults.
03:34

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

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

01:57
But because I was raised the way I was with my father as a doctor I just thought this was kind of strange why would we give these people Reiki? We’re not going to give them back sight, we’re are not going to grow another arm or a leg, we are nto going to make them smarter, I mean, y’know, not to be irreverent… So how are we going to change their lifes and what was the purpose of giving them Reiki anyway? Finally, after having had some very intense conversations with some of these people who were my age, I realized that healing was all encompassing, it wasn’t something that was what I might call now ‘curing’. It wasn’t in a like… what I realize in my idea of a whole person was that a whole person would have their sight, would have 2 arms, 2 legs, 0307-0311 (coughing) would have all their faculties and it was obviously not true.
03:18
So I had a lot of confusion in these days  and it took me another few years to really understand the concept of healing and also of wounds. It’s like … I realized that in treating people with amputations it’s really obvious where their wound is, but where you have a person who has an emotional wound, that’s not so obvious. And that everyone is amputated somewhere and that we just …  put all of our pity, and all of our superiority sometimes into taking care of physically disabled people when in fact we are also disabled, it’s just not physical. So these are some of the insights that I had during this period of time.
04:17

0:00
So as well during this time is when I was just finding my legs as a master, so to speak, and working out my own personal issues, as I said before. And the skiing process really helped me to manage some of these processes in a way that was very humanistic. That I… that I found out then what Hal had meant by being perceptually handicapped. And that was that my perception of myself was so skewed, so distorted that it distorted the rest of the world. And it was a handicap because it was so distorted that it.. it actually didn’t match the real world very much at all.
1:10
As I came into this realization I understood that my practice of Reiki had brought me back into myself and given me the gift of knowing… my strength, my chara.. part of my character, understanding beauty and understanding that we make our own world, really, and my world was pretty tortured and …. really painful. And I have come out the other side, I don’t fell like I’m really much different but my viewpoint on the world is that it’s a friendly place, which is very different than when I started out….
2:13

0:00
I was the only Japanese kid running around the streets and so I was obviously … you know different, and so therefore on the outside. So a last story about my childhood… so… and reconciliation.
0:22
I went to my 40th highschool reunion, which was kind of scary. And the first night we were sitting at these big banquet tables of about 12 to 15 people at a table. And… you know, I mean, it’s amazing, you know when you go to these reunions it’s like.. 0047-0051 (cough)
0:52
Some people have not changed at all, you can recognize them and they just look at little older and other people you are going “who are you?”, like they totally changed somehow. So I was sitting at the table and somebody came up to me and said “were you in our class?”. And I went “what? I’m Phyllis Furumoto, Japanese”. “Oh, you look so different”. I said “really?”. And somebody else said “well,”.. in the table “well, I never noticed that you are Japanese”.
1:39

1:39
So it was interesting for me, even in that moment, like… it’s almost 10 years now that I’ve been there at this reunion, that as kids, some of the kids didn’t notice that I was Japanese and didn’t notice the difference. And yet from my point of view I was always different, always on the outside. So all of these different things, I say “well Reiki has given me the possibility to rewrite my life, to have it be more accurate, to have it make more sense and to understand the degree of distortion that I lived in for a long time.”
2:26
So at this point I feel pretty congruent. It’s a work in progress but the …. Experiences that I had in growing up allowed me to become a stronger person and to be able to handle adversity without feeling a victim and that for me has been a really valuable lesson in my life.
3:00

00:00
Yes, it was my understanding that my mother really pushed my grandmother to see me. You know, she would… my grandmother and she  would talk about Reiki and about the different people who had come to Keosauqua to visit my grandmother because at that point she had moved closer to my mother. Because she was supposed to be retired but I can’t imagine being retired from Reiki and that was true for grandmother. So my mother, even when I was there she would just say, “It’s Phyllis look at Phyllis, she is your perfect person!”And I would go: «No! I’m not your perfect person.» But in the end it seemed as though my mother saw something in me and in my connection, future connection with Reiki that I din’t see, for sure. And neither did my grandmother.
01.12

11:02
So the succession may of not be one person, I don’t know. It could end up being a group of people, but for sure the master body of this system needs to be able to open to another way of thinking and another way of being as masters, I would say a higher expression of mastery in order for the succession-process to be successful. And what I mean by successful is that it is done not without conflict because I don’t believe that there is a possibility of no conflict but I believe that we can see the conflict as a natural progression toward a creative resolution, reconciliation.
11:59
And if they don’t keep that in mind, if they vote… if they want to take a vote by personality, then I will have failed. Because this position is not about personality, I mean, I would have lost, hands down if they would have taken a vote on personality, because my personality was a wreck. Reiki healed me. This having to force myself out of my personality idiosyncrasies to think bigger and to think, you know, more humane, you know, it made me this way. You know, I might have had leaning sort of. But y’know it made me give up a lot of personality distortions. And it’s not about personality…..
13:00

1:52
So my personality is in the relative world and the lineage bearer comes from the absolute. So what happens for me and what happened for me is that Reiki gave me a bridge. Now the bridge is really important. It is difficult to go from the relative world to the absolute. So Reiki allows me this bridge to come here. But unfortunately when I’m here it’s very easy sort of by gravity to just go *flutsch* back to.. back to the relative world. And we see this. So in the beginning for instance, when I would teach classes my husband would say at the time, I need to come to your class because I need to see the best of you. I could take it and be hurt by that but I really understood what he meant. So he would come to class and he would see me leave my personality behind in some way and go to the absolute and become Reiki Master. And then after class we would walk home or drive home or something and *boom* we get inside the door and I’m screaming at the kids, right? So I’m back to the relative world just in you know ten minutes.
3:23

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

8:18
So I offer this to all of you who just don’t like me, which I totally understand. You know you don’t need to like me, you don’t even need to love me and you don’t need to recognize me. You just have to allow that I’m a human being who has a path and this path ended up to have this absolute … encouragement of lineage bearer. And I’ve done my best and I know that maybe I’ve could have done better if I’d have been a different person, but I wasn’t a different person. And I am lucky to have a family that is my … that has become my anchor in my relative world and at the same time have people around me to support me being my absolute best. So that’s a little pun a play on words, in English “absolute best”.
9:25

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