0:00
You know titles that are transferred from culture to culture are often very problematic. And it’s the same for this from the Japanese culture into Western culture in English. They referred to me as a Grand Master, it was a term that was coined and has been used in other Japanese art forms, the Grand Master, to say the Sensei, the head Sensei, teacher of teachers so to speak. But it means more than teacher.
0:46
So a master for me has a least five different aspects. There is the initiator, the teacher, the mentor, the student and the tradition keeper. So when people say “I’m a Reiki teacher” my response in my head is to say, “Oh, I see, so you’re not claiming responsibility for being an initiator, for being a mentor, for being a student or for being a tradition keeper”. And for most of the Reiki teachers that I know that’s true actually.
1:28

4:43
So I feel sad that the practices coming out of Japan feel like what they have to offer is somehow they have to offer something that is from Japan and therefore it’s more valuable. And what they actually have to offer, that I think is incredibly valuable, is that they come from the original culture. And that their way of being, their way of being with Reiki, no matter what the form is, could demonstrate this incredible cultural heritage that they’re carrying naturally.
5:28
And that I am taking tours now of students back to Japan to try and touch this culture so that they understand more about why this practice and why I’m so strict about some things. Because I see that if I westernize or fall pray to giving students what they want then I’m not being a tradition keeper. And I really feel that this role of tradition keeper is very important in this day and age of computers and 0606 ähm…. and ähm… 0612 …
6:20

00:00
As I mentioned before, I have recognized five aspects or roles of master, Reiki master. And in the condition where a student comes to me and says “I want to be a Reiki Master”, then all these five roles have a part to play in the preparation of that student. And a part of the tradition keeper piece is to honour our ancestors. So honouring our ancestors means, if I don’t know the answer to a question, I go back and ask. And it could be a person, sometimes it’s sending a treatment to myself and asking Reiki to help me. I also ask the master student to do the same because they must begin to take this responsibility on for themselves.
1:14
I would…. In the beginning when people said, or now when there are new masters and they have people come to say “I want to be a master candidate”, I recommend that the masters, the new masters have at least 10 years of experience teaching before they take on master candidates. If they have a student who wants to be a master before this time, then it is appropriate that they refer that student to me. So sometimes this works and sometimes it really doesn’t.
2:00

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

8:24
And I believe that this is part of the breakdown, in America anyway, of our family structure, is that we count on computers and televisions instead of living oral tradition. And I don’t feel like there’s any replacement for oral tradition, and it is the way that we as human beings learn. So if we’re horrified by the way children relay to each other in the school ground, it’s because they relayed how they have been taught, by television, by video games and by computers and by movies. And we can’t blame the children. So I believe that in our folk-art tradition that it is very important for the good of our society to maintain these traditions. So that’s one example that I can give you and in another year, after contemplating this with other masters and other beings, I assume that I would be able to be more articulate about other aspects of tradition keeper.
09:40

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