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
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

00:00
Hawayo Takata’s importance in the practice of Reiki covers, I think, different … different facets. One is that she took this practice and became a practitioner. And she treated thousands of people with all kinds of ailments and all ages and some for one treatment and some for treatments over years. So what she did was she really proved the aspect of healing of Reiki. And that it was combined also with obvious 0053 sort of ähm  … what would she call it? … 0058 common sense, practices of diets, not smoking for instance.
01:06 (räusper)
So, sometimes she would tell her clients, or her patients, «you can come for Reiki but you have to quite smoking.» Like this. Or, «you wanna lose weight, I put you on a diet and you come and get Reiki.» You know. So, she took this practice and from her two hands really gave the practice of Reiki this depth and understanding that it can be used for anything. She totally trusted whatever happened in the treatment. She would say, “not sick – reaction!”  Ohhkay! (laughs)
01:55-02:03 (cough)

02:03
The other thing that she did for Reiki was she literally brought Reiki from Ja.. Japan and from the Japanese Culture into the Hawaiian islands at a time when Japan was going to go through a major demolition of their culture and of their values and also just of their country.
02:33-0235 (cough)
So, I don’t know if the researchers have discovered how many of the Masters, for instance, had died during World War 2? What had happened to the clinic? But Reiki was definitely pushed underground in Japan and for Hawayo Takata it was a flowering time. It was a time to build up her practice and to become well known.
03:03 (Pause) 03:09
And then what she did in the years that followed the war was trans… translate Reiki as a practice from one culture to another culture to from the Japanese culture, which was quite specific, to a world-wide culture. And that she did this … well, I don’t know how conscious she was of doing it. But I would’ve .. I would  loved to have asked her some questions about what her process was of doing it. But I also know that the system itself as an ent… as an energetic entity has its own momentum in development. So she was not necessarily doing it out of her own conscious will but following the energy of Reiki and following where it was going and seeing that there were some things had to be either emphasized or brought forth in order for the practice of Reiki to flourish.
04:25
And I find this to be an amazing feat. I’ve just come to this understanding in the last 10 years how… what a magnificent job she did. And I feel that if she hadn’t done it, that it wouldn’t have been so accessible to people.
04:51

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

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

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

2:30
Now, I’ve thought and talked a lot about this, and someone once wrote as a rebuttal somewhere about the spiritual lineage: “well Mikao Usui never talked about himself as being a member of the lineage”. And I thought: “Well, hello?! Of course not, he didn’t know there was going to be a lineage”. You know…. There’s master and student, but I feel lineage doesn’t come till you have the third person, because then you have a line that is drawn and then the fourth person really becomes a lineage. So a lineage doesn’t start with one person or even two, it has to contain at least 3 people.
3:16
So my grandmother and in some of their innocence or wanting to make her feel important or whatever their motivation was, I believed they used the phrase Grand Master, which is used a lot. It’s also used now to translate some of the martial art terms of the person who is in charge of the Dojo in martial arts and so on, as the Grand Master, but it’s not something that I relate to …sort of in this lineage base.
4:01

6:40
Now, what does Grand Master really mean? Well, you know, I still to this day don’t really know and at the point where Paul and I were sort of giving each other duties, he knew that he would never be the lineage bearer and he still to this day is very clear about that. And so that allowed me to have, what I would call “an accurate title”. The further away I get from Hawayo Takata’s death the more easy I am with this term Grand Master, because I feel whether I like it or not, I’m growing into it.
7:38
During the … master intensives that Paul and I facilitate together we have identified 5 roles of masters. So it helps me in organizing myself when people say “I’m a Reiki teacher” (0758-0802) (cough)… and not go into a judgement that says “no, you are a Reiki master”. So the roles of a master are, that I feel, are identifiable, are: initiator, teacher, student, mentor and tradition keeper. So each of these 5 roles of the master have a different quality and mastery is really about being able to hold all of those and be active in all of those.
8:44

12:55
In the same light, to kind of get back to my topic again, I believe that the Grand Master has it’s own individuation with roles and that one of them is lineage bearer, one of them is the form keeper or something like that but we haven’t gotten to explore that and I think once we do, we will understand more about the essence of what is meant by this phrase. Whether or not that phrase actually communicates in, is totally … I don’t know, we may come up with something really different.
13:35
One of the things that is not understood at all, it seems, by the general public and by the Reiki community, is that a Grand Master is actually recognized. It is not taken. So in the process of my becoming recognized as a Grand Master, I could not say to people “I’m in, vote for me”. It needed to be.. come from the other side, it needed to be recognized. And in that recognition, I believe, that the Reiki community grew me as a Grand Master, that every master of Hawayo Takata did have the seed of lineage bearer or Grand Master in them. It was the recognition of me and my willingness, whether I knew it or not, to take it on and the energy of Reiki that came to me, whether my grandmother wanted that to be or not, that really grew somebody very different than the masters who were initiated by Hawayo Takata.
14:56

14:56
And it doesn’t mean that I am wiser or have a better viewpoint of the system or anything, what it means is that I have a more global view. And one of the things that really separates Paul and I from all the other masters that Hawayo Takata initiated or recognized, was this global view, this idea that we were much more than Reiki masters to our own students, that we were actually growing into this mast… universal mastery path and that in this as a group of Reiki masters we really could have influence on the outcome of humanity. And….
15:46
It was amazing to me that the masters who were initiated by Hawayo Takata did not understand the influence and the impact that they had on the entire Reiki community. You know, they would say stuff like: well, you know… you know the members of the Reiki Alliance, like all their students, I don’t care about them. I was going: “how can you.. how can you not care about them?”… (laugh)… “How can you not care about the system… that we’re practicing?”
16:22-16:27 (cough)
They really took it as a linear kind of progression, where, you know, Hawayo Takata was master and their teacher, they taught exactly as she taught them, in theory, which I truly believe was from their heart. And so it didn’t matter to me and it still doesn’t matter to me that these masters could be members of the Alliance, their form could be really different than most of the Alliance members but they still for me practice the same system, because that blood line, so to speak, the energetic blood line of Hawayo Takata still ran through them.
17:15

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

0:00
Another application of form and essence is this piece about what… and the answer to the question “what practice is it that I follow”. So there is one, is initiations, that’s essence for me and the other is the form of practice, that’s the form, obviously. And there are many masters that I have initiated, who don’t practice this form but they have the initiations. So… and then as I said before, there are other people who have been initiated into another practice, who adopt this form. So for me both of them are equal. I don’t find that form is more important than essence or the other way around, they create a kind of partnership….
1:07
Those people are very.. in some way in a kind of bloodline, as you said, people who can trace their initiation through from Hawayo Takata or me or from Chujiro Hayashi. Then the… evaluation is on the form, because if the form is in alignment with this practice, then they’re practicing this system. If their form is somewhat out of alignment, but their intention is to practice this system, then they are.. they just have alignment issues.
1:58

1:58
If they are not intending to practice this system but are very close to the actual form of this system, then their intention is that they are not practicing this form – they are practicing another form. But then there are people who don’t practice this form and they are, you know, some percentage outside of the alignment and their initiation is from another form, then it seems that they are really practicing another form. So… I hope that was really clear?.. It seems not clear. Anyway…
2:49
If you want to speak about Barbara McGregor, I actually don’t know what her practice is, so I couldn’t make any kind of judgement. I do know that her…the way she teaches and her attitude toward other masters and so on is not in alignment with this system. She is very much of a woman on her own. And her students are her students… and I have known other Reiki masters who are like that as well. That they won’t teach or mentor anybody else’s students. And I have found that always to be disconcerting but I also accept it..
3:52
RV: when you say: ‘this sytem’, that’s equivalent to Usui Shiki Ryoho?
4:03
Yes, but now to be specific: it’s Usui Shiki Ryoho honouring the lineage of Mikao Usui, Chujiro Hayashi, Hawayo Takata and Phyllis Furumoto. Because without the lineage you can’t differentiate from all the other practices that practice but don’t honour this lineage.
4:27

00:00
Well, it’s very hard to generalize why people are angry and specially around this. And as I said a lot of it has to do with peoples‘ misunderstanding about the use of trademarks and what the bring you. The other thing is that, you know, when we adapt a practice like Reiki that touches us in this kind of essence place of our humanness, then we want to protect it, to control it in the sense of, you know, making sure it’s not harmed, to be sure that other people don’t harm it themselves. We don’t want it taken away from us. We don’t like betrayal. And so … depending on your own attitude about what those controls must be
01:02
or how want’em protected or how … I should have done my job to protect it then of course there … I can understand why there would be a lot of anam… anger and animosity because I just didn’t do my job. I mean, that was Joop’s .. as far as I received from his communication at the time, his bottom line, was that I wasn’t doing my job so that he had to do it for me. And now that he was doing my job I ended up appearing taking it away from him. And.. you know, I can see that. However, people assume that there was a way to control the proliferation of the different of the different forms of practice. And I believe there was absolutely no way to control that.
02:02
I mean, this started happening from the moment Hawayo Takata died or before. And I liken it to our human need to make things our own. So as a kin.. as an example which seems kind of flip
02:24-02:30 (coughing)
it seems kind of flip but actually, I think we all can relate to it, as we go into a hotel room that is made to be neutral and immediately we open our bag, we take out our stuff. I used to have a whole hotel room thing. I’d always have a pareo or a beach shawl, Sarong kind of thing, I put it over the TV. And then I’d have the pictures of the masters, I’d put them up. Have a little candle, put my stuff in the bathroom, scatter it around, take the towels down and fold them the way I want it. You know, I’d undo the bed because I hate having the bed tucked in at the bottom.
03:16

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
Well, in 1982 when the masters, mostly the masters of Hawayo Takata met, in Hawaii, it was decided that I was the only one who would initiate masters. And I don’t know really where this decision came from, but it was a wise decision on the parts of other masters. Not because I was the best person to do it but because in tradition the Grand Master is the person to perpetuate the system. So they would be the only person to initiate masters. At the same time it meant that… the masters who came out of this system would get the same “training” or preparation and they would have something in common and hopefully that training would be… thorough and the best, you know, that somebody could offer….
1:24
Then.. and I felt honoured by this because I felt that all the masters knew that they could initiate a master and they were.. some of them were told before you die it’s important for you to initiate at least one master because then Reiki won’t die. And so…
1:53
I don’t think any of us realized what an amazing journey this would take us on. At one point I had certificates printed shortly after Hawaii and I got 1st degree, 2nd degree and I got master certificates done and I wanted to print 50 and the guy said “I’m not printing 50”, because it was the old kind of printing, where it was really a printing press. And he said: “forget it, you know, I’m gonna print you 2 or 300 and if you don’t use them, that’s fine but I can’t print 50”. And I thought “well, I’ll never use them”, of course I did….but not in the short time to 1988.
2:45

4:06
However, as newer masters began to come out and as other Reiki students could see it from the outside, their idea was that I was the only one that had the power to initiate masters. And there was nothing I could do, and I tried, there was nothing I could do to dissuade them from this thought. So a friend of mine and I were travelling actually through Germany and we did a number of workshops before this conference in 1988 in Friedrichsdorf. And I just told John, I said: “I have to do something about this because it’s a lie and if it’s out into people who say that this is what I say about this, then.. you know, it’s gonna totally destroy me”…0505-0510 (cough)..
5:11
I stood up and gave a speech in Friedrichsdorf and this is what I think I said, which is.. everybody has their own version, so far I’ve now heard 4 or 5. But what I thought I said was: “The masters of Hawayo Takata abdicated their right and their… yah, their right to initiate masters, given to them because they are masters of this system, to me. I don’t know why but they did and I feel like it’s been beneficial for this system.”
5:52

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

2:02
And that would relieve me a lot because I feel that this has to…. this material has to be made available but I can’t deal with people arriving, you know here and looking through the boxes, and having to supervise them and ahh…just kind of gives me the willies. So I’m just really excited by this. And now this winter I’m starting to develop my own archives. So sorting things out, throwing away, you know, cancelled checks and stuff which I don’t really need in the archives and doing things that I need to do, because some of the stuff is in my head like I want to take all the files that I have, both computer- and E-mail-files of the masters that I’ve initiated and be able to match them to a photograph that I might have and digitalize this, like scan this into a digitalized record.
3:17
So there would be as thorough record as I could have of all the masters that I have initiated and their history with me and with the system. So that’s really exciting and I have lots of manuscripts of people’s research and their papers that they have written and I’d like to digitalize them and make the available in a kind of library online and there are lots and lots of things that I could do to help speed up the process of my archive, because my Reiki archive is going to be massive compared to my grandmother’s. So like instead of four boxes of pictures, it’s twelve.
4:13

0:00
Well, for me the Master Symbol came up when people… when people began to initiate masters who were not Hawayo Takata (if that makes sense). And then they wanted to validate or prove that they were masters. So how could they do this? And a natural answer to this question is: Do you have the right symbol? But for me there is no Master Symbol.
0:43
What is called the Master Symbol, number one: It is not a symbol, it’s a phrase in Japanese. So you know there are two ways to look at this: All language is symbol. So we can say “Father, Son and Holy Ghost” and it’s a symbol, I mean it has more meaning than just the words themselves in Christianity and it has become a holy phrase that evokes, if a priest says these words, a certain kind of energy, which I myself have experienced. So when people say this phrase in Japanese, it’s a phrase that comes from.… it’s like a holy phrase in Buddhism, so it’s not a symbol like the second degree symbols, it’s a phrase, it’s a part of the initiation and that’s it.
1:56

9:38
And oh just to answer the question about different symbols: Well there are no different symbols. The problem again is ignorance and I will use the word ignorance, it’s kind of an ugly word but it carries for me an emotional impact that I actually mean to communicate. It’s about ignorance of the Japanese language. Like 99% of us, including myself, do not read and write Japanese, (1017) so…. (cough)
10:23
99% of us don’t read and write Japanese, (1028) so of course it looks just like a series of lines that means whatever our master says. But in truth it’s actually the written Kanji for Japanese. So there are so many different ways to write the Kanji, so many different styles and so many different… handwriting styles that of course it looks like there are different symbols being given to different people, but it was just simply the way that Hawayo Takata wrote the Kanji in that moment.
11:05

0:00
Well I have no knowledge of this. You know, for me I received the initiation the way that my master taught me. I assume that it was the way that she received it from Chujiro Hayashi.. I don’t believe that… It was not in Hawayo Takata’s nature to make Reiki more palatable to the western mind. She wanted to make it, she wanted to transfer the power of Reiki and its connection to the Japanese culture to the western mind because that was essential to how it worked., not to involve other people and to make it better. You know this is really for me… a huge difference in the… interpretation of her movement.
1:08
So I have no idea I don’t know how Jikiden Reiki is practiced, I don’t care because it’s not my practice. It doesn’t mean that they are the genuine one or the original one. I don’t believe that any of the practices that are practiced today are the genuine one or the real one because it just depends on where you are. Like the association that is in Japan that is supposed to come from Mikao Usui’s one teaching and the association whose mission was to keep that teaching as accurate as possible, then I can say ok if in their practice somehow this didn’t appear then
(0207) (räusper)
it’s an anomaly. But we have no idea why and to speculate on that to fill in the blank is really dangerous. Because I have seen people do that with Hawayo Takata’s practice, and I know a lot about her practice, but say in one class she doesn’t mention this and so you know for that whole thing and that one master who eventually, you know the first degree student, who eventually becomes a master this particular one thing is not in their practice because in the first degree class she happened not to say this.
2:46

2:46
And so it becomes, you know, she never said that. Well I can totally accept that for many of the masters that she initiated because she taught to the student and to the class. And her classes were not structured in way that’s an outline. I mean she mostly always did the hand positions but in California she told them to start on the abdomen for some reason and in British Colombia she told them to start on the head. Why? I don’t know. But I actually have to just accept her wisdom in her teaching style. The hand positions are the same basically, but where to start is really different. And it was a kind of place of argument for a while. And I said, well, it doesn’t really matter. I mean what we know is that she taught each class individually, she taught each student individually, she taught each master how they needed to be taught. I saw that because I saw her prepare many masters and it really depended on their personality, right?
4:04

4:04
So Wanja Twan, who is very esoteric and has no shyness about asking questions about past lifes and all these others things. I mean she asked a lot of questions of my grandmother, I mean I wouldn’t have the nerve to even think about. So she ended up with an interesting group of …you know a knowledge from Hawayo Takata that I didn’t have because I wasn’t brave enough to ask the questions. And then there are other people who asked other kinds of questions or who took a part of the practice that they could relate to in their own personality and develop that part of it.
5:00
And it’s just really wonderful because when I could imagine sitting around the circle of masters that Hawayo Takata initiated that her practice was not embedded in one of us, it was embedded in all 22 of us. And it was only if you could take the big picture of the 22 of us, then you would get her practice. And that’s what was so magical for me. So I’m… I don’t like this kind of saying about when did this appear and when did this disappear because it’s calling for a lot of surmising that feel like is… I mean what is the point?
5:55

7:53
But it was a development of process of mastery. You know and I now believe, that in the classes now even with young masters, this is not an issue like it was then. I mean of course it happens. And you know, there are lots of long term relationships now, that started as a student came in to a masters class, they fell in love and they took their time, they were mature, they allowed their relationship to mature and now there are long term relationships and people are happy with them. But… it takes time to kind of sort that thing out..and… I just ….feel like we are in a different place now.
8:49
So.. that’s one way to use our power is through our sexual expression. Another way to use power is power over… this is an expression where, you know, it’s kind of the cult leader thing, you know, like I know the truth and I’m giving you the truth and if you want to know the truth I am the only person that’s the source of the truth, right… and what the original , what I got in my Reiki class was you have access to your truth and no one else does. I don’t know where I got this message, she never said it like that, but that’s definitely what I got and what all of us got. So when we would have discussions it wasn’t like “I’m right, you’re wrong”, it was like.. the end-sentence was “and this is what she taught me”. This is what I glean from her teaching. Well, how could you argue with that? You couldn’t, so you had to like open yourself and just allow that all these little differences were also a part of her teaching and that you could keep your own without being threatened by everybody else and welcome and embrace your brothers and sisters Reiki Masters you know equally even though we weren’t the same. It was a tremendous opportunity.
10:26

10:26
And… I think it’s very human to want to find the real story of creation you know, it’s like… native tribes all over the world, you know indigenous groups of people have a creation story and when I listen to some of their creation stories I think well that’s total fantasy, but what I have learned over the last 30 years in listening with different ears to these stories is that they are based on truth, they are based on the truth of the tribe. And that truth lives on through the tribe and keeps the tribe nourished, you know on these energetic-physical-spiritual levels.
11:23
And…. The Reiki story as is told by Hawayo Takata in truth… you know like in factual truth, I have no idea you know how factual it is and I never cared. But what I do get when I tell the story, not because I believe it, because I tell you in the first ten years I told that story because that’s what I needed to do as a Reiki Master. And when I saw what it did to the people who were listening to the story, I thought well there is something more going on here than I can perceive because it’s not like I told the story so well or I told the story so accurately or I told, you know, I’m such a big person that the story made a difference in people’s lifes. I mean as a young master I was just astonished by the effect the story had on people by the energetic transmission that came through that story.
12:31

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
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

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

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

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

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

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

3:57
So that’s when I went back to the Japanese words Usui Shiki Ryoho. Still many people call their system of practice “the Usui system” or Usui Shiki Ryoho but that’s why I’ve added the lineage eventually because that really specifies it.
4:18
You asked about the Reiki Alliance and the Reiki Alliance is an organization that was founded by… partly by me and a group of masters initiated by Hawayo Takata, in 0432 ähm (räusper) 1983. And now of course the membership of the Reiki Alliance includes members from all over the world and from many, many different masters. The Reiki Alliance is a kind of … association for masters who practice this specific system. So they have a membership system where you have to be able to demonstrate that you practice this system in a similar way. And that feels fine for me. 0520 ähm (räusper) excuse me 0523
5:26

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

00:00, 0008 (sigh)
After Hawayo Takata died 1980, in the end of 1980, sorry….
00:17
After Hawayo Takta died in December of 1980 some of her masters began to be asked to go teach in other countries. Wanja Twan, who came from Sweden originally and immigrated into Canada, went back to Sweden and initiated a Dutch master, a woman who was Dutch, excuse me, who immediately, literally went to the Netherlands and began to teach. Beth Gray was asked to go to Australia, Fran Brown was asked to go to France. I mean, it was an amazing process and Mary McFayden one of the very first students that she initiated was Brigitte Müller, who was a… whom she met in an ashram in California. Brigitte went back to Germany, took Reiki back as a 1st degree student and invited Mary immediately to come and teach and that’s such a beautiful story.
1:33

3:03
Beth Gray went to Australia and she was a charismatic healer herself. And Reiki, I feel, gave her an opportunity to have a form for that healing along with a few other of the Reiki masters that Hawayo Takata initiated. And when she went to Australia, she found a waiting community. And who knows why these things happen, as in the story of Mary McFayden or Inger Droog who went to the Netherlands or Wanja Twan who taught in Scandinavia again.
0346-0348 ähm (cough)
The Australians welcomed Beth Gray, she had somehow the right personality, which was very forward, extremely charismatic and extremely opinionated, I will use that word. Which was great, because somehow it fit into their society and they’re very strong in their opinions, the Australians. And they need to be, you know, they are in a very harsh environment, given, everything. And when they were… when Australia was first settled they needed to be tough. And that toughness still is there in the Australian culture. And it is part of their charm, actually these days.
4:41

3:24
(René: It is very much true for me personally, ähm…Let me just think about this… ähm)

0334 Okay, I’ll add something. (OK)….
0340 When.. so when I accept a master candidate….what I am doing, is I’m opening up a part of me to share that is my most profound and secret place inside of me. I’m sharing the part of me that’s a master. Sometimes people refer to this as a huge responsibility, for me it is not a huge responsibility… and I don’t know what is being referred to as a lesser responsibility, so I don’t know where the comparison goes… comes from. But the responsibility for me is to be true to myself, to be true to the practice that I teach and pass on and to be true to the path of the master candidate and it demands of me more presence, more willingness to not be the only person in that master’s life, that Reiki is the ultimate teacher, not me and that the ancestors or the lineage that I come from serve as a part of the teaching of the student.
5:19
So if I can and could go back to my initiating master Hawayo Takata and say “what would you do in this case?”, I would have loved it, but I never got that opportunity. I did actually do it by just in treatment and sometimes I got an answer and sometimes I didn’t. Sometimes… the time when I didn’t get an answer was actually more profound than when I did (laugh).
5:53

4:58
The aspect of tradition keeper is one that’s new and I’m offering two weekends for masters and 2nd degree students who.. to come and talk about what they feel like tradition keeper is for them, how they feel like this role has been developed within our system and in our community. 0522 (räusper) …. (pauses)
5:35
In my mind tradition keeper begins with this understanding that I have had from my master and that is “you don’t change what I’ve given you”. And basically we haven’t, it’s basically the same former practice as I said earlier she taught to different classes and to different students a little bit differently but you can take the basis of that in the way that we teach today. So this is part of tradition keeper and there are some aspects of our tradition that are being challenged these days, oral tradition for instance. I find that all folk-art is taught by oral tradition, acupuncture, Chinese herbs, Shiatsu, Reiki. These.. all these martial arts all these are oral tradition teachings, you have a master, you have somebody you go to in person and that’s how you learn and you learn through doing.
6:53

0:00
Perhaps another part of tradition keeper is simply noticing that there is …. a human aspect to the student/teacher relationship that
0021 (räusper)
is always a challenge for both. And that is when the student “grows up” and becomes a master of their own or even a 2nd degree student on their own, they have their own experience, they have their own understanding of what they’re doing and sometimes it doesn’t agree with their masters. And that’s okay. One of the things that was very clear in Hawayo Takata’s teaching was that everybody has the right to their own relationship with Reiki, the energy. 0056-0057 (räusper)
0:59

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

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

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

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

00:06 I met Paul Mitchell in the summer of 1980 and it was a pretty funny experience because I was just… I was just a women of 30 years old, having no what I consider to be “esoteric experience and although I had had them.. as I look back on them and but I didn’t recognize them then… and I was living with my grandmother in Quisaqua/Iowa ?? where my parents lived and where my grandmother moved in her last years
0:53
Paul was a recent student of hers in San Francisco and he was driving across country to help a friends move a car from San Francisco to Washington DC. And he thought “oh, I could stop and get second degree from Hawayo Takata in her own home… So he called Hawayo Takata my grandmother and he said “I’m passing by” well I figured his speech “could I come and get second degree” and she said “Yes, when are you arriving?” an he said “tomorrow” or something like that…
1:32 (räusper)
So he came and because I was there as my grandmother’s assistant at the time,
0141 (räusper)
I was supposed to be travelling with her and helping her but because she became ill I came back home and gave her Reiki every day and helped her cook and so on… I thought that I was there to.. so that she can sit with Paul while he ate and I would cook dinner for both of them and then leave 0205 (Cough) 0210
2:11

2:11
I opened the door and there was recognition between us. It was like “oh, hello” and my grandmother felt the intensity so she showed Paul in to the living room, dining room area, sat him on the chair, said “We’ll be right out”. Then she came to the kitchen, closed the door and went “You go home, you go home right now” and I went “But I haven’t cooked you dinner?”. She said “I’ll cook”, I said “No, let me just stay, I’ll help you cook dinner”. But she wanted me gone like that.
2:54
And… So I was, despite all of my projects and I never saw Paul again that week. A few months later a couple of months later we ended up in San Francisco at Paul’s house because that’s where she was staying in September or October, I don’t remember which month, to do some classes. And it was the end of my time with her during that year. So I flew back from San Francisco to Denver and then to Winner Park and resumed my duties in the ski area. But that night, we went out for dinner the three of us, Paul, Hawayo Takata and myself and we came home and she instantly fell asleep. So Paul and I finally got to talk to one another “alone”, so to speek. And it wasn’t a kind of sexual man/woman-thing, it was something like we’ve done something together before, I mean it was very kind of spooky for me, because I never really had this happen. So then I didn’t see him for a couple of years after that.
4:13

4:13
By that time we were both initiated as masters, he had been initiated later and my grandmother, our master, had died and he had moved to Idaho and I was living in Southern British Colombia. So we were living about 4 hours apart, kind of as a miracle. And so we ended up along with a couple of the other masters from that area that my grandmother had initiated as a little group of new Reiki Masters who were lost. Because our master had died and we just needed to comfort each other and to compare notes and so we did this a lot.
5:08

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