DIVE INTO REIKI: Today, I have an exceptional guest, Paul Mitchell. I met Paul when we were on a panel for Reiki Home and I was really impressed by the depth of his practice and his kindness. So, we connected, and he kindly agreed to come today to talk about his practice.
Paul's education was in philosophy and theology, and his early work was in religious education teaching in San Francisco. He met Hawayo Takata and studied level 1 with her in 1978. He became one of the 22 masters initiated by Takata in 1979.
In 1992 he was recognized as Head of the Discipline of Usui Shiki Ryoho. Together with Lineage Bearer Phyllis Furumoto created the Office of the Grandmaster responding to the community call to define the system received from their teacher, Hawayo Takata. Since that time, he has traveled to over 25 countries supporting the Reiki community in their practice and development. Paul, thank you so much for joining me today.
PAUL MITCHELL: Oh, you're very welcome. I'm happy to be with you.
DIR: I wanted to start with your origin story, the first time you encountered Reiki practice.
PM: Okay. As you mentioned, I was teaching religion in a Catholic boy's school. One of my co-teachers had a flyer for a conference on holistic health. He said, "We should go to this." I was trying to wrap my brain around why as a religion teacher, I should go to this. But it was intriguing. And so I went, he didn't. It was the beginning in the early seventies of the holistic health movement. So, a lot of the luminaries were speakers. There were about a thousand people in attendance. What touched me, actually, was the personal stories of well-known healthcare people, psychologists, psychiatrists, doctors whose personal lives were a mess. And then they had some spiritual awakening, and it totally changed their relationship to their work with other people in healing professions.
So, I was driving home and thinking, "Oh, there's something here for me," but I had no idea what it was. I was in a master's program in education. I never went to see my advisor. I just took courses that looked interesting. And so, I was looking at the catalog for the summer session, and there was a course in holistic health and self-regulation. So, I said, "Well, okay, that's it." So, I went to this course put together by Dr. George Araki, a biologist at San Francisco State University. And he had started a little mini department called interdisciplinary studies in science, and their hidden agenda was bringing the scientific method to bear on healing. So, this course was like just the potpourri of what was going on. We had lots of guest speakers.
We practiced a little yoga, we learned about autogenic training and biofeedback. We did some Tai Chi and meditation. Learned about Ayurvedic medicine and a bit of Native American medicine, just all kinds of things. One day the guest speaker was Hawayo Takata. She walked into the room. She was very short, I think under five feet, and very bright and energetic. Dressed nicely. She began talking, telling her story of how she came to Reiki. She told us a bit of what Reiki was. She was a great storyteller. I was just mesmerized. And then she said at the end, "Well if people are interested, I can come back and teach you Reiki." I found my hand in the air and put down my contact information.
I was driving home after this class, and I thought, Oh, this is what I've been looking for." And then I was confused because I didn't know I was looking for something! So I went home and told my wife about it, and she wanted to take the class too. So we took the class in Dr. Araki's home. He's Japanese American. We white folks were a minority. It was mostly the Japanese community taking the classes at that time. We just had a lovely time. He opened his house to us every Thursday if we wanted to come and practice together. So we did that, and that was having that kind of instant community. I don't know if you can imagine 1978 and the word Reiki, which nobody knew!
DIR: Even 10 years ago, most people didn't know much about Reiki!
PM: So that little community really held me because it was just strange, right? But I had such absolute trust in my teacher, and, looking back, I would say she was really the first master that I ever met. So, I just put myself in her hands and trusted her teaching and trusted her faith in me. You know, it's like, "How can I do this? And I'm not my teacher." And she communicated to me that I could, and I should. So I did.
DIR: I think that doubt you had is familiar to most people who start training in the Reiki system. In a prior conversation about Mrs. Takata, you mentioned something that struck my mind: she gave you everything you needed to practice without fear. Can elaborate about that, both as a student and as a teacher since you have been one for over 40 years.
PM: I'll have to tell you when I was driving to the class what was going through my mind was, "I'm sure everybody in the class will be able to do this, but not me. And if there's some special experience to be had, everybody else will have it, but not me." So that was my mental attitude going into the class, which. Certainly, it said a lot about me as a person at that time. And I didn't have any special experience in the class other than being in her presence. So with that, I went home just wanting to put my hands on anybody who would allow me. It didn't matter what the situation was. I felt totally free to do that. And that's when I realized she gave me everything I needed to not be afraid.
She gave me the confidence that I had this connection with Reiki, that it would come through my hands. I had that as a basis. Secondly, that I could do no harm with Reiki. That I didn't have to know anything other than a relatively simple set of hand positions and that sometimes there could be what we would call unpleasant reactions to treatment. And that was okay. I connected it with what I heard as a child growing up. Sometimes things have to get worse before they get better. I don't know if she said those words, but [I made] that connection with my experience.
I mean, I love it when I give a treatment and the person just blisses out and becomes totally relaxed. I love that. And at the same time, I've treated people who got very emotional, wept, got afraid, had experiences, or greater physical pain. And I was able to hold the space for the person.
Let's just take pain as an example. Treating a shoulder because the person has a chronic shoulder problem, and when I treat it, it hurts more. I see that that's happening: their eyes are getting a little big or something. So I say, "Well, how does that feel?" "I'm feeling more pain." "Okay, so that's good because your body is really taking in the Reiki, and it's okay. If it's too intense for you and want me to stop, I'll pull my hands from this position and work around it. But if you can be with it, it's going to be good."
Often at the end of treating that position, when I take my hands away, it feels better than it ever has for a long time. Those experiences with Hawayo Takata gave me a way to hold, let me be comfortable, and then communicate that to the person I'm treating.
DIR: It brings to mind the Reiki Precept, "Do not worry." But we always worry in sessions. You said that with her presence as a teacher, she already gave you everything you needed. That is such a beautiful statement. But she also made you practice a lot. According to you, she was a little bit of a drill Sergeant. Can you talk about the importance of practice?
PM: I learned afterward that her way of teaching was very Japanese. You go to the master and just pay attention. She gave no written materials. All of us Americans showed up with our notebooks, and she said, "Put them away. No notes, watch my hands." You had to be present.
She communicated mostly energetically. It just went in. She was open to questions, but she taught this beginning class to the sense of what the beginning student needs to know? So if somebody came up with some experience was maybe kind of out there, she just said, "Oh, fantasy," and, "Practice, practice, practice." She said that all the time, three times: "Practice, practice, practice." The first evening she taught us how to treat ourselves. She would say, "Reiki is, first of all, for yourself, treat yourself every day and then naturally your family and your friends and anybody else who comes to you." But that was the order.
[I had tried other] things for a while that were very interesting, but they always dropped away. But after my first year of having my first degree, I looked back and realized that I had treated myself every single day. One of her teachings was, "Reiki will teach you." Well, it was clear to me that the learning environment, the classroom of Reiki teaching, was when I was doing Reiki for myself, for others.
She defined Reiki as universal life energy or God power. Universal life energy was just a concept for me. God power I kind of got because I was having a lot of religious upbringings. That landed. But both grew on me. This is the energy of life, and it's not like I didn't have it. Everything is filled with life energy. It's not like Reiki is a new thing. It's just our awareness of it. That was part of the new thing of learning Reiki: "Oh, I have a conscious relationship with the energy of life." I put my hands on myself and another. In those relationships with self, with others, receiving treatment from others that the intimacy of connection with what Reiki was offering me grew and grew and grew and grew.
DIR: One thing that you said right now is that Reiki is a system to grow our conscious connection with universal energy. I think many people see Reiki as a type of energy and there is a lot of discussions like Reiki is not so powerful. There are more powerful energies. So what will you say to people who have this approach?
DM: It's a complicated question for me because what do I really know? What I really know is my experience and how I interpret my experience. Of course, there are all kinds of energies. Nuclear energy is very powerful. It has benefits and lots of destructive potentials. I know there are all kinds of levels of energy, but my experience from the very beginning, is that Reiki is the energy of life. I learned it as life energy. And at some point, I also speak about it as the energy of life. From whatever the source of that energy is. Who knows? Maybe it is eternal from a Buddhist perspective. Maybe it was created at some point from a Christian Judeo-Christian tradition. But for me, it is the energy of life, and it's also this energy of connection. I can put my hands on anything and feel the energy. So part of that for me is like, yes, this is the core of all of life. This is the stuff of life on the energetic level.
So, you know, [less] powerful, more powerful… those are interesting questions for a while. But, for me, they're not so interesting. Because for me, Reiki put me on a life path. What kind of path? Let's say a healing path. Well, what is healing? So, you work that question over and over and over again. I live with that question. What is healing? I go back to the Greek root, and it [means] wholeness. Okay. Wholeness. Well, what does it mean in my human being-ness to be whole? Well, there are lots of theories about that. And there are spiritual traditions that focus right on that: what does the meaning and purpose of your life? Why are you here? What are you working towards?
But my experience of Reiki is that it constantly, in a way, awakens me to the essence of what it means to be human. In a sense, it constantly asks this question to me, "Oh, who do you need to become to manifest that essence more clearly? More authentically? And we have the Reiki principles that give us guidelines for that. The principles have nothing to do with anybody else. They're all about how do I live in my body? How do I live in my mind? How do I live in my spirit? How do I live in a relationship? Reiki is all about relationships for me. Why am I so happy that my teacher said, "First of all, Reiki is for you to treat yourself"? Because it [constantly brings] me to a much more intimate understanding of myself. Yeah. So, you know, what do I need to heal? Well, sometimes it's my body. And sometimes it's my mental, emotional state. And sometimes, it's my spiritual self that needs healing, which is basically wholeness, just to get to the essence. What does life energy want to offer in this time in history my world, through this unique gift of Paul Mitchell? Recognizing that every other human being is also a gift. So Reiki is this path for me to wholeness.
In the Reiki world, we love this word transformation. Who doesn't want to be healed instantly? Who doesn't want to be transformed instantly into some luminous being?
DIR: That was the reason I took my first class!
PM: Right. But it's a journey. Mrs. Takata used to say, "Reiki will go to the root of the problem." One of her masters who passed away a few years ago, Shinobu Sato, was very Japanese. She was born in America, went back to Japan, grew up into her twenties in Japan, then came back to America. She was in Hiroshima when the bomb dropped. She would say, "Mrs. Takata always said Reiki will go to the root of the problem." And she's right. And sometimes it takes one treatment. Sometimes it takes a lifetime. And she just practiced. For me, it's not that it takes a lifetime to solve a problem. That's not what I understood. It's a lifetime of unfolding. That's the journey. This constant unfolding of who we are here to be. I'm happy with how far I've gotten. I'll be 75 soon. But I also say I have a long way to go.