In This Issue
Reiki Tip From Hawayo Takata
"Let Reiki Teach You"
Our Fall Class Schedule is Now Available!
Please visit us at learnreiki.org for details.
Next Month:
Takata answers questions about Reiki
Welcome to the September 2008 newsletter! Last month, John Harvey and I had the pleasure of a visit from Phyllis Lei Furumoto at our home in New Hampshire. Phyllis is Hawayo Takata's granddaughter, and one of the 22 original Reiki Masters initiated by Takata. Phyllis was recognized in 1980, by many of Takata's students, as Hawayo Takata's successor and lineage bearer in the Usui Shiki Ryoho or Usui System of Natural Healing lineage of Reiki.
Phyllis began her Reiki training as a young child, and was often responsible for giving Reiki sessions to her family, including her grandmother, Hawayo Takata. Phyllis completed her training in 1979, while assisting her grandmother on an extended teaching trip. At the end of this trip, early in 1980, Phyllis was initiated
as a Reiki Master and designated lineage bearer by her grandmother, Hawayo Takata.
Since that time, Phyllis, with the support of many of the masters initiated by Takata, has held the role of Grand Master and continues to serve the world-wide Reiki community teaching and practicing Reiki. Although, John Harvey and Phyllis have been life-long friends, I had never before had the opportunity to spend quality time with Phyllis. I have found Phyllis not only to be very intelligent but also
very wise. Her level of spiritual maturity as a Reiki channel is apparent in everything she says and does. I was touched by her clarity of spirit, her warmth, and her down to earth humor. I can't think of a better person to help guide us as Reiki practitioners, as we move forward into the future. During the visit, Phyllis generously allowed us to conduct this short interview for our September 2008 newsletter.
Phyllis graciously shares with us her wisdom gained through her own
long practice as a Reiki Master and a lineage bearer, and from her travels
throughout the global Reiki community. You may listen to her weekly
program, "Reiki -- Balancing Form and Essence," on live Internet radio
every Thursday afternoon at 1 PM/PT, 4 PM/ET on the Internet.
Click here to visit our new website
Interview with Phyllis Lei Furumoto
By Dr. Lourdes Gray
Lourdes: “Phyllis, tell us about your connection with your grandmother.”
Phyllis: “I will. Of course, that’s much easier to do now I have had hindsight of about 30 years. Even when I was a child, I had this connection with her that was very special, and I didn’t like it. Well, in theory, it was because I was the oldest, so she sort of got to have me as her caretaker when she came to visit. If she wanted to have a treatment, I was the person to give it to her. If she needed something, if (someone) needed to run downtown and get her something, I was the one to do it. When I look back on it in my later years, now that I have later years, I see that, even then, if I had understood …well if I could have understood, that she was more a master to me, than a Grandmother, or that these two things were very combined in her because I intertwined them in my mind. I understand that because, when I had stepchildren in my thirties, I was both a Reiki Master and a stepmother, and I realize that my being a Reiki Master, really colored the way that I was as a stepmother. I’m sure that her being a Reiki Master and being very clear about what she saw as being good for me, was from a very different viewpoint than that of being a typical grandmother. Now, I really wanted a typical grandmother. I really wanted someone to make me chocolate chip cookies, to spend lots of money on me and (she laughs) to just say, ‘Yes, you’re very good, you’re very good. Everything will be okay.’ But it wasn’t like that with her. So when I was 30, I can remember standing in this Colorado mountain meadow going ‘I’ve got to find something to do with my life.’ My father would say ‘You’ve gotten an “A” in recreation for your whole life, now you’ve got to settled down, and get doing something.’ I really agreed with him, but I had no idea what to do because every job that I had imagined at that moment was available to me, I didn’t want to do. You know, they were just like too boring, too not with people, too regimented, too this, too that, and I didn’t want to go to school anymore, so this was in August. In October, my mother called me and said, ‘You need to travel with your Grandmother. She’s got this incredible trip planned and she needs somebody to accompany her. Somebody in the family, and it’s you.’ And I thought, why me? She said, ‘… well, because you don’t really have a job.’ Because at that point I was working at a ski area, and it was a job to me, it paid my rent, and I enjoyed it, but it certainly wasn’t something that she felt was a job, like being a nurse, or being a doctor, or something. So, eventually I decided to go on this trip, and of course, it changed my life. Because then I became a Reiki Master and I traveled with my Grandmother and lived with her for the next five months, from April to October. It was really difficult for me. I had to go through a transformation from her being my Grandmother in the foreground and then being my Reiki Master, and I didn’t even know what Reiki was at the time. So this movement, if you can imagine, of these two people within my Grandmother, and moving that connection in my life was very interesting. Then, the next year, the next summer, I decided that I was going to go off by myself and just explore this connection of Reiki within me. Which I did. At the end of that summer, I wrote her a letter and said, ‘Ok, I’m a Reiki Master.’ Then I realized, in hindsight again, that that was the time that I also accepted her as my Reiki Master. That was really a powerful moment for me, and in her letters that I inherited, I inherited this letter that I wrote her, and every once in a while I take it out and read it, because I just see, how amazing it was that I knew that I had to spend a summer by myself, I knew that I had to explore this connection with Reiki. I mean, I don’t know where these thoughts came from, but I am so happy that I had them. I just have to attribute all this to Reiki. That somehow Reiki touched in me a part of myself that was wise about myself … not really having life wisdom because I wasn’t old enough, nor experienced enough, nor had enough compassion to have wisdom about other people’s lives, or the life that we all lead, but certainly about myself. At the end of that summer and the end of that fall, when I spent that time with my Grandmother and my Reiki Master …then in the beginning of December in 1980, she died, and that threw me. I mean, I was so angry with her for dying. Because I had lots of questions unanswered. I was not fully trained in the sense of, I wanted to know like what to do, what not to do. You know, all these different things and I could hear her voice in my head saying, ‘Let Reiki teach you.’ Which she probably would have said had she been alive, but I still would have had the comfort of knowing that I could scream at her, or something. I had this really interesting connection that had a lot of anger involved in it, and a lot of impatience … and that really was from me as personality. That didn’t have anything to do with what was really going on between the two of us. As I worked out of my personal anger and my personal impatience, I realized what a profound teacher she was, and how she was able to communicate the profundity of Reiki in these simple stories which seemed like they had absolutely nothing to do with Reiki, and that she taught through a way of being rather than through a way of speaking, and yet both were so congruent that they just went inside you, and you knew what was Reiki and what was not Reiki. It has stayed with me all through these days. Now, of course, ever since 1980 when she died, her presence with me has grown more and more integrated. So, at first she was another person, like another entity that maybe moved to Tibet and I never would see her again, but she was still around, and I could call her up on my cosmic phone and say you know, like, ‘What should I do now?’ Sometimes I would get an answer, and sometimes I would get, ‘Let Reiki teach you.’ Then a few years ago, it seemed that she became less separated from me and more integrated within me, So, although I find that this connection now is not about two separate beings, but more of a line of energy, I don’t know what that line is. I don’t know whether it’s blood line, or spirit line, or what the line is … or maybe a combination of both. But I am really grateful for her and for her way of being. Because I know that even though I didn’t like it very much initially, I really had this strong connection with her that has changed my life. It isn’t that it’s change my life in the way that it’s made me something that I wasn’t, but I was so, in my early years, I don’t know why, but I was so off track with who I was authentically, who I was as Phyllis, that what happened with me with Reiki is that it put me on track. And that was my life change. And it was a good change because I feel like instead of … I always tell people that I feel like I am a certain kind of tree, for instance, and instead of always wanting to be another kind of tree, I end up loving who I am. And you know we all have are own expression. And I feel that this connection with Reiki and our connection with our teacher allows us to become exactly who we are, who we need to be.”
John: “Did you ever have the possibility of meeting Chujiro Hayashi?”
Phyllis: “No, I didn’t. He died before I was born. But my mother met him. My mother met him, and she actually was initiated into Reiki by him. She was a little girl, I think she was 12. I think that’s how old she was when she was with them. And that’s when my Grandmother received her Reiki also. So she lived with the Hayashi family with my Grandmother during the time that she stayed there … about a year.”
John: “In Hawaii.”
Phyllis: “No, in Japan.”
Lourdes: “In Japan!”
Phyllis: “Yes, in Japan. And then of course, they came, Chujiro Hayashi and his daughter.”
Lourdes, “What’s her name?”
Phyllis: “Kiomi? Well, I can’t remember what her name was. But, anyway, they came for five months, to Hawaii in the mid-1930’s.”
John: “ Your grandmother got to become a Reiki Master while she was there.”
Phyllis: “Right. I feel like that was really her training. You know her time to be trained as a master.
So, you know, they had a huge number of classes and students …hundreds of students.”
Lourdes: “In Hawaii, while he was there?”
Phyllis: “While he was there, yes. He was going to there two months, and he ended up kind of extending and extending and extending it. Finally, after five months, they left.”
Lourdes: “What was the purpose of the visit? Was it for him to complete your Grandmother’s training? Or was it vacation?”
Phyllis: “Oh no. Definitely it wasn’t a vacation in that sense. You know, it was … she wanted her master, well I think, you know, first and primarily, she wanted her master to come and see what she had done with Reiki. In the Japanese culture, the best thing that you can do as a student, to honor your teacher, is to emulate your teacher as much as possible. For her, she wanted him to come and see how much she honored what his teaching was, and how she was practicing, and to also take her next step. And whether or she knew that was about teaching and becoming a master herself, that I don’t know, but I would imagine so, because she was a pretty sharp cookie.”
Lourdes: “Did she expect that he would complete her Reiki training?
Phyllis: “Well, I don’t know, I’d say that that was her hope. You know, at the time, in the history of Japan in the early 1900’s, there was still this great debate going on about the Japanese culture, and how much to give to the Western World and how much to keep in isolation in Japan. I feel that Hayashi took an incredible, well, I wouldn’t say risk, but I would say that he really went against the grain of many of the social values in Japan at the time … to actually give Reiki and take on Hawayo Takata as a student. Even though Japanese was her primary language, she was not from Japan, and they knew that she would go back to Hawaii. So that meant that she was going to take this practice outside of Japan. Whether or not he imagined training her as a master, at the time that he came to Hawaii, I have no idea. But it was obvious that he was willing to go where the energy of Reiki led him. I feel that in his recognizing my Grandmother, as his successor in the end, he gave a gift to all of us that had to do with breaking down of the social value systems, that just doing what he knew in his heart was right to do. I think that it was very courageous of both of them, extremely courageous.”
Lourdes: “Beautifully said. Where do you think we are going? Tell us about both your hopes and your thoughts concerning the future of Reiki.
Phyllis: “Well, on one hand, I don’t know. On the other hand, I just can look at nature and see what the natural progress is, and what has happened. And I want to start this sharing by going back to one of my first students in First Degree who said to me, ‘You know Phyllis, what the gift of Reiki is for this world right now, is that it brings spirituality back into our daily life.’ Spirituality is something that the Japanese had very profoundly in the early nineteen hundreds because they had come through almost 300 years of peace, and the culture at that time grew out of really imbuing a certain respect of spirit for all life forms, and in that we were able to see that it is not just, our actions are not just for the moment, they are an extension of a whole, an action that will have effect over many, many years, and that we pay attention to those years. We know that it is not just momentary change. So, in my own practice of Reiki, I see that in the beginning, I was two different people, I was my Reiki Master self, and I was my Phyllis self, and they were very different. My Reiki Master self was peaceful, had a lot of humor, very light, and as my husband at the time said, ‘The best of who you are.’ Then I would, leave the Reiki class and I would be with his kids, and with the family and everything, and just be sometimes a maniac, so it was this very interesting paradox, a paradoxical kind of life, and you know, as these two lives have come together and integrated with one another, I can see that Reiki has imbued everything that I do, and if I can stay conscious through my self-treatment, through my paying attention to the Reiki precepts, through my understandings of relationship and honoring my own integrity, then I have the chance to really live what I would call a Reiki life. And should that kind of depth be spread to people all over the world, it means that there can be a change not just within our individual selves, but with our societal values, and I am hoping that this will happen. So, when we say, what is the future of Reiki, I can see that the consciousness of Reiki will live on because, I feel like its kind of like a Pandora’s box, but a positive one. It’s like some box has been opened and I don’t feel like, well I think we can forget, but I hope that we won’t. I feel that one of the tasks of the Reiki Master is to create a place of remembering, and remembering for our students, and also for ourselves. At the same time, the actual practice that Hawayo Takata passed on to John and myself, and then to you and then to students, all over the world, it may be as I said earlier, like a stream flowing into the ocean, that eventually it will just disperse, and that people will not be able to say that this was Hawayo Takata’s teaching and this was not. Maybe there will be a place for preserving this form which I actually place a lot of value on, because that’s the kind of personality I am. But, you know, for other people form is not that important, so I don’t know where that part of it will go. I just know that it is important for me to set up what I feel like is of value, and after I die, Reiki will take over, and whatever I do just won’t matter.”
Lourdes: “What do you think Takata would say if she could see us today? If Takata could see Reiki today, what do you think she would say? If she had a sentence or a phrase to express her thoughts or feelings, what would it be?”
John: “Or a word.”
Phyllis: “Well the phrase that comes to me, which is very interesting, is ‘Don’t make beggars out of people.’ This something that she said all the time. ‘Don’t make beggars out of people.’ She was talking quite often about charging people for Reiki treatments … to be clear to give them an opportunity to maintain their dignity by offering something in exchange for the Reiki treatments … to be sure that you create this flow of energy between people, so that you don’t hoard it all and they don’t have to beg for it. There are all kinds of different themes within this phrase for me and I feel like today …because we want so much sometimes for Reiki to be here or Reiki to be there, we see that Reiki will benefit (such places as) drug and alcohol abuse centers, and so on, that we’re ready to give it away again. It feels again, (that we must) be really clear that what we have is of value, and that it’s important for us to maintain the dignity of ourselves, but also of the other people involved, and the other entities involved. So I guess that’s why the phrase came up in my head, that it was the only one that came up.”
Lourdes: “Wonderful, very, very nice … and absolutely essential in our practice.”
Phyllis: “Yes. I think that we can get really lazy about that, and it’s easy to slip.”
Lourdes: “Yes. And we are not doing any favors for people…”
Phyllis: Right.”.
Lourdes: “… making them beggars.”
Phyllis: “Right, exactly.”
Lourdes: “Wonderful. Thank you Phyllis. It’s a pleasure to do this short interview with you. And thank you so much for sharing your wisdom and experience.”
Phyllis: “You’re welcome.”
John: “Yeah!”
Phyllis: “Yeah!”
John Harvey Gray and I are pleased to announce that we are in the process of compiling the first CD of all of Mrs. Hawayo Takata’s question and answer sessions held at the Trinity Metaphysical Church in Redwood City, California. The sessions were all recorded and then transcribed verbatim. It will soon be a new product!
For those of you who are new subscribers, or for those who have not yet had the chance to do so, take a look at the changes that we have made to our website! We have added a Reiki Resources page where you can find free copies of previous newsletters, articles and view Reiki training videos featuring John Harvey Gray and Dr. Lourdes Gray. We think you will find the contents of this page informative and helpful. We have also added new photos, and an in-depth article introducing Reiki Master Teacher, Dr. Lourdes Gray, to our readers!
We are looking for some interesting Reiki stories for our newsletter. If you have a Reiki story that you would like to share, please send it us! Please keep the length of the submission to no more than 500 words.
Thank you for taking the time to read our newsletter. John and I wish you a healthy, peaceful, and prosperous month. Please look for next issue in September.