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

5:20
Justin said: «Well, you know, I have the the steamship manifest, you know, that shows when she arrived in Japan and when she left… so, you know, this is like physical evidence. So I went «well, hmm … OK». (laughs) And you know, what I find really amazing for me, is that (0544) in telling the Reiki story in… well (0547) in accepting the Reiki story and listening to it from my grandmother all these years and then it obviously, because Reiki has been so profound for me the history has gone into me, into this like profound sacred box or something inside of me. And it’s not to be changed. So when there is pressure to actually shift things a little bit, it takes time, I mean it’s not going to be «well, ok, it was 6 months instead of a year». It’s a very significant thing for me, because it changes the pace of the story for me.
6:36
So there are lots of these little things that Justin presents. Now, they were profound for me, I don’t know how it will be for, you know the other people in the Reiki community. For some people who are maybe a little bit less precious about the history than I am, it will be a relieve, because they’ll say «ok, so this is all based on facts, now I know I am not lying, so now I can tell the story, you know easily with more confidence».
7:11

7:11
So..ähm.. I do believe eventually that what will happen and what I am working on, actually this is my l’le project, is to keep the teaching story and to write the other story that’s like a parallel with it so that people actually don’t try to mix the two, which is what’s happening now … they are trying to make the teaching story more accurate, and the teaching that is not the point of the teaching story, to be accurate or to, you know, to have facts in it. So I feel that it will be really interesting to see if I can do this in meeting these scholars and so on and these researchers and really kind of putting together this historical thing that actually has very …there is a lot of parallels with the whole, you know, with the stories and so I’m hoping to be able to do that at some point and … so this is my l’le project… that comes out of all this research.
8:26
The other thing is that I am happy that there are, I would say, mindful and sincere scholars who a really taking Reiki seriously. For me this shows (0841) that Reiki  is ähm… the presence of Reiki is becoming more……well, I want to say ”worthy”, but that’s not really the word… (0901) somehow there is a recognition that Reiki is being a significant influence on the world population … So, I am really happy about that … so that’s a kind of an aside process that is going on with this research for me.
9:28

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

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

0:00
…
0:17
ok… this is just an aside, but unfortunately there was actually a panel in Erfurt at this conference about this very thing and I couldn’t go to it because it coincided with Justin’s presentation. It was really maddening…
0:44
So… when.. in 1979 when I travelled with my grandmother, I first heard the story of Reiki, I just thought «… it’s only unbelievable». And.. because you know I had no experience of Reiki, I didn’t even know what Reiki was really, as far as to practice or the energy or anything. And I had to use other people as a kind of test to see whether my grandmother was like really crazy or if she was actually saying something that was a value to people. But people sat and listened to her and they were respectable people and you know, it’s like.. I just finally had to surrender to.. that she was saying things to people that I couldn’t relay to but these other people did, I mean, they were awestruck by this whole thing.
1:51

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

02.10
And OFF THE RECORD….. You know Justin Stein is a really great resource for me in preparing myself. Because he has no agenda, he has no attachment to being the right guy, he just is doing his job in the best way he knows how. He just touches my heart so much and he really challenges me with some of the stuff that he’s found and it’s been good for me but it comes in these little steps and I can feel myself opening you know, opening, getting softer and so on. This has been really great. I really respect him a lot. He for me is a true researcher and the rest of them are only …. digging for gold and they haven’t found it yet. That’s my personal opinion and NOT ON THE RECORD!!!! I mean it’s a crude way of putting it but it’s really what I feel.
3:36