0:00
One of the confusing things about grandmother’s teaching is that she called what she taught “Reiki” and she called the energy “Reiki”. However, the practice of Reiki was like a shortcut for Usui Shiki Ryoho and maybe Usui Shiki Ryoho Reiki. So… we all called it Reiki until like the beginning of the 1990ies. And then there were so many other Reiki forms of practice emerging that it was very difficult to know who we are talking about, it was very confusing.
0:52
Then in about 1993 or 94 there is this gentleman who was a master from Germany, Shunjan Joop Hilger. And he decided to take care of business because he knew that I wasn’t doing this, which I… appreciated his motivation, I didn’t appreciate what he did, but I appreciated his motivation. And he trademarked in Germany… the words Usui Shiki Ryoho and the Usui System of Natural Healing and the Kanji of Reiki. And so… I challenged him because he was starting to threaten people, that if they didn’t comply with his idea about what the practice was, then they couldn’t use the words.
1:55
So I went into a 2 year trademark…. what’s it called.. challenge I guess or something like that (background voice) … and I challenged him to the right to trademark these. And the attorney that I used in Köln..in Cologne said, when I told him my whole story, said: “well, if you are the recognized lineage bearer, the Grand Master, then they are yours.”
02:29-2:45 So … (talks to herself ….pause )

2:46
So he didn’t… he actually …(0250) Joop actually settled out of court eventually, but it took about 2 years and a lot of money. And.. I..when I went to… so what happened was: I was awarded the right to trademark these things. However, I needed to … they erased his trademarks, they took them away from him. And then it was up to me to establish trademarks again. So immediately we applied for a trademark of these things. But in those years, I think there is about 3 or 4 years in there that Reiki went from not being known at all to actually being publically known. So then it was not possible to trademark because they had become “words in common use”, which are not trademarkable. Interesting
3:53
And that was true for UK and true in the United States. So I ended up without any trademarks, which is actually good. But in the rest of the world, some of the countries that were able to trademark Reiki and so on, still hold these trademarks. (coughing)
4:21

4:21
Once I got into the trademark thing, I found it fascinating, by the way. There was a way that we could have established an industry trademark so that everyone who passed a certain, very minimal criteria for Reiki could use it. And it wouldn’t have cost us very much money, because there would have been a lot of people to maintain this trademark, but…
5:02
Even if I had been able to trademark Reiki and keep it for this practice, I wouldn’t have made much money, because …the money you make in trademarks depends on how much people can actually pay for the trademark…(laugh)… and you know this is not much. So people though I was gonna become a billionaire or something having trademarked Reiki and I kept saying to people: “You know, Reiki is not Coca Cola”.. I mean…
5:36
So that was really interesting, but what happened is that some of the other Reiki forms of practice did go and trademark their own name, which was wonderful because that started then to separate out of Reiki as a big heading or the Usui System of Natural healing, it kind of took away some of the entities that were using Reiki. I ended up doing.. it’s going back to the original Japanese phrase which was Usui Shiki Ryoho… and then some other people started to use that also and then I just added the lineage so that it could be… the practice could be identified.
6:30

0:00
I think for the most part, and this is my judgement, that people who were angry with me about Trademark had no idea what was happening and they still don’t understand it and they still hold onto ideas about trademarking that are actually not accurate and they didn’t trust me. So there are these kind of different aspects of it. So I was not…
0:39
Joop was the one who wanted to control how people practice Reiki, that was why some German masters said: “You know, I want you to do something about this”. So I was the only one who could have taken the trademark away from Joop because they were actually, essentially mine. And he… he applied for them not in my name, but in his name. And he wasn’t willing to just give them to me because obviously I wasn’t doing my job as the Grand Master, so why would I all of a sudden do it? Right? That made sense, I mean I totally understood him. And I didn’t want to control people, this was my thing.
1:23
But what I learned about trademarks is this: That in the business world you get to choose your own name and this name is what people know you by and your reputation and your, now we call it: branding. And all of that becomes a part of this name, there is an energe…. they recognize that a name can engender this energetic field and can actually inform people what they’re actually getting into. So….
2:01

2:01
You know one of the things that’s been interesting is names that were made up like Xerox. What an interesting thing a word that was made up for a copy machine and a whole line of business products, business machine products. And now if we want to make a copy of something printed, we say: “could you go Xerox this for me?” and it may be not a Xerox-machine but a machine made by Sony or some other company, right? (0234) So we don’t use… can you go, ya, so…
2:42
So the thing of it is, is that Reiki was becoming so well known and there was some question mark about what this word really meant. So it was a way for the Reiki community to come together to actually define what Reiki was and to allow those, that what I would call, “sincere” who really had Reiki to come together and to create what I called earlier an industry trademark. And the examples for this are in the US, and I believe this is true in Germany especially, is that when you get something that’s wool, by pure wool, there’s a little trademark that you find that looks like a skein of yarn, it’s like threads going this way and this way and this way and that’s an international industrial trademark. So everything that is really true wool can use this trademark.
3:51
And that’s what could have happened with Reiki. So there would have been simple criteria that people would have, you know, met like you were initiated by a person in person as a student, for instance that could be one of the criteria. So then, everybody, you know, all these people who would have liked to have used the trademark could have, you know, given some money to support the trademark. Because in order to use a trademark you have to (0435) have  somebody every month ohh, (0437) have somebody every month go through the trademark magazines to make sure that nobody is registering trademark that is close to yours (0446). ..(cough) and so on … (0451)

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

0:00
The Reiki alliance to become the organisation of licenced Reiki Masters, so Reiki Masters that were really clearly Usui Shiki Ryoho. It would have left the other practices open for anybody else, they could have applied for their own trademark, their own name and then everybody would be clear about who’s doing what.
0:36
And I wouldn’t have asked for money, I mean, they actually to apply for a trademark is not, if nobody is contesting it, is not that expensive. And if you want to maintain a trademark in that way, its not so expensive. The industrial trademark much different because you have to really adhere to a criteria. Because, if you ever bought a garment that was supposed to be pure wool and it had this little wool emblem on it, and it ended up to be rayon then you would be really disappointed and that trademark wouldn’t have any designated identifying power anymore and the same would have happend with Reiki.
1:26
So it’s very interesting, so people just assume that if you have a trademark you’re gonna earn money, which is really crazy. Mostly, as one of my business… my master who was in business and he sold medical equipment, like these new innovative medical equipment things to hospitals and medical centers and stuff, he said trademark are terrible, he said you don’t want to get involved with them, they cost lots of money and they are just a headache
2:01

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

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

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

05:57
Or they have a dream about another symbol, so they add that symbol to the practice. So, you know, I just see that it’s all these people making Reiki their own. I can.. I don’t even now I want to control them, because they’re not actually threatening my practice. I’m the only one who can threaten my practice. Because I’m the only one who can change it. I… no one else can force me to change my practice. So, a lot of people don’t get this! They feel that if they’re surrounded by people who don’t eat rice and they do, that eventually they’re gonna have to succumb to not eating rice. But that’s totally your own choice.
06:53
And this is the part about mastery that is really important to understand. There is only one person who can change or corrode your practice, and that’s you. And … and I feel that it’s really easy to blame somebody else for your own frustration. But this is how … and this is how I worked this whole thing out, is that, I just thought, well, I can’t be angry at these people because I see that they’re just doing something very human. And so, I let it go after a while. That’s my only surmising. Actually.
07:42

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

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

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

0:00
.. but my peacefulness around this has come and lately, what’s really funny is that I actually found my notes for this speech… as I was going through these papers… I don’t know where they… I can’t lay my hands on them today, but it was really interesting to read it and to see how progressive I was but at the same time people were not able to listen to this language. They wanted to have kind of a physical “You can initiate masters and you can not!”, you know “You are not ready!” and “You are!” and I couldn’t have done that because it really, really for me was not my place to bless anybody to initiate masters nor to prevent them from initiating masters. So of course what happened, was.. is that … the masters that I thought were ready to initiate masters were angry with me and they didn’t initiate masters for years. And the people who were kind of young, upstart masters, who ‘thought they knew everything’ and so on, they began to initiate masters right away and they soon learned what initiating masters was about. I couldn’t have taught them that.
1:33
And in the end it was really right. You know, it wasn’t something that was “pretty” in the beginning and we all had judgements. But… and I opened Pandora’s box, I admit.. but I feel like it was now a good thing. I wish I would not had used the sledge hammer but perhaps the key (laugh). But I didn’t have the key then.
2:07

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

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

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

8:19
And in the middle of all this I asked for the Reiki Alliance to become the association of licence … of licence masters, who would out of this trademark be able to set standards that were already set anyway for membership and that they would hold the membership of all licensed masters. And they refused to do it because they didn’t feel like this was a “Reiki way” of being. So at that point I felt so unsupported and so misunderstood and so fed up with this whole thing that I just dropped it, just like that, because the last nail in this whole thing was driving down from Breitenbush one August afternoon with Paul Mitchell and we were speaking about this trademark thing and about how the Reiki Alliance could be an association of licensed masters and so on. And he said “Well, you know, I never supported this, ever… the whole trademarking thing, the licensure and any.. everything”. And I said “Well, it would have been good to know, because I wouldn’t have done this without your support”. Because at that point he and I were like partners in holding the OGM, because this was in 1996 or 7. We were partners and I said “You know, if I don’t have my partners’ support, then … We could have had this discussion and maybe something could have been gleaned and I would have been more aware of people who weren’t in agreement with me.”
10:39

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

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

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

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