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

0:00
After Hawayo Takata died in December of 1980 the master community was slowly informed about this.. about her death by my mother. And what I mean by slowly is that at first she didn’t call anyone, I don’t know for how many months. And then she was starting to go through my grandmother’s papers and compiled a list of people, because some of the masters who my grandmother had initiated she was not acquainted with and didn’t know. Others she knew from the conversations with my grandmother and because they came to visit my grandmother, in Iowa.
0:59
As the masters began to be informed, many of them called me and recognized me over the phone in the sense that they said “well you’re your grandmothers successor, now what are you going to do?”. And it was a questions that I couldn’t really answer.
1:19
So 1981 passed by very rapidly because of course I stayed with my family through X-mas 1980 and then into 1981 (0133) (cough) ähm
01:42

1:42
And during this time I didn’t really know what to do. And then it was evident at some point that Barbara Weber wanted to be recognized as the successor. And I believe that it was somewhere in the late summer or early fall, but again I don’t really know for sure, of 1981 that I went to visit Barbara Weber and asked her if we could do this together. And she said no.
2:22
There was another big question mark about a couple of master who had been initiated and I was surprised because it seemed like the had been initiated before my grandmother’s death which I was a little bit shocked about. But nobody would give me a straight answer. So I flew into Chicago to visit the Chicago masters and talked to them and I believe that I met everyone that year except for a woman named Iris Ishikuro, who was from San José and I never did get to visit her.
3:07
Eventually I realized that the masters had not been able to mourn their teacher of pay some kind of ceremony, you know do a ceremony about her, so I organized this meeting in Habi Hawaii in 1982 and I believe then it was in the spring, sometime like May or June. And this was the first time that a group of masters had come together and we stayed for a week together there. (0347) …(cough) (drinks)
4:01

4:01
some of the masters brought their spouses, some of them brought their adult children and we had a couple of little children I believe there too. And we had such a lovely time together that we decided to meet again the next year at Barbara Brown’s house.

04:28 ..(cough)….

I really do feel better (laughter, Andi in the background.) OK. Well, try my Ricola (RICOLA, René singing) I mean, the best thing Switzerland ever produced. (laughter, Thassos: except us, of course!) Yes! (René: dont forget we’re really Italians, Thassos) … (René: you know why Toblerone is called Toblerone?) … (actually the company is called Tobler and the first one for export, was Tobler One..) Is that really true? (René: well, the legend says so). OK, so… Try not to have a very strange protrusion of my mouth…. ähm
5:46
In this meeting in Hawaii we spent quite a lot of time talking about the succession and about Barbara Weber and her kind of threats to the rest of us. And we also spoke together about her way of teaching because when we started to exchange treatments, it was evident that we had different hand positions, we started in different places
6:23 (cough)..6:28
and a couple of the masters had, what I would call, special gifts that came up
0635-0640 (cough)..
and so their treatments looked quite different than the rest of us. So we spent some time having a demonstration. Ethel Lombardi, I believe, was a gifted healer herself and when she received Reiki this brought out this gift and the gift was, in her own words, to pull out energy out of the body and so that’s what her Reiki treatments looked like. So she kind of did a little class or something for us all and some people didn’t like it at all, some people could relate to it and some people thought “well that’s interesting but it’s not Reiki”.
7:31

7:31
Everyone there basically acknowledged me as a spiritual lineage, as my grandmother’s successor. And.. I remember the daughter of Virginia Samdahl was there and we had a talk. And she said “Well Barbara Weber is my master and I have great affection for her and great loyalty to her, but you carry something different and I can acknowledge you as a spiritual lineage”… well actually that … that wasn’t really coin, so I have to say “I can acknowledge you as your grandmother’s successor but I also acknowledge Barbara Weber as my Reiki master”. So in some way she was the first one that articulated this difference between – what I would call – the initiation lineage and the spiritual lineage, although that wasn’t actually named as such at that point…. Yeah, I think that’s true…
8:44
The next year when we met, there were more masters that had been initiated by me by this time and other masters that had been initiated by some of the other masters of Hawayo Takata and… a few masters initiated by Barbara Weber…. It was there that we didn’t really mean to come together and find a name for this group but it just arose out of kind of an organic process. And I think that that’s true that in… if you have a group of people that meet with a certain aim, then you end up naming yourself. So this group founded the Reiki Alliance.
9:39

9:39
And we talked a lot about the nature of Reiki, about the nature of the practice, about the things we wanted to preserve, about the things that we…excuse me…. that for us were not included in the practice and so on. We had really wonderful sharings and ….these two meetings were very important for me as … I felt…. recognized by people in a way that was very different. So some people who were familiar with being a devotee of a guru, an Indian guru, they wanted to wash my feet and kiss my feet, which I just… was really hard for me. Other people wanted me to get dressed up, have really nice fingernails and so on, which I didn’t ..(laugh).. and other people wanted me somehow to be holy or wise or, I don’t know why but I was just myself. And at that point I was a pretty naïve… ja, pretty naïve person, in a lot of different ways.
11:09
After the Reiki Alliance was formed that year, then the next year…. then the next year we decided to go to California. And I have no idea why I did this, but I end up….ended up renting a couple of big houses up on Donnner’s path in California near Lake Tahoe and that’s where we had the masters’ meeting. And it was out of that meeting that a little book was borne. People wanted to preserve the oral tradition but somehow be able to give their students something for the class. So I totally opposed writing this or putting this book together. So at one point one of the masters, who was very clever actually, came to me and said: “Well, if there was such a book, what would it be like?” I can remember her question to this day. And I said: “Well it would be very small, like pamphlet thing, it could have the story of Reiki in it, the pictures of the lineage and the precepts and maybe something else and it would not be for sale at the open market, it would just sold by the Reiki Alliance as a Reiki Alliance Publication”. So that’s how this little, what we call the “Blue Book” got formed and eventually Paul Mitchell was the one that put it together.
12:57

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

0:00
Well…again I… this is totally my theory, it’s not based on facts at all, but a theory and my theory is that in the Japanese tradition there are ways for people to recognize successors and one of the ways that Hawayo Takata was recognized as Chujiro Hayashi’s successor is that she was left with his house.. with everything with all his material possessions, with everything. And it was understood of course, that she could have kicked the Hayashis out of their house and taken it for her own. But she didn’t, she wanted to go back to Hawaii. So she of course allowed the Hayashis to stay in their home and to run the clinic and so on.
1:00
When my grandmother died everything went to my mother. And she, I believe, actually whether she was a Reiki master or not, handed the lineage in some way these inheritance piece to me. And…
1:26
And at that time the phrase was the Grand Master, so the master of masters. Now… I don’t know where this phrase came from. There were a group of my… of masters that my grandmother initiated both in California and in the Chicago area, who were older women, who probably had… knowledge of the Masons or some group like that and so for them… instead of using the word Sensei or another word to indicate an honour in Japanese.. (0222) (burping)… excuse me, (0224) they would call her the Grand Master.
2:30

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

00:00-00:13 Well, my real answer is, «I don’t know.» But I’ll back that up by saying other things (René: you don’t need to mention her name…) No, no, its fine.
00:20
This is a question that has arose again, interestingly enough, in the last few months, about Wanja Twan, for instance, who… because… I know that she recognizes me as my grand-mother’s successor but she is a very stro.. and she is a very strong master. She has influenced her teaching according to what she remembers Hawayo Takata teaching. But also her own very strong personality which is Scandinavian
00:57
which has again a whole other color. I find the Scandinavians to be really interesting people. Very esoteric and very … esoteric isn’t really quite the right word… Well, I’ll come up with word… but anyway. So, what Wanja has done is that she’s declared her successor as her daughter Anneli. And this has caused some confusion in the Reiki community, for instance, in the UK where Wanja has a very strong following. And as does Anneli now. And the students are getting confused about whether or not they acknowledge me as lineage bearer
01:55-02:00 (cough)
So, some of the masters and students of Wanja do not recognize me as the successor of this practice. They recognize Wanja in some way as their initiating master and as the person who carries the lineage of that practice. They don’t acknowledge a spiritual lineage. And Wanja does. So, even though Wanja is very subtle about her recognition of me, on some level, she doesn’t communicate that to her students. And so this creates a schism or can create a schism within the UK community because people don’t understand o’… the students don’t understand why the spiritual lineage is important.
03:06

03:06
So, it’s an interesting paradox, that Wanja… I feel really recognized by Wanja as my grand-mother’s successor. But I also see how strong her initiation-lineage is. So, for me, I… there are two things that I carry: I carry my initiation-lineage as a Reiki Master and then I carry the spiritual lineage as the successor to my grand-mother, Hawayo Takata. The two lineages for me are the same. But for Paul Mitchell – for instance – they are not the same: his spiritual lineage comes to me and my successor. His initiation lineage goes from Hawayo Takata to him and then to his masters.
03:57
So in Beth Gray… the issue with Beth is that she … I don’t know whether she was initiated by my grandmother, I know that she was recognized by my grandmother as a master, I believe that John Gray initiated her as a master. And I have kept this kind of «secret» for many… well, since 1980. And.. I believe it created confusion in her. Because she wasn’t clear about her own lineage and so she couldn’t be clear about the lineage that she passed on. She was also very careful about the people that she initiated as masters.
04:53
I don’t know how many master she she did initiate, maybe 3. One gal who was in Queen… no, one gal who was in New South Wales has died. She was a young woman, she was like 40 something and she died very suddenly; (0513) I should know her name, because I’ve met her, several times.
05:20 Barbara McGregor  (René interrupts with a name proposal)
05:29

05:29
Barbara McGregor and then there is another woman who was from Sydney area that she initiated. And Barbara McGregor in my viewpoint, sort of took took Beth’s tendency to dramatize and sort of expanded that. So, a lot of her material anyway when I first was in Australia in the early 1990ies then that Beth was the first occidental Reiki Master. Well I don’t even know what that means.  She certainly wasn’t the first “white” Reiki Master, for sure. She definitely wasn’t the first Master, so, I don’t really know what that means.
06:26
And then they sort of put titles on her to make her to make her special. The really sad part for me about that is that Beth Gray was an incredibly special person. She didn’t need a title, y’know, to indicate her specialness. This is the part that really bother me a bit. Because people would ask me, «well, what does that mean and is this true?» and it put me in a place, of either lying or being evasive, which I am not very good at. Or trying to explain this very strange claim that really meant nothing to me.
07:09
Because I didn’t know what they were using “occidental” as. Y’know. So…  The woman in Sydney and her partner came very often to visited Beth. And it was kind of sad for me because her reluctance her reluctance to initiate Masters in Australia, which may have been wise, actually, forced all of her very loyal students out to be initiated by masters they didn’t care about. They were masters who had been initiated for maybe 2 months as a Master and just wanted to, y’known, reproduce themselves or whatever. And they had no relationship with the Master that initiated them. They were really Beth Gray’s students and continued to be Beth Gray’s students
08:07

08:07
and continued that teaching without her blessing as a master. And there is something about that that was really sad for me. So, our… our and I will say “Our” consciously, our understanding of recognition of mastery and lineage was so slim at the time that we were doing all this that I have to say, that we were really lucky we didn’t get into more of a muddle. (0841) And that now it feels like
08:45-08:47 (coughing in the background)
on some level because I don’t know anything about real lineage I can kind of invent what I want to about lineage and its OK but I also feel like it also is very inclusive… for instance … there are masters that I have initiated who don’t practice the system I do, their form is very, very different, so I don’t recognize them as Usui Shiki Ryoho Masters. At the same time there are other Masters who started out definitely not in this form of practice but have come through taking the intensives from Paul and I, but also through their own willingness to just connect with the energy of this practice
09:34
that they become practitioners though they were initiated into another practice of Reiki before which is fine for me. Some of them don’… can’t trace their lineage because they wer… they went to some kind of a music festival and in the middle of the music festival somebody said, «I’m going to initiate you as a Reiki Master.» and they do. And they don’t even know their name. But y’know, somehow they… that initiation was sincere enough that they actually followed the path of mastery and ended on my doorstep. And I said, «Well, Okaay..if you want to do this and are committed and you are sincere, then why not?»
10:18

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

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

2:24
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

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

0:00
My mother called me a lost soul and I really hated this, because mostly I didn’t know what she meant, so that was really interesting. And it wasn’t until maybe 10 or 15 years later that I realized what she meant. Because whether I liked it or not, whether I knew it or not, whether I was conscious about it or not, the practice of Reiki gave me connection to my spiritual self, gave me connection to my soul and gave me means of finding out what I wanted to do, not what other people wanted me to do.
00:47
So it was true that in my early years after the time that I was 30 it seemed like, and I will say “seemed like”, I used a lot of other people’s opinions to make my own decisions. However there was a part of me that the really important decisions that I made, I didn’t care what anybody thought. You know, I married a man that I should have never married because my mother told me that I had to get married because I couldn’t live out of wedlock with a man. So that was about the last time I ever did really anything important in my life, let somebody else’s say so.
1:38

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

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

0:00
When my grandmother died in 1980 and Barbara Weber Ray, well then Barbara Weber said that she had been told that she would be the successor, I… my reaction was it was totally possible.
0028 (räusper)
And the process of succession is more than telling someone that you will be the successor. There has to be recognition. And of the 22 masters that were initiated by Hawayo Takata, most of them recognized me. Sometimes because just before her death Hawayo Takata had said “Phyllis is my successor”.
1003 (räusper)
But because there is another factor which is that the energy came to me and this Hawayo Takata had no control over. I believe that this was also true about Chujiro Hayashi. He might not have wanted Takata, Hawayo Takata, to have been the successor but he got where the energy was going and he surrendered to it. It wasn’t that I was the favourite of my grandmother, let me tell you. She wanted me to be very different. And she was not happy with me but she also recognized something inside of me, that I didn’t even recognize myself in truth. And….
1:56

1:56
As a juxtaposition, during the time when I started to travel with her and take my training with her, she and Barbara had a falling out and she wouldn’t even speak Barbara’s name. She was so angry. And because she had a heart condition my mother said “don’t even ask her what’s happening!”. But she wouldn’t have said anything anyway, it was so painful for her to talk about it. So there was a split between those two and there was a resignation almost that I might be her successor. And I’m not playing myself down, I mean…
2:44 (Schnäuzgeräusch)
I did things that she didn’t like, I went out on dates with men and she felt like “Reiki is the only thing that you should be paying attention to”. You know, this is it. And… I had very long hair, she wanted me to cut it short. I enjoyed life to the fullest, she thought I should work more. I mean, you know, I just wasn’t her ideal candidate, let’s put is that way. Barbara was actually much more the ideal candidate. But this falling out that they had, I have no idea what is was about.
3:28

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

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

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

3:20
Ten years ago I started to do work with this regenerative development thinking and in that I realized that … I didn’t know how the succession would work and that I needed to study it and I needed to really get the master community involved. I always thought that the successor would come from the body of masters that I had initiated, which kind of makes sense and it might actually be so. I have no idea. I don’t have a person in mind at all. There have been people who have come to me and said “I feel like I’m going to be your successor”. And I just have studied them over the years and I don’t have this feeling, right now anyway.
4:17

4:17
So when I .. found out that I had cancer and the treatment for it was so effective and so quick actually, I feel like the Reiki community was alerted but we didn’t do anything about it.
I went back to my old, you know, not
0443 (räusper)
as intensive travel schedule but I went back to my old ways and travelled and did my thing and so on. And then my metastasis happened, three years ago. And then the Reiki communities .. the master community sat up and said “okay, this is not over”.
0504 (räusper)
And I believe my body really has served me because three years ago we started on these… having these weekends called succession weekends. And they were not about voting to see who the best candidate was, which actually people did come thinking that.
5:28

5:28
But we are working on … investigating what are the functions of the spiritual lineage? Is there an energetic essence called the Master Body? Which I have spoken about from 1985 or 6. I believe there is a Master Body. There is an energetic Body that includes all Reiki Masters and especially all masters in the system and that they carry responsibility for the system because they’re masters. And we investigate what is the process of succession? What actually happens energetically? You know, where will this succession go? And what I’ve realized personally for myself is that of course somebody is not going to apprentice with me and be the next me. Somebody is going to appear at the time that’s very close to my death and they’re going to be recognized as the lineage bearer. And this person will take Reiki a whole other step that I cannot even imagine.
6:43
Just like when Hawayo Takata died at first I was really upset that she died so soon after my consenting to be a Reiki Master, not her successor, but a Reiki Master. And what I realized some years later is that in her dying then she gave me the gift of her wisdom and of her presence, because I’ve always felt her presence, but we didn’t have to struggle personality wise. And we would have had major, major struggles on the personality level.
7:25

7:25
So I believe that the same thing, it might be true for me. And if so, I still have my little antenna out seeing when this person will arrive. But what I’m now looking for is not almost like who they got initiated by or whatever, it’s how their mind works. Because what I realize is that what was perhaps different from me that I was different from many other people who could have been the successor is the way my mind works, was inclusive, was universal, could see patterns, could make sense of what seemed to be conflicts and appreciate that they actually were necessary in order to go to the next step and things like that.
8:30
So I’m looking for someone who naturally has that, not someone who is like me, because you don’t want another me. You know this is not the way forward in any practice. The next lineage bearer really has to take it, the next step that I can’t see, like my .. Hawayo Takata would never have been comfortable with all these different languages and all these different cultures. I mean she was not able to see the benefit of, you know, this global spread of Reiki, even though that’s what she wanted.
9:11

9:11
You know, she had… I had this very strange experience with her which really was difficult for me because we went to Puerto Rico. The first time I ever heard about Reiki, ever knew what Reiki was or anything. And she had a Spanish interpreter and she could not get that Spanish was a language that needed to be interpreted so that people could understand her. So she would just talk and never make space for interpretation, she would talk right over the interpreter. I mean, it was really embarrassing for me. And I had a talk with her and she said: “They just have to deal with it”. And I thought “this is not respectful!”. I’m sorry, but you know I just don’t get this. And I just think about this situation when I’m sitting in Poland or Russia or Italy or Spain or the Netherlands or even in England sometimes, you know, or Australia. Australia was really bad because there’s this old saying about thinking that you speak the same language but you really don’t.
10:38
Anyway, it was just really, really interesting for me to see that I had the personality and also my physical body was strong enough to do the travelling and do the global movement that I’ve been able to do with such ease. I really appreciate my body. And I really appreciate the difference between Hawayo Takata and myself. I didn’t make this global community, I didn’t spread Reiki, definitely not, but I kept up with it. And that for me has been a real amazing feed. I think..
11:17

11:17
So, whoever comes now, they have have what we call a millennial brain. They have to…. they have to be able to really see you know the globe and our world community as one. And all these young people do. I mean they get it by you know, being born with computers in their hand. I mean… I don’t know…. I don’t get it. But I really get how different their perception is and how oecumenical their view point is.
11:53

touching …really touching

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

14:59
And this group of masters will accompany me through this process of succession and education and at the end our end-state in a year hopefully will be a collective lineage bearing… a collective lineage bearing is the name of the end-state of being. And that will open up a whole field of understanding that will go
1531 through another (schlägt etwas mit dem Arm)
1532 sorry
another process.
1537 (Hintergrundgeräusch)
And my instrument for doing this is going to be in a webinar-situation where the 16 or 20 people who have the small group of go through this process will sit and do this talking over the webinar. So nobody has to travel you only have to have a really good internet connection and willingness to spend time on your computer.
16:06

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

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

3:21
So whether Mikao … Chijuiro Hayashi was a dissonant or was a rebel in Mikao Usui’s day or whether he was his best student or simply a student that went off and founded a clinic, we’ll never know. But found a clinic he did, he met Hawayo Takata and …. in response to Reiki showing him that Hawayo Takata was his successor he also sat in contemplation with the other masters that were in his circle and did something very unique at that time for him by giving the succession and following the energy of Reiki, which led Reiki out of Japan and into Hawaii and then into the rest of the world.
4:27

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

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

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