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