Bby Don Brennan
Mrs. Hawayo Takata, the American woman who brought Reiki to the West, loved to tell stories to illustrate her teachings. She had a wonderful sense of humor and her stories were both entertaining and instructive, as she drew from her life’s experiences.
But, not all of her stories were based on fact. The most well known of these was the story of Usui being a Christian minister and president of Doshisha University, a Christian school in Kyoto, when he supposedly set out on a quest to learn how Jesus performed his healing.
When we look at history and also cultural and geographical circumstances, we see some of the challenges she faced in teaching Americans an esoteric form of healing with Buddhist sounding terminology from Japan. After all, this was Hawaii, where there was still resentment toward the Japanese for the bombing of Pearl Harbor, decades earlier.
So she did what she had to do to make Reiki more user friendly to Westerners and to preserve her own safety. Although she didn’t start teaching Reiki classes until the sixties, she began her professional practice of Reiki as soon as she became a Reiki Master in 1938. Before December 7, 1941, her office sign advertised “Reiki” in English, with Japanese kanji at the bottom. After the attack, the sign displayed only English and she changed Reiki to “Short Wave Treatments,” a more neutral, scientific sounding name.
Another fabrication was the story of Usui living a meager existence in a slum in order to heal beggars so they could find gainful employment. It seemed that these people had no appreciation for being healed and returned to begging because they were simply too lazy to work. It seems that they placed no value on their healing because they paid nothing for it.
The only part of this story that is true, is that Usui worked very hard to bring Reiki healing to the homeless. However, the homeless were not beggars, they were two hundred thousand of the two and a half million people who had lost their homes in the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923.
But the story does bring up important issues about gratitude and appreciation. It may also reveal some inner conflicts Mrs. Takata had for charging a lot of money for Reiki classes. Because of her ancestry and her poverty while growing up, she felt like a second-class citizen. She saw how money made such a difference in the way that people were treated.
In some of her stories, she described herself as a “country girl,” who was easily taken advantage of by city slickers in the big city. Naivety, low self-esteem and a naturally generous spirit made her easy prey.
As she began her formal Reiki teaching, she described previous experiences of training neighbors for free. Instead of following through with their practice of Reiki, these neighbors would send their family members to her for treatment. Because they paid nothing for the Reiki training, they placed no value on the gift they had received.
Fran Brown writes in “Living Reiki,” that Dr. Hayashi told Mrs. Takata, “Never teach a Reiki class for free. For then it has no value. The people will not value it enough to use it.” He also added, “You can return your gratitude to them by treating them when they need a treatment.”
And indeed, she was generous with her Reiki treatments. She sometimes treated people for as long as two hours on a daily basis, sometimes for months. She charged people who could afford to pay and gave Reiki for free to those who couldn’t.
Clearly, Mrs. Takata had a deep love and respect for Reiki and she wanted others to have that same sense of appreciation. She may not have been completely aware of all the human dynamics, but she gained insight into human issues of self-worth, gratitude and gracious giving and receiving.
Who we are today, has to do with all that we’ve been through in this life. This affects our identity and sense of self-worth. Most human beings, at their very core, feel unworthy. It’s true that victim consciousness may allow us to feel that we deserve to receive something because we’ve suffered somehow as victims, but this is not the same as feeling worthy of receiving. We can also delude ourselves into believing that we are privileged and deserve entitlement, but again this is not feeling worthy of receiving.
So most of us feel that worthiness must be earned in order to receive. Often, we place a greater value and have more appreciation for things that required greater efforts to obtain.
After her recovery through 6 months of daily Reiki treatments, Mrs. Takata already had a deep appreciation for Reiki and desperately wanted to learn it. But first she had to convince Dr. Hayashi to accept her as a student. She then traded her labor for tuition, while working every bit as hard as the other Reiki students in staffing Dr. Hayashi’s clinic. And later in Hawaii, she had to live with fear while continuing her practice of Reiki.
If we lived in a perfect world, we would all give freely with no thought of receiving anything. We would receive graciously with no thought of debt or obligation. We would simply trust that all would be provided for. In a perfect world we would feel empowered. We would feel worthy. And we would have gratitude for our blessings. But, like Mrs. Takata, we all struggle with our imperfections to find a balance.
© 2014 Donald Brenna
from
Metaphysical Times
Volume IX Number 2
May 2014
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