00:00
My parents met at the university of Hawaii after my father was discharged from the army. He was a part of the very famous 442^nd Japanese Amercian Battalion and ended up in Italy and he ended up loving Italy. And it was sort of an interesting thread through his live. And he was in pre.med at the time and my mother who really was an artist from her soul out … got pushed into be a pre-med student by her mother, my maternal grandmother who was Hawayo Takata.
00:57
And I am sure that my grandmother had in her head, that her daughter would go to pre-med, be a doctor and also be a Reiki Master she becomes a doctor and also a RM. My mother was with my grandmother at the time she met Chujiro Hayashi in Japan and received first degree from him. She never went on in Reiki because her idea was that she was going to raise a family and she didn’t want to have a career so to speak of Reiki. So … you know, times were spontaneous and who knows what it was like back then after the war in Hawaii but they ended up eloping because grandmother thought that my father would never make anything of himself.
01:51
And, so they eloped and they got married. And they eventually.. he ended up going to medical school in University Dallas, Texas. So they moved to Dallas, Texas and he went to med school there and then that’s where I was born, so I was born in Dallas. In ‘48.  And there is this rumour in my family that said that my grandmother, who was very into auspicious names, wanted to name me Dallas because it was a booming town then and … would become a very big city and she thought that would be a great name for me but luckily, anyway in my own story, I got saved from this by my mother who said «No». … So I ended up to be Phyllis. And I have no idea why.
02:53
I was born with a cleft pallet and I had a speech impediment from when I was very small, obviously when I started talking. My first 7 or 8 years of schooling I went to a speech therapist.. I just hated my name because the sounds that were hardest for me were f, s, t and r …it’s all through my name, right. So I just thought that his was very cruel. (laughs) And eventually I asked my mother «why did you do this?» like «why were you so set on my being able to speak clearly?» And she said  “because you are going to grow up and speak to a lot of people” And I went (shakes head), well, she is crazy
03:54

03:54
You know, that was about the time I started to take voice lessons, from this German opera want-to-be in a neighbouring town. Her name was Misses Stolz. For those of you who don’t know Stolz is the German word for proud. She was very proud. And very, you know like typical, big bust and short y’know with crazy hair all piled up and everything who’ll just wack us with a stick, y’know, if we didn’t do something right. And I just couldn’t understand why I had to put up with this. And not only that, I didn’t really know if I had a good voice or not. Because I was going there for enunciation.
04:43
It was kind of a crazy time. At the age of 4 my parents moved to Iowa City in Iowa. Because they had a very, very good medical school there and that was the internship for my father. While he was there he was asked to continue his residency into neuro surgery where in that time it was just a very baby specialty. But my mum got pregnant again with my brother. And he decided he hat to go work. So he went around and interviewed for jobs because they decided to stay in Iowa. My dad was a  great gardener, I mean, my mother and father came from plantation workers in Hawaii and they were were farmers back in Japan who were .. immigrated to Hawaii.
05:46
And … so I assumed that was one thing. The other thing was they didn’t want to go back to Hawaii. Because they wanted to be kind of free of the Hawaiian immigration culture at the time. And then he in his interviews he met up with this man named Jim… James Warrol who was about 10 years older than he was and had a pract… a medical practice. And was looking for a partner and when they met, my dad said, «well, we just felt they we knew each other and that we were brothers». Which was very interesting cause my father was not at all esoteric or, y’know, I mean I… we, we never talked about emotions with him. But for him to say this, must have been … the experience must have been very profound.
06:46

06:46
So we ended up in this very small town in the south-east corner of Iowa. That’s where I went to school all my years of … in the United States Grade School, so from 5-18. And basically I saw my life as being really terrible. My Brother was born almost 5 years after I was, so I was almost 5. I had been an only child, very pampered and very dotted on for 5 years and then, all of a sudden, the son comes. In Japanese families, sons are very important. And he was also a premature baby. So he got lots of attention. And I felt totally not cared for at all.  And then a couple of years later my sister came, so very close together. Actually, they’re.. I think they are an year and a half apart.
07:54
So, it was kind of .. one thing over another thing. And then in school – because this was right after the war – people were not happy with having a Japanese child in school. And the teachers were extremely weird. Mostly, the prejudice and they kind of hateful experience I had in school were from teachers. They would… the kids would tease me about being Japanese and I would, of course, fight for my self. And … I was the one that got her mouth washed out with soap. Or, y’know, got to stand in a corner. Or.. and the other kids never had any kind of retribution from the teachers.
08:49
It was only when I was 64, if you can imagine, and found out that I had a metastasis from my breast cancer.And so that my girl friends from this time, I’ve met them when I was 4 when I moved to Keosauqua, three of them came and we talked about my relationship with my mother which was very fraught and my family life back in those days and who they saw I was during that time. And it was a revelation, really, I mean, this was really true reconciliation. 0934 OK, I’m gonna take a little brake here..0937
09:42

06:12
My father was a doctor. So, whenever we got sick., which was not often, I have to say, we… he came, he would look at us, kind of poke at us with his finger and say, “you’ll live, go to school!” I mean, I never missed a day of school. I was late a lot in school but I never missed a day in school. So when I graduated at the age of 18, from this school, the principle had to give me this certificate that said that I had never missed a day school in twelve years. He said, «but I don’t know why I’m giving you this certificate because you were late probably half of those days. (laughs) And I said, «well, that’s really lucky for me.» (laughs)
7:12
I felt not very well cared for by my father but my family was definitely raised in a way, where, you know, you got sick, you went to the doctor, he gave you a pill or a shot and you got better. I mean, that was our idea of healing. Which wasn’t really healing. It’s kind of curing. So that’s how I went out into the world with this idea that I was not, I was not worthy to be a friend of anybody, I saw myself as very ugly, as having very little to offer people. And that I had friends was kind of a miracle. I didn’t really understand why I had friends. And that they just happened to me and that when they happened my parents would take care of.. would be there and they would take care of whatever was going on. And because of this hip thing that I had, which I can’t really explain, because nobody ever explained it to me, 0837 when I was 24 or so, no 25 I foun.. I was taken up to the mountains by some friends of mine.*
08:51

01:57
But because I was raised the way I was with my father as a doctor I just thought this was kind of strange why would we give these people Reiki? We’re not going to give them back sight, we’re are not going to grow another arm or a leg, we are nto going to make them smarter, I mean, y’know, not to be irreverent… So how are we going to change their lifes and what was the purpose of giving them Reiki anyway? Finally, after having had some very intense conversations with some of these people who were my age, I realized that healing was all encompassing, it wasn’t something that was what I might call now ‘curing’. It wasn’t in a like… what I realize in my idea of a whole person was that a whole person would have their sight, would have 2 arms, 2 legs, 0307-0311 (coughing) would have all their faculties and it was obviously not true.
03:18
So I had a lot of confusion in these days  and it took me another few years to really understand the concept of healing and also of wounds. It’s like … I realized that in treating people with amputations it’s really obvious where their wound is, but where you have a person who has an emotional wound, that’s not so obvious. And that everyone is amputated somewhere and that we just …  put all of our pity, and all of our superiority sometimes into taking care of physically disabled people when in fact we are also disabled, it’s just not physical. So these are some of the insights that I had during this period of time.
04:17

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

11:20
When complementary therapy is used as a primary therapy it means that allopathic medicine has said: “There is nothing we can do for you”. Right? So people go to the last chance kind of thing. And you know that puts a lot of pressure on the practice actually to deliver whatever that expected result is. So when the expected result isn’t delivered then it becomes not a viable option. But what’s true, in every case, including in allopathic medicine, is that we die, as human beings and… as my dad said, who was a general practitioner MD in the US, he said “well, you know, I do the best I can and the people who should die often don’t and the people who shouldn’t die because of the care they are being given and the condition of their body, they do die. So I don’t feel like I have any control over whether or not the person is going to die. I know that I can do my best and that’s all I can do.” And I really appreciated this. It is one of the things… one of the conversations that I have had with him that was very fruitful for me and my own practice.
12:51:
So a practitioner-program for me is really different and could be academic in some sense 1258 but differing
1301 (räusper)
but adopting the academic say for a social worker or a nurse practitioner or something to Reiki and I think that it is very, very important that people who are designing these programs don’t… don’t assume that Reiki practitioners do not need the practice. And they…. that they don’t need the hours spent because I feel that what’s very important like a doctorate in psychology, for instance, they have to go through their own term of psychological therapy and I know a doctorate student who never completed this piece so he never got his doctorate.
13:57

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