Those of you who have studied Reiki with me know that I absolutely love telling the stories of the Reiki Masters in our lineage. My teacher, John Harvey Gray, passed down a rich trove of stories in the form of giant reel-to-reel audio tapes he recorded of Hawayo Takata teaching Reiki classes and “talking story,” to use the Hawaiian vernacular for storytelling. John would play these recordings during the Reiki classes he taught, and Takata’s voice would deliver the stories of Mikao Usui, Chujiro Hayashi, and her own impressive life story. She told many stories of helping clients, neighbors, and friends with Reiki. She explained through experience how to run a Reiki business, how to deal with the money aspect of Reiki, and how to cultivate the right attitude to let Reiki flow through you without getting in its way. She also told many inspiring stories of her life.
Takata was born to indentured servant parents on a sugarcane plantation in Kauai, and she grew up literally dirt poor. Her husband died unexpectedly, leaving her a widow with two young daughters. Through grief and stress, she developed serious illnesses, and having exhausted medical help, she turned to Reiki. Her own story of healing through daily Reiki treatments at the Tokyo hospital of Chujiro Hayashi is inspirational for many students of Reiki. But perhaps more inspiring is her personal success.
Takata went on to live the American dream, building a successful Reiki business in Hawaii, investing her profits in real estate developments, and more importantly, living the life she wanted to live, in a high floor apartment with a great view over the Ala Wai bridge, next to a golf course, playing 18 holes a day, before she would go to her Reiki office to serve clients and her local community. She made life serve her, provide for her, and she did it on her terms, in a strange profession that years ago was far, far outside the mainstream understanding and awareness.
In many ways, listening to the recordings of Takata, I felt like I was learning Reiki both from John and Takata, and it was listening to her stories that gave me the confidence to open my own Reiki practice, and, after finishing the first degree class, start my fifteen year journey toward becoming a Reiki Master so I could teach Reiki classes myself. Yet her story is seldom told nowadays, and many of the stories that are told are discounted or discredited. Most of us cannot conceive of how life was in Japan before the war, and how Takata grew up in the territory of Hawaii among the local Hawaiian Japanese people. But the more time passes, the more truth and understanding I find in the recordings I heard almost 30 years ago.
In November of 2019, NYC Reiki Center hosted Hawayo Takata’s successor and granddaughter Phyllis Lei Furumoto and her spouse, longtime Reiki Master Joyce Winough here in NYC. While Phyllis and Joyce were here, over dinner one night, they told stories of sorting through many boxes of documents and objects left by Takata, which had been stored in a garage for more than forty years. Having found so many treasures, they formed the Takata Archives Project, to sort, identify and catalog all the materials. With the help of Dr. Justin Stein, a Reiki researcher who participated in the Archives Project, they were able to place all the archives of Hawayo Takata at UC Santa Barbara so they will be conserved in perpetuity, and will always be available for future students of Reiki and for researchers and academics. Joyce shared that she had photographed many of the documents, and after interviewing many members of Takata’s family, put together a presentation on the life and legacy of Hawayo Takata. Out of that dinner we conceived the idea of Joyce presenting the Takata Archives over Zoom on November 7th and 8th, 2020.
What an amazing experience it was! For two days Joyce showed us never-before-seen photos, an audio recording of Takata that had never been shared publicly before, insider photos of the plantation Takata grew up on, and at one point a number of the members of Takata’s family joined us on Zoom to answer questions and share stories about their grandmother, her life, and to provide context to those of us who could not conceive of what life was like for them at the time these stories happened. Joyce also revealed and put up on the screen for us to read, letters Takata wrote shortly before her death to Phyllis that address all the questions and doubts and speculation that has been swirling for decades. Nobody has seen these before. Phyllis kept them private for all of her life, until her death in 2020. Joyce chose this weekend to share them for the first time, and it felt very special to witness these pieces of Reiki History being revealed.
On behalf of NYC Reiki Center, I would like to sincerely thank Joyce Winough for spending her weekend delivering the Hawayo Takata Archives presentation to the almost 100 students of Reiki who joined us. For any of you interested in arranging Takata Archives presentations for your own Reiki communities, you can contact Joyce through the Office of the Grandmaster (OGM) website. https://www.
