0:00
I think the biggest and most profound revelation that I’ve had sofar in my time in Erfurt and listening to all these scholars talk about very detailed and sometimes very esoteric aspects of religion and of spirituality is that as my grandmother said, Reiki is not a religion and I’ve been confused about that in myself a lot and I realized that part of that confusion is that I was confused about what is spirituality and what is religion and weren’t they the same.
0:54
So it turns out that historically after the war or after World War II, during the age of what they call «modernization» (laugh) which is an interesting term… this.. the concept of spirituality and religion started to divide and they started to become two things, which is really interesting for me. So that was just something to be with that I was not quite settled with this concept that they are divided. I mean one can contain, religion can contain spirituality but somehow spirituality can not contain religion and it’s an interesting weave, anyway that was the impression that I got.
1:50
So… and then that spirituality now is defined as a process of reforming your personality through.. stimulus that is brought to you by activities or believe systems or interaction with other people that touch your spirit or your soul. And.. so.. I find that to really describe my experience of practicing Reiki.
2:30
And I don’t.. and what is interesting for me is that I read in Wikipedia that what happens is that because of this modernization process that’s happening in religion that people often describe religious experience as a spiritual experience and actually for scholars they are not the same. So, we are, you know, we are kind of mixing ourselves up.. and.. by my saying for instance «oh, that was a truly religious experience», where a scholar might say «well, actually it wasn’t, it was a spiritual experience».
3:16
0:00
When I first started to teach Reiki and then started to travel around to meet groups of Reiki people, we were very much involved in personal healing, like how did Reiki affect people and how did Reiki affect the individual. When I first came to Germany however, I was really struck by the profundity of what happened in Reiki classes here. Brigitte Müller was the woman that I initiated and she was the first Reiki master who practiced here in Germany… And when I went to her class, which was about 17 to 20 people (1:07) (coughing) I found people weeping and going through some kind of cathartic experiences. And I didn’t understand German at the time. So I didn’t know what they were saying. But afterwards Brigitte said, well this happens all the time in classes, and it happened immediately when Mary McFayden came and started to teach. She was the master from Hawayo Takata, who came and taught in Germany and… was the mother of Reiki here in Germany, as far as I’m concerned.
1:58
And what was happening with people, is that they would say «Oh, I haven’t cried for 40 years» or «I haven’t thought of the war 20 years», and… or «I haven’t..», you know they were taken back to a time when their emotions were sort of stopped and held.. you know, kind of hold. And it seemed that Reiki pressed the hold button or the pause button and then they could feel their emotions again. And in doing that, it really felt that they were healing individually their own confusion and fear and shame and guilt about whatever happened around them during World War II. If a significant number of individuals have this experience in one part of the earth that I feel like there is an energy shift, you know, in that country.
3:08
3:08
And then what was also happening is that when I came to Germany a couple of years later, I met a woman near Hamburg, who was a very excited Reiki student and she decided to buy a house in the country and have a Reiki center, where we could do workshops. So I was really in the middle of doing workshops and decided to have one at her house. And I really liked being there. So I decided to make a kind of my place to land and then I would just teach from there and do these different master candidate classes and so on. And I was having people come from the Netherlands and France and Belgium and the Scandinavian countries and so on to this place near Hamburg. And almost immediately what I heard form them was «well, it was really difficult for me to come here”. And I went, being an American: «why?». And they would say: «Well, I swore I would never come to Germany again in my life after the war». And this happened so many times and so many different memories and painful experiences came up with their being here in Germany, but… and then there was the other side of it: So there is this guy who came to my workshops, and he really, I mean, looked like a Gestapo officer, you know the stereo-type kind of guy, and I just.. his name is Hans. And then he said «Well, I’m a citizen of the world, I’m not German». And I said «Hans, you’re really German and if you don’t own this Germaneness then you’ll never be able to use it in a way that heals people”. So he found that was pretty weird. I actually thought it was a pretty weird thing to say, but I didn’t know what else to say, it was true. And after a few years of this, people started to come back and one of these Dutch guys who really touched me, he was big truck-driver kind of guy, you know, not very well educated and he had been driving all through Europe all these years. He said «You know, every time I came through Germany he just said ‚okay, don’t stop, don’t break down, I don’t wanna speak the German language, you know, I’m not into Germany». And he said: «You know what happened? … When I came this time I thought I’m coming home”…
5:58
5:58
..and it just so touched me because there was obviously a healing, you know, that went far beyond the individual to this society that just had so much pain that they didn’t know what to do with it and that reiki was coming in and it could be expressed and it could be dissipated. I mean, you know, the memories will never go away and you know, if you think about it the pain comes back but there is some understanding also of the humanity of everybody that was involved. And I found that to be really profound. And it’s happened in many other places in the world… And I also believe that in every country where Reiki has profoundly been practiced, which is now pretty much every country in the world, even Africa, that there is something shifting in the society. And the people in the east, in East Berlin, who took Reiki, found that it was kind of a 100th monkey-thing that happened that the amount of Reiki that was started to be practiced in East Berlin and in East Germany rose to a level and actually contributed in opening the wall. And I have no idea if that’s true and at the time I just went «oh, forget it». But now that I see the profundity, you know, in the past of these kinds of experiences, I realize that it’s really very possible, that something shifted in the holding of this society that really allowed the Wall to come down and didn’t need to be there to demonstrate the separateness of people. So there’s that part of how Reiki has affected societies and cultures where it’s gone into.
8:13
And now I need a Kleenex…
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 442nd 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
02:03
The other thing that she did for Reiki was she literally brought Reiki from Ja.. Japan and from the Japanese Culture into the Hawaiian islands at a time when Japan was going to go through a major demolition of their culture and of their values and also just of their country.
02:33-0235 (cough)
So, I don’t know if the researchers have discovered how many of the Masters, for instance, had died during World War 2? What had happened to the clinic? But Reiki was definitely pushed underground in Japan and for Hawayo Takata it was a flowering time. It was a time to build up her practice and to become well known.
03:03 (Pause) 03:09
And then what she did in the years that followed the war was trans… translate Reiki as a practice from one culture to another culture to from the Japanese culture, which was quite specific, to a world-wide culture. And that she did this … well, I don’t know how conscious she was of doing it. But I would’ve .. I would loved to have asked her some questions about what her process was of doing it. But I also know that the system itself as an ent… as an energetic entity has its own momentum in development. So she was not necessarily doing it out of her own conscious will but following the energy of Reiki and following where it was going and seeing that there were some things had to be either emphasized or brought forth in order for the practice of Reiki to flourish.
04:25
And I find this to be an amazing feat. I’ve just come to this understanding in the last 10 years how… what a magnificent job she did. And I feel that if she hadn’t done it, that it wouldn’t have been so accessible to people.
04:51
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
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
1:33
Mary was in London during World War II, she lived through the bombing of London by the Germans and Germany was THE last place she ever wanted to go. So immediately after she was initiated as a master she meets this German woman, starts going to Germany to teach and that’s where she did most of her teaching in her career. And she changed and transformed for me a whole generation of German people who were holding on to their own wounds, inflicted by World War II and by the whole process of the Nazis and fascism and so on, and by their own German culture of being very strong and not very emotional. So Brigitte said that one of the things that she was always astonished, is how much people could cry. That they would come to a Reiki class and in Germany people just sat and wept for these days because they needed to because it was a part of their healing that needed to happen.
3:03