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

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
Well I think the first ….again
0:11
I feel that the largest sort of betrayal or injustice in my life was definitely not understanding the point of my going on this trip with my grandmother 1979. And that.. I mean people laugh and I think the think I’m joking, you know, the difference between, you know, a person who decided to quit everything and become a ski bum, because skiing really transformed my life on a physical level as well as lots of other levels . And then I went off in the summer to travel with my grandmother, a person that I didn’t really like, and I was really uncomfortable, we’ve had a really painful relationship with and at the same time I feel that somehow underneath it, Reiki was calling me, but I could only say that 20 years later, I couldn’t have said that at the time.
01:29
And I really did think that I was going with her to carry her suitcases, make sure she didn’t get robbed or carry the money anyway and make sure she ate well. So… much to my surprise it ended up to be the initiation as a master and my first teaching on how to teach classes and so on. And my first understanding about what Reiki was for her. So, I felt betrayed by my mother who encouraged me to go on this trip, never saying “Well you know, if you go, you’re going to, you know, working with your grandmother and so on”. And then, when my grandmother initiated me, you know, and I heard this kind of funny like clapping-hand-noise, and she says “And now you can work with me”, you know, I really did have this picture of carrying suitcases, counting money and I never.. I never imagined teaching Reiki, because up to that time I didn’t even know what Reiki was. So….
02:50

02:50
And it was really interesting, because… just a few months before I was invited on this trip I had my 30th birthday. And I thought “Oh, wow, I’m 30 years old, I’m so old.. I mean.. I surely might live to be 60 and if I do, I cant be a ski-bum for 30 more years”, you know, because this is not what’s happening. So, I thought to myself “well, what kind of job would I like?”. I thought “well, I don’t even know a job that I would take” because it was really important for me after working in the mental health field that people were treated as individuals, not as a diagnosis. So it was the early days of psychotropic drugs and when people came in and they were diagnosed as schizophrenic, they got these certain drugs and it was a certain amount of dosage. Even though for some it made them totally sleep all day an all night and for others it was.. it made them really weird, you know, much weirder than they were schizophrenic. (laugh)
4:09
So I didn’t like this and I really wanted to be able to assist people in realising their individual authenticity. And little did I know that Reiki would be that gift. But… I certainly did not know it at the time I took the trip. And… so once I kind of got through that, which was interesting, it took me… I think over a year, because I went on the trip with my grandmother, which is a whole series of stories, and then… she got sick in Puoerto Rico after a month. So I ended up at home in Iowa with her and my mother for 3 more moths, which was my kind of picture of hell at the time. 0509- (cough)..
5:15

3:01
Sometime in the mid 80ies I remember realizing that I had lived a lot of my life at the mercy of other people and what they thought and my mother kept pointing this out to me but I had no idea what she meant at the time (laugh) what she was talking to me. But I realized that as a master and as a lineage bearer, as grand master if I didn’t feel a complete Yes in everything that I did, then I wouldn’t do it. That was my motto. And I still use that to this day. I don’t have to have reasons for it to be a Yes, because often there are no reasons. Because it looks like on the outside that I shouldn’t do it, but on the inside, if I say Yes, then I just do it. And my thinking is that.. if I make a decision for a Yes then I can always make another decision later because I didn’t… I can’t blame anybody else, because I can’t say “oh well, that René he told me do this and then, you know, well he shouldn’t have told me that and now so I am in this hot water “. And if you do it yourself , then you can always make another decision. And it’s really OK for me to go: “Whoops, I thought this was the road I wanted to take, and it isn’t”. So I’m backing up, I’m turning around … or I’m taking a detour or something else.
4:50 (räusper)
I also learned that what people bring to me as a reflection of who I am at the time … and I see that I am also a very reflective person back. So if somebody comes to me with a kind of attitude , then watch out, because I can just turn into that attitude so fast, it’s a little scary for me actually.
5:25
I have a few relationships in my life, where … it will always be a contrary kind of relationship but in that contrariness there is … there is a deep and abiding faith of care in that relationship, and that the safety is there to be contrary and to be aggressive sometimes, to be myself if I need to be and to reflect back to the other person who they are. Not.. I don’t do this consciously, I don’t think “oh, I’m.. now I’m gonna be reflective” . But it’s just something that happens inside of me. 0610 And ähm .. So (räusper)
6:15

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

2:33
We shared a lot about what we were doing with each other and that wasn’t something that she liked, that we were constantly trying to figure out the psychology of what was happening, that we were always astonished that it worked… things like this. So for her this was kind of sacroligious, anti-Reiki so to speak.
3:04
As she grew older, she grew very possessive of her mother because… I feel that she understood my grandmother’s passion for Reiki and that is was sort of her destiny to be this person in Reiki and at the same time, I don’t know if my gandmother would have been a different kind of mother, but as a mother she was… well, they didn’t have an easy relationship. So it was an interesting process to see them, those two and then me, because the three of us felt like if I backed up as an observer, felt like we were the three women in the household sometimes and everybody else faded into the background. And that was interesting and a lot of it had to do with……I feel that a lot of it had to do with my mother’s perception how Reiki should be practiced.
4:30

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

00:00
Yes, it was my understanding that my mother really pushed my grandmother to see me. You know, she would… my grandmother and she  would talk about Reiki and about the different people who had come to Keosauqua to visit my grandmother because at that point she had moved closer to my mother. Because she was supposed to be retired but I can’t imagine being retired from Reiki and that was true for grandmother. So my mother, even when I was there she would just say, “It’s Phyllis look at Phyllis, she is your perfect person!”And I would go: «No! I’m not your perfect person.» But in the end it seemed as though my mother saw something in me and in my connection, future connection with Reiki that I din’t see, for sure. And neither did my grandmother.
01.12

0000
Ähm… I think she objected to some of the ways Hawayo Takata had been …(pauses)  start again.
00:23
I feel that she had reservations about the way that people treated my grandmother, Hawayo Takata, as their master. A couple of  people in California used to buy her clothes, and sort of dress her up. And she wore a wig for a while because they wanted her to. So she kind of became this like dress-up doll that … it wasn’t really her and eventually all of us including my siblings and my mother convinced her not to wear a wig because it looked so weird. And, she had beautiful white hair and to just wear her hair, her natural hair.
01:23
So in the last 2 or 3 years that’s what she did. But there was this place where people put her on a pedestal and treated her in a way that was not very … actually not very respectful. Because they were using her for their own means. And my mother was very sensitive to that. I don’t know if she had issues with the way that Hawayo Takata was teaching Reiki, I don’t think so. But more how her students treated her and what they wanted out of her. You know as a Master. Because there were other masters that Hawayo Takata had initiated who were good students. You know, they didn’t do that and they would call every month and give my grandmother a report about their practice and about their classes and talk to her about their Reiki and so on. And those were the people that my mother really approved of.
02:37

0:00
After Hawayo Takata died in December of 1980 the master community was slowly informed about this.. about her death by my mother. And what I mean by slowly is that at first she didn’t call anyone, I don’t know for how many months. And then she was starting to go through my grandmother’s papers and compiled a list of people, because some of the masters who my grandmother had initiated she was not acquainted with and didn’t know. Others she knew from the conversations with my grandmother and because they came to visit my grandmother, in Iowa.
0:59
As the masters began to be informed, many of them called me and recognized me over the phone in the sense that they said “well you’re your grandmothers successor, now what are you going to do?”. And it was a questions that I couldn’t really answer.
1:19
So 1981 passed by very rapidly because of course I stayed with my family through X-mas 1980 and then into 1981 (0133) (cough) ähm
01:42

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 … (ooo5) (Renés voice)
Well this idea of the master symbol didn’t come from Hawayo Takata’s students. It came after she died, a few years after she died when there were many, many masters who already had a couple of generations away from (0030) (René: yea) Hawayo Takata. So this didn’t come from this circle, (0034) I’m really …. (René: this circle you mean the 22 Masters) Yeah!
0:41
So I don’t want to report on an understanding that the circle had of the differences of how she wrote it. I mean, they kept to the practice, for the most part (0056) the way that she impar… you know, the way she, (hicup) excuse me…. (räusper)
1:03
They practiced and taught the way that she gave them the system. (0107) (hicup, turns her eyes up) ..So…
1:14
I never… in all my years of, you know, talking with them I never heard anybody question what she did because at the very beginning it was clear that it was Kanji and that there were several different ways to write the Kanji just like in Reiki there is a book that my mother produced called inevitably “the grey book” because it has a grey cover and the Kanji on that is a very, very old Kanji, it’s almost Chinese, it’s so old. And the Kanji written today would have many less strokes and would almost not be recognizable.
2:02

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

0:00
My mother called me a lost soul and I really hated this, because mostly I didn’t know what she meant, so that was really interesting. And it wasn’t until maybe 10 or 15 years later that I realized what she meant. Because whether I liked it or not, whether I knew it or not, whether I was conscious about it or not, the practice of Reiki gave me connection to my spiritual self, gave me connection to my soul and gave me means of finding out what I wanted to do, not what other people wanted me to do.
00:47
So it was true that in my early years after the time that I was 30 it seemed like, and I will say “seemed like”, I used a lot of other people’s opinions to make my own decisions. However there was a part of me that the really important decisions that I made, I didn’t care what anybody thought. You know, I married a man that I should have never married because my mother told me that I had to get married because I couldn’t live out of wedlock with a man. So that was about the last time I ever did really anything important in my life, let somebody else’s say so.
1:38

1:56
As a juxtaposition, during the time when I started to travel with her and take my training with her, she and Barbara had a falling out and she wouldn’t even speak Barbara’s name. She was so angry. And because she had a heart condition my mother said “don’t even ask her what’s happening!”. But she wouldn’t have said anything anyway, it was so painful for her to talk about it. So there was a split between those two and there was a resignation almost that I might be her successor. And I’m not playing myself down, I mean…
2:44 (Schnäuzgeräusch)
I did things that she didn’t like, I went out on dates with men and she felt like “Reiki is the only thing that you should be paying attention to”. You know, this is it. And… I had very long hair, she wanted me to cut it short. I enjoyed life to the fullest, she thought I should work more. I mean, you know, I just wasn’t her ideal candidate, let’s put is that way. Barbara was actually much more the ideal candidate. But this falling out that they had, I have no idea what is was about.
3:28

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