0:00
Well, the short answer is: I don’t know. The longer answer is that, ähm you know, his paper is on …what happens to an oral tradition when it’s taught through a number of generations and it goes from one culture to another culture and the changes that happen within the practice. Is this… Why are the changes made? And is there a developmental process actually going on? And these kind of questions. And then.. so that’s the general kind of theme of his thesis. And then what he did, was he used Reiki as an example of that and especially the time of Hawayo Takata because she was the person who took Reiki as a Japanese practice, well actually Usui Shiki Ryoho, and then brought it to another culture and then within that (1:16) how did she… let me start again. (1:26) How did she translate not just the language of Reiki but the culture of Reiki? How could she bring the Japanese culture into the practice of Reiki at the times and the moments when it was important for the actual practice to be understood?
1:54 (coughs)
And this part, I think Justin does beautifully.. for the most part. I mean of course I don’t agree with everything that he has surmised or come to, but I do really like his approach, because he really gets that this wasn’t about making Reiki… for instance some people have said “well, she made Reiki more Christian because she was teaching Christians” – but, this just drives me crazy but ähm…He saw that she needed to, for instance, add this precept particularly “honor your parents, teachers and elders» because for a Japanese person this is THE fundamental principal that every child grows up with and this is where you… this is what your life revolves around. And, of course, in our culture that is not necessarily true.. (laughs)
3:02

3:02
And, you know, be kind… and the others were kind of more repetitive sounding, but for the Japanese they weren’t repetitive, like be kind, be… count your many blessings and so on, they all kind of sound the same, but they weren’t actually the same for the Japanese, because they’re subtlety of the difference of these is much greater understanding than we have in our culture. So I feel like she did a wonderful job of translating not just the language but the culture. And he does a very good job considering how difficult it is to historically go back and rebuild history in this way.
4:00
The other thing I like about Justin’s presentations is that he doesn’t have a Reiki attachment. He doesn’t need to like prove himself that he is like the fountain of all truth in Reiki. And it’s just so refreshing. He’s just doing his job as a scholar trying to get this paper together so that he gets his doctorate degree. And there is no hidden agenda in his papers… that I’ve noticed anyway. And with that I can take in a lot of what he’s saying that can be confrontive
04:42
… in a way that feels like, «well, you know, I just have to sit with it for a while and after a while it will become easy… So this is a small but significant thing for me, because I always heard her say that she had been with Mikao Us…. no! sorry, with Chujiro Hayashi, her teacher for a year and maybe it was a year altogether. But she was in Japan for like 6 ½ months, I think, the first time when she learned Reiki.
5:20

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

1:51
As I grew to have more relationship with Reiki and to start teaching it and to recount the story myself, what I realized was that there was a transmission of energy that was happening through the story, that I had no control over, like it just happened and I wasn’t consciously making it happen, it just happened. So, one of the odd things about the story of course is that (0225) Hayashi.. no, Haw.. ähm.. (0227) Usui’s story and Hayashi’s story pretty much remain the same as my grandmother told it. But when I came to my grandmother I knew like way too much information. So I had to start sorting out which information I actually told in classes, which became a part of the story and then what about me? (0251) Right? …
2:53 coughs
(0257) So, then Paul and I started to do these Masters intensives together in 1993. And when we came to telling the story, I would tell the first part of the story and then he would tell the last part of the story. And so it was interesting to listen to him and see what he left out and what he said and so on. And what we realized was that information does not carry energy as well as story. So we left out the date she was born and we left out you know, all this stuff and just talked about “when she met Reiki”. (0340)
3:42
So then (cough) god.. (0347) so then I had this insight that, (0350) ähm (pauses) (0358) it was not the story of four people but it was a story of Reiki and how it emerged through these people’s lives. Which was a good perspective for me because it really helped me when people started to add birthdays and you know, when people died and all this factual stuff… but it’s not about people. It’s about Reiki. So that helped some people.
4:26
And then…when the memorial stone was found was a really big thing, because that was the first real kind of substantial body of information, and lo and behold, what was on the stone collaborated my grandmother’s story. Well that was like «shuuu» relieve!
4:59

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2:18
So, people often see Chujiro Hayashi as… or it’s assumed…. It’s assumed that Chujiro Hayashi was Mikao Usui’s best student. Well, I don’t actually know whether that’s true, it was never my assumption. All I know is that he was a student of Mikao Usui. It’s very possible that he was the rebel of Mikao Usui and went off and did his clinic because he followed his heart. I mean obviously the man was a clinician. And in this being a clinician, he needed to have a clinic, he needed to make notes and he needed to make a system of some sort. Whether or not Mikao Usui thought that this was a good thing, we’ll never know, I mean, excuse me but no amount of researchers is going to figure this out.
3:21

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