0:00
ähm. I just spent 5 days in Erfurt at this conference called International Association of the History of Religions (kind of an awkward title for an association) and in this association there was one panel that was brought together about Japanese spiritual movements and Justin Stein, a doctoral student from the Toronto University, presented a paper there, part of dissertation and another women, another doctoral student, Hirano (I don’t know her last name), she also presented a part of her paper and then there were two others, who presented papers that were relevant to the history of Reiki and the influences on Mikao Usui as he grew (0108) to aehm… as he grew to … (0116) develop the practice of Reiki as we know it now.
1:21
So, this follows a whole process that I’ve been involved in in the last two, years, brought on actually by my mother’s death. There are a couple of reasons why: One was because when she was alive, it was very difficult for me to investigate and to go deeply into my grandmothers‘ life and so on because she was very protective of it. And the other part was that when she died, I had to go through, along with my sisters, all of her papers… and deal with them and we are still going through them. So I thought «well if I die, who is going to do this for me?» and the obvious place to start was with these boxes of my grandmother’s things that I had actually never looked into.
2:19

2:19
So I invited Justin Stein and Robert Fueston who is another researcher in Kentucky I believe that’s where he lives, and Paul and Susan Mitchell and Joyce, my partner. And we have formed a kind of archive team. And the good news is that Robert is actually a trained a librarian, with his focus in archival material, and Justin is a very good researcher… And then Paul and Susan and I just know a lot about the history of Reiki from Hawayo Takata’s time.
3:01
So it’s been a really interesting process to go through it and of course the researchers, Justin and Robert, want everything to be public instantly which freaks me out… So my questions is alway: «is this the right context in which to present this to the public?». And it’s been… we’ve had wonderful discussions, because we have very different points of view and very different ideas about what should happen. So Justin and Robert together have been privy to seeing some documents and so on that we’ve started to archive and digitalize, scanning into computers and so on. But I don’t intend for it to be exclusive necessarily, it’s just at this time it’s exclusive, because I don’t really know how to allow the public to be able to access these. So my next step is to find a place where actually scholars can access them in a way that feels appropriate to the material.
4:24

4:24
So we are… I am in the process of applying to the Japanese-American National Museum in LA, to see if they will take all the archives, and then they can take… and then people can go there who are doing research and actually have access. And.. there are still questions about different things that are in my possession, 0451 like my grandmother’s 0453-0457 (cough) like my grandmothers‘ certificates that were written by Chujiro Haysashi and …. do I put them in the archive? and … I am definitely putting them in the archive. But what kind of access do we allow for those kinds of things? So it’s… they are all interesting questions and I am learning more and more about archiving, probably more than I ever wanted to know. But this for me is very important because I look at my own live in Reiki and the boxes of paper that I have and the boxes of pictures that I have.
5:37
And I just go «well, now I have to start.. once we get my grandmother’s done, then I have to have a whole team come and do archiving for me, because I have transcripts of hundreds of… not hundreds, but many, many talks I’ve given over the years and little film clips and of course the video has become much more prominent now and thousands of pictures and…, you know, so the whole history, there’s a whole history here of the development of Reiki from the time that Hawayo Takata died and for me this is an important piece for not just the practice that I hold, but for Reiki, the global Reiki movement in general. Yah.
6:22

0:00
I can’t really use my mother altogether.. you know, I mean I was busy running around doing teaching and, you know, being my kind of gipsy-self. And these things were just stored in a box and I didn’t think anybody was really interested in, you know, it was not a big deal. And then, about 20, yes 20 years ago when William Rand started to do his research, he just really… all my little walls of resistance came up and I… I sort of ignored all this stuff that I had because I didn’t know what I would find and I was afraid of what I would find, I think, you know in all this stuff… or what I wouldn’t find, you know it’s kind it goes both ways.
0:56
So… then, you know I met Justin probably 4 years ago now and I also before him met 3 or 4 other people who were doing research in Reiki and then.. Rick Bockner and I started to these weekends of telling stories about Hawayo Takata and her teaching and so on. And I did bring out some of the nice pieces of this archive for people to see. And I think almost 10 years ago now, we had a Reiki Alliance conference in Idaho and I had all this stuff and I thought «well, actually just make a room or like an archive, like a little museum of this stuff from my grandmother», which I did. And people really loved it, they respected it and.. it was my first opening actually and all this other stuff has come. So I’ve gradually become more willing to be more open with it and I think the door really opened when my mother died, because it was… I didn’t have familial retribution, then..
2:23

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

0:00
Not really. For me what’s revolutionary and new maybe for you is just confirmation for me of what happened. So we went through and what has been really great with the Archive-Team is that we’ve been able to stitch together a history of her practice and so on that confirms and helps me remember all the kind of little points that I remember but putting them all together and connecting them. And that’s been really great.
0:42
We are pretty much finished with digitalizing all the archives, all the material. So we are now looking for a place to house the archives and we are really leaning more toward a university setting where the academics, all the people now and in the future who want to do research on Reiki and want to do research on how we would maybe call it the movement of Reiki, started and how it progressed through Hawayo Takata and also my time. So I think we are going with the university archive more than a museum archive. So that’s the last place we left it and one of our members is researching and connecting with the person who is going to accept the archive and we have all the boxes ready to go and they are all labelled and the contents are put on the box, so we have everything. All we need to do is to load them upon a truck and take them to California. So I’m hoping to do that this summer.
2:02

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