0:00
Well, the short answer is: I don’t know. The longer answer is that, ähm you know, his paper is on …what happens to an oral tradition when it’s taught through a number of generations and it goes from one culture to another culture and the changes that happen within the practice. Is this… Why are the changes made? And is there a developmental process actually going on? And these kind of questions. And then.. so that’s the general kind of theme of his thesis. And then what he did, was he used Reiki as an example of that and especially the time of Hawayo Takata because she was the person who took Reiki as a Japanese practice, well actually Usui Shiki Ryoho, and then brought it to another culture and then within that (1:16) how did she… let me start again. (1:26) How did she translate not just the language of Reiki but the culture of Reiki? How could she bring the Japanese culture into the practice of Reiki at the times and the moments when it was important for the actual practice to be understood?
1:54 (coughs)
And this part, I think Justin does beautifully.. for the most part. I mean of course I don’t agree with everything that he has surmised or come to, but I do really like his approach, because he really gets that this wasn’t about making Reiki… for instance some people have said “well, she made Reiki more Christian because she was teaching Christians” – but, this just drives me crazy but ähm…He saw that she needed to, for instance, add this precept particularly “honor your parents, teachers and elders» because for a Japanese person this is THE fundamental principal that every child grows up with and this is where you… this is what your life revolves around. And, of course, in our culture that is not necessarily true.. (laughs)
3:02

03:16
You know, those kind of things, bit I’m making the room mine. And it’s the same thing for the people that I know who created different forms of practice. Now, whether or not that motivation was because they were naive and they thought, «that this was OK because after all Reiki is Universal Life Energy. So anything that I do to Reiki and to the form of practice is fine because its universal.» That’s one part. The other idea was that, «well, I don’t like this part of the practice and I don’t see any necessity for it, so I’m just going to leave it out. Because, why should i… why should it make a difference?»
04:08
But in my, in my own defense, if I may say so, or in my own theory, Hawayo Takata gave us a recipe and it produced a kind of kind that I really like. If I still want to have this kind of cake, I am not changing the recipe. And my … and this is where the analogy actually ends. I want this cake to become even better. So, the more I practice the recipe, the more of my energy goes into that cake and then it becomes my cake, not the recipe’s cake. So this is my, my feeling. But for a lot of people, you know, they didn’t like the thought that people had to pay money for Reiki,
05:08
so they dropped money. Or they said, «you can pay by donation.» That was one of the first things that changed. People didn’t want to have a guru, they didn’t like the spiritual lineage they couldn’t relate to it, so they dropped that. Some people didn’t like the precepts. They dropped that. Some people didn’t like the formal hand positions, so they dropped that. Some people didn’t like touching the body, it was too invasive. So then they had Reiki working over the body. So, there are just all these different things that ended up getting taken away or added. «ohh, gosh I had such a wonderful experience of this kind of, you know, crystal practice. I’m going to put this into my Reiki practice.» So that gets added.
05:57

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

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