Last week I had the privilege of being one of only 50 members of the UK Reiki federation to engage in a 2 part webinar with the partner of the deceased Phyllis Furumoto. For those of you who do not know who I am talking about this lady was Hawaya Takata’s granddaughter who became one of the grand Reiki masters and for those that have done a course in Reiki she is only third on the Reiki lineage so to be able to have this rare access to archives of Hawaya Takata, of her life and to hear about her life story will be something that I will always remember.
The reason I have so much respect for this lady is because she grew up in the Japanese American community and worked on the sugar plantations from the age of 12. She was lucky enough to marry someone who introduced her to Dr Hayashi when they went back to Japan on a business trip organized by her husband. Dr Hayashi taught Hawaya Takata and they were both given credit over the years for building the class structure for Reiki and putting an emphasis on healing others. Something which Usui really didn’t focus on that much. He was much more focused on healing the self. She is also responsible for bringing Reiki to the West and she transformed Reiki from a complex system to an easy-to-use concept. Phyllys Furumoto defined that even further to make a Reiki system that could be translated to the western world. After the death of her husband Takata became a single mother to two young daughters. She worked her way through a male dominated world and challenged traditional healing methods, she was truly an inspirational figure.
Reiki sustained her as a single parent as she built healing centers in America. She was challenged again and again to prove the effectiveness of Reiki. She was invited by Native Americans who had heard of her work and were intrigued by a western woman who in their culture they would have classed as a medicine woman. She proved the effectiveness and healing power of Reiki and gave evidence of the effectiveness of Reiki to the doctors who wanted to see evidence of the healing work she was doing. On top of this Takata was involved in real estate and was a true entrepreneur. After Takata’s death on the 11th December 1980, her granddaughter Phyllis contacted 22 masters that had been taught by Takata and although they didn’t know each-other, she brought them together to form a community to keep the true Usui Reiki alive as it had been taught by Takata. Already there were teachers creating new methods of healing and branching off from the original class structure and in 1983 they formed the Reiki alliance to keep the true Takata teachings alive.
During the webinars we heard recordings of Takata when she was teaching in her classes and to hear this lady all these years after her death was truly inspirational.
Phyllis died on the 31st March 2019 and the original Reiki is still being held onto although there are still many who want to develop their own translation of the system rather than hold on to its integrity.
Given that there were only 50 places available I felt so blessed that I had been chosen to share in the two webinars, it has really inspired me to keep going with my Reiki practice. Being able to integrate Reiki where it is appropriate into the counselling and hypnotherapy work I do with clients really aids the clients in their healing journey. I include Reiki in hypnotherapy for pain relief, in trauma work with counselling clients and sometimes after a really tough session, 10 minutes of Reiki can be invaluable to help that client become calm before leaving the therapy space. Of course Reiki alone without counselling and hypnotherapy is also effective, as I’m sure many of you will agree who have received this amazing healing technique.
From what I have seen over the last 10 years of teaching there are very few teachers out there who teach the master levels of Reiki. I have seen many students from around the country who have had to travel many miles to me to get access to this level of teaching. This is possibly due to the fact that many teachers do not see it as financially viable to teach others to teach but I feel that it is an essential part of the Reiki journey. Because of this I have decided to continue teaching only the master practitioner and master teacher levels because of the shortage of teachers for these higher levels. I will only teach in a maximum class size of 3 and only run two of these classes a year. You will need to bring evidence of being taught levels one and two before being accepted onto the course if you were not previously taught by me. (You must have been taught in person as online courses are not accepted by the Reiki organisations). I feel this will be a happy balance for me and will help in keeping the original traditions of Reiki going into the future.
If you require more information please do not hesitate to get in touch and I will be more than happy to help you.