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

2:28
I have been in some family constellation work through students of Bert Hellinger . I’ve been very taken by depth of forgiveness that happens as a result of simply , in my book, understanding circumstances. So
0251 (räusper)
2:56
I haven’t done my own personal familywork, with family constellation work, which I would like to, but the situation has never come up. But I have done work within the lineage, so we had a constellation where there was a person standing in for Mikao Usui, standing in for Chujiro Haysashi, standing in for Hawayo Takata and standing in for me, Phyllis Furumoto. And then… for the successor of the lineage. Fascinating, really fascinating. And what happened was, is that in all of our imagination we found out that we had never connected like Mikao Usui with Chujiro Hayashi and imagined them having conversation, which is exactly what happened in the constellation. And for Hawayo Takata to have conversation with Chujiro Hayashi, which of course she did many, many times, for hours, I’m sure.
4:06

4:06
But I never imagined that, so to hear these people converse together and to say “Well, I always wanted this from you.” And the other person saying “But I couldn’t have given you that, that you had to find for yourself.” And then the energy of forgiveness and reconciliation coming in that same moment was astonishing, it was very moving for me and allowed me… I think they came at a time when it allowed me to divest myself of last ideas that as a lineage bearer I had to be perfect.
5:00
I knew my grandmother wasn’t perfect, for sure. And ..it was always my big paradox or my big….dilemma of how to hold my grandmother as the woman that I knew she was and my experience of her as a granddaughter as another person of the planet and as a Reiki Master 0526 knowing she was not hum… ähm 0528 knowing she was not perfect and yet hearing how.. she was so perfect for everybody else. So that was an interesting play in itself in this constellation. So I found it to be… I find it to be very interesting and it’s something actually that I’m still working on…0550 to get clear about
5:52

0:00
So the first thing that happened… well, so my mind goes to “Who would be on this list of forgiveness or making amend, coming to reconciliation actually, the best that I know. And when I go there, I think well.. is this really necessary?… And so there are two answers to this question “is it really necessary?”
0:46 (räusper)
On one end.. one level I feel that the gift of accepting who we were as human beings at that time and being able to understand both sides of the coin… both sides of the situation, is a kind of reconciliation of itself and doesn’t need to involve the other person.. necessarily.
1:15
On the other hand, for some time and in some instances I can when that would be really beneficial and be able to happen… by simply going out to dinner and talking about what happened and then come into a realization that both of us were in circumstances where we really just had to do what we did….
1:50
But what happenes in that instance is that… I believe it doesn’t build the ability to accept what’s so. And that for me is a kind of a foundation principle. It’s like … I met, I met this man at the beginning of when I was Reiki master in 19.., no, yah, in 1980. And I fell in love with him and we got married and we were married for about 7 years. And there were parts of our life which were ecstatic and they were incredibly creative, because we’re both very creative people. And in that creativity, we were undisciplined. So… (laugh)… we also created very painful situations for each other. So a sort of like the very best of ourselves and the very worst of ourselves kind of got brought out in this situation.
2:58

2:58
And when I talked about irrevocable damage, it’s like I feel that in our relationship unconsciously, unfortunately for the first few years, we did irrevocable damage to each other in the sense that we knew where our… because we were so intimate and so close, that we knew exactly where that sacred wound was in each of us. And that, you know, somehow we kept pounding on this sacred wound until it became so painful that the blissful parts and the creative parts of our relationship didn’t actually match this other part and that the pain just got too much for us to deal with being together.
3:56
It’s been a very interesting thing because we’ve stayed “friends” so to speak, very close friends, and he entered into a relationship almost immediately after we’ve separated. But she always felt like the second wife, for years until I actually had to go home at some point to kind of clean up this relationship. Burn has letters and burn… everything that we had that I felt like had attachment, and really release this relationship back to neutral, almost, so that she could actually take her place as his wife. And I…
4:44

4:44
I feel that still there is this place that we never go to anymore because we know that we’re vulnerable with each other and we don’t really trust each other and actually I feel like both of us, not just him, which I’d like to think, but…( laugh).. also myself. I feel like in that sense we are untrustworthy with each other, that there is this kernel of some piece of our relationship which is untrustworthy and that we recognize that and in that recognition I think it’s just realistic to accept it and do the best we can of what we have and be able to enjoy that piece and enjoy each other and not go to the places that would again put us in this place of irrevocable damage. And so..
5:50
I think that’s a good example of that and I feel like that there are people in my life, I could make a list of those people, and what it’s taught me about myself has been invaluable. So in my next relationships I was very careful when I went there and in my present relationship, 0614 you know, there’s a…  I won’t say it because it’s really nasty, but
06:19
there is this phrase that as a sort of a wild Hippie person, which just flung around like … you know, we just used it for every situation and so it became part of my vocabulary and in Reiki of course part of my private vocabulary, but this is a phrase that really goes to the sacred wound part of my present partner and I got it after a few instances that it would be better if I could not say this phrase, you know, in our conversations. And…
7:05
In this situation she was conscious enough being able to say „You know, if you say this again, I’m out of here, no matter how much I love you, I can’t stay here“. And I was conscious enough to say „Well, I don’t wanted to do that. So, you know, I’m not gonna do this anymore“. And I have, sometimes when I feel really hurt and upset, but it’s gotten.. she’s gotten less sensitive but I’ve also gotten much more sensitive. So in the sense that we learn from these places where we’ve created this irrevocable damage… I just hope that, you know, there is something better that comes out of that, you know for myself and for people who come to.. come into my life afterwards. And then I can honour my realtionship with this man that I was… that I’m still very much in love with, but I still… I can’t live with him for sure, that is not possible. So .. interesting..
8:18

00:00
Yes, perhaps it addresses a question I have for you… which … I reali.. I’m really comfortable in saying these things …  I do say them in public a lot. I mean .. y’know depending on the situation. (pauses …)
00:40
But I guess I have to just trust the context in which this will be presented in … y’know like … does this really have to do with Reiki? And then I answered my own question by saying, of course ,it does and especially in the sense of the theme or the purpose, the mission of the film itself … I had to kind of had to go around that for a minute and check that out.
01:11

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

06:46
So we ended up in this very small town in the south-east corner of Iowa. That’s where I went to school all my years of … in the United States Grade School, so from 5-18. And basically I saw my life as being really terrible. My Brother was born almost 5 years after I was, so I was almost 5. I had been an only child, very pampered and very dotted on for 5 years and then, all of a sudden, the son comes. In Japanese families, sons are very important. And he was also a premature baby. So he got lots of attention. And I felt totally not cared for at all.  And then a couple of years later my sister came, so very close together. Actually, they’re.. I think they are an year and a half apart.
07:54
So, it was kind of .. one thing over another thing. And then in school – because this was right after the war – people were not happy with having a Japanese child in school. And the teachers were extremely weird. Mostly, the prejudice and they kind of hateful experience I had in school were from teachers. They would… the kids would tease me about being Japanese and I would, of course, fight for my self. And … I was the one that got her mouth washed out with soap. Or, y’know, got to stand in a corner. Or.. and the other kids never had any kind of retribution from the teachers.
08:49
It was only when I was 64, if you can imagine, and found out that I had a metastasis from my breast cancer.And so that my girl friends from this time, I’ve met them when I was 4 when I moved to Keosauqua, three of them came and we talked about my relationship with my mother which was very fraught and my family life back in those days and who they saw I was during that time. And it was a revelation, really, I mean, this was really true reconciliation. 0934 OK, I’m gonna take a little brake here..0937
09:42

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

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

3:58
So I am a little bit sensitive about the word “victim” and the word… and the other ones that surround this word because…. it feels a lot like an analogy that I tell my students that if you were in a rowboat going down a river and you had oars and you didn’t use them, you’re a victim. It’s your choice to put the oars in the water and have a… and participate in your own life then you have a possibility to make decisions and to have some sense of where you want to go. But you’ll never not get out of the river of life, so you can’t be totally in control but you can be partners with it.
4:55
That’s what I feel like I’ve learned in Reiki through my life. And it’s changed the perception of my life and as I said 2 years ago when I had this metastasis diagnosis and these three women came and we… they like helped me rewrite my childhood so that now what I realize is that I was brought up in this small community, which I hated, that people really cared about me even though I didn’t feel like I cared about them and that everybody watched me because I was the doctor’s daughter, so… I hated that too, but also they cared for me, so I was in danger, somebody would come and take care of me, right? 0550
5:55

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

0:00
ähm.. 0007 It took a few years for me to understand that my mother had been with my grandmother during the time that she met Chujiro Hayashi and began to practice Reiki. And what I understood from her was that she had been initiated in 1st degree with Chujiro Hayashi. And then that was it. She didn’t do 2nd degree. And for most of the time in our relationship from 1980 when I became… understanding about being a Reiki master, she was not happy with the way that Reiki was being taught, that it had been changed through the culture and that we didn’t respect it.
1:08
It was a kind… it was something like.. in polite society you don’t talk about religion, politics and then I had to add Reiki, because her political ideas were very different than mine, so we never talked about politics and we didn’t talk about Reiki because in the end, you know, when I got older and more mature in my Reiki understanding… for her, Reiki was something private, it was not a series of phenomenas, it was… it was something that was practiced without.. being surprised in some by how it worked.
2:09
What she saw in the students of my grandmother and me included, 0216 was that we.. we shared a lot, we shared a lot about… (repositioning herself)
2:32

2:33
We shared a lot about what we were doing with each other and that wasn’t something that she liked, that we were constantly trying to figure out the psychology of what was happening, that we were always astonished that it worked… things like this. So for her this was kind of sacroligious, anti-Reiki so to speak.
3:04
As she grew older, she grew very possessive of her mother because… I feel that she understood my grandmother’s passion for Reiki and that is was sort of her destiny to be this person in Reiki and at the same time, I don’t know if my gandmother would have been a different kind of mother, but as a mother she was… well, they didn’t have an easy relationship. So it was an interesting process to see them, those two and then me, because the three of us felt like if I backed up as an observer, felt like we were the three women in the household sometimes and everybody else faded into the background. And that was interesting and a lot of it had to do with……I feel that a lot of it had to do with my mother’s perception how Reiki should be practiced.
4:30

4:30
So in the end when I had cancer and I started… and I was living in the same town as her, I was receiving hands-on-Reiki like from 7 to 5 times a week, almost every day, not from my mother but from friends of mine and people would come in and stay for a couple of weeks and treat me and so on. So, she would never let me treat her but she offered to treat me a couple of times and that was very special…
5:11
She said that she wanted to be a mother and that she didn’t want to take Reiki on as a career, so to speak. And I used to think that this was a kind of sacrifice, but I realized it was a choice of hers and that she made that consciously and I appreciated that.
5:39
Now that she had passed, I feel much freer in what I can do in the public and what is… what I can open up to the public because I feel that I have… I have taken on some of her understanding of what’s private with my grandmother, the line between grandmother as a private grandmother and Hawayo Takata as the Reiki master.
6:15
One of the things that has been exciting for me in … now I go back to the archives and what I’ve said about going through my grandmother’s things, my mother actually gave me in 1980…something when my grandmother … after my grandmother died… that they will be, I hope, will be housed in the Japanese-American-National Museum in Los Angeles because it… she will be held as a whole person, not just a Reiki person, but as a Japanese-American woman who did this amazing thing and dedicated her life and has touched the lives of people all over the world. So for me that’s an amazing story.
7:07

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

0000
Ähm… I think she objected to some of the ways Hawayo Takata had been …(pauses)  start again.
00:23
I feel that she had reservations about the way that people treated my grandmother, Hawayo Takata, as their master. A couple of  people in California used to buy her clothes, and sort of dress her up. And she wore a wig for a while because they wanted her to. So she kind of became this like dress-up doll that … it wasn’t really her and eventually all of us including my siblings and my mother convinced her not to wear a wig because it looked so weird. And, she had beautiful white hair and to just wear her hair, her natural hair.
01:23
So in the last 2 or 3 years that’s what she did. But there was this place where people put her on a pedestal and treated her in a way that was not very … actually not very respectful. Because they were using her for their own means. And my mother was very sensitive to that. I don’t know if she had issues with the way that Hawayo Takata was teaching Reiki, I don’t think so. But more how her students treated her and what they wanted out of her. You know as a Master. Because there were other masters that Hawayo Takata had initiated who were good students. You know, they didn’t do that and they would call every month and give my grandmother a report about their practice and about their classes and talk to her about their Reiki and so on. And those were the people that my mother really approved of.
02:37

12:57
This phrase “the spiritual lineage” came in the second meeting at Barbara Brown’s house when we were trying to put together statements of identity for this Reiki Alliance. And I still believe that these statements have great foresight and also a great challenge. I can’t say them right off hand but one of them says something like… “we recognize all masters as equal in the oneness of Reiki” and the Reiki Alliance members today still argue about this phrase. But I believe that all masters of Reiki are equal in the oneness of Reiki. It doesn’t mean we are the same and it’s very important for me…it was very important for me that this thought was a founding stone, a corner stone of the Reiki Alliance because I didn’t want anyone to feel that this Reiki Alliance was a like an exclusive club. But actually my fear became realized and when the new form started to appear in the mid 1980ies or actually in the late 1980ies the Reiki Alliance rally closed it’s door and became very specific to the practice that was passed on from Hawayo Takata to her masters. And that was fine for me but I also wanted them to realize that “they weren’t better than” and this is something that is still in discussion in the Reiki Alliance today.
14:53

0:00
Well, I’m just trying to remember, if I can, if there is another motivation to put that in… it may be that that was a little bit of a defensive statement because Barbara Weber had put out that she was the only true Reiki master that had been initiated and that it was maybe from that standpoint that some of the people voted for that particular statement. I wanted Barbara Weber to join the Reiki Alliance, that was my dream and for all of us to work together. I would say that….
1:09
..that maybe 85% of the masters were initiated by Hawayo Takata was a member of the Reiki Alliance at some point. And at that point, because we all practiced the same system it was really easy to say that, that “all masters are equal in the oneness of Reiki”. And for me it means the same thing as in the US constitution, that all men are created equal. And I.. I feel that that’s true still today and is our challenge not to go into our human ego and decide that we or our lineage or whatever is the best. It’s just so, this is the practice that I have. I cannot say this is the best practice. I can only say that this is what I’ve received from my grandmother and in my way of honouring her I want to be as and practice as close to what she taught me as possible and that’s true for all of the masters that were initiated by her.
2:24

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
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

02:13
But it was important for me to be able to hold the totality of what Hawayo Takata passed on as practice and know that the totality really was about the 22 masters and in all the different ways and variations that we practice.
That the truth of the practice was in the whole, no’… was not in this person’s practice or that person’s practice but in the whole group’s voice of the practice. And right now, y’know, what’s sad for me is that that circle is now not alive. In the sense that most of them have died.
03:00
So, now what we’r… what I’m working on is creating something called, which is not just being created now, I mean, it’s already in existence but the… to create consciousness about something called the “Master-Body”. Which for me is this collective of all Reiki Masters and that whether or not you choose to be an active member of this body you add to the body energetically, just by being a master.
03:33

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

00:00
It isn’t that it it’s not painful. (0007-0011) (coughing) It can be confusing. And it can be thoughtless. But basically I think we’re moving into an era in which people see that there is a pathway and that my students will.. can go to another form and find what they are looking for there. And then there are other people who can come from another form and find what they are looking for here. And without this movement … what’s really important in nature is crossbreeding. And, y’know, it’s really important not to end up having a monologue.
01:00

01:00
And, y’know, at first with all these different forms I used to think that it was a betrayal of my Grandmother and her teaching, y’know, to stray from this form. (0114) But now what I’m seeing is that we just created (0117) we just created our own (0119) ähm… we created our whole ähm …(shakes head) (0131)  we created our whole field (0134) of different forms of Reiki practice, (0138) so that people could enter however they came to Reiki and that people could find their way through Reiki. So then it becomes even a multi-level path, not just entering into one practice staying there for the rest of their lives. But having the … the ability to follow their impulse to other things.
02:04

4:52
And that could have really cleaned up the… what I would call the “fringe” element of Reiki where people are really combining Reiki with different things and calling it Reiki but there … it’s not really Reiki and most Reiki people would agree with that. they would have had to use another word, which would have been fine.
5:23
So.. that was one instance where I felt really misused by the German Reiki Master community because they were the ones that came to me, a lot of them, and said: “Joop is sending us threatening letters, could you do something about this?”. So then when I asked them to support what I was doing, they couldn’t do it, they wouldn’t send me money or anything. So I did it anyway. Cost me about 60’000 Dollars.
5:56
And you know, it was for their benefit, it wasn’t mine. I wasn’t practicing in Europe and in fact I wouldn’t have cared. Should Joop have taken me to court it wouldn’t have stood up, he could have sued me for use of the trademark. But actually, since I was the original owner of the trademark, it would have been really a crazy situation.
6:24
I don’t know what would have happened if I had just let it go. I mean, I think that he might have tried to take somebody to court or shut them down as a Reiki Master and I don’t really think he could have. I mean that could have maybe been nasty but I don’t think he would have been able to do it because he had no authority, recognized authority in the community at that point. And at that point, I was still recognised by most people as the Grand Master. So it was a very interesting juxtaposition in the mid 1990ies. Now that is not so true because the proliferation of different kinds of Reiki and how many Reiki students they’re just in numbers in the world.
7:13

0:00
The one thing additionally that I want to say is that technology was not my friend .. (laugh)… One of the things that I feel like really was…. very disturbing for people is that because this was such a controversial issue, there was nobody that I could turn to, to communicate this stuff out and the Internet was not there yet. People didn’t have E-mails, I mean, I didn’t… I don’t think I used E-mails at the time. And Jürgen, my friend, Jürgen and another friend of mine kept saying: “Phyllis, you have to get a Computer, you’ll love Email and pretty soon you won’t be able to live without it”. And I went: “I am not getting into this!”.
1:02
So, if we had been technologically now, you know, if we had been in mid 1990ies where we are now in technology, I would have been able to have.. keep everybody informed and actually educate the Reiki community about trademark. And we could have done something then, that would have been really neat and very beneficial for everyone. But it cost me (0131) (burp and background noise) that 60’000 Dollars was also my education because I sat for hours in trademark attorney’s office and they had to explain to me like the very basics of trademark  and how they worked and how I was paying money for and so on. And…. it was a good education for me and if I ever have to get into trademark again, I actually can figure it out.
2:03

2:03
There are a couple of other interesting points: nr. 1 I wanted to create another name for the Reiki that I do like … .. well like Barbara Weber came up with «Radiance Technique», she trademarked it, it was totally clearly hers, nobody fought her for it and it was really clean. You know, and that’s what everybody could have done in that moment, is to just have been clean. But it wasn’t, we weren’t there, we weren’t mature enough at that time and I am including myself and I couldn’t think of another name, so I went back to Usui Shiki Ryoho, which was not trademarkable because it was in common use and also… because it contained a man’s name and the man was not alive to ok it.
3:05
So then, after I couldn’t think of another name and couldn’t trademark Usui Shiki Ryoho then I thought, well this is Reiki just telling me: “ok, you stood up to somebody who wanted to sort of… exercise control over a certain group of masters and it was good that you said «no”. And I appreciate the Reiki Alliance for supporting me in handling the costs of this particular law suit.
3:49
And I feel like it was a good thing for us to do, for the whole Reiki community, because now…. in the… now people can not trademark Reiki and so it’s still… it’s the same, we still have freedom of use and… no one has to be the Reiki police. (laugh) .. So we get back to that again.
4:21

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

0:00
Well, for me the idea of Reiki Home came when I was using Kenyon Ranch as a workshop-venue for myself. It was wonderful that it was only 20 minutes from my house. They owned it. They were running it. All I had to do was call up and make a reservation. And then as Reiki people began to come and attend events and workshops there, quite often they would say ‘well, we should buy this for ourselves, this is a perfect Reiki place’ and I don’t know what they meant actually, by that time. Some of them loved the charm of the old buildings and the natural feel of how the buildings and the whole ranch itself was a part of the landscape there. It also has a very serene energy, a very peaceful energy, I don’t know why but it does. And then I started to think about the nature of our Reiki practice and how we relate to the earth and (0132) how we relate to (0134) (räusper) excuse me, how we relate to (0137) other things, other than ourselves, other than human beings, and I’ve been thinking all these years that the reiki community has grown and grown and grown…
01:45:

01:45:
…and if we would take one thing, like recycling, to heart and the whole reiki community would actually recycle everything to the best of their ability we can make a huge difference in our communities because it would mean that not just our families would recycle but then we would affect our neighbours, our friends, our colleagues – it could be a kind of world movement. But I could never get anybody interested in this particular project. (Laughs)
2:26
So, I invited a friend of mine out who was … whose job is Resource Development. He is a person who does reconciliation with the earth and also with communities and with the nature of their relationship to the planet and so on. So, his history and telling of how the land was before I came to Arizona was amazing. These lands were grass lands and the grass was about this high (points) and when the cowboys, the settlers came through these valleys they realised this was great pasture for cattle. And as in the late 1800s as California started to raise cattle they started to do cattle-drives that went across the Southern part of the United States and into St. Louise and other places where they could ship the meat back to the East coast.
3:43
So when they came through here the cattle grazed on the grass, they trampled it, they were in such numbers that very quickly the grass died because they didn’t have time to regenerate. And their …they also brought seeds from other places. So we got Mesquites trees everywhere and the land became defensive because it needed to be. So, cactus started to grow, there was less water feeding the top soil. So, it got drier and drier so the cactus came more and more. Now it is a very prickly landscape…
04:21:

04:21:
…but in those days it was a very soft landscape. So, the secret is to gain water… to have water stay on the top of the surface of the land instead of running off so fast. So, a lot of ranchers here, who have taken this to heart, have gone up into their foothills and they take the material, that’s natural material like rocks and twigs or branches or dead trees or whatever is lying around, and they build these little dams every so many feet down a water shed and in doing that it just stops the water for maybe 30 minutes. But that water soaking in to the land changes the whole landscape.
0511:
And they have changed their ranches, which have been full of Mesquite and prickly cactus and so on, into grass lands again. Just by doing this. So, I had this idea or this image of a hundred Reiki people out there for a couple of summers doing these kinds of projects and restoring the land around the ranch and of course for the ranch into grass land again and to be able to show people that it is so easily done, it just takes manpower … or, excuse me, people power (laughs).
05:53:

05:53:
So I got very enthusiastic about this and also that I just, when I tuned in to the ranch, and this is kind of esoteric, I just felt the ranch saying to us, as a group, “I need healing”. “I need..”, You know, it‘s been used as a … with horses and cattle, so it has been trampled on, now people drive all over the ranch in cars packing the earth and not letting the small creatures, the ants and so on live actually in the soil, so it is compacting this clay-sand mixtures, so then the plants have a really hard time to grow. So now it’s becoming just a flat like, cement like, surface which it shouldn’t be.
06:41:
All we would need to do is stop driving on this property for a year. And it would make a total and huge difference. There are natural berries that grow on the land that we could harvest, there are many, many things that could happen and at the same time I really feel that in our Reiki community it just seems like we’re all trying to make our living, you know, to be individually sustainable but I don’t feel like we can be sustainable until our system is sustainable. Until our reiki practice is sustainable. I just felt like we could create an income for our system and for Reiki maybe as a general practice. And the way we could do that is to benefit other communities that are also working on healing like a yoga community, therapy community, esoteric kinds of workshops that teach people how to work with energy, and so on. And that they would walk into this ranch as a venue and it would be a Reiki space, literally. The food would be cooked by Reiki people, the paintings on the wall would be done by Reiki people, the rooms would be cleaned with Reiki … people (laughs)
08:17:

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:

10:32:
and that we can be ourselves there. So we really opened the vision to including reconciliation with forms of reiki practice with different, even … different, I would say, factions or groups within the practice that I have, Usui Shiki Ryoho. And to be able to come together not to teach each other our systems but to share what we have in common which is so much more profound, what we have in common, than our differences. Our differences are mainly on a kind of physical level, of doing, but the difference … the similarities are about our humanness, our humanity and how we are touched as human-beings by the practice of Reiki. And what develops in us, in our practice of Reiki and that for me … (shakes her head in awe) far outweighs our differences. So, somehow if we can come to this place in ourselves, I believe this group of people that is working on manifesting this calling that we call Reiki Home ..
12:00

12:00
..if we can do this in ourselves then I feel like it’s possible to do it around the world. A lot of people say, well, y’know, why Southern Arizona? Y’know, Arizona doesn’t have a very good reputation for liberalism, for instance. And, I think, you know when we look at our planet it’s like, well, why India? You know, why do people go to India for gurus? Well, because that’s where the gurus grew up and they lived and that’s where this whole thing happened and if feels like that however it happened, whatever the circumstances were that brought me to Arizona, that brought me to Kenyon Ranch in the first place, that brought Reiki students there and there are lots of Reiki students that come in the other groups and they’ve also connected and said “oh, y’know this would be a great place for Reiki.” So, it’s been an interesting development. Some people call it my dream but it does go along with some of the ideas that I had in the beginning about having like a retirement villages for Reiki Masters or something really crazy like that. This is my work now, to do this Reiki Home, to realise it because I feel like it’s my next step of calling in Reiki. So, this is all I can do… Hmmhm.
13:50

0:00
Oh I’m sorry I didn’t make that clear… (0009)  We are incorporating or inviting or visioning that this will be a reconciliation place for all Reiki practices to come together. Not, as I said, not to teach each other our practices, not to convince each other who is right or wrong but to live in peace, to rally live supporting each other because I believe that.. what humanity is asking for is a way to get in touch with our human spirit and to be able to nurse that spirit just in a very simple way like we do with Reiki, our Reiki practice.
0:54
And if we spend our time arguing about hand positions and you know personalities and so on it’s really a sad waste of an opportunity to develop humanity in its sense, to deepen our Reiki practice. And you know having different forms and having different ideas about
0123 (räusper) 
where Reiki, the energy comes from and you know should we have oral tradition and have a master who stands in front and in person and initiates or is it okay to accept you know distant initiations and so on. All these questions, they really are the meat for some great conversations, not about finding out who’s right or wrong but to deepen our understanding of the universe and these questions Reiki is leading us to
2:01

2:01
And I believe that this is what Takata said when she said “let Reiki teach you”. She didn’t say “go practice Reiki however you want to”. She said “let Reiki teach you” and one of the things that I learned about Reiki is that when you get a question that’s the great learning, that’s the place where you get to go deeply and sometimes it takes you years to find the answer. And I believe if we all came together and connected and discussed these questions we would further our own individual practices, our own individual understanding of the universe and raise the practice of Reiki in the world to… a recognized force in our social transformation.
2:58

12:31
And I believe that there is truth in that story, a kind of bigger truth that no fact can destroy. And that .. this concentration on fact has been a little misused, not.. I don’t think.. not consciously but through the motivation of saving people from the untruth, whatever that is… which I can’t go there myself… And the other things is that … I feel like there is a drive in some people and perhaps it’s more male than female, for having really solid foundation, really like mental truth, like I know this to be true (1338) (cough) …. and 
13:48
.. my basis of truth of the story is the way that I feel when I tell the story and the effect that is has on my students. So these are two really different measures of truth and I would say generally species-wise that intellectual is more masculine and feeling is more feminine.
(1413)
However it is my… it’s one of my bucket-list-things to do is to bring these two together and to be able to have peace with this because I have to say…
14:32

0:00
So, if we could generalize and say that this informational truth was sort of masculine and the feminine truth was from feeling then there would be a wish for me to bring these two together and it’t kind on my bucket list of things to do before I die that somehow these two will come together peacefully, not in competition but in understanding that they actually complement one another. And this the thing that again is… always.. a little irritates me, because.. people write books or they want to save the Reiki community from another lie or whatever their motivation is and I think it’s too bad that… we don’t really want to serve the community and what I mean by that is not to be so egoistic about it, you know to feel like I’m going to save the world or I’m going to write the best so and so or whatever and all the research basically that has been done, where I ‘ve been able to see the actual facts have supported the story as I have gotten it, received it from Hawayo Takata.
1:44 ähm (räusper)
There are not very many… there have been one or two little things, where I’ve had to really think about “what did she really say?” and “did I use different words?” and “did I misunderstand this part?” and so on but for the most part it’s been totally supportive. …The publication of having the existence of the memorial stone in Tokyo..outside of Tokyo .. totally supports the story as it was told to me by Hawayo Takata.
2:25

0:00
Why would I have to make a sacrifice? If you ask me “what would I have to give?” that’s a totally different question (0016) (René: let me rephrase the question..laughter…Thank you … and the answer would be?) (0028)
0:29
Well… first of all I feel like I have to stay alive long enough for this to happen, because one can not push these things, these kinds of coming together. So I believe that this filming, I believe your conversations with all these Reiki Masters around world
(0058).
I believe that movements like the Australian Congress (for whatever better word)… I believe that Reiki Home as it matures will bring these factions together in a way that is the right time. And then when we meet it will be able to be done in a way that people will say “well, that wasn’t so difficult! Why did we think that this was impossible?”.
01:30
And this has happened over and over and over in my lifetime with Reiki. And so I don’t know why it can’t happen now. So I have to give up dying…. And probably other things in my personality that I can’t see right now. But I have to be able to make the space open for the conversation and I work on it myself.
02.10

02.10
And OFF THE RECORD….. You know Justin Stein is a really great resource for me in preparing myself. Because he has no agenda, he has no attachment to being the right guy, he just is doing his job in the best way he knows how. He just touches my heart so much and he really challenges me with some of the stuff that he’s found and it’s been good for me but it comes in these little steps and I can feel myself opening you know, opening, getting softer and so on. This has been really great. I really respect him a lot. He for me is a true researcher and the rest of them are only …. digging for gold and they haven’t found it yet. That’s my personal opinion and NOT ON THE RECORD!!!! I mean it’s a crude way of putting it but it’s really what I feel.
3:36

0:00
Certain people bring out certain qualities in us, you know, when we partner with them and it’s really interesting, you know, we always polarize. So you know the more macho the researchers are, you know, and now I feel like Frank Petter and William Rand and some of the others have softened a bit. I don’t know if that’s really true or not but it feels like they have. So I feel less defence, defended and so you know it’s like this is part of the process it’s going to take to have us come together not particularly in the sense of being in the same room talking together but being able to use their data and find it ok and then… you know what I mean (0054) So.. (René in the back ground) Oh no! This is not on the record (Thassos: this was on record) … I’m kiding, I dont care. (Thassos in the back ground). (0111)
1:10

0:00
Well there.. at this point I have to say that… I have to consider my physical health, so most likely not. But in the sense of an ideal situation, it wouldn’t work unless we had a higher purpose. We couldn’t just meet to meet because what’s the point? I don’t want to necessarily be friends with them, I don’t want to learn their…. form of Reiki. I don’t want to teach them my form of Reiki, I mean I’m not… that’s not an agenda item on my part. So the question is more to the point why would we meet, what would be the motivation for us to go and it would have to be something pretty astonishing, something… (0103) you know I’ve been studying ähm …
1:09
excuse me .. .(0113) I’ve been studying regenerative thinking and a part of this regenerative thinking is to acknowledge that in order to have transformational processes happen that we need to be able to think on three.. at least three levels and maybe more. And the three levels that are primary are the individual, this community.. our group-mind and then for us to have a higher purpose. So it’s a third line of work.
1:42

1:42
So, for instance, if individually we all worked on ourselves enough and were engaged enough to feel like we were able to go an meet each other… then the next line is what would we.. what would bring us together and it would have to be a third line of work, it would have to be something that all of us were passionate about and all of us were willing to come together to talk about this (points upwards), not here (points midway) and not our individual selves.
2:21
So, for instance, in ProReiki there is.. this organisation has in someway set a bar that’s a higher purpose, which is to explore… the possibility of making Reiki professional, which I am still on the borderland whether or not this is an appropriate mission, but it still is a mission but it brings us together so that I can be in a room or be in a meeting with people that I would never be in a meeting …. I mean I wouldn’t be there just flat. So that’s all I am saying is that we would have to have really interesting conversation at hand.
3:15

reconciliation is the force that brings us together. Just to be clear: I could do reconciliation without meeting them.

0:00
I don’t know their systems, I don’t know what the differences are, so I haven’t a clue so I don’t see the disparity personally and… because…. Yeah because I would have to ask him what does he really mean by Usui Reiki and by Takata Reiki because (0030) for me there is no Takata Reiki, (0033) there is Usui Shiki Ryoho and….
0:39
For me there is just Usui Shiki Ryoho and under this lineage. So it’s a very specific practice. And it’s ok for me that our practice is different than other practices. This is what was given to us and this is what we’re are practicing and it develops through the next lineage bearer, which is me. And you know trying to …. figure out how the term “Reiki Master” came so that he can kind of use it against people is just so like what’s the point?
1:23
Again for me I heard my grandmother refer to herself as a Reiki Master, I heard her to refer to other people as Reiki Masters, I heard her refer to Chujiro Hayashi as a Reiki Master, so I don’t see what the point is. (0140) äh.. (räusper)
1:44

1:44
Trying to translate Japanese into English or any other language is difficult and what he doesn’t really understand is that of course he can go to a generalized thing but she had full knowledge of Japanese and she had full knowledge of English and so her translation not just included the linguistic translation but included the cultural and the practice translation. So for me it’s like “well why not Reiki Master?”. And I agree with him on the point that in Japan you don’t declare yourself a Reiki Master and you don’t declare yourself a Grand Master. These are done through recognition. And I was not … I didn’t declare myself a Reiki Master nor did I declare myself a lineage bearer or a Grand Master. That was done through the recognition of my grandmother and of my colleagues and of students. So I’m fine with being Phyllis Furumoto and this other part for me really is important. That recognition has a lot to bear. So I agree with him on that point. (0306) … (räusper) And…
3:11
And as an aside to term these politics, for me it’s not politics because we are not talking about social behaviour. We are talking about the manifestation of spiritual practice which has a totally different meaning. So there are….
3:34

3:34
In Japan, because of the culture.. Japan introduced Buddhism to it’s… brought Buddhism in kind of the year 536 or something. And out of that time many different… sects like SECTS of Buddhism emerged. They basically all practiced Buddhism in the sense that they take the words that… were attributed to Buddha and the methods that he used to attain enlightenment, they have approximately the same identification of enlightenment what the term means, but they take only a small portion of his teaching and one method to get there. And that’s the difference of all these sects. But they all know that they.. their foundation is all the same practice. And I would love Reiki to become that way because it means that there is no competition, there is no right and wrong, just different forms and different methods to get to the same relationship with Reiki, the universal life energy.
5:04
So for instance in Zen meditation, which is Zen Buddhism, which is very… well we have some idea in the western world about Zen meditation, so it’s a very specific kind of meditation. And you basically sit in silence and you’re.. you sit doing chants of mantras and stuff to a certain amount of time and then your process is to have internal processes that bring you to enlightenment to peace within yourself. And it takes many, many years if not a lifetime.
5:46

5:46
For another sect of Buddhism, they believe that …. I can’t remember the name of the sect, but it’s a sect that actually created the Japanese written language from Chinese. And this man created a sect of Buddhism and they believe that language and the chanting of language, phrases is a way to enlightenment. So this one sect takes the heart sutra and this is their main chant and they say that if you have the heart sutra on your wall and say it every day then you will, your inner self will automatically become improved. It will be beneficial.

6:45
So here is one sect that says you’re supposed to chant and use language, the other sect doesn’t use language at all. But they don’t fight against each other. They just simply see that perhaps a student of one sect could go to the other because they advance and then they decide “oh, now I need to go and sit in silence” or the other way around. And the point is that they know that their service is to the student and his benefit. And this is the part where we in Reiki are not, we don’t have yet, we don’t serve the student, we decide that our practice needs to be big and important so that we can be big and important. And we are not paying any attention to the confusion and the disarray that this brings into a student. And so not only do they have to put up with that with their own disarray inside of themselves and their own spiritual practice and figuring out what’s going on, but then they have to figure out this whole other mess that is there.

7:59
And for me the mess is an adolescent stage of development, which is where we are. This practice is only a hundred years old, give or take a year or two and… you know we are not there yet. You know, Buddhism is, you know…. In Japan now we could say it’s an 1800-year-practice. So in those 1800 years yeah in 1800 years of practice they figured out a few things, and competition is one of them.
8:43

08:43
and maybe they never had competition, I don’t know.
08:47
Andi to add.

0:00
So for me, I don’t feel that these differences can be resolved nor is it … beneficial to be resolved. People have differences of their opinion, they have differences of practice, it’s like a recipe for a certain kind of cake, every good cook has their own little take on how to make this cake really taste like the authentic yellow pound cake for instance you know. And that’s the richness of human mind and the richness of our understanding of the universe. And I…. you know having a unity for me is not having agreement. I don’t believe in agreement, I don’t believe in sameness because in nature.. look.. no two snowflakes are the same, no two crystals of water are the same, no two human beings are the same, no two leaves are the same. What makes us think in our human existence that agreeing with each other is such a great thing? I don’t know where that came from, personally.
1:33
I think it’s a mythology that would be really beneficial for us to blast. And I believe that the practice of Reiki celebrates us as individuals, it gives us exactly what each of us needs from the moment that we are initiated as a 1st degree student or even before we are initiated into the practice. Now for some people it is very important to learn through experience of money as a commitment process and for me as a practitioner of a system that asks US$ 10’000 for mastery we are asking that person to commit their life and the US$ 10’000 for me is the least of their worries. They have to commit to surrendering their livelihood to Reiki, they have to commit to support their family through Reiki, they have to commit to break and let go of all of their believe systems they have about themselves and about the universe and to be open to changing everything in their lives.
2:48

2:48
So my experience of the US$ 10’000 is that people receive the US$ 10’000 through.. when they are ready through the universe by totally miraculous ways. I mean even the people who have the money in the bank, really don’t have the money in the bank. I mean people have more money in the bank but for some people because they inherited or they worked hard for it or they won the lottery, but most people don’t spend US$ 10’000 on a whim. And you know Reiki Master candidates are asked to give these 10’000 saying this is all that I have, this is what represents my life commitment to Reiki. And it means something to them. It’s not a matter of bucks in the bank, definitely not…..
3:54
It’s part of our spiritual practice. So if we were talking about a technique this is the thing that I keep hammering away, if we talk about a technique of course you can shop and say “ok, I want to learn Swedish massage and in this school I go for, you know, 6 months, you know 2 hours a day and I pay this amount of money. For somebody.. for another school I go for a year but I go all day but it costs me 5 times more. So I can choose which one I want, what kind of technique building I want to get. But here you are talking about a spiritual practice. And everybody, as far as I’m concerned, has the capability to hand me US$ 10’000 when they’re ready. And it has proven to be so time after time after time. And most of these people, this is the most money they’ve ever accumulated in their lifetime and probably never will again.
5:01

5:01
So it doesn’t matter how many loaves of bread a Dollar buys in your country, this is not the point. The point is: are you willing to really give yourself? So if you think about other spiritual practices, like
0515 (räuspern)
as an American if I went to Japan and said “Well I didn’t learn to sit seiza” you know when I was a little kid I could only sit seiza for this is with your legs folded up but you know under you… I can only sit seiza for 6 hours so how about you know give me a break and as an American I only have to sit seiza for 6 hours while all the Japanese people have to sit seiza for 12. Well forget it! You know, the Sensei would just look at you and laugh. You know, because that’s not the point, the point is not how much you can actually do or how much you think you can do. The point is how willing are you to discipline yourself and get into that space so you can sit seiza for 24 hours and not blink an eye or perhaps at the end of that 24 hours you just kind of roll over an lie on the floor. They don’t care. They don’t care what happens after the 24 hours let me tell you. The 24 hours that’s important.
6:27

6:27
So we’re again talking about a spiritual practice. We have to get above social norms and social judgements and social understandings about how much dignity a person can have. So for instance, like I have a couple of stories: So there is this master who’s been teaching in Mexico. She is from Chile and there is a woman who comes to her 1st degree class and she recognizes her as a woman that sells lemons on the street corner by her place where she teaches Reiki. And she says “what are you doing here?” and she said “well I want to take 1st degree Reiki”. And she said “oh, okay, well…” and she said “I have the money, I have the money” the woman this lemonseller says. So she said “okay”, so she taught her 1st degree, everything is fine. So a year or two later she you know keeps coming back and finally the lemonseller says to her “I want to take 2nd degree now. I have the money saved”. And she said… and inside this Reiki Master said to herself “I can’t accept it, this is like a half a years’ lemons you know sold, I can’t accept this”. And so she calls me on the phone. And I said “who are you to steal this woman’s dignity? She knows exactly what she is doing! She knows exactly what she saved this money for! And you in your middle-class complacency are going to steal her dignity and say ‘you can’t do it because you’re too poor’. Like that is totally crazy!” And she said “okay, so there’s one more thing” So I said “okay, so what?” She said “Well she’s illiterate” and I said “So?” She said “Well, she’ll never learn the symbols”. I said “Are you crazy? This woman was smart enough to be able to sell lemons and save US$ 500, are you kidding me?” like, I mean, you know the wonderful thing about Reiki that brings us as Masters to these places where we confront our own believe systems about people, about what’s intelligence, about you know… significance of social standing, I mean, all these different things.
9:25

9;25
And we get to laugh at ourselves and say “ridiculous!”. So she didn’t laugh at herself then, but a few months later she did and she said “you know, this woman is practicing, she’s doing great work, now what do I do if she wants to be a master?” And I said “Well, don’t even go there, I mean, go there when it happens and count yourself lucky that you have such a dedicated student”.
10;00
You know, I love the story because it so identifies a lot of my own prejudices and my own believe systems that I had from the very beginning and a lot of these were broken when I, the first time I went to Russia because not only did I go to Russia .. I was really broke at the time, I hardly… I didn’t have any money to pay my employees in my office and here I was spending, you know, a thousand Dollars to go to this country and maybe not come back with any money because of course Russia had no money, that was my believe system and that they wouldn’t…if they did have that they wouldn’t pay for Reiki…
10;48

10:48
So when I got to Russia I was told that I would have one day with people who wanted to be master candidates and at that time there were 2 or 3 Russian speaking masters and they had just be initiated but all the other masters initiating in Russia were from other countries and flew in and did classes and flew back out. And they were not able to ask for US$ 150 for first degree, they just couldn’t bring themselves to do that. So I was to address these master candidates and of course one of the big questions was about the money, US$ 10’000. So I tell you I did a lot of Reiki treatment on myself, I did a lot of nashing of teeth and I knew that I had to walk in there and say “you pay your initiating master US$ 10’000, I don’t care what they ask you, you pay it!”
12:03
So.. I went in and I was like trembling and there were 130 people in this room, wanting to be Reiki Masters. And I have to say, that was in 1992 or 3 or something like this and today I still know most of those people, like 85% and 90% of them were initiated. And they paid US$ 10’000. They got it instantly which was amazing for me because if I had addressed 130 Americans and said this to them, I would have gotten a lot of resistance. So here’s the deal:
1250-51 (räusper)
I went in and I said “you know, this system is like a recipe and I want you to know that I paid US$ 10’000 to my grandmother for my commitment to Reiki, for being a Reiki Master and at the time I had no idea why I was doing this, because I didn’t even know what that meant. And I said “over the years I’ve initiated many masters and I want you to know that whether you know it or not, you will be a Reiki Master in this system and you will be a Reiki Master in a world community and though you cannot imagine travelling outside of Russia, now, you will! And when you go outside of Russia, I want you to be the same, I want you to have the same commitment to the system, I want you to have paid the same money and I want you to be able to hold your head up and say I’m a Master of Usui Shiki Ryoho, just like you!
14:15

14;15
… They stood up and gave me a standing ovation and I nearly fell to the floor. And some years after that I was in a master seminar with a man who was there and he said “you know, you came on the eve of the USSR breaking up because that was the only way legally I could go to Russia actually. And he said “here was this giant that had been brought to it’s knees and split apart and we had no dignity left and when you said that to us you gave us back our dignity and our desire to be a Reiki Master in the world.” And he said “we never even imagined that”. And he said “you gave us something to work for”.
15;20

15;20
And it still really touches me and at the time I was there, it was like about 2000 like early 2000’s, and I had gone to Russia
1534 (räusper)
expecting to address about 300 people and that’s what the hall can take, that was how many chair it had.
1544 (sniff)
And there were over 500 people that wanted to come for this weekend. So they immediately, the organizers scrambled around, they found another place that was bigger and that I could be there but it meant that I made an amazing amount of money even though each of those 500 people paid me US$ 20 or something like that.
1608 (sniff)
And I felt a little guilty about it. You know and this man just looked at me, he said “You earned every penny of that!” He said “Don’t you feel guilty, because if you feel guilty then again you’re taking away our dignity! Because we want to support you! We want you to go out of here, you know, content and able to be nourished in whatever way you want”. And it just really touched me and the relationship that the Russian speaking countries, the former USSR countries
1654 (sniff) 
have with money is something that’s very, very special!
17:00

0:00
In nature there are always activating forces and restraining forces. I think I’ve spoken about this earlier, where a seed in the ground has an activating force, it wants to grow. And when the right conditions come, the right temperature of the soil, the moisture of the soil and so on, it starts pushing its way through the soil, that that push actually gives that plant strength. If it didn’t have the restraining force of the soil, then it would grow weak. And by the time, by the time it comes up through the soil, then it wouldn’t be a strong plant and it wouldn’t mature in its full capacity. So we see this in nature over and over again. It is natural to have restraining and activating forces. And sometimes, you know, you would think that … some people say “oh, this is an activating force but this is a restraining force, and I would say “no, no, that’s an activating force and this is a restraining force”. So it becomes really a personal, subjective judgement about what’s activating and restraining. The point is that it’s something that is coming together and seemingly in conflict.”
1:39-0141
Joyce is here (waving at her)

0:00
And what happens in activating and restraining forces is that there is a reconciling force. And always the reconciling force is something that’s greater than these two positions. Right? Like there’s this physics theory that… I try to remember how to say… which is that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. And that’s also true about this activating/restraining thing is that the reconciling force, which we might call Reiki, brings something to creation and there is something new that evolves because of this.
0:55
So in our human endeavour we always will have somebody saying “Yea” and somebody saying “Nay” and there will be a reconciling force and then something new will be created. So in the story of Mikao Usui, he had an activating force, what I call a burning question. Now whether or not that question was exactly the question that I say in my class, I don’t know. But he did have a question, he had something that motivated him to go to different countries, to search for an answer and to come back and be disappointed. Which for Japanese people to say disappointed it’s not disappointed like “oh, I didn’t have chocolate ice cream”. No! This was like crushed, you know disappointed.
1:51

1:51
And so what he did was he went inside of himself to keep the search going and the resistance, the restraining force was the outer world not giving him this answer. So he had to go deeper and deeper and deeper inside of himself. And until he was ready …when he was ready, I would say, he went to the mountain, got in touch with the reconciling force and what was new created was the beginning of this practice.
2:28
His moment of energy where he was touched by Reiki, what we now call Reiki, which he didn’t have the word for at that time, I assume….
2:46

2:46
So.. in the sense of people squabbling about “I have the right Reiki” or “I have the only Reiki” or “I have Reiki from… you know, Krishna or whatever” you know all of this is working out the individual’s process and also it adds to this restraining and activating force on this global level what we call the .. what I call the global Reiki community. And Reiki is our reconciling force and I believe that when we are really ready to surrender to that reconciling force and are able to hold the creative dissidence that is happening right now, we are going to get something really great.
3:51
So if we can imagine ourselves in a cauldron just being stirred by the great hand of Reiki…
4:07

4:07
We’re preparing and we are also composed for something much greater than we could ever imagine. Not one of us, I believe, can imagine what’s going to happen eventually. And I believe that it doesn’t matter about heart/mind because… in the Japanese language it’s heart/mind, they are connected… Kokoro I believe is the word. And it is because the Japanese know that….. spirit you know like the mind is not the void of spirit. In fact our brain somehow takes in physical input and somehow magically transforms that into a thought. I mean, no one at this point knows really how that’s done, I imagine and kind of hope actually, that we never know.
5:21
Because it means that there is something that’s like a spark that we can’t explain thank God. I mean really thank God. And that that also relates to our heart, our feelings like we meet somebody for the first time and our heart just opens. We meet somebody for the first time and we go “I don’t know”, you know. And it’s not a thinking process but it’s the same thing. We take in, we look at this person and we take in the physical, you know, sensory perceptions and then all of a sudden it’s a feeling and we act on it. So heart/mind and it has to be balanced. So in the martial arts when you’re standing with a sword, ready to kill someone, well actually the military in Japan, when you are standing with a sword, ready to kill somebody you have to have Y E S!! And it has to be the congruency of your heart and your mind saying YES. It has to be complete because otherwise you dishonour the person you are killing because you are not fully present.
6:47

6:47
Presence means having your heart/mind in alignment and being there. 0653 So our western idea….OK?
0700
Our western idea of separating heart/mind is really not beneficial to us. And I believe it is actually why people are so… now… are to traumatized by war, because they don’t go in to the battlefield with YES. They go into the battlefield with their mind saying yes and their heart saying no. And they come out totally damaged because a human being, a soul cannot handle that kind of dissonance. It’s too much.
7:50

0:00
Many people ask about the reason why Chujiro Hayashi didn’t accept Hawayo Takata as a student in the beginning. And there are some rumours that is was because she was a woman, which I have never actually thought about because
0031/0032 (räusper)
the person who took her to the clinic in the first place was a woman who was a student of Chujiro Hayashi. She was the dietician in the hospital where Hawayo Takata was going to have an operation….
0048-0:56 (räusper, Augenverdreher) So, äh..
I actually have this question and it was kind of unanswered for a few years and then there was some understanding that came to me that in Japan…. during this time there was a lot of confusion and some of that confusion was about nationalistic ideas of Japan’s culture being exported to other countries and in the same way other countries’ cultures being imported into Japan, which was not actually welcomed because for the most part the Japanese considered everyone else on the planet barbarians. One of the things is that of course who they saw in the beginning were sailors and they never bathed and the Japanese bathed almost every day. So just that little physical difference was one thing.
2:04

2:04
The other thing is that the sailors of course being who they were, sailors, and kind of pirates, you know, were not very sensitive to walking on Tatami mat floors with their muddy boots and so on. And the Japanese were like very refined, very sensitive to new ones and the sailors new ones was like “Get me another drink” you know. So they had these very strong ideas about what the rest of the world was like.
2:38
So they didn’t want their refined culture … represented by flower arrangement, tea ceremony, martial arts and those kind of things, they didn’t want them to be taken out into the barbarian world and destroyed, basically. So when I found this out I thought “well maybe that was one of the reasons why he refused her”, I don’t know. Even though she spoke Japanese as her first language, she was fully Japanese in parentage but she was born in Hawaii and was going to go back to Hawaii, that was very clear.
2:24

2:24
So it seems like that might have been the appropriate or obvious reason why he refused her and why when the surgeon wrote the letter of recommendation, which was very important and is still very important in the Japanese culture today, …. he reconsidered and after consulting the other members of the association, he was willing to take her on as a student. And she became of course the most diligent, the most disciplined and the most passionate of students.
4:09
This happened in 1930s, in the middle of 1930s, so when the war was coming, when the … when Japan got into participating in the world war scene, the global war scene and everybody realized that Japan and the US were obvious enemies. She went back to Japan and after having a dream of her master in white taffeta robes, Kimono, which meant that he had died, she was afraid that he had already died
0450 (räusper)
and she had missed his funeral. So the story goes that she knocked on his door and he said “Oh, you’ve come too early”. So he set her off for more training. She told me that she went to a place that taught her … therapy using hot springs, so how to increase your circulation and heal yourself by soaking in hot springs. But there was a system. So she … I can’t remember what it was now, but it was like first you put the left leg into the hot water and then your right leg and then your left arm, your right arm and… you know, she had this whole system down.
5:38

5:38
And then she did other, she studied other things. So I don’t know how long she went somewhere… but she came back on an appointed day and Chujiro Hayashi kind of made a speech, a farewell speech to his students about what his predictions were, about Japan attacking the US and how they would be in war and what, you know, Hawayo Takata could do to save her family and herself and so on. And also he recognized Hawayo Takata as his successor by giving her all of his worldly possessions, that’s a very usual thing to do in Japan for succession. And then he laid down and in a little while stopped breathing and went into transition. This is what Hawayo Takata would say in her story.
6:46
I won’t get into this but I believe that this… she said that this was the most … spiritual moment of my life. And when she said that you just had this feeling of this man, knowing that this was his time to die and knowing that he could actually choose it and that he did it. And I don’t believe it was through a suicide. Maybe some historian researcher will tell me otherwise but even so he still chose this moment. And in Japan that’s a very honourable death.
7:35

7:35
So then Hawayo Takata eventually went back to Hawaii and during the war many of the people in Hawaii were put into internment camp  or (0745) they were contained in their plantation … (räusper), exuse me. (0754) They were contained in the plantation housing areas. So Hawayo Takata somehow and it is said that she followed Chujiro Hayashi’s instructions, she was able to travel from island to island freely. And she gave Reiki treatments, she taught Reiki, she did a lot of things but that was very, very unusual for a Japanese person, either man or woman, to be able to leave their island of residence and travel freely, that was unheard of. Her family never were put into internment camps and my mother tells stories of taking cookies and treats to her friends who were in the camps. So there were camps in Hawaii. And this some people don’t believe and some people say it didn’t happen but I believe my mother. (laughs) (0856) (räusper) 
8:58

8:58
So at the end of the war Hawayo Takata was still teaching and practicing in Hawaii but like everywhere else, everywhere else on the planet Wolrd War II changed social habits enormously. Because this is one big factor in Hawaii, so there were all these young men who had been born on the plantations, were from the age of 18 to 30, they enlisted in the US Army the 442 battalion, which were only Japanese-American men, they were sent to Italy because of course they couldn’t be sent to the Far East theater because nobody would know who they were shooting at. And my father was one of these people, one of these men. And when they came back they all got the GI-Bill, so they were able to go to university, which in their lifetime they never would have been able to do. And they became doctors, lawyers, professors, you know scientists. I mean they just changed the face of Hawaii totally.
10:25
So in one generation they went from basically being slaves to running the state of Hawaii and to healing the people in the state of Hawaii through their professionalism. And this particular change, you know, was really interesting because my grandmother Hawayo Takata at the time she was, I don’t know, I mean how much money do you think she collected for Reiki treatment then, I have no idea, you know, a few Dollars. But some she’s a very frugal person, somehow she saved all her money, would buy a little plot of land, which is very Japanese, you know, land is it. So you buy a little plot of land and then you buy another little plot of land and pretty soon she moved to Honolulu in the 1950’s and was able to buy a piece of land on McCauley Avenue and it was on this land that the first condominium unit in Honolulu was built, amazing. For a Japanese woman who was born on a plantation to have done this through Reiki.
11:48

11:48
I find that this juxtaposition, you know, of here Chujiro Hayashi didn’t really want to teach her Reiki because she was, you know, going to take it to Hawaii and then it ended up that he named her his successor, knowing full well that this would take Reiki out of Japan and perhaps save it in some way. And this for me is a very good example of a Japanese person not worrying about what the social norm was, or what would put him into prison or what was the best for himself. No, he followed the energy of Reiki and said “this is your successor and so it goes out and whatever happens to Reiki will happen”. And actually what happened to Reiki fulfilled Mikao Usui’s dream that Reiki would touch the world.
1301-1302 (lets her hands drop)
13:00

1:38
However, when I came to Reiki and then my grandmother died. It seemed instantly but it was a couple of years later. And then I was recognized as the lineage bearer or Grand Master of the system, her successor. I tried to listen to all the voices and somehow come to a compromise about what I should do and what should happen and what direction will we take and so on. But I started to find my own will and that was very important for me. One of the very first times that I had a difference of opinion with this group of masters was in 1983 when we were drawing up the foundation of the Reiki Alliance. And people really wanted to exclude Barbara Weber, because at that point she was saying really nasty things about us and ….being very righteous, I think that’s an accurate word.
2:59
I wanted to include her… I was… I did not found the Reiki Alliance in order to have my own organisation. I really want this on the record! I wanted to found an organisation that would lift everybody up to a higher purpose so that we can all sit in the same circle. So I kept inviting Barbara Weber Ray and her… the masters that were her students or her masters actually to please come to the Reiki Alliance, so that we could have a place to sit and talk.
3:48

3:48
But that wasn’t going to happen. And that’s okay. But I just felt that that was really important. And then as the years went by I just realized that if I could say YES, a full Yes to anything that I did, initiating a Reiki Master, having a first degree class at a certain place, getting married to my ex-husband… my husband then or moving to Canada or moving back to Santa Fe or wherever, whatever I was doing. If it were my decision then I could own it. And if I needed to make another decision, I could make that decision, but it would be all mine. And that’s what I have gone to since then.
4:44
There are lots of people who have said “please, please do this” you know “next year”. And I said “well, I’m not ready, I can’t do it, I can’t say yes”. And it’s frustrated a lot of people and it sometimes frustrates me but I feel like this YES is a very important piece and what it did for me was it broke down the walls inside of me. I felt like I had all these different personas inside of me and they were all fighting with each other. And when I needed to have congruency then I needed to break all these walls down and listen to all the voices inside of me and come to a place where is was really YES.
5:36

5:36
And then I started looking around and by that time I was in Germany, I lived in Germany for five years and I lived in Hamburg, which is very close to Berlin and I had initiated a master who lived in Berlin, West Berlin, who was going to the East to teach classes, illegally. And so the Berlin wall was very real for me and I was there when it opened. I mean “opened” is a very accurate word, because it just opened.
6:23
I thought to myself “I hope the world learns a lesson from this”. That you can put up an artificial wall but it doesn’t keep families from loving each other or wanting to be with each other, it doesn’t keep people separated. It just is an artificial structure that brings pain. And it seemed at that moment, because of the way that the wall opened that maybe we had come to another order of relationship in… between nations and between people in the world. And I have to say that after this there has been a kind of… in my opinion, a kind of back-stepping that.. and maybe it’s going forward and we’ve met another impasse. But somehow today, in 2016, you know we’re looking at countries in Europe building walls, literally building walls again, because they want to keep out their brother and sister who are starving to death, who fear for their life so much that they’re leaving their beloved homeland.
7:56

7:56
You know, it’s weird for me that people think that these people, that migratory people, people who are running for their lives literally are doing this out of choice. Well of course they would stay at home if they had food. Of course they would stay at home if they thought their children would grow up. You know, of course they would stay at home if thought that they would live to see another day. But they’re literally running for their lives and that the call to humanity for me is we’re getting an “F” right now, which in American grading system means “we’re failing”. We’re failing our test of humanity.
8:49
There is a wonderful saying that says “if you have enough build a longer table rather than a wall”. And it’s like this is what we need to do. The world needs to respond and I’m amazed that you know, an earthquake in Africa or in India or Bangladesh can just inspire all these musicians and all these people to give millions of Dollars to rebuild.. because they’re in their own place and they are not migrating. But these people, not just Syrians but other people are migrating because they have to and we’re not willing to spend this money in our own countries to take them in and to say “you can live here until your country is ready to take you back”.
9:56

9:56
I just … it’s for me a big test, it’s a global test like we’ve had global world wars, now this is a global test for humanity to say “our we really being human”. I mean it’s no mistake that… wow, am I really getting opinionated?… okay… It’s a big mistake for me to think that .. to have the question “why is … why is fascism on the rise? Why is extreme prejudice on the rise?” It’s because people are afraid for their existence. But here in America we could all lower our existence level by just a little percentage and give people who really are… really are starving food. And we wouldn’t have to give up much. In fact, we live in luxury for the most part. And if we can’t be humane enough to give a little of that so that other people can actually live. I feel like we’re not doing a very good job in being human beings.
11:26
Now I’ve always said to people, especially in the US, you know, if you want to make a difference in the world, do your self-treatment, because this will change the atmosphere of your life, make it more peaceful and that will make your community more peaceful and so on, which I still agree with. And now we have to put a little bit of our .. we have the saying
… where our money where a mouth is. We have to actually give. And I’m surprised that there aren’t some kind of way that we can all give money and create a way for these people to be supported. And I just think that we are being so uncreative with the solution and that spending on top of that millions of Dollars to erect more walls, just seems like totally crazy to me.
12:36

3:28
So on top of that, that the energy came to me and the masters recognized me that was something that there was no controlling. I couldn’t control it and at the time I didn’t even know if I wanted it. But it only took me a few years to recognize that I didn’t have a choice either. That even if I wanted to have denied it that that would have been… very disruptive to my life and very disruptive to the life of Reiki. That it wouldn’t have automatically gone to Barbara Weber. They would have had to have found somebody else.
4:10
This was all very interesting, you know, because I hardly knew what Reiki was, much less try to work out all these nuances on an energetic level and on a personal level and you know here I was asking .. asked to be the Grand Master and all the people were older than I was, including the people that were around my age, they were still one or two years older than I was, they had mostly all… had years more of experience in Reiki and I was supposed to be their Grand Master.. I mean… you know, I didn’t really seem appropriate at the time.
4:53

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

6:38
Barbara took the stands of being the only one who had better training than us, that had received a… more symbols and so on and eventually said that she was the only Reiki Master that my grandmother, Hawayo Takata, had ever actually initiated, that all. the rest of us were not really Reiki Masters. So that put me and all of us into this question “Are we really Reiki Masters?” And that was the best thing that could have happened to all of us, including me, because I had to go inside myself and find this truth. You know, am I a Reiki Master or not? Do I feel like I’ve gotten what I need from my Master? And eventually the answer was yes. So…
7:44
She pushed me in a lot of ways, some not nice. But I have to say and I said this at the time in the 1980s, she was the gift that my grandmother left me. She made me, forced me to go inside and find the strength that I needed to have this position. And to be able to nourish and have the community nourish this part of me because I believe that all of us initiated by Hawayo Takata had the possibility of being her successor. I mean, I don’t feel like I was special in the sense of I had more education or I had the right education or I had her bloodline or anything… that… that actually I don’t think had anything bearing on the case at all.
8:41

8:41
And then when I was recognized then the community nourished this part of me and kept recognizing it and grew me. So the first 10 or 15 years was a gardening project, really, of the Reiki community and they did a great job because I came out of it whole, I feel like the community came out of it a better.. a better community. And I feel like I’ve grown into a .. I’ve grown into a Grand Master. And I’m… that’s not about recognizing myself or … what can I say … well, it’s not announcing myself as a Grand Master, like many people have. It’s about acknowledging the achievement of a community to grow it’s leader. And I think they’ve done a wonderful job. And in that process I’ve healed a lot of my personality quirks, well they don’t ever go away but I feel them to the point where I feel like I can be a good human being and that’s all what I can ask for really.
10:08

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

13:00
At some point… (laughs)
1303 (Schneuzgeräusche)
… in my…. realisation I realized that I didn’t want to be liked, I wanted to be respected. I didn’t care about being loved, I wanted to be respected. And I’m still working on that, because in the first 10 years all I wanted to do is be loved. So finally people thought “okay, I’ve succeeded in giving her what she wants”. And when I got it I thought “well, actually this is not what I want”. I want respect and it’s coming, because I’m respecting myself… more.
13:45
So the succession process is a process and it is very exciting because last weekend… a weekend in February in Mexico a small group of us got together to speak about succession. And because my cancer is active again and I don’t know how many years I have of active duty so to speak, I feel time really pressing on me now. And so now we have a…. what is called, what we call a transformational succession process plan in place. And we are starting it… you know, the first steps of that are being started. There’s a letter of invitation that’s going to go out and there’ll be a small group of masters who will …. well my guess is small group of masters who will say yes to the invitation.
14:59

16:06
And then with the webinar, people who are interested can sit in as witnesses. So we could have hundreds of witnesses if we want, which will be really great. And it will be able to inform the master community in a kind of networking situation. And eventually in a year we might be able to have a collective in-person gathering, you know where we speak in person for once. But anyway, we’ll just see what happens. But this is being coached and facilitated by Ben Haggert, who was a … my go-to-person with this regenerative developmental thinking process. And it’s really changed the way that I think and the way that I see the process of life.
17:05
I’m very, very excited by this because … it gives me not hope but a way to carry this system forward into the future and I believe that not only the system but the whole of the global Reiki community.
17:36

0:00
It’s specifically called…. (sighs) OK lets start again
0:14
When I refer to this system or the system or the system as I teach it or the system that Hawayo Takata passed on I’m speaking about a system called “Usui Shiki Ryoho” which was the original name of the system as Hawayo Takata taught it, however she just called it Reiki because it was easier. I guess. And… Usui Shiki Ryoho translated roughly into English is “The Usui System of Natural Healing”. So we used that phrase in English for many years up until about 1994 or 5 and then I reverted back to Usui Shiki Ryoho because many people took on Usui’s system of natural healing, but it was not really the Usui system of natural healing, it was something else.
1:19
But they didn’t understand that the naming the system actually named a certain form of practice. So when that became more clear then I also in the late 1990s decided to add the lineage because that really identified it as a specific practice. So for me its Usui Shiki Ryoho honouring the lineage of Mikao Usui, Chujiro Hayashi, Hawayo Takata and Phyllis Furumoto.
2:00

2:00
This particular system of Reiki practice has a specific form and a specific set of fundamental principals and values that is unique to this system. One of the things that happened in the mid 1990s is that there was a gentleman in Germany who 0221 trademarked  0223 äh Usui Shiki… no …. trademarked 0226 Usui system of natural healing, trademarked the Reiki Kanji and a number of other things and felt that he was doing this in service to this system because he felt that I wasn’t doing my job, which he might have been right, I have no idea. But I certainly didn’t want him to own the copyright in Germany, because he was sending threatening letters to masters and so on.
2:55
So I got into a very interesting conversation with him, we’ll call it a conversation between our attorneys and eventually they awarded these – trademarked phrases and the symbols, like the Kanji being a symbol at that point to me, because I was the rightful owner. Well by the time they did this, which was I think in 1998, Reiki was so common in Germany that it had become a household word and therefore could not be trademarked. Which on one hand I was very relieved because it just saved me from a really …. difficult process of trying to defend the trademarks while at the same time it opened it to a lot of people.
3:57

5:26
But there are many, many masters who practice this system who are not members of the Alliance. So the Alliance is a volunteer organization for masters to support themselves as masters. 0545 Yah..
5:48
Question from René: OK, within…. .??… yourself as a Grand Master for those fractions?
0552
Well, I’m only a Grand Master to those who recognize me. So there are members of the Reiki Alliance who don’t recognize me… now…. which is interesting. And I … in some way my questions is how do they get to be members of the Reiki Alliance? But that’s true for me that they’ve come and told me “I don’t really recognize you as a Grand Master”. So I asked them “Why are you a member of the Alliance?” And then our conversation ends there. I’m only the Grand Master for those who recognize me, I’m.. it’s not a titular head that is so, if everybody tomorrow ceased to recognize me as the Grand Master then I wouldn’t be it anymore and that would be fine for me.
6:48

0:00
You know titles that are transferred from culture to culture are often very problematic. And it’s the same for this from the Japanese culture into Western culture in English. They referred to me as a Grand Master, it was a term that was coined and has been used in other Japanese art forms, the Grand Master, to say the Sensei, the head Sensei, teacher of teachers so to speak. But it means more than teacher.
0:46
So a master for me has a least five different aspects. There is the initiator, the teacher, the mentor, the student and the tradition keeper. So when people say “I’m a Reiki teacher” my response in my head is to say, “Oh, I see, so you’re not claiming responsibility for being an initiator, for being a mentor, for being a student or for being a tradition keeper”. And for most of the Reiki teachers that I know that’s true actually.
1:28

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

5:51
So, you know, in this particular practice, say we have a million students and … 9000 masters, I don’t know, these are numbers I am just picking out of my hat. 0604 (Schneuzgeräusche) But how is the succession going to be carried smoothly, well somewhat smoothly and clearly into the future, and this is something that we are studying now. So it is possible that when I die that one person will take this on and be supported a group. And it isn’t a group of “in-people”, it’s a group of people who are willing to be committed to this part of their practice.
6:44
I realized very early on that any of the masters that Hawayo Takata initiated could have become her successor. And I believe that as masters, when we are initiated and recognized as masters we have the potential to be a lineage bearer. It’s obvious because if we, if you or anybody else initiate a master then we are actually starting a lineage.
0716 (räusper)
But the masters who applicate in some way this part of them as masters to me as lineage bearers, I want them to awaken this part of themselves not so that they can be lineage bearers but that I believe that it is this part that will recognize my successor. Does that make sense?
7:45
So I’m very excited by this process and… excited because it expands my awareness of my own life and what I’ve been doing all these years.
8:04

1:21
Whether or not those people in practices that are named Usui Shiki Ryoho recognize me as the Grand Master, my passing and the succession will affect their practice to a certain extent. Not because they want it to but because it just is so, I believe that and it will affect… as it will affect all the other practices that call themselves something else. Mainly because a lot of people have founded their practice in resistance to me. And if you found a practice in resistance to me then I hate to say it, but you are as connected to me as those who feel like they are connected to me.
2:12
One of the things that I have asked people over and over again if they want to start their own practice, please go ahead and do so but name it something else so that students have an understanding about what they are practicing. So all the people who have Usui Shiki Ryoho as their, you know, name of practice are holding that name in some way in resistance to change it. Because if they chose Usui Shiki Ryoho at the time, even in 1988 they would have recognized me as the lineage bearer. Because it was in fact the only system basically that existed.
3:01

3:01
So anything out of that should have been renamed and I’m not attached to this at all. I’m just saying to sort it out. This is for me what would have sorted it out much better. I did try actually to find a name for this system to separate it .. not separate it, but to differentiate it from other practices but I couldn’t do it and probably that’s true for them too. So okay. But in Japan this is very common, they change the name a little bit, they use a different character and it changes the name of the practice. So people are very clear about honouring each other and their own practice.
3:52
And one of the things, this is little digression, but one of the things that are sad for me that in Japan what happened because of the way Reiki “returned” to Japan, it returned in a sense of resistance against me and resist… and also in competition. And you know that’s totally for me not the Japanese way. And so people felt like they had to be defensive. But I… they didn’t have to be defensive about me, I mean, I’m not claiming the right way or the best way or the only way. I’m just claiming that I have a way.
4:43

4:43
So I feel sad that the practices coming out of Japan feel like what they have to offer is somehow they have to offer something that is from Japan and therefore it’s more valuable. And what they actually have to offer, that I think is incredibly valuable, is that they come from the original culture. And that their way of being, their way of being with Reiki, no matter what the form is, could demonstrate this incredible cultural heritage that they’re carrying naturally.
5:28
And that I am taking tours now of students back to Japan to try and touch this culture so that they understand more about why this practice and why I’m so strict about some things. Because I see that if I westernize or fall pray to giving students what they want then I’m not being a tradition keeper. And I really feel that this role of tradition keeper is very important in this day and age of computers and 0606 ähm…. and ähm… 0612 …
6:20

6:20
In this day on confusion and fusion, confusion and fusion of different cultures. You know like you go into restaurants now and if it says Asian Fusion you have no idea of what kind of food you gonna get but it’s somebody’s idea of Chinese/Japanese/Thai/Korean whatever, all mixed together, right. And this is very confusing to me, I just want you to know. So fusion sometimes results in confusion. And I believe that one of the gifts of having clear different practices is that students get to choose which practice they can come to, that’s right for them in the moment. I’m not a proponent of putting all the practices together and having one universal practice, that is not going to save the day. What’s going to save the day is for us is to be respectful with each other no matter what.
7:33

0:00
This phrase “agreeing to disagree” puts me in mind one of the very first principles that I learned in practicing Reiki and that is “there’s no right or wrong way to be”. So I would like to say that this statement “agreeing to disagree” puts me in a place of being against somebody or disagreeing with their opinion. I would like to say, maybe people think this is a little too slippery, that we simply have different opinions. And I honour their opinion as much as I honour mine. If I don’t do that, then how could I ask others to honour my opinion or my practice without me honouring theirs?
1:11
There was a period of time in the early 1900… 1990s, excuse me, 1990s where many of the colleagues that I was involved in and had workshops with and we were in community together, they made very snide remarks about some of the “new” forms of practice. And it didn’t sit very well with me but I didn’t know why until I finally figured out that they also reported to me conversations they’ve had had with students or members of the public where there was a kind of not so nice remark made of our practice and I said to them… well I said “If you don’t change your attitude toward the other practices, then how do you expect to be respected?” You know, it’s like “Do onto others as you would have them do onto you”, you know, it’s a very old, wise axiom. ….
2:31

2:31
In my years of Reiki experience, we all have theories about where Reiki comes from, is it different from other forms of energy, like X-Ray or radio waves or whatever. We have a different idea about whether was Reiki rediscovered or was Reiki discovered or was Reiki a gift that was given. You know, there are all these different viewpoints. And actually in the last few years what I’ve come to realize is that the truth, the actual universal truth can only be found if all of us are willing to sit in circle and honour our own positions and speak our own positions without fear of retribution or judgement and be able to hear each other in the same way, so that we… if we could see these as vibratory waves, we would see these words come together and form a group voice. And this group voice is really the truth part.
3:47

3:47
So we all have a measure of truth, because it’s our truth, it’s our individual truth and I have to assume that everybody who speaks their opinion or their idea about Reiki or about hand positions or about whatever, is speaking their own truth. They are not making it up. So if I can hope that that critical assumption is accurate, then for me we own our own truth and each of our voices is a part of the greater truth.
4:32
So it feels very different than agreeing not to agree 0436 …… 0437 (Background voice)… 0440 (Background Räusper)  (René: I suspect that my follow-up ques…) 0449 Oh, I want to add something:
4:53

4:53
Having said that (laugh) 0456-0501 (cough) ….
Having said that, I am very clear about the practice that I teach and hold and I have ended up, you know, thinking myself a total liberal in politics and the way that I live my life. And being called conservative by my own students, “well why don’t you even consider changing this part of the system?”, “Well because that’s not what I was taught” “Well, how can you say that? That was 30 years ago, you know, don’t you like move on?” And, you know, part of my job not only as the Grand Master and lineage bearer, but part of my job as a Reiki master and a Reiki student is to take what I was given and to practice that PERIOD
6:00

6:00
Okay, so my human conditions is: I can get bored. Well, what I’ve learned is, if as a student I have gotten bored, it means that I’m not really paying attention and I’m not actually applying the practice. Because in my experience, when I get bored it means that I’ve run into resistance within me and there is something resisting taking the next step. So I just stay on this “mmmmmmm”. And of course it’s boring. So we want something and in our day and age I have to say that we have all kinds of options to shake ourselves out of this boredom, some new idea or some new way of being or perhaps another way to learn Reiki or whatever. And it’s not beneficial to our personal endeavour of personal development.
7:05

7:05
So I am very conservative, I am very, maybe even rigid, about the practice that I hold and keep but it’s because this practice has given me the richness of life that I could never ever hope to have had before my practice. And I know that if I’ve received this much in the last 30 years, then in the next 30 years I will receive even more. So why change it? You know, why change it? And I honour the other practices, they have emerged because of people’s need to have it changed and it’s served other people or a different priority like instead of my feeling where a few students who practice deeply is what I go for. Other people go for the more students on the planet that have Reiki, the better. And I don’t … subscribe to more is better.
8:19
So that’s okay, because what I found in the last years is that these two philosophies, if you will, of how to teach Reiki and how to “spread” Reiki, have come together to provide in the world an incredible Reiki community and it couldn’t have been done one without the other. So, yes, I hold my practice to be very clear, very strict and not without movement.
10:13

1:33
Mary was in London during World War II, she lived through the bombing of London by the Germans and Germany was THE last place she ever wanted to go. So immediately after she was initiated as a master she meets this German woman, starts going to Germany to teach and that’s where she did most of her teaching in her career. And she changed and transformed for me a whole generation of German people who were holding on to their own wounds, inflicted by World War II and by the whole process of the Nazis and fascism and so on, and by their own German culture of being very strong and not very emotional. So Brigitte said that one of the things that she was always astonished, is how much people could cry. That they would come to a Reiki class and in Germany people just sat and wept for these days because they needed to because it was a part of their healing that needed to happen.
3:03

7:40
You know her masters have taken her personality and her way of being with Reiki and taken in upon themselves to further that. And as a master who initiates other masters, there are masters that I’ve initiated, that I feel very much affinity to and somehow our personalities are very much the same and so it feels like they carry a part of my legacy without knowing it. And I believe that the masters that Beth Gray initiated there, do the same thing. That she was looking for someone specifically to carry this piece of her legacy, which she has done. And it’s a gift and a challenge in and of itself.
08:39

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

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

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

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

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

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

0:00
Again, this is a… my problem because I know the question isn’t going to be asked, it’s just so weird for me to just say “I’m sorry”, you know, like where does that come from and what am I sorry for and you know there is that whole thing. So I’m just trying to formulate a starting point and then where to get to from there.
0:43
Some years ago I was introduced to a little book called “The four agreements” by Don Miguel Ruiz and he’s a Mexican…. He’s a Mexican … sorry I’ll start again…
1:06
Some years ago I was introduced to a little book called “The four agreements” by Don Miguel Ruiz and it’s been translated into many, many languages. And basically he is asking people to start on a spiritual path having these four agreements with themselves. One is to do your best, another one is to not take things personally, to be articulate with your word and ….. okay, what’s the fourth one? Do not take things personally, do your best and be articulate with your word and … oh ja, don’t make assumptions. Okay, I’ll start again…
2:11

2:11
So a few years ago I was introduced in this little book called “The four agreements” by Don Miguel Ruiz and I really recommend it to all of us who practice Reiki because it’s a really great way to … measure and to take assessment of our own humanness in human relationships and in the relationships with the planet and everything else as well. And I …. these four little phrases run through my mind, always do your best, don’t take it personally, do not make assumptions and be articulate with your word.
2:59
I try to do that in my own mind. And of course, being a human being, when I do my best I often don’t do what other people want or expect. When I don’t take it personally, sometimes people think that I’m cold or I don’t care. When I don’t make assumptions, it means that I don’t assume that somebody is hurt, I don’t assume that this is being taken the wrong way or I don’t assume that it actually affects people, which is actually not usually accurate (laugh).
3:46

3:46
And being articulate with my word, I think that for all of us, we try to express ourselves verbally and one of the things that is so clear for me now is that our verbal language has gaps and it definitely has places that cannot express what we really want to express. I spent some time in the 1980s and 90s learning German. It was a very interesting endeavour for me because language is not one of my better skills and though I love the German language I also didn’t have time to dedicate to the learning of it. Though I did take a 3 or 4 months course in Hamburg and that helped pave the way for more coherent German sentences (laugh)
4:45
Although I missed the week about pronouns, which turned out to be definitely significant (laugh) So I’m not very good in German pronouns. So anyway, I realized though when I was taking this language and trying to speak it that I really had to get into the mind set of German, you know and of being German. And it was really fun for me because at that point I was liv… I had an apartment in Hamburg and I really loved North Germany as a part of the country. And I was feeling very at home there. So it was easy for me to kind of slip into this German part of myself, I would call it.
5:37

5:37
But when I went to other countries and I didn’t have knowledge of their language, I didn’t really understand their culture and their cultural priorities, I realized that I often offended people or as they say here in America “was kind of like a bull in a China shop”. I just, you know, blundered my way through being an American, not really understanding that I might be offending people.
6:10
So there’s that part of me, being human. And then there’s the other part of me, which just is shy and sometimes not wanting to put myself on the firing line, which I think all of you can understand. So I have more courage these days and I also have more understanding about where other people come from, that I feel like everyone is doing their best. Everyone follows their path of Reiki and even though I may not like it or I don’t agree with it, I will fight to the death for your right to have your own path, because for me that is the gift of Reiki and the gift of this path.
7:02

7:02
And I have told my students this as well, that if we differ in opinion it’s okay for me on one hand, I may not like it, I may not like you for a few days but I will fight to the death to make sure that you’re right to disagree, or to have your own opinion more accurately. It’s preserved because that’s our inalienable right as a human being.
7:33
I also feel that, whether or not I like it, I’ve made assumptions and whether or not I like it, I not always said what I really needed to, because of my shyness or because I feel like I won’t be taken seriously. So there are many different relationships that I have that I don’t even know I have, out in the Reiki world and also relationships where I know that I’ve transgressed. And for all these times when you feel that I’ve transgressed, that I’ve entered your space unwillingly and uninvited, where I’ve offended you in some way, where my … where my loyalty to my master has caused you pain because it’s different from what you have learned is Reiki, and that has given you pain, for all these things I want to ask your forgiveness because it wasn’t my intention, it’s not the way I hold you and everyone has been a great teacher for me. And without you I wouldn’t be who I am today.
9:09

0:00
My burning question at the age of 30 was “What am I going to do with the rest of my life?”. I knew that I couldn’t continue to do what I did for the rest of my life, which was to work in a ski-area and basically have fun. It didn’t feel like this was my contribution to the world. Although I didn’t have very lofty ideas at that time, I just wanted to have the best ski-run ever. So I don’t know where this thought came from, except my father, who said “Phyllis, you really know how to have fun, now what about working?” (laugh).
0:51
And I really got that he wasn’t talking about working like… working to make a living and to put bread on the table, it was about really contributing. So I wondered about this and in my wondering my mother called, who was usually the provocateur in my life. And she said “Your grandmother is going on a Reiki tour in the summer” and this was in like October or November. And she said “You’re going with her because she needs a companion”. And I said “Why me?”. And she said “Because you don’t really have a job”. I said “Mom, I really have a job. I mean, you know, I can’t just take off for four months”. And she said “Well, you can and you will”.
1:42

1:42
So it took me about four months to figure out if I was willing to do what she said and in the end I said yes. And this started a journey of myself that ended up, I thought I could go back and just be myself again. But in truth when I was introduced to Reiki and I started on the path of Reiki, not consciously, not choosing it but having it handed to me through my family, I realized that I could really never go back to what I call now an unconscious life, that somehow just this trip and this initiation into mastery and this push of my grandmother to begin to teach and begin to relay to people through Reiki the energy and through Reiki the practice, has started a process inside of me that was unstoppable.
3:11

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

7:53
Very early on, like maybe 1982 or 3, somebody came to me and said 0802 “You should tra….. you should trans…no… 0807 you should trademark Reiki. 0809 You should write down the whole system and trademark it, now!”. If I had done that, what would have happened in the future? Where would we have been today? And I just couldn’t see the benefit of doing this. I thought that trademarks were something very different than they are. So in the middle of 1990s I learned through my own experience of having to “fight” a trademark, a registration, that trademarks are simply the business way of saying “This is who I am”
0902 (räusper)
and that you don’t make a lot of money, they do cost a lot of money. And you’re able to … if done with integrity, actually maintain integrity.
9:22
So what I really wanted to do in the mid 1990s, which was by that time too late,
0928 (räusper)
was to have what is called an industry trademark. And so the ones that we might be very familiar with are for cotton, the little symbol for cotton, or wool, which is a woven kind of symbol but these are trademarked by the industry. So all the manufacturers of cotton material can use this trademark. And that’s what we could have done with Reiki. It would have maintained a certain boundary around practices, not controlling practices but being able to identify them. But at that point there was one practice, I didn’t see that the future would hold that there are many and this was a decision that I took, doing my best. I certainly didn’t have any assumptions to make because if I didn’t make them and my big assumption, the critical assumption was that the world was not going to change, (laugh) but it did.
10:45

10:45
So in keeping to this feeling of doing my best at the time, I think that when I was… in the mid 1990s when I was going through this trademark thing, I had some regrets but I couldn’t have made a different decision, at the time, in 1983. I just couldn’t have, it was not to be done.
11:18
Another decision that I made, that people… that seemed to be a very big deal in the Reiki community, was in 1988 during the first Reiki Alliance conference in Europe in Friedrichsdorf. I made a very important speech. And unfortunately… I wasn’t…. I wasn’t able to be articulate and to be accurate in my word. So people misunder….. people misunderstood me, they interpreted this speech really differently and … than I had imagined they would and … I did my best. So basically this … the whole thing that it came to was that I … that I had listened with growing dismay about people saying “Well you’re the only one who has the power to initiate masters”. And I would tell them “You’re wrong. This is not about power”.
12:55

12:55
And finally what I realized was in order to dissipate this rumour, this misunderstanding, I needed to just open the doors. Because the doors were already been pride open by other masters who were initiating masters already, Barbara Weber being one of them. And people saying “Well, are they really masters? Does she have the power to initiate masters?”. And I kept saying “It’s not about that. It’s not about that!”. So… and I also, one of the other motivations for me was that I saw that some of the masters of Hawayo Takata, who had been practicing and teaching and doing their path, were really ready to initiate masters, they had master… they had students coming to them, wanting to be initiated as masters. And those students were given to me to prepare and initiate. But I was starting to get students who weren’t my students, they were the students of the masters who sent them. And I couldn’t, in all integrity, take them on. I wanted to say “You study with Paul.. you study with Beth… you study with somebody…” you know, whoever has sent them, because it just wasn’t right.
14:24

14:24
So in this speech I tried to say (laugh) that the circle of masters who had actually given me their power to initiate, like there’s a word in English called “abdicate”, they gave this power to me and I believe it was the good thing to do at that moment, 1983… ah 1982 because this would have split the Reiki community I think maybe irrevocably, if so many masters had started to initiate masters for even the first 5 years.
15:09
So I did it, everybody saw how I did it. A lot of people didn’t like what I was doing but they couldn’t say anything ‘cause they had given me and said “you are the person to initiate masters in this system”. And that would have worked, if the system had stayed small, had stayed local but it didn’t… it just… in 1988 people were being initiated all over Europe, in India, in Canada, in Australia. You know, it’s like “Really? I’m going to initiate all these masters? Forget it!”
15:47
And the other thing that I said to my friends, was “I am not going to be an initiation machine, where people just send me their students, I initiate them and that’s it. I mean that’s too weird for me. So…
16:07

16:07
I made the speech and I said “you know, it is a master’s right to share their information and their calling as a master to any student that they feel is worthy. And it is up to you to prepare yourself for this step”. And I don’t know if any of the other messages have gotten through but the response was I had given away my power, I had… and I said “I haven’t given away anything. I had nothing to give away”, because this whole power thing was a misconception, you know, it’s not about giving away your power, it’s about sharing sacred tools so that a worthy student can step on the path of mastery and have their own experience of this. It’s not a… it’s a gift but in a kind of funny way. Because you know they are going to have hardship, challenges, confrontations… it’s going to take their life and totally change it. And… that’s a kind of funny gift I have to say.
17:28

17:28
So, anyway… I spent a lot of guilty feelings around this because it was so misunderstood at the time. I felt like I hadn’t been able to really articulate what I wanted to and, you know, at some point I just had to say “I did my best and it opened up the space and it was a little ungraceful but in the end it accomplished what I wanted. And that was to dispel this idea that it was only me who had the power to initiate masters. That was really important for me. 1807… So
18:21

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

2:07
Then all these new forms of practice started to pop up, some from my own students. And … people wanted me to control them. They wanted somehow from me to do a good job so that people wouldn’t feel like they could just go off and do their own Reiki. And I took it upon myself to really study the situation and decide if there was anything that I could do, anything at all. And in the midst of all this kind of contemplation time …. Shunjan Joop Hilger … I found out that he had trademarked
0301 these ähm Usui Shiki Ryo … no, 0304
the Usui System of natural healing as a phrase, Reiki as a phrase, the Kanji in Germany. And he had been awarded the trademarks. And I thought “oh… now what?”.
3:22
So in this whole process I had a partner, the Reiki Alliance, because many of their members were threatened by Joop’s use of these trademarks. And what was so, is that even though I wasn’t able at the time inside myself to trademark these things, I also didn’t feel like it was appropriate for another master outside the lineage to hold these trademarks. So we got into kind of out-of-court discussion about who own the trademarks, which cost both of us a lot of money and time and energy and … I’m sure agro… aggravation, sorry, it’s a slang (laugh).
4:14

4:14
And… you know, during this time I had a lot of education about what trademarks really were, what they were used for in the business world, what I could do with them, what were my alternatives and what it would take to actually trademark something like Reiki in the world, because by that time, Reiki had spread all over the world. So I went to the Reiki Alliance and I asked the Alliance members to file for trademarking and local communities in the areas did trademark Reiki and the Kanji and some other… and a couple of other things and they paid for them. And they did a beautiful job, I really, I … was so touched by their willingness to do this for Reiki and for their practice.
5:21
And I was overwhelmed. I was trying to do my own schedule, I was in the middle of learning about trademarks, I had to keep earning money because this whole process was taking tens of thousands of Dollars. And also I was really… though I didn’t admit it at the time, I was really sad and wounded, Nr. 1 by Joop who was a master that I initiated, why didn’t he come to me and said “Look, you know, you’re not doing your job and if you don’t do your job properly…” and maybe he did and I didn’t hear it, I don’t know. You know, “I’m going to, you know, … get these trademarks and so on …”. I would have liked to think that we could have worked together on this, but I don’t think so now.
6:19

6:19
And the other thing was that in Germany there were many masters who were threatened by Joop’s holding these trademarks but they weren’t able to financially help me or weren’t willing to help me financially, because they felt like it was my fault anyway that I hadn’t taken care of this in the first place. So that was really horrible for me.
6:46
There were a lot of different things going on and I … in my personality I was so unable to imagine or take in … solutions, because for me this was for me a major crisis within the Reiki community. I still have boxes of documents from this era (laugh). I have had boxes of documents scanned for prosperity in this whole process. Still, especially in South America and in Spain, Reiki master communities are holding trademarks but not knowing what to do with them and not knowing how to pay for them. I didn’t keep track of the legal entities that needed to be held so that so that trademarks could be brought in and I realise now that I needed a whole organization to do this, not just me. But I needed to have been able to hire a trademark attorney, to be able to hire an office person who just dealt with trademarks and to keep up with all the licencing and so on.
8:19

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

10:39
So I just, you know, at that point between my personality and my lineage bearer self I was crushed. And I just dropped it, just like that. And I left a lot of people high and dry in my own community. Some masters actually left Reiki because of this situation. My relationship with the Reiki Alliance has never.. I don’t think healed from this particular process, on my part, because I felt not supported, not recognized and not heard….
11:37
There has been tremendous misunderstanding that has come out of this particular four year period…. And… there is nothing I can say to … convince people otherwise. You know, there is an idea that I was doing this just to make money. Well, you don’t make money on a trade mark unless the people who are able… unless the people who want to use a trademark actually pay you money. And I knew that Reiki masters wouldn’t be able to pay me US$ 5’000 a year, so that was not what I was gonna ask. It was just assumption, after assumption, after assumption, that for me, especially with the Alliance members felt very painful because I realized, they didn’t know who I was, they didn’t know how much I thought for them and they didn’t know that I could see them and that I would be compassionate. So this was just a heartbreaker.
13:03

13:03
Could I have done something different? No, I felt like I did my best. Unfortunately … (laugh) unfortunately my best was not nearly good enough. Ahhh… I was not prepared for this. I had no one in the community that would step up and be there for me. I had business men come and tell me … who were Reiki masters… come and tell me “Don’t get into this, you’ll regret it” and then walk away. They didn’t come and say “Listen, you need help. You need to know what you are getting into, I can help you with this” and eventually show me that this was not where I wanted to go. But nobody was willing to do that and that kind of unwillingness, I don’t blame them, I blame mys… I don’t blame myself, I just feel like I wasn’t open to it. And they didn’t feel the opening to come and support me.
14:05
So … I don’t know where that came from, but … It’s been my … If I have any regret in my whole time being recognized as the Grand Master, that’s the one. I never met Joop in person. I would…. Now I realize I should have several times met him in person. We only talked through attorneys. We never talked face to face. We didn’t go to court, it was settled out of court, so I didn’t even see him in court…. And I feel badly about that, because I feel like we only have the projection of who we think he or she or I was at the moment and it’s probably still present. I mean that’s where our relationship ended, so to speak. And that’s where it’s going to stay, because as human beings we can’t progress until we actually progress in real life. And that’s really sad.
15:20

15:20
So… Can I forgive myself? Well, yes. I feel like I have. Because I couldn’t go on if I hadn’t. And I don’t know what I could have done differently. And I don’t even know who to write now to say “Thank you for all that you did to support myself, your local communities and the vision of Reiki that we all had. And that vision now, where I am now, was so limited, I realised, that …. If I knew then what I know now, it would have been a very different scene, and I didn’t.”
16:24
Speaking about it helps, because I feel that I’m able to speak about it in a way that I don’t bring up my guilt and I don’t bring up feeling small and inadequate but I just bring up this overwhelming feeling of sadness that….. it couldn’t have been different. If that makes any sense. That I would have liked for it to have been different for everyone…. And it wasn’t.
17:13

17:13
Since then (laugh)… since then my life as Grand Master has been pretty mellow (laugh), and I feel that…. I changed in a way through this process and I’ve become much more clear about what I’m willing to do and what I’m not willing to do, who my audience is and who my audience is not and so on. So these are the three places when you asked me about forgiving myself that come up for me and that there’s obviously energy still there, and I think rightfully so. It’s…. these were times where in our…. in my community anyway.. in this practice that there were significant changes of development that happened.
18:28

0:00
0006 (räusper)
As a part of this system, there is a lineage and this lineage is like our ancestry and to just deny it or to say it doesn’t exist anymore is a lie. So in this system, there will be a lineage. What that lineage looks like, I don’t know. Is it one person that will succeed me? Is it a group of people that will try and do the work together? If so, then we really need a lot of work before I die. Is it possible for me to step back into a not so public role? Of course, I need to take care of myself, I feel that if I’m predominant, then… in visualness, then other masters will not have the opportunity to step into that place.
1:21

1:21
And no one really knows what’s going to happen with this and … for me …. the question is: Is it possible to have a spiritual practice without some kind of a still point for the spiritual practice, a lineage, an ancestry? And I think this is a question that is really open to discussion. I know that I fulfil a role that lots of people don’t see … don’t see, period! It’s on an energetic level, it has nothing to do with how important I am or how … or what my personality is. If, as I said, if everyone stopped recognizing me as the lineage bearer, as a Grand Master, then I wouldn’t be it anymore and I would be… but I would still be a Reiki master. And I would still continue my life as a Reiki master. What I have done is for… is in service to the community and in service to the system that we practice.
2:45

2:45
I believe that if one of the elements is missing from this practice, like spiritual lineage, then it changes the dynamic of the nine elements and then the system breaks down. I’ve seen that over and over again in the practices that have happened in people meaning well. For instance …. Sometimes masters have gone into countries where they feel that they can’t charge money or very little money for 1st degree and that happened in Russia and luckily for the timing and everything for Russia I appeared at the right time and asked the masters candidates then to pay their US$ 10’000. And because they did that, they also together devised a program over three years to bring the 1st degree and the 2nd degree … commitment, monetary commitment to the same level as everywhere else in the world. And that was an amazing situation and it does make a difference.
4:14

4:14
What happened with the masters as well, these new masters, is that they made up the difference. So if they paid US$ 50 for 1st degree, then they went back to their initiating masters of 1st degree and gave them US$ 100, so that they would have had a US$ 150 commitment, the same as everyone else. And every one of them reported a difference. They didn’t know why, they didn’t expect it, many of them thought it would just be an exchange of money, but it wasn’t. It was something different. So it’s a phenomena that I have no idea about, I just know that there’s some energetic that we actually cannot perceive and that we are not able to articulate. So if there was no spiritual lineage in this practice, I believe that the practice would disintegrate. And….. so there needs to be somebody.
5:22

5:22
The activating force is the preservation of this system. The restraining force is about personality. If people were able to think about me not as a personality but as a part of this system that they practice, I am just as essential as the symbols, as the hand positions, as the initiation, as themselves as masters. We don’t understand what the dynamic is but I know that the dynamic is there. 0603 (nods her head) 0605 So …. ähm… Ya! 0611 
6:13

0:00
So, if people, if the masters cannot raise their thought process and their understanding to a higher expression, then …. then the system will just dissolve, like an adobe brick dissolves back into dirt. It’s … it will be disbursed into humanity, people will practice it in their own way for, you know, another two or three generations and my guess is, it will just dissipate and maybe will remain as kind of a memory and become just a part of human…..
0:52
… maybe we could say evolution, human evolution, that people still put their hands on themselves and remember why.
1:06

2:22
We have no idea what are…. human relationship is. We’re students and with each other, we…. we separate from each other because of petty judgements and misunderstandings that we don’t have the courage enough to just go and say “hey, you know, what about this?” I mean if people would come to me and just say “Phyllis, you know, I heard this story. What’s your side of it?” I would be so relieved. They wouldn’t need to agree with me or even need to understand me, just that I was asked for my own perspective would be such a relief. Because this is all done, mostly, and about 95% through assumption of who I am. And I find that really appalling. If I have
0316 (räusper)
something that’s going on with me, then I always ask the person directly.
3:28

3:28
I have been assumed to have had judgements through the comments of students of the system, but they do not represent me, they represent themselves. And I’m here to help hold the still point for them to come to and often times they are not there yet. And that’s okay.
4:00
Realistically speaking I feel that the community has a job to do
0407 after I’m dy…. 0408
after I die
0410 (räusper)
or I step back so far that they need to recognize another spiritual lineage bearer. And in that recognition I can see that there will be
0427 (räusper)
the possibility that Reiki will do it’s job and advance the view of people to recognize that person where the energy is going, to where the energy is going, because I feel that that’s what needs to happen, Yah….
5:02-5:16 (silence)
Yo! 5:17

1:25
I know that… and I just want you all to know that I’m happy to be a miracle trial also, but it gives me kind of a surety. It also wakes up the community. When I.. and it wakes me up because I thought to myself: “ok, so I can’t go back to the way I was”. And two years later after I finished all my treatments and so on, in that time I started to investigate and Reiki brought to me my next calling as a Reiki Master, as a Reiki Student and also as the Grand Master of this system and that is to
0213 (räusper) ähm 0216
…. prepare the system and perhaps the global community to serve our world, our global community of human beings and our global society
2:34

4:11
Reiki has a very unique kind of leadership to offer. So this means that we have, we need as far as I’m concerned, to grow into that leadership ourselves, which means that it’s not a hierarchy it’s a circle. The power is in the circle. And I have always said to people “I am not the top of the line, I’m not the world expert, I am a student of Reiki that has a specific duty to this system”. But everybody has as their own gift, their own understanding that they bring to the system. But their sharing of this gift is not so imperative as mine. That’s the difference.
5:12
I have always seen myself as sitting in a circle of masters, first the masters that Takata initiated and now that that circle has grown so small I can count on one hand the number of masters now alive, I think…. I look to another circle, the circle that I call the Master Body…
5:46
Are we able to sit together in a circle either virtually or physically and talk from our heart-mind (touches third eye), and to share our truth and to listen to the truth of others equally? Are we able to take the leadership when it’s important and then to give it to another person when it’s their turn to lead? 0618These are all 0620 (räusper) poss… all..in our, this..
06:25

06:25
We have this potential and it’s right at our fingertips literally. And one of the things that I hope to bring to at least the system that I practice and hold is the possibility of them understanding that this is our next step to fulfilling what I believe is the calling of Reiki, which is to make a difference, not in a passive way but in a passionate way, to use all of our dedication, all of our passion for this practice and all of our energy as human beings so that we can bring to this planet understanding about the energy of money, that we can bring to it shared leadership and understanding of the value of every person’s human dignity, that we can bring to them the experience of being one, of laying our hands on people and knowing that we are one with this person whether we like them or not, whether we are afraid of them or not or whether we fall deeply in love with them or not. Those emotions don’t matter, it’s this intrinsic connection that we have as a species and every other species on this planet has this in their consciousness. It’s just that we have forgotten. And it’s so important that we start remembering. And I believe that that’s a huge gift that Reiki gives to us.
0806 So.. 0808 (räusper)
08:11
Right now we hide this by good/bad, right/wrong, better than. Those are tricks of our human mind so that we don’t feel the pain of others, so that we don’t feel the pain of separation, so that we don’t experience this incredible vibrant joy of being connected. We have to reduce it so that we as an individual can live content to know that we are in control.
08:57

0:06
It is my hope that my legacy will be that I not only invited the Reiki community to move to a higher expression but to have guided it so that it became a higher expression of itself. And what I mean by this, and I don’t mean to be critical of where we are because every level of expression is necessary and needs to be lived thoroughly, it’s a little bit like growing up as a human being: You know, we need to live babydump (0:46) thoroughly or it gets stuck somewhere. We need to live adolescence thoroughly, we need to live young adulthood thoroughly. And what we’re moving into as a community for me is a maturity, but it needs to what I feel like Reiki is asking of all of us is…
1:17

1:17
Is to do this reconciliation not for reconciliation’s sake but as a stepping stone to the next stage of development of this practice, and I mean practice globally. That is to be able to … develop into a practice that serves humanity and serves life. That’s very, very clear from the self-treatment of those individuals to associations and groups of people who do specific projects to the global community that actually votes and informs the government leaders of our times and that actually make a difference on a political and on a spiritual and on a mental level and the only way we can do that is to act together.
2:29

2:29
I was thinking about a reaction that I have about ant colonies, you know these little in German “Ameisen” and you know I see them start one or two ants in my brick sidewalk at home and I think oh, oh  and in a week the whole colony has moved you know their home underneath my sidewalk and the brick is starting to subside into the earth and you know they don’t think about “oh, we are going to move here and create destruction”. They are just moving there because it’s a nice place to live.

3:15

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

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

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

0:00
A few years ago I ran across a little book, it was the rage back then, called “The four agreements” by Don Miguel Ruiz and I at first thought, well this is just like the precepts of Reiki and but just spoken in a different way. But then I started to realize that these four little phrases affected me in a different way, more directly maybe and with less questioning. So I’d like to share them with you because they have really made an impact in my life.
0:51
The first agreement is “Be impeccable with your word”
The second agreement is “Don’t take anything personally”
The third one is “Don’t make assumptions”
And the fourth one is “Always do your best”
I feel as a human being that I’ve been able to use these in order to not only do my best and be sure that my communication is as best as I could be, but also to own my own humanness, my own understanding of situations and then realize afterwards that my best could have been better if I had known what I know now. So…
1:53

2:31
The one about “don’t take things personally”, that’s tough. Because in the beginning, especially in the early 1990’s I thought that the changes that were happening in different practices and the formation of new forms of Reiki were an affront to Hawayo Takata and of course I wanted to defend her. And so I definitely took things personally, if not personally also for Hawayo Takata. So I was a bit strict and a bit strong in those days and really confused because at the same time I really do believe that every person has a right to their own opinion and who they are. So even though my students differ in opinion and in theory from me I want to also say that I would defend their right to have their space, have their opinion and have their theory.

3:47

3:47
When we make assumptions, often times what we are doing is filling in the gap of the unknown. And I believe that as Reiki Masters and I wanted to train myself to do this, that if there is something that I don’t know, I try not to make an assumption in order to fill in the unknown, but to just allow it to be and to see what happens. Well, of course in the early days I wasn’t very good at this and I made lots of assumptions. And now I trust that the number of assumptions that I’m making to fill in the blanks have lessened and in making those assumptions I feel like I have put other people in boxes or put on to people certain attitudes that maybe weren’t correct.
4:50

4:50
Be impeccable with your word, this one is really important for me. I really try to be impeccable, which means to say my truth as best I can in any given moment. And the most important part of this is the “in any given moment”, because the minute that I have a conversation with somebody, that idea or that word could change (0525) (cough)
5:36
These five… these ….0540 These four agreements with myself have allowed me to look back and to…
6:05
These four agreements have allowed me to look back without judgement and without guilt and to see my humanness and to come to you with a request
0619
… and then I think it can go on with the rest of it…. (Do you think that’s possible?)
06:30

0:00
And so: be impeccable with your word, be impeccable with your word, be impeccable…. Being impeccable with my word
0:26
Being impeccable with my words
0:31
Being impeccable with my words
0:47