2:05
And then I went to Brazil, let’s see, now it’s been four years ago (2011) and there is this wonderful man, (0214) (räusper) (0216)who is actually Italian, but his whole family has lived in Brazil for, I don’t know, generations. And he is a physiologist and his doctorate thesis on Reiki, because he received Reiki when he was 14 and was depressed and suicidal and Reiki saved his life, I mean, he’s totally clear about that and he became a master when he was 18. And now he’s like 30… something. And he said: «Reiki is the largest ‘healing’ (he didn’t really use the word «healing»), largest healing method after allopathic medicine in Brazil, by far”. He says, millions of people practice Reiki in Brazil and that it’s the «go to thing» … you can go to a doctor and sometimes in the outback, you know in the countryside and so on in Brazil (I don’t think they call it countryside, but..). there… it’s amazing that they have Reiki and that that is what sustains them. And I believe that that’s true in many, many countries.
3:29
Reiki is coming into its own as a spiritual practice as well… I think in the US is one of the most profound developments that’s happened with the Reiki students is that they’ve gone from in being a kind of thing that you used to like “get rid of headaches” to really being in touch with their core essence of who they are. I know that was that’s my story. And because of that my whole priority of life is very different. And if you get a community of people like that then their priority of their whole town becomes different.
4:17

4:17
So I taught in this one little town near Seattle, Washington and so many of the people there finally had Reiki after about 5 years. Because by that time there were myself and then a master I initiated who was also doing Reiki classes there and so on and the town at the time was maybe, I don’t know, 20’000 people. And they estimated that 5’000 people at one point had Reiki, that’s a quarter of the town. And she said, you know, if somebody falls on the street, the people run out of the shops and give the person Reiki. Or, you know, if somebody is dying…
04:54-05:04 (street noise-pause)
5:09
Or if somebody…
5:17
Or if somebody is diagnosed with cancer then, you know, they just have the sign-up list, where everybody signs up to give this person Reiki every day, you know, and sometimes 2 or 3 Reiki treatments a day if they are open to it. So it’s this really beautiful community that was already had their community intact, some of these families have lived there for like 10 generations. And so they just took on this Reiki as a part of their communitive service. And their way of relating to each other as community members. And I found that to be amazing and I’m sure that that happens in lots of different cities, in neighborhoods, you know in little townships and so on.
6:05

2:46
So he didn’t… he actually …(0250) Joop actually settled out of court eventually, but it took about 2 years and a lot of money. And.. I..when I went to… so what happened was: I was awarded the right to trademark these things. However, I needed to … they erased his trademarks, they took them away from him. And then it was up to me to establish trademarks again. So immediately we applied for a trademark of these things. But in those years, I think there is about 3 or 4 years in there that Reiki went from not being known at all to actually being publically known. So then it was not possible to trademark because they had become “words in common use”, which are not trademarkable. Interesting
3:53
And that was true for UK and true in the United States. So I ended up without any trademarks, which is actually good. But in the rest of the world, some of the countries that were able to trademark Reiki and so on, still hold these trademarks. (coughing)
4:21

6:16
I mean kids are raised in the Japanese culture to respect one another and to learn to work with their… energetic being in a really different way than in France or in the U.S. I mean Americans are just all over the map as we would say colloquially. So we had no boundaries, you know, and we got called on the carpet, we were really lucky actually in.. I say “we” as a huge community going into this that something really terrible didn’t happen, but it didn’t.
7:01
We figured out, in 1990 the Reiki Alliance figured out that they needed to have a code of ethics, because things were getting so bad. And it was not just between students and masters but between masters themselves like people would have gatherings and people would have affairs and then, you know, we ended up having to hide affairs from the spouses of these people who were also acquantancies and good friends of… I mean, it was… as a social wreck… you know then the ethics, the code of ethics started to come in and people started to say “ok, let’s… you know… get some…. you know handle on this you know… let’s be mature about this”.
7:53

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

0:00
0006 (sigh)
In some countries like Australia for instance Reiki has entered into the academic scene and in the US also and Reiki masters have gone to adult education courses and given 1st degree, 2nd degree and I believe sometimes even the master level. And they have had to fit into an academic kind of course structures, so 3 hours once a week for several weeks, so they have tried to change the form of teaching to match the academia and they also…. The students don’t come because they’re called to come, they come because they want to have credits in whatever field they are given credits for a Reiki class.
1:10
So it really changes the motivation of the student, what the student receives and for a lot of people it seems to authenticate or validate Reiki as a recognized therapy of sorts, I don’t know how to say this. But when I think about globalisation, this term that I learned and how the effective globalisation actually usually distills and sometimes dilutes the very essence of the practice that is being globalized then I would say that this is at the edge of benefit for the system itself.
2:10